by Lora Leigh
“Stay in place until daylight, then head to Cami’s,” he said. “Crowe or Logan will have breakfast for you.”
Rafe listened again before grunting mockingly. “Not in your dreams, Tank,” he replied to whatever the other man said. “I’ll be sleeping.”
Perhaps Tank wanted Rafe to fix breakfast.
“We’ll talk tomorrow,” Rafe told him before flipping the phone closed and staring back at Cami. “Tank’s at Amelia’s. No one is moving in or out, but he saw Amelia in her upstairs bedroom window as she closed the curtains. She’s not showing up tonight.”
It was still early.
She would show, Cami knew, but it wouldn’t be until late. Very late if Amelia followed the time line they’d had when they were younger.
Amelia had always been very adept at slipping out of her father’s house and slipping into Cami’s.
“She has the key to the basement door,” Cami told Rafe quietly as she set the coffee cup back on the counter. “I never had the lock changed, just in case she needed someplace to run to.”
Rafe leaned forward. “Cami, what was the secret you were keeping for Amelia?”
Closing her eyes, she lowered her head, her jaw clenching painfully.
Had it just been this morning? Had she told Rafe they had lost a child and in the next second been forced to face yet another emergency?
There had been no chance to rest, to find peace or a few moments to discuss much of anything that had happened three years before.
“Cami, the time to keep secrets is over,” he warned her, his voice low yet hard. “Why did Amelia go from the rebel with a cause to that staid, silent wraith of a young woman we saw today? What did her father learn when he read your diary?”
She was careful to keep her gaze down, but from the corners of her eyes she watched Crowe. Closely. And he was consciously not looking in her direction.
“Cami, I have to agree with Rafe,” Logan stated, his gaze compassionate but just as determined as his cousin’s. “We need to know now. She’s passing you notes that she can’t sign in her own name, and coded with a message that only you would understand that she needs to meet with you. Something’s wrong here, and it’s affecting more than just those in this room at the moment.”
But it affected one of them more than the other, and obviously, that one hadn’t trusted his cousins with the information.
“Cami.” Rafe’s tone was warning. “I won’t beg for the information. What I’ll do is start asking questions around town; is that what you want?”
Cami flinched.
Crowe lifted his head then, his gaze slicing across the room to her, obviously aware she was watching him from the corners of her eyes.
She watched as he drew in a deep breath and gave a short shake of his head before he said, “She helped me break into the courthouse the month we were home on leave that year. She stole her father’s key, slipped inside with me, opened the safe, and I took the file he had been putting together on us. We wiped the computers, made certain there were no copies, and then I took her home.”
Cami swallowed tightly.
Amelia had told her about it several nights later, after Crowe had disappeared into Crowe Mountain once again. Excited, nervous, her emerald eyes sparkling with what Cami knew was a surfeit of pure sexual arousal, Amelia had told her exactly what had happened before he took her home. Crowe was leaving quite a few details out of the story.
“Hell.” Logan blew out a hard breath as frustration creased his face. “Now he’s blackmailing her.”
“And no one cared to tell us.” Crowe directed the accusation at Cami.
“Perhaps someone thought you’d be man enough to at least pay attention to any changes in her after your little escapade,” she shot back. “Tell me, Crowe, did you even bother to question why Amelia married so quickly? Or why she changed so drastically?”
His lips thinned. “I didn’t know until today.”
Cami’s jaw tightened as her lips pursed for a second in an attempt to hold back her anger.
It didn’t work.
“Why doesn’t that surprise me?” she charged roughly. “Did you even give a damn after you charmed her out of what you wanted and left her watching for you every damned day?”
His eyes narrowed.
“Cami,” Rafe warned, “let it go for now. We’re all less than calm, and there’s no sense in fighting among ourselves.”
She let her gaze connect with Rafe’s, the need to continue the accusation straining her patience. Because she knew how Amelia felt where Crowe was concerned.
Like Rafe for Cami, Crowe had lit a fire inside Amelia that even the knowledge of the repercussions if anyone learned what she had done couldn’t cool. Amelia knew that Crowe was even more forbidden to her than to any other woman in the county, with the exception of the current Corbin princess, Ann.
And someone had found out. The wrong person had found out, and it had destroyed Amelia’s dreams.
Her father had somehow found the diary that Cami kept hidden in a box of letters and cards tucked in the back of her nightstand behind books, mementos, and a picture of her with her mother and Jaymi.
Cami had never learned how he had found it. What she learned, though, was the price she and Amelia both had paid for the discovery.
The price they were still paying.
“I hate this fucking county,” Logan breathed out roughly as silence filled the room. “Wayne Sorenson always was a Corbin lapdog. It’s a shame his daughter is paying for his lack of backbone.”
Wayne Sorenson was particularly cruel. Amelia hadn’t just betrayed him; she had broken the law. He had the proof of it in the journal Amelia’s best friend had recorded the events of the night in. Amelia and Cami would stay away from each other, Amelia would marry the man Wayne had been shoving down her throat, and she would become the perfect daughter. If she didn’t, he would ensure that she was arrested for breaking into the courthouse and interfering in an investigation against suspected criminal elements.
There was nothing he could do to Crowe, because for some reason Cami hadn’t mentioned his name. It was a habit she had taken as a teenager. She never wrote their names. She called them instead by the predatory nicknames she had given them.
Rafe was the wolf, Logan was the tiger, and Crowe was the lion, the king of the jungle, simply because he seemed to be harder than the other two.
There was no way Amelia could deny Cami had written about her, though. Her name was there, written in bold black, and the act had been described in exacting detail.
“I’m getting a shower and heading to bed,” Cami told the cousins. “This hasn’t been my best day and I’d just as soon go to sleep and forget it happened for a while.”
She could feel the heaviness weighing her soul down as guilt bit at her hard and deep.
She hadn’t just lost everything she had held dear, but she had also managed to strip every shred of Amelia’s freedom. Because if she hadn’t returned home and done exactly what her daddy wanted, then he would make certain her prints were found inside the safe and the county attorney at the time would have arrested her and made certain she spent time in prison. Then her father had upped the ante. She would do what he wanted, or he would take Cami’s journal and implicate her in the crime as well. He might not be able to arrest Crowe, but Wayne could destroy both her and Cami’s life.
Wayne Sorenson had tied his daughter’s hands, hobbled her, blindfolded her, then shoved a dagger so deep inside her heart that Cami knew her friend would never recover.
Moving through the house and up the stairs, Cami told herself she would make it up to Amelia one of these days. It was one of those promises Cami made almost daily and one she knew she couldn’t fix. She’d lost so much simply because of the county she had been so determined to stay in. She hadn’t wanted to move to Denver, but Aspen was just small enough that she could never live there without running into her parents.
If her mother ever recovered from the stro
ke she’d had, if she ever left the nursing home— Unfortunately, she had seemed more than content exactly where she was. Away from her husband.
Still, if not her parents, Cami would end up running into her father, and how painful would that be?
The heat of the shower only reminded her how cold she felt inside. How tired she had become. She’d kept her secrets as long as she could, and when they had come spilling out there had been no stopping them. Just as there had been no stopping the emotions tearing her apart.
There were times she felt she’d placed herself in deep freeze after she had lost the only friend she had been able to depend upon, then lost her and Rafe’s child.
That ice was chipping now. She could feel it inside, fracturing, trying to break apart, the seams melting and weakening as she fought to hold back the pain.
Laying her head against the shower wall, the heat of the water pouring over her, Cami fought to hold it inside, to keep the pain from breaking her apart.
The knowledge that she had carried Rafe’s child had been like a ray of hope heating her from the inside out. The thought of that perfect little life, that part of Rafe that could never be taken away from her … Yet it had been taken.
Lifting her head, she hurriedly finished, knowing the cost of what she was doing. Standing there beneath the warmth of the water and letting herself remember, revisit that loss, was the most dangerous thing she could do.
She wasn’t strong enough for this.
She was losing too much too fast and facing too many truths that were coming at her from too many different directions. She’d tried for years to harden herself, but all she’d managed to do was build the most fragile of defenses against the pain. And those defenses were weakening by the moment.
“Are you warm enough yet, kitten?”
She whirled around, her eyes blinking open against the sting of the shower to see Rafe leaning casually against the ceramic wall at the entrance to the shower.
He watched her as though he could see into the very heart of even those secrets she hid from herself.
“I just needed to relax before going to sleep.” She had to turn her back on him.
Staring back at him, seeing the warmth in his gaze, the sensual hunger, and the sparks of anger that still sizzled in the sapphire blue was more than she could bear.
She pushed her face beneath the water once again, because she knew the warmth slipping down her face had nothing to do with the water spilling from the shower.
She’d been finished minutes after stepping beneath the spray. The soft hint of almond milk soap still filled the heated warmth as she tried to force the water to soak beneath her skin.
To warm her.
To hold the nightmares she knew she would have tonight at bay.
“Poor Cami.” Heated and warm, his arms went around her, his bare chest was suddenly at her back, and the feel of his nude body, so hot, so strong, sent a surge of lightning-fast, wicked-hot need erupting through her system.
She was forced to draw in a quick, hard breath.
The solid length of his cock nestled against her lower back, while his powerful thighs cushioned the rounded globes of her rear.
“Do you remember our first night together?” he asked as his lips lowered to her shoulder, brushing against the tender flesh there before nipping at it erotically.
“Yes.” She was almost moaning now in pleasure.
“Do you remember what you begged me for more of?”
Her body felt weak, flushed.
She didn’t want to be reminded of it. Her dreamworld was working out just fine, thank you very much.
Or was it?
It wasn’t this warm.
It wasn’t Rafe holding her against his body.
It wasn’t the feel of him, so very prepared to send her system into a pleasure so extreme it tempted insanity.
“Poor Cami,” he whispered. “Holding everything so tightly inside. Do you ever feel like a wind-up doll ready to blow apart all the mechanics that hold you so tightly bound, Cami?”
“Stop, Rafer.” She didn’t want this.
She didn’t want to break apart into so many pieces it was impossible to put her together again.
He chuckled at her ear before his teeth raked against the sensitive flesh of her lower neck.
“I’m going to fuck you, baby. I’m going to ride us both into exhaustion, feel you beneath me, over me, in front of me,” he whispered at her ear. “I’m going to paddle that pretty little bottom and hear you scream for me, hear you beg for more, as I ease inside your tight little ass and feel you go crazy beneath me.”
No.
She didn’t say the words, she couldn’t force them past her lips, as she felt his fingers sliding between the curves of her rear.
“And I’m going to watch,” he growled, the image of him watching his thick erection stretching her, easing inside her, flickering through her imagination, and sending her juices flooding the outer lips of her pussy.
The heated warmth surrounded her clit as Rafe moved behind her, shifting, his knees bending beside hers until she felt the thick silk-over-iron crest easing against the slick, bare lips of her cunt.
“Yes. Rafer, yes.” Her legs parted farther as she leaned against the shower wall.
His hands gripped her hips, easing her back, positioning her hips as she felt the engorged cock head parting the folds of flesh.
A second later she cried out in such erotic shock she nearly lost her footing in the shower.
His hand landed in a gentle, sensation-igniting pat, just heavy enough that the sound of wet flesh coming in instant contact echoed around her.
It was the heat that bloomed against the soft rise of her pussy that held most of her attention, though. The sensation, so rich and lush with sensual eroticism, was almost too much to bear.
The heat blossomed around her clit, swelling it tighter as the head of his cock forged its way into the snug opening of her sex.
“There, baby,” he groaned as he pulled her hips back a fraction farther and, with one foot, pressed her legs wider.
“I could fuck you for hours, Cami. Stay inside this hot little pussy and do nothing but relish the feel of you.”
Her head twisted against the shower wall as cries spilled past her lips.
Then, with a tight, hard surge of his hips, half the heavy length of his cock buried inside her. Then the other half, until she was filled so deep, possessed so fully, she couldn’t imagine ever being without him now.
“Fuck yeah,” he growled as she felt the full, throbbing length of his dick thickening inside her.
“I dreamed of fucking you,” he admitted as he began to move then. “Dreamed of watching my dick stretch your sweet pussy open as it milks my flesh inside it.”
And her flesh was milking his cock. The inner muscles were flexing, rippling, tugging at his flesh as the nerve endings buried there became so sensitive she could barely breathe for the pleasure.
Each thrust filled her, stroked her, heated her.
She was dying for more, dying for him to fuck her harder, faster, to take her with all the pent-up hunger, need, and desperation that burned inside her.
Gripping both her hips now, his lips at her ear, his breath heated and warm, he began moving harder, faster, each stroke burning to the center of her core as she began to sway, to move. Pushing back, she took him harder, her back arching, her fingers curling into fists at the ceramic wall as she felt tightening of pleasure begin in her womb.
The sensations radiated through her. Burning, intense, they flowed through her system, drawing her to her tiptoes and causing her to cry for him again, to beg him to send her over that edge of oblivions.
When it came, she could only collapse again, shaking and shuddering in his grip as she felt the hard, heated spurts of his semen filling her, adding to a pleasure that had already stolen reason and common sense from her mind.
He was her weakness. He was the one person she couldn’t say no to, the o
ne man she couldn’t resist.
Breathing heavily, her knees weak and shaky, she leaned against the wall, fighting to catch her breath. What he did to her should be illegal. She was certain it was illegal somewhere.
“I would have wanted our baby,” he whispered at her ear, his own breathing heavy and rough. “But even more, Cami-love, I would have cherished his mother just as much as I cherish her now.”
And the inner walls came crumbling down around her.
CHAPTER 23
Rafe was aware of the confusion in Cami’s gaze as he pulled the detachable shower from the mount and carefully washed Cami from head to toe.
As he ran the soft, soapy cloth between her thighs to wash away his semen, his gaze flicked to her face. Her expression was somber, her soft gray eyes filled with conflict, with hunger, and with the saddened memories of all she had lost.
“I should have never let you run as I did,” he whispered as he knelt in front of her, running the suds-filled cloth along her soft thighs, then across the gentle curves of her pussy.
He knew if he touched her flesh it would be softer than the rich lather covering it, silkier, warmer.
“You didn’t let me do anything, Rafe,” she assured him. “I do as I wish.”
He let a grin tug at his lips. The fire inside her was often hidden, that temper that he knew she had often controlled and tempered with her compassion. But it was there, just waiting to flare free.
She was independent, but she’d had no choice in adapting to independence. What she didn’t know was that all that lovely independence was perfect; it was fine. But he possessed her. She was his, from her very lithe, sexy body to the depths of her fragile feminine soul. She belonged to him.
She sensed it, though he doubted she had considered the consequences of it.
He wouldn’t stand back and allow her to slip away in those hours before dawn any longer. He wouldn’t allow her bed to be separate from his, and he sure as hell had no intentions of allowing her life to be separate from his.
Leaning forward, he laid a gentle kiss against her hip, his lips lingering against the almond-fragrant flesh as her fingers threaded hesitantly into his hair.