The acrid, spicy sweet taste mixed with the smoke had the immediate effect of easing the worse of the tension that had begun to fill him.
This wasn’t the same warning, or foreboding as his recruiting officer had called it, that had served Rafe so well in the Marines. This was something he had only felt when heading into the most dangerous of the missions he’d undertaken. This wasn’t just a foreboding, it was a straight-up fucking warning.
From the moment Cami’s firm little knock had sounded on his door, those inner sirens had begun going off. And now, staring into the night, he wondered at the sense of danger he could feel edging closer.
He had hoped he could return home, slip in without too much of a ripple, keep to himself, and find the life he’d searched for around the world.
And God knew he’d searched for that place in the world where he could, at the very least, be content. He wasn’t asking for happiness. He’d learned long ago that was far too much to ask for. Contentment, though, hadn’t seemed too high a price to charge for the years he had spent defending his country. After all, he’d also been defending this little corner of America that had decided he and his cousins had no place in their midst.
Or perhaps those other places just weren’t the place whose proud mountains sustained them. That place where their fathers, their grandfather, and his father before him had planted Callahan roots. Those other “places” hadn’t been home.
Logan and Crowe too had found that contentment eluding them. Crowe had actually resigned from the Marines the year before Rafe and Logan had and spent those months alone searching for a place he could call home. Crowe had traveled around for a while, but as he’d written in his last e-mail before they’d returned, evidently there really was no place like home.
For Crowe no place like the cabin his mother had left him that overlooked the sheltered valley below. For Rafe it was the small ranch his Uncle Clyde had owned. The one that his grandmother had been raised on before marrying JR Callahan.
For Logan it had been the house his mother had owned before her death. The one she and his father had lived on. The one he had been born in. It was flat in the middle of Sweetrock. A two-story traditional American with a wide porch surrounding all sides. In the back was the roomy yard he and his cousins had played in as toddlers. Next to it was the garage where his father had allowed him to “help” work on the family car.
The house was surrounded by other similar houses. Once, long, long ago, before his mother had given in and married the father of her child, Logan had played with the neighborhood children there. He had been accepted, and had known a childhood happiness that Rafe only barely remembered while Logan refused to discuss. And none of them could pinpoint why it had changed. Why had their grandfathers, their entire families, turned on the children left behind? What had made them suddenly hate and despise the sons that cherished daughters had given birth to? And why didn’t anyone seem to have the answers to those questions?
Rafe puffed on the cigar again, frowning into the swirling snow and listening to the moan of the wind. Rafe knew it had begun with the daughters marrying the Callahan brothers. Still though, that animosity hadn’t grown against their children until after their deaths.
A grimace tightened his face as he forced himself away from the maze he was beginning to step into. Questions without answers, they could pile up into a mess inside his brain if he let them. There was simply no way to figure out why the families that he and his cousins should have been able to turn to had turned their backs on them instead.
They were the sons of the daughters those three men were known to have once cherished and adored, until the night they had eloped with the three brothers. Three brothers who had spent every day since their return from the military accusing the barons of having murdered their parents, JR and Eileen Callahan.
After twenty-two years of asking “Why”? and of all but begging the good people of Corbin County to just explain what sin they felt their parents had committed, Rafe, Logan, and Crowe had simply stopped caring.
They’d had enough of it the three days they’d sat in that tiny jail cell, frozen with shock and horror, accused of killing a woman all three of them considered their best friend.
It had taken three days for Uncle Calvert, a Marine recruiter, and the lawyer he had hired, to get their release.
Then for another three days Rafe and his cousins had lived in silent shock beneath the care of the man who had raised them and the uncle they hadn’t known still lived.
If it hadn’t been for Ryan, they would have rotted in prison. If they had lived that long. Before Ryan had made it to the jail with the lawyer, all three of them had been beaten so badly by the sheriff and his deputies that it had taken all they had to walk out of the jail.
The evidence at the scene of the crime had been conclusive, the judge had decided. The DNA testing on the blood indicating an older male had gone along with the FBI’s profile of the serial murderer. A profile the FBI stated the Callahans in no way matched. The judge had further concluded that as much as he would love to see Rafe, Logan, and Crowe Callahan locked up for the rest of their natural-born days, he couldn’t in all conscience bring them to trial for a crime he was certain they hadn’t committed.
A man who didn’t know them and hadn’t taken the time to learn anything about them would have loved to see the three of them locked up for the rest of their natural-born days.
Son of a bitch, that memory still had the power to amaze him, and never failed to confuse him.
Leaning against the balcony railing, Rafe flicked the cigar ash over the edge of the railing and narrowed his eyes against the snow.
Their fathers hadn’t been scions of society, but neither had they been the dregs of humanity. And for not the first time in Rafe’s life he was beginning to wonder exactly what three cherished daughters could have done to their families to ricochet back on those daughters’ children? And once again he was asking questions he couldn’t answer.
Now, here Rafe was, right back where he had started, and wondering what the fuck he had come back for. What had made him, Logan, and Crowe hunger for this particular little place in the world?
Because insanity must run on the Callahan side of their genetics, he decided as he puffed the cigar once again and relished the aromatic burn that filled his senses.
He’d be damned if he knew where to go from here, though. He could rebuild the ranch; it had been damned profitable before Clyde Ramsey had died.
Rafe, Logan, and Crowe had had plans for the ranch. They’d been certain the climate would have to be different when they returned and living there wouldn’t be the hardship it had once been. He’d be damned but they couldn’t have been more wrong.
The quiet musings and his enjoyment of the cigar were disrupted by the sound of a powerful snowmobile motor cutting its way through the heavy windswept snow falling from the sky as well as that layered on the ground.
Strong LED lights cut through the white walls of fluff falling around them and traversed at least two feet of heavy, wet snow as the powerful machine made the precarious turn between snow-hidden fences.
Logan or Crowe. The new snowmobiles were unmistakable, and only they were insane enough to be riding through a blizzard for whatever it was they wanted. It could be as simple as sharing a cup of coffee or as complicated as heading back out for whatever wild-assed idea one of them had.
They were bored. He’d sensed it weeks before. And things could get dangerous, especially for Rafe, when Logan and Crowe were bored.
There were times Rafe felt as though he was the adult and his cousins were no more than wayward overgrown children. Very dark, very cynical, but nonetheless as wild as hell and without the normal cautious attitudes most adults displayed at their age. Hell, their time in the Marines as snipers should have fucking matured them. At least by a few more years than it appeared it had.
Sighing heavily, he turned, tamped the cigar out in the small ashtray kept on a ledge by the door, then slipped back into the bedroom.
Cami was still sleeping peacefully, sprawled out on her stomach, her pretty rounded ass emphasized by the silk sheet lying over it.
He pulled the comforter over her body then tucked it to her shoulders before moving for the door. Opening it he headed to the kitchen his steps quick and silent as he moved down the wood stairs.
He’d forgotten about the clothing left tossed on the floor until he stepped into the brightly lit kitchen to see Logan twirling a pair of tiny violet panties on one finger while he held up a matching lace and silk bra with the other. He looked from one to the other with curious moss-green eyes. As though trying to determine exactly what it was or why it was there.
Glancing at Rafe, he dropped the lingerie on the table, then picked up the sweatshirt and read the front of it. Rafe watched as his cousin visibly tensed before turning the sweat shirt and reading the back.
Flannigan #12, Corbin Co. Teachers Softball League.
“Cami Flannigan,” Logan mused softly as Rafe began picking up the clothes, folding them haphazardly, and laying them on the counter. “Did you lose your mind sometime between the agreement we made about Corbin County beauties and whenever you picked her up at?”
The agreement? They weren’t to fuck any woman within a hundred miles of Sweetrock.
“Don’t start, Logan,” Rafe warned him quietly, unwilling to start an argument with Logan that could end up waking Cami.
“You don’t think her father caused us enough trouble after Jaymi was killed? Come on, Rafe, he bombarded your commanding officer with e-mails about us for years. Even Clyde wasn’t safe from Mark Flannigan’s vindictiveness. Do you really want to give him another shot at us? What the hell do you think he’s going to do when he learns you’re fucking his baby girl?”
Mark Flannigan wouldn’t give a damn one way or the other Rafe knew. From what Rafe had learned over the years, Cami’s relationship with her father had only grown colder. The only reason Cami’s father would even pretend to care would be if he could destroy the Callahan cousins with it.
“What I think is that this is my business,” Rafe informed him as he moved to the other side of the kitchen and began making more coffee. “Now, tell me why the hell you’re here in the middle of a blizzard rather than sitting in front of a fire in the house?” Rafe shot him a disgruntled look. “Didn’t we just spend three days opening the house and moving you in?”
And it had sucked, too. Every day neighbors had glared at them from porches or through their windows. Old men had shot them the finger while teenage boys steered a wide path around them. It was more than apparent they weren’t welcome and they sure as hell weren’t wanted.
“I was bored.” Logan shrugged, his expression smoothing out to cool disregard.
“Try again,” Rafe snorted. “Why are you here?”
Sure, he was bored, but his cousin had ridden over thirty miles in a blizzard on a snowmobile. The fact that Crowe had tinkered enough with the engine to make the vehicle capable of it didn’t mean it wasn’t still a damned dumb decision.
Logan leaned back against the inside of the bar counter, crossed his arms over his chest, and stared back at Rafe quietly. Behind him, the darkened living room reflected the fiery red glow of the coals in the fireplace and the large oil portrait of Rafe and his mother when he had been three, standing at her knee.