The voice, despite its gentle sadness, held a sinister, malicious edge.
“You better hope you spent your time with Rafer Callahan wisely. You should have chosen someone else to dirty yourself with if you needed a hard fuck,” the voice warned her somberly. “If it happens again, you could meet the same end as your sister. Wouldn’t that be a shame, Ms. Flannigan? Wouldn’t it hurt your family, your friends, to find your body broken and discarded for fucking that bastard?”
Who the hell would call and say something so cruel? She and Jaymi had been close, much closer than most sisters with such an age difference between them.
But she remembered the calls Jaymi had received while sleeping with Rafe, and she had once told Cami that the caller’s voice had sounded tearful and filled with regret.
“I’m always careful,” Cami told him quietly, confidently. “And I don’t do bullies. Or cowards.” She disconnected the call quickly, then ignored the next several as she moved back to the kitchen and laid the device on the table. She stood back by the counter and simply watched it as though it were a snake, coiled and hissing as “blocked number” showed on the caller ID again.
As a third-grade teacher for the only elementary school in the county, she ended up meeting most people, whether they were parents or not, more than once. She recognized that voice, even as carefully disguised as it had been.
Still, she would remember whose voice it was, and when she did, unlike her sister, Cami would raise hell and make damned sure he paid for attempting to terrorize her, let alone threatening her.
She knew Jaymi had finally realized who had been calling her. The week before she had died she had attended one of the county-sponsored street dances in the town square, and when she had returned to the apartment she had been more than upset. She had been furious. She hadn’t said she had known, but Cami had known her sister and she had known when the phone rang that night and the look on Jaymi’s face when the caller ID had come up “blocked.” Jaymi had taken the phone to the bedroom, but as she walked into the other room Cami could have sworn she heard Jaymi say, Now I know why you hate him so bad. But Jaymi had refused to tell Cami who it was or what was going on. The next week, Jaymi had been killed.
Cami drew in a hard, deep breath.
What was she going to do now? she wondered. The implications of the phone calls were frightening.
The phone rang again.
Eyes narrowed, she stalked back to the table, checked the number, and saw the “blocked” signal again. Pushing the call button, she brought it quickly to her ear. She would be damned if she was going to live in fear. “Fuck off, nutcase,” she snapped.
There was silence for a moment. Long enough for Cami to realize it wasn’t the unknown, threatening voice of moments before.
“I just wanted to make certain you got home okay,” Rafe’s voice came over the line carefully.
Cami’s teeth snapped together. “Here’s a piece of advice, Rafer Callahan. Unblock your number when you call; otherwise, I won’t be answering.”
She was not going to worry about missed calls and whether or not it was Rafe.
“You know, you’re the only person that calls me Rafer,” he growled, something in his tone warning her he was more angry than simply irritated. She didn’t think it was because she was calling him by his full given name.
“Learn to live with it,” she muttered as she began moving through the house, closing curtains and checking locks again.
The normal nightly ritual suddenly had a new, sinister meaning, and she didn’t like it. Because it didn’t matter she had already checked them once, she needed to check them again.
“Your cousin Martin took out close to a thousand feet of new fence on his way in and out,” Rafe informed her. “I’m suing.”
Yes, Eisner was her third cousin on her mother’s side and Crowe’s very, very distant cousin on his mother’s side.
“And you’re telling me why? I’m not his lawyer; that’s his cousin Doug Atchinson. Give him a call.” She had no sense of guilt because she rarely remembered Martin was related to her. Besides he should have known better.
“You’re being awful accommodating all of a sudden.” Suspicion laced Rafe’s voice, and she could almost see him staring back at her. She could almost see herself drowning in those bottomless sapphire-blue eyes.
“So are you,” she fired back. “How the hell am I supposed to pretend we haven’t been occasional fucks if you start calling to check up on me?”
She needed to get over the past few days, the heated passion and the feel of his flesh against hers. She needed to let her body readjust to not having him inside her. To not having him pumping hard and deep and stretching her pussy with that delicious pleasure-pain she could have so easily become addicted to. She might have already become addicted, because she was dying for him. She needed her fix.
“What happened?” Suspicion laced his voice. “Was someone at the house when you got there? Has someone called?”
She tensed. How had he known she was feeling spooked?
“If there were, and they had, then I know how to use my Smith and Wesson to deal with it,” she promised him as that craving for him began to pound through her blood veins. “And just to set you straight, Rafer, you happened. You’re like some kind of damned catalyst or something, because every time you invade my damned space you completely fuck my life up. Stay on your own side of the county and let me deal with mine.”
She disconnected the call. But she held the phone between her breasts, her eyes closed, her breathing rough, as she fought to hold back her tears and to contain her anger. She couldn’t let this happen to her again. She could not allow herself to sink into that well of physical and emotional hunger as she had the last time.
She wanted to stomp her feet on the floor like a child and rage against fate, life and the unfairness of aching for a man she couldn’t have. Because having him meant losing herself in him and she couldn’t allow that to happen again, if she wanted to live in her hometown.
Other women could have affairs with married men, cheat on their husbands, or have more than one lover at the same time. She, on the other hand, couldn’t even have the man she dreamed about the most. The one who kept her heart racing and her pussy so wet she was going to have to change panties. She couldn’t do it because she didn’t have the emotional distance to survive if anything happened to him.
A sigh fell from her lips as she closed her eyes briefly. Other women knew how to love and still retain their souls. She didn’t know how to do that, it seemed. As for her panties, she realized she didn’t have to worry about changing them because she had forgotten to put them back on after they had dried hanging over Rafer’s shower.
“You’re the only one who calls me Rafer.” The remembered sound of the husky quality of his voice had her heart rate increasing, had it pounding fiercely. The sexual implications in the deep rasp of his voice had a burning, soul-deep response tearing through her system.
Yes, she was the only one who called him Rafer.
Even Jaymi had been amused by the habit Cami had of calling him by his full name.
It was more intimate. No one else called him Rafer, just her. It was a part of him that was only hers, because he refused to allow anyone else to use the name. And Cami allowed no other man to touch her.
Her experience at being a lover was confined to the few nights she had spent with Rafe over the past six years. so infrequent had been the times they had come together. She had been a virgin that first night, and she might as well have been a virgin the night she knocked on his front door.
The phone rang again.
Lifting it from between her breasts, she couldn’t help but smile despite the trembling of her lips and the tears that filled her eyes.
Rafer Samuel Callahan. The caller ID displayed his name clearly.
With fingers that shook more than her lips did she added the contact to the cell phone’s address book the minute the ringing stopped. She was determined not to answer, not to hear his voice again, not to weaken and beg him to hold her again.
She was going to hear it enough in her dreams, and the torment of it would drive her insane for months.
Or longer.
He was living closer now, she thought. It wasn’t as though he were half a world away and inaccessible. He was here, in Corbin County. And he wanted her.
She could go to him. She could take what she wanted if she could just be strong enough to forget her own past mistakes. That was the problem. It wasn’t shame or fear of the county’s condemnation. It was her own condemnation she had to worry about. And she should have proven that beyond a shadow of a doubt before she left the ranch.
Her family would turn their backs on her once they learned of that kiss or at least her father would. But he had turned his back on her years before. Her mother was dying, and if she learned of it, then she wouldn’t exactly die hating her younger child. Her mother was able to process very little information now. Alzheimer’s and a stroke had all but erased the loving, gentle mother Margaret Flannigan had tried to be whenever her husband wasn’t around. She was the only person whose opinion Cami really cared about anyway, and her mother barely even recognized her anymore.
If Cami could only figure out why everyone hated Rafer and his cousins. She could show her father the injustice of what they had suffered — no, that wouldn’t happen. There was no compassion left in her father after Jaymi’s death.
Cami gave her head a hard shake. No, he wouldn’t care because it would only be an excuse. What she hadn’t considered while allowing Martin Eisner to see her kissing Rafer was the fact he would tell Mark Flannigan as soon as possible. When he did, Mark would use the excuse to ensure he never allowed Cami to see her mother again.
* * *