And she shook her head, the smile that curved her lips suddenly filled with life, with the memory of love. “I wouldn’t have missed it for the world, Rafe. Even if I had known one day he would be gone, I wouldn’t have missed it.”
And Rafe knew, Tye had felt the same.
His friends had been two parts of a whole, and with Tye’s death, there were times Jaymi seemed almost crippled with grief.
But in her eyes, in that moment, he saw another side of it. A side that held no regret. That loved so deeply that the pain was worth it.
And he promised himself, swore to himself, he’d never love that way. He’d never let another person in that deep. He’d never allow himself to be broken by losing them.
Two weeks later
The bronchitis was getting worse.
Jaymi sat beside Cami’s bed and read the thermometer worriedly. Her temperature was edging over 102, her sister’s face was flushed, her lips dry, and fever glittered in her dove gray eyes.
“But you were getting better,” she sighed as Cami stared up at her with overbright eyes.
“Lost my medicine,” her sister admitted, struggling for breath as she coughed again, the labored, rough sound worse than it had been when her sister had showed up at her doorstep earlier that day.
Their mother had sent her to the apartment, a good twenty-minute walk from the house that would have taken Cami much longer as she labored for breath.
She glanced at the clock, willing the doctor to call her back about the prescription before it was too late. She worked at the pharmacy, but still, Mr. Keene wouldn’t like it if she had to let herself in tonight to fill the prescription.
If he were in town, he would have come in himself and done it, she knew. He liked Cami. Hell, everyone liked Cami, except their father.
“How did you lose your medicine?” Cami’s answer perplexed her. Her sister wasn’t an irresponsible child. She’d been forced to grow up young, and hadn’t had the luxury of being able to forget the simplest things. Mark Flannigan, their father, had little patience for teenage angst or forgetfulness from his youngest child.
Cami shrugged at the question and turned her gaze away to stare at the wall on the other side of the bed.
“Cami?” Jaymi touched her sister’s chin gently to turn her gaze back to her. “What happened to your medicine?”
“I don’t know.” Her dry lips trembled as her eyes filled with tears. “Dad came in the bedroom and he was upset because there were dirty clothes on the floor and the tissues were on my table. I think he threw them away when he started throwing everything in the trash.”
Jaymi’s lips thinned.
She knew better than to call him, or to appear at the house furious over it. Mark always had a way of making it look as though it were Cami’s fault, or even pretending innocence.
While he did, their mother would stare at him in resigned accusation before mumbling about taking her medicine and heading for her bedroom.
She wasn’t going to allow this to continue, she decided. Once Cami was better, they would go to the house and pack her things before bringing them to the apartment. Cami was being neglected in the most despicable way. Even worse, Mark was risking her health. He had to have known he had thrown the medicine away. That wasn’t something that was done by accident, and she knew Cami wasn’t a messy child. She was too neat for her age and Jaymi couldn’t believe there had been enough tissues on the bed table for Mark to have missed the bottle of pills and the cough medicine.
She just prayed the doctor was willing to fax the prescription in to the pharmacy before Jaymi broke several different state and federal laws and refilled the prescriptions herself.
She would not allow her sister to suffer more tonight, and the hospital was more than an hour away. After the wreck she’d been in the week before, she was wary about driving the mountain roads.
There shouldn’t have been anything wrong with her brakes. There had been no reason they would go out as she started down the mountain, causing her to nearly crash over one of the sheer cliffs that dropped to a boulder-strewn ravine below.
It had been sheer luck that had kept her from going over. That and the fact that a rock slide from the cliff above the road had caused the state to clear a wide area on the other side of the road to make room for debris.
She’d managed to steer her car to the other side and the very fact that she hadn’t been going fast had possibly saved her life, Joe Townsend had told her.
But he had acted oddly. He’d refused to look her in the eye, and Joe was the type of man who looked a person in the eye. But when he’d warned her to be careful, and she had taken it as a warning, he’d been more commanding than concerned.
“Jaymi, watch what you’re doing,” he told her fiercely. “Don’t be taking any chances.”
She hadn’t been aware she was taking any chances. At least not in her car.
But the night she and Rafe had stopped seeing each other, another call had come in, and this time, she was certain she knew who it was. Mostly certain of it. There was just enough doubt that she had to see him first, had to look in his eyes as he spoke to her to be certain.
Each time she called him the call went to voice mail. The one time she’d shown up at his office, he had been “unavailable,” according to his secretary. But he couldn’t hide forever. Sweetrock was a small town, she was going to see him eventually.
The ring of her cell phone had her jerking the device from the table next to the bed and flipping it open.
The prescription had been faxed in. The pharmacy was closed, but the doctor was certain it would be filled before the doors opened the next morning.
So was she. She had the keys to the store and she had the license to work behind the counter and fill prescriptions. She was supposed to have it checked by the pharmacist; she wasn’t supposed to fill anything without Martin Keene’s presence. But this was an emergency. It was her sister.
Cami fought to cough again, nearly losing her breath as she tried weakly to clear the obstruction in her lungs.
“Cami, I’m going to go get your prescription,” she told her as she rose from the chair and grabbed the jacket she’d laid at the end of the bed earlier. “I’ll be back in a bit, okay?”
Cami nodded, her eyes drifting closed, her breathing labored as she tried to rest before another bout attacked.
“Get some rest, baby.” Leaning down, she kissed her sister on the forehead before grabbing her purse and keys and heading out of the apartment.
It was dark. The street lights glowed weakly in the evening fog, casting sinister shadows along the nearly deserted back streets.
She considered moving to the front of the block, but it was the quieter part of the evening. There wasn’t much traffic until Main Street and then heading south toward the interstate.
The pharmacy was only a few blocks from her apartment, which was why she liked the job. She could walk to work and back, and even during the rain and snowstorms, it wasn’t a bad walk. It would just be a wet one.
Which was why Cami had bronchitis. Her father had sent her the eight blocks from their home to the pharmacy to get their mother’s prescription rather than waiting for Jaymi to bring it to the house after she locked up.
He had deliberately attempted to get Cami ill, she thought as she tucked her hands into the light jacket she wore and strode faster along the neat, well-lit back street.
Cami was susceptible to bronchitis and pneumonia. If the first stage wasn’t treated quickly and aggressively, then Cami could become viciously ill. She’d been hospitalized twice in the past four years, once for pneumonia, the second time for double pneumonia.
Pausing at the street corner, she felt a chill race up her spine and marked it down to the thought that her father might be attempting to kill his youngest child.
If she was his youngest child.
Jaymi had done some counting in the past weeks since her father had revealed his attempt to convince Uncle Eddy and Aunt Ella to keep Cami when they moved to Aspen.
Cami was thirteen. She would be fourteen in three months. Add nine more months to that, and it added up to the time their mother had taken Jaymi and stayed in Denver with Aunt Beth for nearly a year.
Jaymi had been ten, and she remembered, even now, how much happier her mother had been then. She laughed, giggled on the phone. Sometimes, Jaymi would wake up in the middle of the night and thought she heard a man’s voice in the bedroom across the hall.