174469.fb2 Midnight Sins - читать онлайн бесплатно полную версию книги . Страница 47

Midnight Sins - читать онлайн бесплатно полную версию книги . Страница 47

Her steps quickened.

Gripping her keys tightly in her fist, the longest key extending between two of her clenched fingers, she watched the shadows suspiciously. She wasn’t panicking yet, but she knew someone was out there. Waiting. Watching.

For a moment, she was drawn back to her childhood.

Jaymi and Tye laughing as Cami had managed to evade them the last day before he shipped off to Iraq.

The Navajo her sister had married had taught her how to move much more quietly than she ever had over those months. She’d gotten good enough to evade Jaymi, but not Tye himself.

“She’ll be hell to catch if some bastard ever decides to chase her in the dark,” Tye had bragged on her that night. “Little sister will know how to evade, and when I come back, she’ll learn how to fight.”

But Tye hadn’t come back. Six weeks before he was due to ship out, he’d been caught in an explosion and killed instantly.

She hadn’t just lost her own best friend that day, but she had also lost her sister. A vital part of Jaymi had died the day the Army officer and chaplain had arrived to tell her the news.

As the memory dissipated, she realized she was doing as Tye had taught her, weaving in and out of the shadows, never taking a straight path, using the trees as cover.

She never walked beneath the street lights, and didn’t hesitate to walk on someone’s lawn rather than venturing too closely to the pooled light beneath the tall posts.

It wasn’t long before the sensation eased, though that feeling of tension that still gathered inside her assured her someone was still out there.

She entered the house by the back door, stepped in, and locked the door back quickly.

She didn’t turn the lights on.

She didn’t turn on the television.

Slipping up to her bedroom, she spent most of the night staring at the locked bedroom door and wondering who the hell was following her.

CHAPTER 13

The next morning Cami awoke as the sun poured into the skylight over her bed, still dressed in the jeans and sweater and sneakers she’d put on after returning home the night before.

The boots would have been impractical if she’d had to slip out her bedroom window and make her way along the roof to where she could drop to the ground more safely.

The knowledge, or the feeling, someone had been following her had spooked her. She was on edge, restless, and that Saturday morning she was just plain pissed.

That was not Marshal Roberts playing with her head, no matter what Rafer believed.

As she poured another cup of the fragrant brew, the sound of the cell ringing had her quickly reaching for it and checking the caller ID. She prayed it was Rafer.

She’d actually swallowed her pride and called him the night before, but it had gone instantly to voicemail, an indication the phone was either turned off, or in a dead zone.

A frown pulled at her as she activated the call and brought the phone to her ear.

“Good afternoon, Jack?” she greeted him, a question in her voice.

“Hey, Cami, I’m pulling onto your street,” Jack Townsend answered back. “Do you have a few minutes to talk? I have something I want to tell you.”

“Sure. I’ll be waiting at the door.”

Disconnecting, she moved through the house to the door and opened it as Jack’s tow truck pulled into the driveway. She couldn’t imagine why he was at her house that early, or what he could want. She hadn’t taken her car in since he’d returned it after the blizzard, more than a month ago. Well, actually, she thought, closer to two months.

He wasn’t alone, though; his wife, Jeannie, was with him. The petite blond lifted her hand in a wave as she practically jumped from the truck and joined her husband as he came around the front, glaring at her.

“I keep telling her I’ll help her out,” he groused as they reach the front porch. “But Short Stuff insists on jumping. One of these days she’s going to break a leg.”

Jeannie punched him in the shoulder lightly with her fist as she laughed back at him. The love between them was apparent, though. It was actually so apparent that the gossipmongers loved attempting to cast suspicion on it.

“Come on in,” Cami invited, still confused at the visit. “There’s fresh coffee and store bought cinnamon rolls.”

Cami led the way into the kitchen after closing and locking the door securely behind them.

She admitted she had become paranoid in the past weeks. The phone calls might have stopped, but that feeling of being watched had her wary. Perhaps her caller had grown tired of calling and decided to act.

She couldn’t tell if the caller knew about the last night Rafe had been at the house or not. The suspense was making her as nervous as hell, though.

“I thought it best to stop in and talk to you, versus the phone,” Jack stated as she poured the coffee and set cups in front of both Jack and his wife at the kitchen table. “Some conversations you simply don’t trust to normal channels of communication.”

The last comment had her tensing.

“Jack’s paranoid,” Jeannie admitted. “We’ve received a few calls warning him about consorting with Callahans.” She rolled her eyes. “I swear, you’d think we were involved in political intrigue or something. Or perhaps a return to the Middle Ages? Tell me, Cami, are the Callahans traitors perhaps? Did they steal national secrets? Attempt to assassinate the president?”

Consorting with Callahans. “No,” Cami said softly, her gaze meeting Jack’s. “But I’ve been getting similar phone calls.”

Cami quickly related news of the calls she had been receiving to Jack and watched the couple exchange a worried look. She omitted the visit by Marshal Roberts, but over the weeks she had been surprised that no one else had mentioned it. Whoever had seen Rafe’s grandfather here evidently wasn’t telling anyone else.

“Hell.” Jack plowed his fingers through his dark hair as he sat back in the chair slowly. “Did you tell the sheriff?”

Cami shook her head.

“I’d suggest it,” Jack warned her. “I called Archer first thing, not that we’ve been able to trace the calls; they don’t last long enough. But at least I have a paper trail if I have to cap someone’s ass for messing with what’s mine.” He shot his wife a quick look, the possessiveness and concern touching.

“The thing is,” he continued, “I was worried enough I called Dad and Taggert. Dad acted so damned strange that Jeannie and I went to Denver over the weekend to talk to him. They had some very interesting information. Some things I had forgotten over the years and a few things I didn’t know about.”

As Jack continued talking, with Jeannie injecting information where she remembered a few things, Cami began remembering things she had forgotten as a girl as well.

The Corbins’ attempts to take Crowe Mountain just after Crowe’s parents’ deaths were well known. What Cami hadn’t heard was the Corbins’ attempts to destroy the Ramsey ranch after Clyde Ramsey, Rafe’s uncle, had taken all three boys in.

Corbin hadn’t managed to destroy the property, but he had managed to affect it financially for several years.

Then there had been the acts of vandalism, cattle missing or poisoned, equipment sabotaged, and several pastures salted.

As the Corbins were targeting Crowe, Logan’s grandparents, Saul and Tandy, had gone after Logan’s inheritance: the two-story house in town that was listed as one of the first houses built in the county, as well as a cash inheritance that at the time had come to more than a million dollars.

Crowe’s trust fund was larger, the inherited account coming from the trust his mother had inherited from her grandparents as well as the property and cash her parents had added to it. She had died only days after coming into the inheritance and within hours of signing the will that made her only son her beneficiary.

Then there were the bits of information that seemed more sinister. The night the three couples had been killed, the sheriff had closed the accident site completely off. Only the coroner and a young attorney Wayne Sorenson had been allowed onto the site for hours.

Even Clyde Ramsey, Marshal Roberts’s brother-in-law, had been barred from the site. In those early-morning hours he received a call from a ranch hand in the area who suspected Clyde’s niece and her husband had been in the accident along with the Raffertys’ daughter and son-in-law, and in the Corbins’ case, their daughter and son-in-law as well as the newborn infant daughter — the only child her parents had taken with them to Denver that day while supposedly visiting friends.