As he moved her across the dance floor, held her in his arms, and claimed her to everyone willing to see, Cami felt that part of her soul open and come alive.
Rafe watched the crowd.
With his head bent over Cami’s, one hand tangled in her hair, the other gripping her hip, he felt her melt against him.
She was accepting him. He could feel that acceptance to the bottom of his soul. And in doing so, she was accepting the claim he made on her.
With his gaze locked across the dance floor on Marshal Roberts, he stared back at his supposed grandfather with a fiery rage and unbidden fury he’d never been able to quench.
Until the old man turned away, replaced the western hat he invariably wore, and walked away.
He didn’t know what the old bastard was up to, but he would find out. There were a lot of things he intended to have answers to very, very soon.
Until then, he had Cami in his arms. Slow dancing, swaying, holding her as close to him as two people could get.
Until the music ended.
Cami found herself back where they had started, sheltered within the small grotto, staring up at Rafer as he stepped away from her.
A second later, she was free.
Trembling, struggling to stand upright on the five-inch heels as he steadied her, but only for a second, before letting her go and stepping back.
“Rafer,” she whispered.
She needed more. She was dying for more.
“Let me know when I can come through the front door, Cami,” he bit out furiously. “Until then, you damned well better remember every word of warning I just gave you.”
Before she could protest or argue, he was gone. Sliding through the shadows and disappearing, leaving her feeling suddenly deflated, lost.
She sat down slowly on the lovers’ bench behind her and covered her face with her hands.
She should have told him why.
She should have told him about the phone calls and that the last threat wasn’t just against her. The last time the caller had contacted her, he had threatened Rafe as well.
“You’re not being a good girl, Cambria. Don’t you know I’ll punish you even more than I did your sister? This time, your lover will feel my anger as well.
You’re not being a good girl.
In other words she wasn’t staying away from Rafe or keeping him away from her.
Maybe she should have told him—
Cami forced herself to go home that night.
The streets, as she suspected, were far from empty, which would make it much easier for anyone to follow her.
She walked back to the house with friends she worked with who had parked farther down the street and gave her a reliable excuse for walking with someone. She didn’t have to ask anyone to walk with her, which would have required explanations.
But once she reach her home and stepped inside it, she almost wished she had stayed just a little longer at the outdoor party. Perhaps until daylight.
Because the house was too quiet.
It was too lonely.
The home she had grown up in, the one she had bought from her father when he and her mother made the decision to move to Aspen, seemed to close in on Cami. For the first time in her life she didn’t feel comfortable, warm, and protected, and she wondered that she ever had.
There had been something about her mother’s presence in it, Cami admitted. Her mother had made the difference. Before Cami’s parents had sold the house and moved to Aspen, it had been a warm, inviting home. Sometimes. If her father wasn’t there.
But still, it was the home she had been raised in. It was the home where she had gotten to know her older sister until Cami had turned eight and Jaymi had moved out.
And even then, Jaymi hadn’t forgotten about her. Jaymi had taken Cami to her new home regularly, and when her husband had been killed in the military it had been Cami who Jaymi had wanted to stay with her for a while.
And her father had never seemed to understand why Jaymi wanted Cami with her. He had never understood why her older sister seemed to love her. If her mother had felt the same way, Cami had never sensed it. But neither could she discount the suspicion. Because there was no way her father could have resented her and her mother not know it.
There were times Cami and Jaymi swore Margaret Flannigan had eyes in the back of her head, because they couldn’t seem to get anything past her when they were children. She would have known, despite the sedatives she took. Margaret would have seen that her husband cared nothing for his younger daughter.
So why hadn’t Margaret Flannery done something about it? Why hadn’t her mother left Mark Flannigan, or at least made the effort to let Cami know that she accepted her?
Was she so unlovable to the father she had adored as a child that loving her was impossible? She wondered as she stared around the house for long minutes. Was she truly so bad that as her father said, he had been forced to take her mother away to Aspen to alleviate Cami’s influence?
Or had he simply found the only way to punish her for not being the daughter who had died? Because taking her mother away from Cami truly was the only way he could have hurt her at that point.
She stood silently for a moment, staring around the shadowed house, feeling the loneliness that wrapped around her. That sense of suddenly having nothing to hold on to and no one to warm her. There were no parents, no siblings, where once there had at least been a sister and a mother.
Now there was simply no one but her aunt and uncle.
And Rafe.
When Cami allowed herself to have him.
Yet even he hadn’t come back to the house with her. He hadn’t followed her, and he wasn’t at her back door now.
He had given her a choice, and now he was sticking to it. She could call him. She could come to him. But he wasn’t going to allow her to excuse her choice with the excuse that he hadn’t given her a choice.
With a hard jerk of her head she forced that thought, that need, back. Moving through the house, she checked the locks on the doors, checked the windows, and double-checked the alarm.
She felt restless, on edge. As though a foreboding followed her, an instinctive warning to beware that she couldn’t seem to shake. The feeling had begun at the social, tingled around her on her way home, and now it had settled into her senses like a subtle scent she couldn’t shake and yet couldn’t identify.
She wished she hadn’t danced with Rafe. Wished she had asked him to follow her home. She wished he were there with her, and she should know by now the folly of wishing for things that weren’t meant to be hers.
Rafe hadn’t followed her home, though; he hadn’t spoken to her after he had left her back in that little grotto. And he hadn’t mentioned that claim on her.
Even though Cami knew he had made it.