“Your opinion of me or anything I do isn’t anything I lose sleep over, Mark,” she told him casually, knowing that the worst thing she could do was allow him to see how easily he could wound her.
She had learned better than that years before.
“What I’d like to know is how he managed to slip past Logan and Crowe,” Rafe stated.
Mark snorted. “They were out back for some reason.” He shrugged comfortably. “I have a key.”
“I’d like that key back,” she informed him. “Is Mom okay?”
“As if you care,” he accused her. “You’re too busy fucking her daughter’s murderer to even check up on her.”
Cami could only shake her head. She called the facility daily and went to visit whenever she could.
Her mother didn’t even recognize her. Cami doubted her mother even thought of her when she did have the presence of mind to remember her.
“What do you want, Mark?” Cami asked wearily as Rafe rose to his feet, pulled his jeans over his legs, and pulled the zipper up nonchalantly.
“I couldn’t believe it when I heard how you were consorting with these bastards.” Mark flicked his fingers to Rafe to indicate not just him but also his cousins, who weren’t in the room at the moment.
“I don’t want to hear this.” Cami lifted her hand, seeing the rage in her father’s face and wishing she had changed the locks to the house when she had the chance.
“You don’t want to hear this,” he sneered back at her. “This is how you repay the love and loyalty Jaymi felt for you, isn’t it? They killed her, Cami—”
“They didn’t kill her, and I won’t deal with you at the moment. Leave, Mark.”
His expression twisted in fury. “Give me the courtesy of calling me Father, you little whore.”
The conversation was over as far as she was concerned. The accusations she could handle; the name-calling was much harder to overlook or to turn the other cheek on.
“Your mother heard what you were doing here, in her home, in the room where she once slept in her bed,” he snarled back at Cami as he shoved his hands into the pockets of his slacks and watched her as though she were a foul odor he couldn’t disperse.
“Then you told her,” Cami accused him, feeling her chest tighten in pain and anger at the thought of what Mark would have said or could have done to torment her mother. “Tell me, Mark, don’t you ever get tired of punishing Mother for having me, and me for living when Jaymi didn’t?”
His expression darkened further. “I forgave her for giving birth to you,” he informed her. “But no, Cami, after this.” He nodded toward Rafe. “After this, I’ll never forgive you for living. Jaymi wouldn’t have betrayed you this way. She sure as hell would have never slept with the man who killed you.”
“I would hope not.” Cami shrugged. “You should leave now. If you really believe Rafe and his cousins are murderers, then it’s hard telling how they’ll react if you continue to stand here and throw their crimes in their faces.”
She glanced at Rafe. The smile he gave her father was all teeth. “Yeah, only God knows how much fun we could have with that one,” Rafe snorted.
“Leave the key before you go, Mark.” It should have hurt. It should have broken her heart a thousand times over, but all she felt was regret.
He could have been a father to her.
He had been Jaymi’s father. He had loved Jaymi with a father’s devotion that Cami had envied.
A devotion she’d prayed for just a bit of. An ounce of. Hell, she would have settled for Mark to simply tolerate her.
The smile that curved his lips was one that echoed with relish. She knew that whatever was coming, he expected to cut her to the bone.
“Your mother will never know I told you the truth,” he told Cami confidently. “She’ll never know I finally found the chance to tell you how thankful I am that you’re not my child.”
Shouldn’t she be shocked?
Cami stared back at him as Rafe cursed under his breath and moved to her. His arm went around her as he moved behind her, drawing her against him and providing a warmth, a security, she’d never had before. Facing Mark had never been easy. It had never been comfortable. But he’d never been so deliberately cruel either.
It wasn’t shock that filled her, though, and it wasn’t pain.
“I think I’ve known that for a very long time,” she told him softly. “If you meant to hurt me, Mark, then you haven’t succeeded.”
That was exactly what he had expected.
He glowered back at her and Rafe. “You’ll pay for this,” Mark finally snapped. “You’ll pay, Cami, when he kills you. When he tortures and rapes you—”
“And if you didn’t notice the fact he was in my bed when you so rudely barged in, then you’d realize he didn’t have to rape me,” she retorted. “No more than he would have had to rape Jaymi. Stop walking the Corbins’ line, Mark, and think for yourself for a change. Jaymi tried to tell you he and his cousins weren’t involved in any wrongdoings. But like everyone else, it’s much easier to please James Corbin than it is to think for yourself, isn’t it.”
“Cami,” Rafe said her name softly. “Go get ready, sweetheart. We have things to do today, remember?”
No, that wasn’t what she remembered.
He’d told her last night they had things to clear up, and that was far different.
“I’m finished with the little tramp—”
Before Cami could process the fact that Rafe had moved, he had done just that.
His hand was wrapped around Mark’s throat, holding him pinned to the wall he had thrown him into.
“Leave,” Rafe said softly.
Anything else he said Cami missed while waiting for her brain to kick into gear once again.
She rushed to the two men, and her fingers curled around the arm that bulged with strength as he drew on that power to keep his fingers wrapped around Mark’s throat.
“That’s enough,” she said softly. “I really don’t want to have to deal with Archer later, Rafe. And you know Mark; he would definitely file a complaint if you leave so much as a single bruise.”
“Oh, he won’t be bruised,” Rafe promised her, though he released Mark slowly. “But I bet you he remembers how little I like hearing that trash rolling out of his mouth to you.”
“And I’m sure he really won’t care once he gets away from you,” she told him before turning her gaze back to the man who had thought he could destroy her.
“Who was my father?” she asked Mark.
“Dead.” He seemed to relish the word. “The bastard was some cop in Denver when she left me one summer. She never made that mistake again. Again,” he reminded Cami.
“Did you kill him?”
Mark chuckled at the question. “I only wish I’d had the chance. A drug dealer and his tramp did that for me when he thought he could poke his nose in their business. His stupidity got him killed.”