With a heavy heart she admitted the truth.
He’d pretended to sleep and he’d allowed her to slip away.
And she was too big a coward to even guess why.
* * *
Rafe watched Cami slide into the cab, saw her gaze lift to the window where he stood carefully behind the curtain and narrowed his eyes on her thoughtfully.
He’d let her leave. Everything inside his soul had demanded he hold on to her, that he tighten his arms around her and fuck her until she was too damned tired to try to slip from him while she thought he slept.
But what was the point? If not now, she would have slipped out later. While he showered. Perhaps while he met with Logan and Crowe at the lawyer’s office. There was no way to hold Cami if she didn’t want to be held, and Rafe knew it.
And she was simply too damned scared of what had happened between them not to run.
Blowing out a hard breath, he looked around the hotel room, then finally focused on the incriminating stain on the sheets.
Cami had been a virgin.
His throat tightened at the proof of her innocence, at the knowledge that he had been the first to touch her so intimately. That he had been first to possess the liquid heat and fist-tight depths of her pussy.
The first to hear her cries of completion.
Instantly, furiously, his dick was spike hard, the head throbbing in renewed hunger. Perhaps it was a good thing she had slipped out so early, because fucking her into complete screaming submission had been all he could have thought of. Logan and Crowe would have had to drag him from the room.
All these years, along with his cousins, he had fought to hold on to what was his. Not just the property their parents had left to them but also the cash that had been frozen in their accounts since the day the Callahan brothers and their wives had been killed.
Fourteen years. He and his cousins had been fighting for their inheritance for twelve years and there were times he swore it was a battle that wouldn’t be won until the Corbins, Robertses, and Raffertys were dead.
But, as imperative as this appointment was, as crucial to their case as it was, still, he didn’t know if he could have forced himself away from Cami long enough to have made it on time. She did something to his brain. He couldn’t help it. She managed to get under his skin and made it damned impossible to think of anything but touching her once she had stood up from that table and he’d seen all the hunger filling her eyes.
He’d fought it. God knew, he’d been fighting it at least for the past three years. Each time he’d seen her since she had turned eighteen, once a year, it had ended in a kiss. A kiss that had nearly flamed out of control last year. She was like this fire he couldn’t resist because when he was with her, he found the cold that usually encased him becoming heated and warm.
Admitting to it now was a moot point. It was there like a fire in the night, like a temptation no man could be expected to resist. That was Cami. His own personal temptation. The one woman he couldn’t turn away from no matter how hard he tried.
Rafe was being driven insane by the need to have her again already. She hadn’t been gone five minutes and the need throbbing through his body was like a vicious hunger, impossible to deny.
Pushing his fingers through his hair, Rafe blew out a hard breath before heading toward the shower.
He had things to do. Things that didn’t include pacing the floors because Cami had slipped out of his bed.
And it sure as hell didn’t include chasing after her, no matter how desperately he wanted to.
Fate conspired against her. It laughed at her. The playful bitch did its best to destroy her, Cami thought as she stared out the window of the apartment her sister had once lived in. The one Cami now lived in herself.
She couldn’t seem to stop crying, sobbing actually. It had been two months, eight weeks to the day since she had run into Rafe while in Denver for educational training. It was the third year they had run into each other and shared a night of passion.
Her palm was pressed flat against her abdomen, the realization of the emptiness that existed there tearing through her again as her breathing hitched and she cried with all the rage and lost hope that filled her.
She was aware of her aunt in the kitchen behind her. Ella had brought Cami from the hospital that morning and had stayed with her throughout the day. She had listened to Cami’s sobs silently, and a few times she thought she had caught her aunt crying as well.
Cami’s mother wasn’t here.
Margaret Flannigan hadn’t come to the hospital. She hadn’t called or come to the apartment. Cami’s father had answered the phone when she had called, though.
“Your mother’s busy,” he’d informed her when she asked to speak with Margaret.
“Please, Dad,” Cami remembered whispering tearfully. “Please let her know I need to talk to her.”
“So you can cry over losing that little bastard he gave you?” Cami’s father had rasped furiously. “Your sister is turning over in her grave, Cami. Your mother’s heart is broken. How could you allow the monster that stole your sister from us to touch you? Are you so desperate to take everything your sister had that you have to take the lover that killed her? The child she couldn’t have? Maybe we’ll all get lucky and he’ll kill you next rather than some innocent, helpless girl.”
Then he’d hung up on her.
Cami had listened numbly to the dial tone in her ear for long moments before placing the phone back in its cradle slowly.
At least, for a while, he had made her stop crying. Shock had driven every emotion she could have felt so deep inside her that it had taken hours for her to make sense of what he had said, what he had meant.
“Cami.” Ella stepped to the window seat as Cami continued to stare onto the street below. “Come to the house, baby. Eddy’s beside himself worrying about you, and I don’t want to leave you here alone.”
“I’ll be fine,” she said.
She was lying. She would never be fine again. As long as she lived, she would never be fine again.
She had lost her baby. The baby she and Rafer had created the night they had come together two months before.
It hadn’t been a blizzard. She told herself it had been a coincidence, nothing more. Just as she told herself every year and managed to convince herself of it. There was no way he could have known where she would be and when. There was no way he could have been heading to the airport on the same day, at the same time, to the same city, every year. It couldn’t be coincidence; that was simply stretching the explanation further than she could believe.
But what else could it be?
The only other explanation was more than she could imagine. That it was by design.
“Are you going to call him, Cami?” Ella asked gently.
Cami shook her head, sobbing again as she turned her head from her aunt.
Cami ached. Inside, out. To the depths of her soul, to the last particle of her spirit, she ached until she wondered if it were possible to die of it.
“He would want to know.”
Ella eased down beside her niece, her heart breaking for the girl. It was all Ella could do to hold back her own tears. To keep from sobbing with Cami.
God, how could her mother leave her alone now? How could Margaret have left this precious, beautiful child to fend for herself against the cruelties her father waged against her?
Did Margaret even know the many, many times Mark had separated them? Had her sister-in-law even realized, in the Valium haze she existed within, that her daughter was being tormented by the man who had sworn to protect her?
“Cami,” Ella whispered as she laid her hand on the girl’s knee. “You don’t have to go through this alone. He would want to know.”
