her, filling her, marking her.
He’d never given another woman the intimacy of coming inside her, of feeling his seed spurting hot and hard in the blistering heat of her vagina.
Not until Cami. He trusted her that first time when she had said she was protected. But even more, Rafe knew if she wasn’t, if she conceived his child, then it would only bind her to him. It would ensure she never ran from him again. That she never left him again.
Buried as deep inside her as possible. Holding her as close to him as possible, he felt a steady glow radiate in the pit of his stomach that he’d only felt with Cami.
CHAPTER 5
She slept peacefully, deeply, her head resting against his heart as her deep, even breaths feathered over the light dusting of hair on his chest.
Rafe kept his arm curled around her shoulders, kept her as close to his body as he could get her, allowing his fingers to stroke the silk of her hair every so often.
He’d waited years to get her here, and now that she was, rather than sleeping as peacefully as he had that first time with her, Rafe was left staring into the darkness of the bedroom.
He was damned wary about going to sleep and he fully admitted why. Every time he had done so, he had wakened to a missing Cami and an empty bed. Not even so much as a letter or a short
If she ran out on him again in such a way, he’d end up doing more than busting a hole in a hotel wall with his fist. Rafe would go looking for her, and that might be the worst idea he’d had in years. He could just imagine the shock, the fear, and the suspicion that would fill her neighbors’ faces if he did such a thing.
She would probably have every male within three blocks in front of her home within minutes, and every one of them would be armed. Every one of them would have murder in his heart and hatred in his gaze, and Rafe had never fully understood that. Because it had begun long before the year six young women had died at the hands of a brutal rapist and torturing murderer.
Cami’s older sister, Jaymi, had been one of the victims.
For a second, he heard her screams as clearly as he, Logan, and Crowe had heard them that hot summer night they had been quietly fishing on the bank of Sweetrock Lake, in the densely covered forest outside of town.
He didn’t want to remember that night. He’d spent too many years trying to forget it. But the facts were that the Callahans had been ostracized far sooner than that year. They’d been ostracized decades before that, and there had been no explanation why.
There had only been that barely disguised distrust and wariness, as well the thinly veiled dislike.
There had been days Rafer had existed in such a state of rage during his teenage years that even his Uncle Clyde had been wary of him. Hell, even his cousins had steered a wide path around him in those days.
He reminded himself that he hadn’t allowed their opinions to bother him since then though and he wouldn’t allow them to matter now. Never again would he allow such destructive fury to rise inside of him because of such pettiness and never again would he run from it.
But it would matter to Cami and he couldn’t even blame her for it. There were times when he had been able to view the situation logically. Had he believed a man responsible for such heinous crimes, he then too would have gone out of his way to make his life hell.
And even before the murders, the years he and his cousins had endured the scorn of the citizens of Corbin County, he’d understood, sort of, why they had done so.
The barons of Corbin County were a powerful force in not just the county, but also in the state of Colorado. Their anger could have far-reaching consequences.
No doubt Cami knew exactly what those consequences could be. She had seen the many jobs her sister had gone through and knew what Rafe had only suspected, that Jaymi had lost those jobs because of him.
She was a teacher; her job depended on the goodwill of the other teachers, the school board, and the parents. No parent in Sweetrock would want a teacher instructing their children who was sleeping with the man suspected of having murdered her sister twelve years ago. A man suspected of conspiring with his two cousins to rape, torture, and murder five other young women between Sweetrock and Aspen, Colorado, during that same time period as well.
Rafe had learned years before not to worry about what the good people of Sweetrock might believe. His mind was invariably set on shocking and scaring any adult who dared to offend him. Hell, they didn’t have to offend him. He was ready to shock, piss off, or frighten any adult who found the courage to confront him in any manner. The inheritance left to him by his mother might have still been tied up in the court system, but the interest from it was not. He was financially secure enough that he didn’t need the barons’ goodwill to survive. Hell, he didn’t even need their ignorance of his existence to make it in Corbin County. All he needed was the military check he received and the considerable interest payment he received each month. After that he could piss off or nearly frighten anyone who attempted to foolishly confront him.
And he didn’t care a bit to do so.
There were even times he had even gained a hint of morbid satisfaction in doing so.
He couldn’t do it to Cami, though. It wasn’t her fault the school board was filled with the high-minded, panty-starched little prudes. The bastards had seemed to actually enjoy each punishment they had dealt out to him during the few years he had attended the high school.
But he’d seen in the shamed, regretful gazes of a few of them that they hadn’t agreed with it. He could find no respect for them, but there was a part of him that could understand it.
Thankfully, he’d managed to graduate early. By the first semester of the final year he had had the credits needed to bypass attendance for the rest of the year.
The school board had been more than willing to allow him to simply return home until the end of the school year. What they hadn’t told him? Unless he was in attendance a required number of days he would lose that year and the credits he had accumulated. Had it not been for the recruiting officer who’d been shadowing Rafe during those last months of high school, then he would have never managed to graduate. He would have been forced to get a GED rather than the diploma he had busted his ass for and had suffered at the local high school to attain.
He’d been determined to have that diploma, even if getting it had been hell. It had been a fight that both he, and the soldier who had befriended him, grew frustrated with.
But Rafe had learned why that soldier had been there. Why he had befriended the three outcast cousins and drawn them into the armed forces, and away from Corbin County. Because he, too, was a Callahan. Given up for adoption by his parents when he was barely six months old, the only knowledge he had of his birth family was what his adopted parents had given him.
When he’d arrived in Corbin County, first during Rafe’s final year of high school and again six months before Jaymi had been killed, he had seen the hell his nephews had endured. It had been on that trip to see them that he had convinced them to join the Marines.
Rafe looked down at the woman in his arms and felt that familiar dark anger from his youth rising inside him. He knew that any moment she could bolt and run, then she would be gone. And the thought of it infuriated him.
He was too damned restless to sleep now. It was one of the reasons he had been drinking himself into a drunk when she showed up on his doorstep. So he could sleep. So he could escape the restlessness and the wary sense of foreboding that had haunted most of his life. Well, at least that part of his life spent in Corbin County. Twelve years in the Marines and eight of those years spent as a sniper, and not once had he felt that same dark foreboding mission. Step his ass into Corbin County with the intent to stay, though, and once again it became a near daily companion.
