Easing from the bed, he felt his heart clench at her disappointed little murmur when his warmth eased away from her. She shifted on the bed, searching for him for a moment before settling back to sleep with an unconscious little pout to her lips.
She would walk away, he warned himself again. As easily as, perhaps more easily than, she had walked into his life once again.
It was better that neither one of them grew used to sleeping with the other. Better that he simply let her go. If he could. He had a feeling that letting her go again would be impossible.
Moving to the dresser on the other side of the room, Rafe pulled on jeans and a heavy flannel shirt before sliding his feet into a pair of comfortable sneakers. He collected one of the slim, fragrant cigars he preferred, a lighter, and moved to the balcony doors.
Slipping quietly onto the balcony and easing the door closed Rafe let the night settle around him.
The acrid, spicy sweet taste mixed with the smoke had the immediate effect of easing the worse of the tension that had begun to fill him.
This wasn’t the same warning, or foreboding as his recruiting officer had called it, that had served Rafe so well in the Marines. This was something he had only felt when heading into the most dangerous of the missions he’d undertaken. This wasn’t just a foreboding, it was a straight-up fucking warning.
From the moment Cami’s firm little knock had sounded on his door, those inner sirens had begun going off. And now, staring into the night, he wondered at the sense of danger he could feel edging closer.
He had hoped he could return home, slip in without too much of a ripple, keep to himself, and find the life he’d searched for around the world.
And God knew he’d searched for that place in the world where he could, at the very least, be content. He wasn’t asking for happiness. He’d learned long ago that was far too much to ask for. Contentment, though, hadn’t seemed too high a price to charge for the years he had spent defending his country. After all, he’d also been defending this little corner of America that had decided he and his cousins had no place in their midst.
Or perhaps those other places just weren’t the place whose proud mountains sustained them. That place where their fathers, their grandfather, and his father before him had planted Callahan roots. Those other “places” hadn’t been home.
Logan and Crowe too had found that contentment eluding them. Crowe had actually resigned from the Marines the year before Rafe and Logan had and spent those months alone searching for a place he could call home. Crowe had traveled around for a while, but as he’d written in his last e-mail before they’d returned, evidently there really was no place like home.
For Crowe no place like the cabin his mother had left him that overlooked the sheltered valley below. For Rafe it was the small ranch his Uncle Clyde had owned. The one that his grandmother had been raised on before marrying JR Callahan.
For Logan it had been the house his mother had owned before her death. The one she and his father had lived on. The one he had been born in. It was flat in the middle of Sweetrock. A two-story traditional American with a wide porch surrounding all sides. In the back was the roomy yard he and his cousins had played in as toddlers. Next to it was the garage where his father had allowed him to “help” work on the family car.
The house was surrounded by other similar houses. Once, long, long ago, before his mother had given in and married the father of her child, Logan had played with the neighborhood children there. He had been accepted, and had known a childhood happiness that Rafe only barely remembered while Logan refused to discuss. And none of them could pinpoint why it had changed. Why had their grandfathers, their entire families, turned on the children left behind? What had made them suddenly hate and despise the sons that cherished daughters had given birth to? And why didn’t anyone seem to have the answers to those questions?
Rafe puffed on the cigar again, frowning into the swirling snow and listening to the moan of the wind. Rafe knew it had begun with the daughters marrying the Callahan brothers. Still though, that animosity hadn’t grown against their children until after their deaths.
A grimace tightened his face as he forced himself away from the maze he was beginning to step into. Questions without answers, they could pile up into a mess inside his brain if he let them. There was simply no way to figure out why the families that he and his cousins should have been able to turn to had turned their backs on them instead.
They were the sons of the daughters those three men were known to have once cherished and adored, until the night they had eloped with the three brothers. Three brothers who had spent every day since their return from the military accusing the barons of having murdered their parents, JR and Eileen Callahan.
After twenty-two years of asking “Why”? and of all but begging the good people of Corbin County to just explain what sin they felt their parents had committed, Rafe, Logan, and Crowe had simply stopped caring.
They’d had enough of it the three days they’d sat in that tiny jail cell, frozen with shock and horror, accused of killing a woman all three of them considered their best friend.
It had taken three days for Uncle Calvert, a Marine recruiter, and the lawyer he had hired, to get their release.
Then for another three days Rafe and his cousins had lived in silent shock beneath the care of the man who had raised them and the uncle they hadn’t known still lived.
If it hadn’t been for Ryan, they would have rotted in prison. If they had lived that long. Before Ryan had made it to the jail with the lawyer, all three of them had been beaten so badly by the sheriff and his deputies that it had taken all they had to walk out of the jail.
The evidence at the scene of the crime had been conclusive, the judge had decided. The DNA testing on the blood indicating an older male had gone along with the FBI’s profile of the serial murderer. A profile the FBI stated the Callahans in no way matched. The judge had further concluded that as much as he would love to see Rafe, Logan, and Crowe Callahan locked up for the rest of their natural-born days, he couldn’t in all conscience bring them to trial for a crime he was certain they hadn’t committed.
A man who didn’t know them and hadn’t taken the time to learn anything about them would have loved to see the three of them locked up for the rest of their natural-born days.
Son of a bitch, that memory still had the power to amaze him, and never failed to confuse him.
Leaning against the balcony railing, Rafe flicked the cigar ash over the edge of the railing and narrowed his eyes against the snow.
Their fathers hadn’t been scions of society, but neither had they been the dregs of humanity. And for not the first time in Rafe’s life he was beginning to wonder exactly what three cherished daughters could have done to their families to ricochet back on those daughters’ children? And once again he was asking questions he couldn’t answer.
Now, here Rafe was, right back where he had started, and wondering what the fuck he had come back for. What had made him, Logan, and Crowe hunger for this particular little place in the world?
Because insanity must run on the Callahan side of their genetics, he decided as he puffed the cigar once again and relished the aromatic burn that filled his senses.
He’d be damned if he knew where to go from here, though. He could rebuild the ranch; it had been damned profitable before Clyde Ramsey had died.
Rafe, Logan, and Crowe had had plans for the ranch. They’d been certain the climate would have to be different when they returned and living there wouldn’t be the hardship it had once been. He’d be damned but they couldn’t have been more wrong.
The quiet musings and his enjoyment of the cigar were disrupted by the sound of a powerful snowmobile motor cutting its way through the heavy windswept snow falling from the sky as well as that layered on the ground.
Strong LED lights cut through the white walls of fluff falling around them and traversed at least two feet of heavy, wet snow as the powerful machine made the precarious turn between snow-hidden fences.
Logan or Crowe. The new snowmobiles were unmistakable, and only they were insane enough to be riding through a blizzard for whatever it was they wanted. It could be as simple as sharing a cup of coffee or as complicated as heading back out for whatever wild-assed idea one of them had.
They were bored. He’d sensed it weeks before. And things could get dangerous, especially for Rafe, when Logan and Crowe were bored.
There were times Rafe felt as though he was the adult and his cousins were no more than wayward
