Midnight Sins

immediately drew female eyes. It always looked a bit mussed, as though a woman had just run her fingers through it and enjoyed the soft, cool feel of it.

Dressed in jeans, sneakers and a flannel shirt, the long sleeves rolled to his elbows, he looked like a lazy tiger prowling his lair. Biding his time before he took his mate.

She almost didn’t control the jerk of shock that hit her at the thought. She wasn’t a mate; she wasn’t a lover. This was where she invariably managed to get herself in trouble when it came to Rafer.

Rafe, she reminded herself. She was going to have to begin calling him Rafe, or she would draw more attention to herself than she wanted. Everyone called him Rafe. No one ever called him Rafer except her. And she just couldn’t seem to break the habit.

“Daydreaming or fantasizing, Cambria?” That silky drawl, so wicked in its sensuality, had her gaze jerking from his chest to his face.

“Excuse me?” She blinked back at him, wondering if he could see into those fantasies and daydreams.

He gave a light chuckle as he moved to the coffeepot. “Have a seat; I’ll make the coffee.”

She stepped warily to the table, only just barely controlling her flush of embarrassment at what had taken place on that table the night before.

His head between her thighs, his tongue dancing wickedly over and inside her pussy. His hands on her breasts, her nipples. Her own hands there—

She clasped her hands in her lap tightly and pressed her thighs together with a firm admonishment that she was not going to get wet. She would not get wet. She wasn’t wearing panties and she simply couldn’t afford to have her juices gathering and easing—

Her teeth clenched in anger at herself.

There it was. The slow, easy glide of her juices from her vagina. At this rate, her jeans were going to be wet and she didn’t have anything else to wear.

“You slept deep last night.” He spoke quietly as he set the coffee in front of her. “I think we could have had a bomb going off outside the bedroom and it wouldn’t have shaken you.”

His smile was a slight quirk.

How long had it been since he had smiled?

Had he gotten over Jaymi’s death? Did he even think of the death of his lover in his arms as anything other than the event that had nearly destroyed his life?

“I need to make a few phone calls,” she said. Rather than asking the questions raging through her, she went for something more mundane, something simple. She needed to get in touch with her aunt and uncle and let them know she was safe. No doubt Aunt Ella was beside herself, pacing the floors by now.

“Phones are down; cell-phone reception is lousy at best,” he told her. “There’s a chance you’ll get a text out if you stand on the balcony outside the bedroom.”

Her aunt and uncle were no doubt worried to death.

“There was about a forty-minute lag time on mine to Crowe,” he told her. “He’s in the cabin.” He nodded toward the mountains rising behind the house.

Crowe Callahan’s cabin was so far up that mountain that when the cousins had disappeared after the judge released them twelve years before, it had taken days for the sheriff to find them again when he’d been forced to return their belongings.

She nodded. If she was lucky, her aunt and uncle would at least know she was safe and warm until the storm was over. She’d simply stated she was with a friend. Would they suspect who that friend was, she wondered? Perhaps not at first, but her aunt’s intuition could be amazingly precise.

Sliding the cup of coffee across the table minutes later, Rafe took the opposite chair and lounged back in it lazily.

“So what’s your story?” he asked.

Her cup halfway to her lips, Cami looked up at him slowly, knowing exactly what he was talking about simply from the hint of underlying anger in his voice.

What would her excuse be for being at the Triple R Ranch during a blizzard with Rafer Callahan? And in his eyes she could see a demand for a reason why she would need an excuse.

“The truth usually works.” She sighed. “The car slid into a snowdrift and I had to stay here.”

“And where did you sleep?” The hard curve of his lips didn’t even resemble a smile. “I need to know what to say when the good folks of Sweetrock decide to decimate me again because I slept with one of their favorite daughters.”

“Like I tell the kids at school, don’t borrow trouble and you won’t have as many problems,” she told him. “If they ask, do what you’ve always done before and shoot them that arrogant look before turning and walking away. Change the way you act and you give them more to talk about.”

And what the hell was she going to say? The question was bound to come up. Any woman seen in the company of a Callahan eventually faced the third degree. Then, there was always the series of lectures, and enough harassment that they’d walk away from the Callahan simply out of frustration.

But it was rumored Rafe never really gave a damn. If a lady left before he did, then oh well, was the attitude he seemed to take. That was the impression he had always given, but Cami remembered Jaymi’s comment once that Tye had told her about the times Rafer had often retreated within himself afterwards. Tye had sworn that those rejections and opposition were destroying Rafe. Cami couldn’t imagine that he had endured them without serious internal scars.

“So, we’re on the sly here then.” He gave a slow nod. “Did I give up my bed for you? Or was I my normal cruel self and forced you to sleep on the couch?”

“Don’t, Rafe.” Cami wrapped her hands around the cup as she stared back at him directly. “Things can’t be any different and you know it. What happened to Jaymi changed everything.”

He snorted. “You were only thirteen then, Cami. I had no thoughts at all of you, sexually. But later—” He shook his head. “You want me until it’s all you can do to sit still in that damned chair and you’ll still deny it, won’t you?”

He leaned forward, pushing the cup slowly out of his way as he braced his arms on the table and glared back at her. “Tell me, Cami, when will it stop mattering to you what the people think?”

“When my job no longer depends on it?” she suggested, feeling his tension, his anger, licking at her now. “When my parents don’t stare at my sister’s picture with such grief and my mother isn’t sobbing because she lost her daughter and the men she believes killed her have gone unpunished.”

Her lips thinned as she breathed out roughly.

Cami’s hand jerked up, covered her lips.

God, she hadn’t wanted to say that; She hadn’t wanted to hurt either of them with the truth he should know by now couldn’t be avoided.

His eyes narrowed back at her as mockery filled his expression. “Yeah, that was real dumb,” he drawled. “We both know there’s no way the Callahan cousins can defend themselves against what the good people of Sweetrock think.” He gave a short bark of laughter at the thought. “Or should I say, what the barons tell them to think?”

Cami could only shake her head at the comment. “You know how they are, Rafe. The barons, for whatever reason, want the three of you out of Sweetrock forever. You’ve had twelve years to try to convince everyone differently and you haven’t even made the attempt. You return home every so often, stare down your nose at them, and pretend they don’t matter. When you know that if you want to stay here, then it does matter.”

“What matters, Cami? Their opinion?” Rafe smirked. “When I was ten and my parents had just died, one of the fine teachers of Sweetrock informed me I was better off without them and while the principal lectured me because I had gotten into a fight with a boy that called my mother a Callahan whore.” By the time he finished he was leaning across the table, almost nose to nose with her, the fury that filled his sapphire eyes frightening in its intensity. “Tell me, why the fuck should I care?”

She hadn’t known about that but she didn’t doubt it in the slightest either.

She knew his life in Sweetrock had never been easy, but she hadn’t known that it had been that terrible when he had been so young. No more than his parents’ lives had been easy. As though there were those determined to make the orphans pay for their fathers’ supposed crimes since their fathers weren’t there to pay themselves.