letting her go and stepping back.
“Rafer,” she whispered.
She needed more. She was dying for more.
“Let me know when I can come through the front door, Cami,” he bit out furiously. “Until then, you damned well better remember every word of warning I just gave you.”
Before she could protest or argue, he was gone. Sliding through the shadows and disappearing, leaving her feeling suddenly deflated, lost.
She sat down slowly on the lovers’ bench behind her and covered her face with her hands.
She should have told him why.
She should have told him about the phone calls and that the last threat wasn’t just against her. The last time the caller had contacted her, he had threatened Rafe as well.
In other words she wasn’t staying away from Rafe or keeping him away from her.
Maybe she should have told him—
CHAPTER 15
Cami forced herself to go home that night.
The streets, as she suspected, were far from empty, which would make it much easier for anyone to follow her.
She walked back to the house with friends she worked with who had parked farther down the street and gave her a reliable excuse for walking with someone. She didn’t have to ask anyone to walk with her, which would have required explanations.
But once she reach her home and stepped inside it, she almost wished she had stayed just a little longer at the outdoor party. Perhaps until daylight.
Because the house was too quiet.
It was too lonely.
The home she had grown up in, the one she had bought from her father when he and her mother made the decision to move to Aspen, seemed to close in on Cami. For the first time in her life she didn’t feel comfortable, warm, and protected, and she wondered that she ever had.
There had been something about her mother’s presence in it, Cami admitted. Her mother had made the difference. Before Cami’s parents had sold the house and moved to Aspen, it had been a warm, inviting home. Sometimes. If her father wasn’t there.
But still, it was the home she had been raised in. It was the home where she had gotten to know her older sister until Cami had turned eight and Jaymi had moved out.
And even then, Jaymi hadn’t forgotten about her. Jaymi had taken Cami to her new home regularly, and when her husband had been killed in the military it had been Cami who Jaymi had wanted to stay with her for a while.
And her father had never seemed to understand why Jaymi wanted Cami with her. He had never understood why her older sister seemed to love her. If her mother had felt the same way, Cami had never sensed it. But neither could she discount the suspicion. Because there was no way her father could have resented her and her mother not know it.
There were times Cami and Jaymi swore Margaret Flannigan had eyes in the back of her head, because they couldn’t seem to get anything past her when they were children. She would have known, despite the sedatives she took. Margaret would have seen that her husband cared nothing for his younger daughter.
So why hadn’t Margaret Flannery done something about it? Why hadn’t her mother left Mark Flannigan, or at least made the effort to let Cami know that she accepted her?
Was she so unlovable to the father she had adored as a child that loving her was impossible? She wondered as she stared around the house for long minutes. Was she truly so bad that as her father said, he had been forced to take her mother away to Aspen to alleviate Cami’s influence?
Or had he simply found the only way to punish her for not being the daughter who had died? Because taking her mother away from Cami truly was the only way he could have hurt her at that point.
She stood silently for a moment, staring around the shadowed house, feeling the loneliness that wrapped around her. That sense of suddenly having nothing to hold on to and no one to warm her. There were no parents, no siblings, where once there had at least been a sister and a mother.
Now there was simply no one but her aunt and uncle.
And Rafe.
When Cami allowed herself to have him.
Yet even he hadn’t come back to the house with her. He hadn’t followed her, and he wasn’t at her back door now.
He had given her a choice, and now he was sticking to it. She could call him. She could come to him. But he wasn’t going to allow her to excuse her choice with the excuse that he hadn’t given her a choice.
With a hard jerk of her head she forced that thought, that need, back. Moving through the house, she checked the locks on the doors, checked the windows, and double-checked the alarm.
She felt restless, on edge. As though a foreboding followed her, an instinctive warning to beware that she couldn’t seem to shake. The feeling had begun at the social, tingled around her on her way home, and now it had settled into her senses like a subtle scent she couldn’t shake and yet couldn’t identify.
She wished she hadn’t danced with Rafe. Wished she had asked him to follow her home. She wished he were there with her, and she should know by now the folly of wishing for things that weren’t meant to be hers.
Rafe hadn’t followed her home, though; he hadn’t spoken to her after he had left her back in that little grotto. And he hadn’t mentioned that claim on her.
Even though Cami knew he had made it.
Even though Rafe was very well aware of the fact that he had a claim on her and they both knew it it was a claim she couldn’t shake or deny.
And as his gaze had followed her throughout the night, she had felt that knowledge. Just as everyone else at the dance had. Even Emma had been reticent to say anything about it, or to tease Cami over it. And normally, Emma was the one to joke about anything.
She had felt his eyes on her nearly every second, especially if another man had dared to approach her.
As though Rafe’s warning had kept her from dancing with anyone else. That had nothing to do with her decision, because she realized he wouldn’t have really made a scene.
He would be madder than hell. He would hate every second of it. He would have most likely waylaid her in private again at first chance. But there wouldn’t have been a confrontation. Rafer Callahan had more pride than that.
The truth was, she hadn’t wanted to dance with anyone else. She hadn’t danced with another man, slept with another man, or engaged in a serious flirtation with another man since the first night she had slept with Rafer. Well, they hadn’t done much sleeping that night.
The most she had done in the past was to go out to dinner a few times with other men, hoping each time that there would be at least the faintest spark of attraction.
But there hadn’t been.
Breathing out roughly, she trailed her fingers over the banister of the stairs as she moved to the the master suite.
The room that somehow hadn’t had even the faintest mark of her parents on it when she had bought it.
She’d redecorated after buying the house from her parents anyway.
