several recruiting officers and staying on the military base there with Ryan’s family. If they hadn’t been, they would have been arrested then and they would have never been able to clear themselves.
Archer wasn’t stupid, though. The Callahan cousins weren’t little more than boys anymore. They were adult men, military trained, and they didn’t take orders worth shit from civilians.
It was one of their best traits, Crowe liked to say.
But even more, they knew how to protect themselves.
“Do you hear me, Rafe?” Archer snapped.
Rafe turned his head and stared back at Archer as determination flowed through him.
The determination to kill whoever had dared to touch Cami. Whoever had dared to bruise her, frighten her, or target her because of who her lover was.
Whoever did this would pay for it.
The bastard was a dead man walking; the Callahan cousins would see to it.
CHAPTER 16
Cami listened from her hospital bed, dry-eyed, resigned, to the sound of her father’s high, shrill voice on the other end of her aunt’s phone.
She’d warned Ella, Eddy’s wife, not to call. Cami had warned Ella that Mark could be nasty and that since moving to Aspen he had rarely wanted to speak to his daughter, let alone see her. Unless he needed her for some reason, as he had the month before, to help get her mother settled in the nursing home.
That, or to pay her mother’s bills.
She stared up at the pristine white ceiling and wondered why that searing pain was no longer there. Once, it had broken her heart that he hadn’t cared, that he refused to allow her mother to care.
But perhaps, even more painful was the fact that her mother would opt to medicate rather than stand up for the child who needed her.
“I’ll not have that damned Callahan trash dirtying my home or endangering her mother. Poor Jaymi, she’d be turning over in her grave to know the sister she thought so much of was still fucking the man that raped and murdered her.”
Cami flinched.
There was such hatred, such bitterness in his voice. Did he truly hate her so desperately for not being the child that died? For surviving when his favorite hadn’t?
Parents weren’t supposed to acknowledge favorites. If they preferred one child over the other, it was supposed to be a carefully hidden secret.
Mark had no remorse at all showing his preference for the child that died, and his belief that the wrong child had died. That he believed Cami didn’t deserve to live when Jaymi had been taken away from him.
“Mark, you’re a bastard,” Ella snapped at that point. “How Margaret ever managed to stay with you all these years I don’t know.”
She flipped the phone closed.
Cami didn’t lift her head; she couldn’t. If she had to look at the pity in her aunt’s gaze then she might not be able to bear it.
“He always was a fool, Cami-girl.”
Her head did lift then. Eddy stood a few feet from the bed, his gaze gentle. She’d rarely seen Eddy with that expression. That was his funeral face and his new-baby face. And now, it was his feel-sorry-for-Cami face.
“Rafer didn’t hurt Jaymi,” Cami said, feeling numb, wooden. “He wouldn’t have called her and warned her against himself. Just like the calls I’m getting.”
Eddy sighed heavily as he shoved his large, scarred, and beaten hands into his pant pockets. “Well, a man gets suspicious and he gets paranoid,” he said. “I’m not going to say he did do it anymore. But I won’t say he didn’t. You’re our girl, Cam. Nothin’ ain’t gonna change that and nothin’ ain’t gonna make us stop worryin’ ’bout you. Especially now.” Somber and filled with brusque emotion, Eddy sniffed uncomfortably before glancing away from her.
“A benefit of a doubt then?” she asked wearily.
He nodded slowly. “For you, girl. I know you. I know you’re damned smart, and you’re a damned good girl. That’s how Jaymi raised you but I ain’t never called you a fool. And I never called Jaymi one. And she always defended those Callahan boys. I’m not going to turn on my second-best girl just because no one else wants to agree with her.”
His second-best girl. She glanced to her aunt, dressed in her nursing scrubs, her expression somber but her gaze loving as she watched her husband. Ella was his best girl, he always said, and bemoaned often the fact that she hadn’t been able to conceive the daughter he wanted. A baby girl who looked just like his best girl.
Cami swallowed tightly. If she wasn’t careful, she was going to end up crying. No, she wouldn’t just cry, she would be sobbing, and she couldn’t afford to sob. She hated crying. It pissed her off and made her eyes sore. And her head was sore enough. She felt overwhelmed by Eddy and Ella’s anger at Mark, and the way they glanced at her, their sorrow for her aching inside them. She couldn’t seem to make them understand that it really didn’t matter anymore. She was used to her father’s disregard, as well as his judgmental hatred where her past with Rafer was concerned.
She had actually needed him when she had lost her child. Him and her mother, but that had been years before. She had learned a long time ago not to let it hurt, not to let it bother her. That was just the way it was.
“It’s okay, Uncle Eddy,” she assured him, trying to smile, but her head just hurt too bad to attempt it.
At least her face wasn’t too bruised. Thankfully, the bastard hadn’t managed to hit her but once in the face. He’d split her lip, turned one side of her face a lovely shade of blue and red. No, the majority of the damage had been the bruises caused by those heavy fists at the side of the head and the concussion the doctor had diagnosed.
Her temple was so tender that any tug at the skin there sent pulses of pain radiating through her head.
“It’s not okay.” He shook his head. “But there’s no changing him anyway.”
“Has he ever been a father to you?” Ella asked knowing he hadn’t been, as she turned away to secure the blood she had taken earlier in the small tote she carried.
Cami really didn’t want to talk about this now, and she definitely didn’t want to deal with it. She just shrugged.
“Cami knows he never was.”
Cami’s head jerked up, a whimper almost escaping as the movement sent a lance of agony twisting through her skull.
Rafe moved around her uncle, his leanly muscled, long-legged stride covering the distance until he was standing beside her, his fingers beneath her chin to lift her face.
She didn’t fight him. She didn’t have the strength. She just stared up at him, miserably aware of what he was seeing.
Her makeup was smeared, the right side of her head swollen, her face darkened with the bruise, and her lip split. She looked like she boxed for a living.
“School board contacted Archer as we drove into the hospital parking lot,” Rafe told her. “Until this is resolved, and your attacker caught, you’re on a medical leave of absence.”
In other words, they didn’t want the gossip or the small chance of danger that came with her attack.
She understood the concern, somewhat. But she hadn’t been attacked at school. She knew her students, though; they were curious and full of questions at even the busiest time of the school day. Right now, she didn’t need the questions or the knowledge that the answers would be spread among the general public.
It was the right decision for her, at this time. It just sucked to have the decision made for her.
“She needs to rest,” her aunt Ella spoke up then, her tone confrontational as she glared from Rafe to her
