surrounded her, tearing into his soul. Cami should have never been alone. “Until I walked to your house during a blizzard, instead of the Phillipses’, which was closer. Until I realized I had to see you.” And there were the tears; they gleamed in her eyes, but they didn’t fall. “I had to see you; I had to know if you were really home. If you were really here. And I swore I wouldn’t touch you.” Throwing her head back, she blinked desperately as she drew in ragged breaths. “I just had to see you,” she whispered hoarsely. “Now what else do you want to know, Rafe? Tell me!” she screamed then, the pain suddenly overflowing, penned up for five years, locked in a dark part of her soul where she had refused to let it escape, and now it was exploding like a volcano of rage and pain. “What the fuck else do you need to know?”
She turned to run.
Cami had never meant to let it go, to let it rise inside her until it spewed from her soul like an erupting volcano that couldn’t be stemmed.
When he had threatened to leave a part of himself that she would never be free of, he had triggered that inner helpless rage she had been able to control in the past.
“The hell you will!” Rafe jumped for her as she turned to run, to escape. “Damn you, you’re not going anywhere. You will not run from me again, Cambria. Not this time. Not now.”
He had seen the intent in her eyes, wild with the agony of a loss he had never known.
Catching her around the waist, he was only distantly aware of Logan and Crowe rushing back into the house from the front porch. Coming to a stop in the hall, they watched, surprised, not prepared as a desperate cry of agony tore from her and her arm swung with all the force in her small, delicate body.
Rafe caught her fist a bare inch from his face, staring back at her in surprise, in anger. She dared to try to strike him, even in her pain, in her rage against fate, when she hadn’t told him that together they had created a life? That she had lost that baby and suffered that loss alone and had never given him the chance to share it with her?
“You never told me,” he snarled down at her. “You were pregnant and you never told me? Why?” As he gripped her upper arms it was all he could do not to shake her, to demand, to rage along with her for the tiny unborn life he had never had the chance to know about.
The tears fell now. Staring back at him, her eyes were nearly black with the emotions, the secrets she had kept for far too long, and the tears he wondered if she had ever shed.
Jaymi had remarked several times that Cami held too much inside, even as a child. That Jaymi never knew what her sister was thinking or what Cami was doing until it was already done.
“Dad said I deserved it,” she whispered as those tears fell from her eyes, her lips trembling violently as she stared up at Rafe beseechingly. “Mom said it was for the best. That I wouldn’t want my child to suffer as you and your cousins did.” Her fingers clutched at his arms now with the same desperation that her fist had aimed for his face with. “It wasn’t for the best, Rafe. I wouldn’t have let my baby suffer. I would never, ever let anyone be cruel to my child.” Hoarse, rough with the tears that fell but the sobs she held back, her voice grated with pain and tore a hole in his soul.
“Cami. I would have been here.” How had it happened? He had used a condom. He remembered using a condom. Had it broken? Had he only thought he had rolled the latex over the violently hard flesh that was so eager to sink inside her?
She shook her head as though she had read his thoughts. “It was my fault.” She swallowed tightly. “You had drunk so much that night. After I fell asleep you woke me. You asked if it was okay. You asked if you could have me bare.” Her breathing hitched, those sobs fighting to be free. “I told you it was,” her voice lowered. “I told you it was, and I knew it could happen. I knew, and I wanted—”
She gave a hard shake of her head, lowering it and fighting to be free again.
“You wanted my baby?” he asked, baffled, as she struggled to escape. “No, Cami.” A small shake was acceptable, he told himself. Just enough to get her attention. Just enough to make her look up at him, those tears still falling, her lips trembling with such vulnerable pain it was destroying him. “You wanted my baby?”
Every woman he had ever been with in Corbin County had been damned vigilant about condoms and birth control. Not that he had been any less so. He had been determined no child of his would be raised away from his protection, and he knew no woman in that county would want to claim him as the father.
Except Cami.
“I wanted our baby,” she whispered. “I wanted a part of you to hold forever, because you were always leaving, Rafe. You couldn’t stay and I wanted to hold on to you forever because leaving before you awoke, so I wouldn’t have to watch you leave, nearly killed me.”
She couldn’t let the sobs free. She hadn’t allowed herself to cry, to release the rage and pain building inside her, because she feared the price.
If she shattered, she might not know how to put herself back together again.
“Let me go.” If he kept holding her, kept staring at her with that naked hunger, then she might not survive it. “Don’t tear at me anymore, Rafe, please. Please don’t ask any more from me. Please God, don’t ask me for more.”
Let her go? It wasn’t happening and now wasn’t the time to tell her that was something he would never do. What she definitely didn’t know was that he had never let her go.
“I won’t leave you alone.” He had to force himself to speak past the lump in his throat.
As he stared down at her he was only barely aware of the doorbell ringing.
The door opened before Logan or Crowe could reach it and check for danger. Cami wished they had made it.
The danger wasn’t physical, it was so much more dangerous than that.
Stepping into the small den her father had once used, Cami could feel her insides tightening in trepidation as she faced her father.
She really looked nothing like him.
She remembered so many times, staring at him and wondering how she had acquired traits and a sense of decency that she knew he didn’t have.
“Is Mother doing well?” she asked as he moved naturally to the large desk she had taken as her own.
He sat down in the large padded chair comfortably and stared back at her.
Cami knew this wasn’t going to go well.
It never had whenever she had faced him across the table in the past.
His lips were curled into a sneer, his brown eyes filled with disgust.
I see the rumors are true,” he mocked her, his tone low. “You’ve not only insisted in fucking the murderers but you have them living with you.” His gaze flicked over her. “Are you fucking all of them?”
“Is it any of your business?” she asked him.
His lip curled tighter. “You’ve managed to get my Jaymi killed and now you’ve also turned my brother against me.”
“I had nothing to do with Jaymi’s murder.” She was already too raw, too shredded inside to take the blame for it.
He leaned forward against the desk. “She died for you,” he accused her. “To collect medicine you begged her for.” He raked her with a look filled with bitter hatred. “You could have waited until the next morning.”
She couldn’t deal with this.
She was savaged from the secrets she had revealed to Rafe, the memories raking her soul as the hatred in his gaze seemed to increase. “You lost your child, Cami, and I thought it only fitting punishment.”
Vicious, cruel, the sound of the satisfaction in his tone shocked her.
“Why?” she whispered painfully, shocked. “Why would you say something like that to me?”
“Because you deserved it.” He rose from the chair then, glaring back at her. “You took Jaymi from the parents who loved her, and you thought your presence would help with that loss?”
“I thought you had a spark of decency was what I believed,” she whispered painfully. “I learned you didn’t a long time ago, though. And it was no more than the truth.”
The cold hard smile he directed her way should have hurt her. It should have at least hurt for the simple fact that he was her father.
“Why should I?” he asked, his voice dropping further to ensure Rafe didn’t hear them, she suspected. “You weren’t my child, Cami. You’re nothing to me. So why should I care?”
