Amelia had always been very adept at slipping out of her father’s house and slipping into Cami’s.
“She has the key to the basement door,” Cami told Rafe quietly as she set the coffee cup back on the counter. “I never had the lock changed, just in case she needed someplace to run to.”
Rafe leaned forward. “Cami, what was the secret you were keeping for Amelia?”
Closing her eyes, she lowered her head, her jaw clenching painfully.
Had it just been this morning? Had she told Rafe they had lost a child and in the next second been forced to face yet another emergency?
There had been no chance to rest, to find peace or a few moments to discuss much of anything that had happened three years before.
“Cami, the time to keep secrets is over,” he warned her, his voice low yet hard. “Why did Amelia go from the rebel with a cause to that staid, silent wraith of a young woman we saw today? What did her father learn when he read your diary?”
She was careful to keep her gaze down, but from the corners of her eyes she watched Crowe. Closely. And he was consciously not looking in her direction.
“Cami, I have to agree with Rafe,” Logan stated, his gaze compassionate but just as determined as his cousin’s. “We need to know now. She’s passing you notes that she can’t sign in her own name, and coded with a message that only you would understand that she needs to meet with you. Something’s wrong here, and it’s affecting more than just those in this room at the moment.”
But it affected one of them more than the other, and obviously, that one hadn’t trusted his cousins with the information.
“Cami.” Rafe’s tone was warning. “I won’t beg for the information. What I’ll do is start asking questions around town; is that what you want?”
Cami flinched.
Crowe lifted his head then, his gaze slicing across the room to her, obviously aware she was watching him from the corners of her eyes.
She watched as he drew in a deep breath and gave a short shake of his head before he said, “She helped me break into the courthouse the month we were home on leave that year. She stole her father’s key, slipped inside with me, opened the safe, and I took the file he had been putting together on us. We wiped the computers, made certain there were no copies, and then I took her home.”
Cami swallowed tightly.
Amelia had told her about it several nights later, after Crowe had disappeared into Crowe Mountain once again. Excited, nervous, her emerald eyes sparkling with what Cami knew was a surfeit of pure sexual arousal, Amelia had told her exactly what had happened before he took her home. Crowe was leaving quite a few details out of the story.
“Hell.” Logan blew out a hard breath as frustration creased his face. “Now he’s blackmailing her.”
“And no one cared to tell us.” Crowe directed the accusation at Cami.
“Perhaps someone thought you’d be man enough to at least pay attention to any changes in her after your little escapade,” she shot back. “Tell me, Crowe, did you even bother to question why Amelia married so quickly? Or why she changed so drastically?”
His lips thinned. “I didn’t know until today.”
Cami’s jaw tightened as her lips pursed for a second in an attempt to hold back her anger.
It didn’t work.
“Why doesn’t that surprise me?” she charged roughly. “Did you even give a damn after you charmed her out of what you wanted and left her watching for you every damned day?”
His eyes narrowed.
“Cami,” Rafe warned, “let it go for now. We’re all less than calm, and there’s no sense in fighting among ourselves.”
She let her gaze connect with Rafe’s, the need to continue the accusation straining her patience. Because she knew how Amelia felt where Crowe was concerned.
Like Rafe for Cami, Crowe had lit a fire inside Amelia that even the knowledge of the repercussions if anyone learned what she had done couldn’t cool. Amelia knew that Crowe was even more forbidden to her than to any other woman in the county, with the exception of the current Corbin princess, Ann.
And someone had found out. The wrong person had found out, and it had destroyed Amelia’s dreams.
Her father had somehow found the diary that Cami kept hidden in a box of letters and cards tucked in the back of her nightstand behind books, mementos, and a picture of her with her mother and Jaymi.
Cami had never learned how he had found it. What she learned, though, was the price she and Amelia both had paid for the discovery.
The price they were still paying.
“I hate this fucking county,” Logan breathed out roughly as silence filled the room. “Wayne Sorenson always was a Corbin lapdog. It’s a shame his daughter is paying for his lack of backbone.”
Wayne Sorenson was particularly cruel. Amelia hadn’t just betrayed him; she had broken the law. He had the proof of it in the journal Amelia’s best friend had recorded the events of the night in. Amelia and Cami would stay away from each other, Amelia would marry the man Wayne had been shoving down her throat, and she would become the perfect daughter. If she didn’t, he would ensure that she was arrested for breaking into the courthouse and interfering in an investigation against suspected criminal elements.
There was nothing he could do to Crowe, because for some reason Cami hadn’t mentioned his name. It was a habit she had taken as a teenager. She never wrote their names. She called them instead by the predatory nicknames she had given them.
Rafe was the wolf, Logan was the tiger, and Crowe was the lion, the king of the jungle, simply because he seemed to be harder than the other two.
There was no way Amelia could deny Cami had written about her, though. Her name was there, written in bold black, and the act had been described in exacting detail.
“I’m getting a shower and heading to bed,” Cami told the cousins. “This hasn’t been my best day and I’d just as soon go to sleep and forget it happened for a while.”
She could feel the heaviness weighing her soul down as guilt bit at her hard and deep.
She hadn’t just lost everything she had held dear, but she had also managed to strip every shred of Amelia’s freedom. Because if she hadn’t returned home and done exactly what her daddy wanted, then he would make certain her prints were found inside the safe and the county attorney at the time would have arrested her and made certain she spent time in prison. Then her father had upped the ante. She would do what he wanted, or he would take Cami’s journal and implicate her in the crime as well. He might not be able to arrest Crowe, but Wayne could destroy both her and Cami’s life.
Wayne Sorenson had tied his daughter’s hands, hobbled her, blindfolded her, then shoved a dagger so deep inside her heart that Cami knew her friend would never recover.
Moving through the house and up the stairs, Cami told herself she would make it up to Amelia one of these days. It was one of those promises Cami made almost daily and one she knew she couldn’t fix. She’d lost so much simply because of the county she had been so determined to stay in. She hadn’t wanted to move to Denver, but Aspen was just small enough that she could never live there without running into her parents.
If her mother ever recovered from the stroke she’d had, if she ever left the nursing home— Unfortunately, she had seemed more than content exactly where she was. Away from her husband.
Still, if not her parents, Cami would end up running into her father, and how painful would that be?
The heat of the shower only reminded her how cold she felt inside. How tired she had become. She’d kept her secrets as long as she could, and when they had come spilling out there had been no stopping them. Just as there had been no stopping the emotions tearing her apart.
There were times she felt she’d placed herself in deep freeze after she had lost the only friend she had been able to depend upon, then lost her and Rafe’s child.
That ice was chipping now. She could feel it inside, fracturing, trying to break apart, the seams melting and weakening as she fought to hold back the pain.
Laying her head against the shower wall, the heat of the water pouring over her, Cami fought to hold it inside, to keep the pain from breaking her apart.
