Lora Leigh - Midnight Sins

The teasing edge of amusement in her gaze had his lips twitching.

“Yeah, especially after you helped us build a hell of an appetite.”

He moved to her, kissed her neck, then wrapped his arms around her and pulled her to him.

He kissed her gently at first, and would have gone for more if his own stomach hadn’t decided to begin growling.

Cami laughed at the sound before pulling away from him and moving back to the ingredients she had laid out.

Just then, Crowe’s cell phone rang and they heard his cousin walk down the hall to take the call.

It wasn’t long before Crowe came back.

His expression was a hardened demand that spurred Rafe and Logan both into action.

“What’s happened?” Rafe questioned harshly as Cami moved to his side, her face etched with concern.

“It’s Archer on the phone,” Crowe growled. “Jack Townsend’s garage outside of town just exploded. Jack’s tow truck and Jeannie’s car were both in the parking lot and no one saw them leave.” He glanced at Cami as a small, unconscious sob finally tore from her, only to quiet just as quickly. “It looks like they were killed in the explosion.”

Cami felt numb inside as Rafe pulled the Denali SUV into the parking lot of Jack’s Towing and Repair just outside Sweetrock city limits no less than fifteen minutes later. Staring at the burned, charred mess of the building, she couldn’t imagine how anyone could have survived such an explosion. Especially if they had been in the apartment overhead where Jack and Jeannie had lived.

More than half of the garage was just gone, with the debris scattered through the parking lot, vehicles lying in a tangled mess here and there. One lay in the field across from the garage. There were more than half a dozen that had been parked in the waiting lot, ready for needed repairs.

There was no repairing the damaged messes they were now. Cinder blocks, mortar, and metal had been slammed onto the vehicles. The wreckage defied any sense of logic or attempts to make sense of what had happened.

Cami stepped out of the truck, aware of being surrounded by Callahans and all the eyes that turned to them as three hard-cored, hard-muscled, steel-eyed Callahan men wrapped themselves around her and defied anyone to attempt to get close to her.

As she stared up at the garage, her heart in her chest, she tried to blink back the tears she couldn’t hold back any longer. She couldn’t believe this had happened.

“This wasn’t an accident,” Crowe muttered from behind her and Rafe as she felt his arm tighten around her back, his hand falling to her hip, his fingers gripping it firmly, as though she would attempt to tear herself away from him.

At the moment, her emotions were so torn, conflicted, and thrown into chaos that she couldn’t imagine moving away from the only person who seemed to ground them.

“No,” Rafe growled. “It wasn’t an accident.”

“How can you be so certain?” she asked faintly. “Why would anyone want to hurt Jack and Jeannie?”

“We’ll find out,” Rafe promised as Cami glimpsed Archer amid a group of volunteer firefighters and several state police officers.

Catching sight of the Rafe and Cami, Archer lifted his hand in acknowledgment before excusing himself and moving quickly across the debris-strewn parking lot. “The fire marshal is refusing to allow anyone onto the premises.” Archer’s voice was low as he reached them, his gaze filled with somber anger. “I can’t check for the bodies, Rafe.”

Cami wanted to close her eyes; she wanted to deny that this could have happened. That there was a chance that Jack and or Jeannie could have been in that building. But Jack’s tow truck was there, as was Jeannie’s little gray car. Was there even the smallest chance that they weren’t in the building?

“Neighbors saw Jack going in maybe half an hour before the explosion,” Archer sighed. “They didn’t see anyone else.”

“He was at the house the other day,” Cami told Archer softly. “He remembered the accident Jaymi was in just before she was killed; his father towed the car in and repaired it. The brake lines had been deliberately cut.”

As the four men stared at her, their expressions cast in hard, brooding lines, Cami detailed the meeting and the information Jack had given her.

“You’re getting the same phone calls,” Rafe stated when she finished. “You’re getting them and you didn’t tell me. Someone else had to tell me.”

He was furious.

Cami could see the pure rage burning in his eyes now, as well as the silent promise that it was a subject they would discuss in detail later.

She could feel the regret then, that feeling that had hidden inside her for the past weeks, teasing her, brooding in her mind. It was regret, and the knowledge that when Rafe did learn what she had been holding back from him, everything she had been holding back for him, the time to pay would come.

That time was growing closer by the second, and she was suddenly very aware of what she could lose.

His trust.

Whatever emotion burned in his gaze for her.

She could lose Rafe, and she suddenly realized that despite the distance she had placed between them, she didn’t want to lose him. She couldn’t bear to lose him.

For the past five years she had lived for the rare times they had come together. She had waited for him, watched for him, and she longed for him with a strength that had kept her from settling for any other lover.

And in that second, gazing in his eyes, she realized that was what she would do if she wasn’t very careful. She was going to damage whatever it was between them that had kept them coming to each other over the years. That bond of hunger, and something, something she simply couldn’t define, that kept the hunger growing ever stronger.

“I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “I should have told you, Rafe. I should have told you so many things.”

She should have never kept the secrets she had kept. Not just about the phone calls but about most especially about the child she had lost. That part of Rafe, that part of the soul-deep need she had for him that she had so longed to give birth to, that had been taken from her.

She should have told him. And now, it just may have come too late.

The past was like a ghost, a haunting spectre he couldn’t escape no matter his attempts. No matter the attempts his cousins made. From their births, they had faced the hatred and controversy of their well-loved mothers marrying the town’s least-loved citizens.

The Callahan brothers had been more than the town had known and yet less than it would have taken for Corbin County citizens to ever make the move to ignore the call to ostracize anything Callahan.

Before Rafe’s, Logan’s, and Crowe’s fathers had married the three heiresses, they hadn’t been ostracized. They had been liked, not always trusted but always able to charm their way into the hearts and minds of those they knew. Once their relationships with the Corbin, Rafferty, and Ramsey daughters were known, all that had changed.

James Corbin and Saul Rafferty had been certain that public condemnation would destroy those relationships. They hadn’t realized how stubborn and how deeply their daughters had loved the men they had chosen.

As Rafe stared down at Cami, he was reminded, not for the first time, of the legacy his, Logan’s, and Crowe’s parents had left them. A legacy that made the lives of the women they might love potentially dangerous. A legacy that those women might not be able to adapt to as easily as they had, because they had lived it every day of their lives. Perhaps, in a way, they had grown used to it.