“Cami, stop this, baby.” His expression gentled slowly. “You’re letting that old bastard fuck with your head. You can’t do that.”
He wasn’t hearing her.
She could feel the danger that swirled around him. She had always felt it. As though some shadow haunted him and his cousins and refused to dissipate.
“Rafer, listen to me,” she whispered, almost terrified that someone else would hear her. “There are too many coincidences. You say you don’t believe in them, yet you’re just accepting three generations dying in the same place, as well as your uncle Clyde. Do you realize no one else has ever died in that same place in the history of that mountain road?”
“Cami…” She could see his refusal to listen to her in his expression, hear it in his voice.
“No.” She pushed her fingers through her hair with an edge of desperation. “You have to listen to me, Rafer.” She clenched at the strands of hair she held as she fought and failed to fight back her fear for him.
“Cami, he’s fucking with you, dammit!”
Rafer could feel the need to confront Marshal Roberts rising inside him with a wave of fury. He couldn’t believe that old bastard had finally figured out that Cami was more important to him than any other woman in his life had been. And to actually have the sheer nerve to come to her house and frighten her this way was unforgivable.
“He’s not fucking with me.” She lifted her gaze to him as he pushed her back to the pillows, propping himself up to stare down at her. “What about Jaymi?”
He could see the fear flashing in her eyes now.
“Cami, Jaymi was killed by a fucking lunatic, you know that.” He ached for her. Jaymi’s death had destroyed her, he knew that, but she had to realize—
“Did she tell you about the phone calls?”
He could feel his stomach clench with trepidation then. “What phone calls? Jaymi never mentioned any phone calls, Cami, neither did you.”
He watched her lips tremble, watched the misery that darkened her eyes.
“I’m getting them now.”
Fear tore a hole through his soul.
“What phone calls, Cami?” He could feel the rage beginning to burn in his stomach.
“The ones that warned her that if she didn’t stay away from you, that something would happen to her. She knew who it was. She knew the voice, but she didn’t put it together until the last social we attended with you, Logan, and Crowe. I heard her that night, telling him that she knew something. Then she went into her room where I couldn’t hear her. She wouldn’t tell me what it was, or who it was.” Her breathing hitched with tears, the sound of them breaking his heart. “Two days later, she was dead.” Her breath caught, and Rafe watched as she fought back her tears.
That wasn’t a coincidence, because Jaymi hadn’t been the only one of the young women who died that summer who had received such phone calls. And now, Cami was getting them?
“You were called?” he questioned her.
She nodded quickly. “I recognize the voice, Rafer, just as Jaymi did. I know that voice, but I can’t put a face to it. When I do—”
“When you do, you’ll tell me and I’ll fucking deal with it,” he informed her harshly, his hands moving to grip her shoulders imperatively as he made the order. “Do you understand me, Cami?”
“And if he decides to just kill you, Logan, and Crowe instead?” she asked tearfully, though she held the tears back. “What then?”
Rafe moved from her slowly, sitting up on the side of the bed and pushing his hands through his hair in irritation.
“That bastard is playing with both of us,” he finally gritted out as he gave his head a hard shake.
Marshal Roberts was a master at manipulation. He had known it all his life.
How many times had Clyde been lured away from the ranch because Marshal had called for some reason or another, and convinced him to meet him somewhere? How many times had the ranch been vandalized each time, and Roberts hadn’t made the meeting with Clyde?
It was a cycle. It had taken Clyde a few times to realize what his brother-in-law was doing. A few years to realize that the core of decency he thought Marshal had didn’t exist.
When Marshal couldn’t lure him away on his own, he’d found other means to pull Clyde, Rafe, Logan, and Crowe from the ranch.
It hadn’t been to protect them as Clyde had once mused. Fuck, no, Marshal had done it out of a vindictive desire to destroy the ranch and make them completely paranoid. If it had been to protect them, then the attacks would have come the times they had sat in the ranch dark, silent ranch house and waited, weapons ready, for the vandals to strike again.
“I want to know everything he said, Cami,” he finally told her. “And don’t leave anything out.”
He watched as she stared up at the ceiling.
“I can’t do a play-by-play,” she told him wearily as she turned her head to gaze back at him. “You don’t believe me, do you, Rafer?”
“I don’t disbelieve you,” he finally sighed. “But, Cami, you don’t know him as I do.” He shook his head at the lifetime of memories he had where Marshal Roberts and his deceptions were concerned.
“Rafer, he was trying to tell me something,” she whispered, and Rafer knew she truly believed that. “What else could it be?”
“Because he’s a son of a bitch?” he sighed wearily.
“That’s not a good enough reason, Rafer,” she said, saddened not just because of the life she knew he and his cousins had lived but also because he seemed to have accepted it as deeply as everyone else in Corbin County. “Coincidences like this don’t happen. There has to be more to it.”
“The reason doesn’t matter, Cami,” he assured her with an edge of mockery. “And coincidences are called that for a reason, I’ve learned. Sometimes, it truly is a coincidence. Now I’m not concerned with the past, with grandparents or with Marshal Roberts. I want to know about those phone calls.”
“I told you about the phone calls, Rafer,” she argued with a surge of anger. The fear was being overshadowed now. Overshadowed by the anger that Rafer refused to even consider the fact that danger could be haunting him. “Why aren’t you willing to listen to me?”
He gave a heavy sigh.
“Did you know the Corbins began this little campaign?” he asked her softly. “Crowe’s granddaddy stood at the entrance to the funeral home when Logan, Crowe, and myself arrived at the funeral home with Clyde. He barred our way. The Callahans had no place there, he said. They murdered his daughter and he refused to have one attend her funeral, and Saul Rafferty, Logan’s grandfather, and Marshal Roberts backed him on it. We weren’t welcome there.”
Cami had heard that story more than once, and each time she’d seen the conflict most people still had over it. She had also seen the knowledge that James Corbin had drawn the line that day and over the years and he’d enforced it. Marshal Roberts and Saul Rafferty hadn’t, though, if she remembered the Callahan history correct. And she was pretty certain she did.
“James Corbin enforced it,” she repeated. “Not the others.”
“The other’s backed him, Cami,” he growled, frustration filling his voice now. “Mine and Logan’s grandfathers were just as much a part of it as James Corbin was.”
“I don’t think Marshal Roberts was,” she argued. “I don’t know about Saul Rafferty, but I do know he moved from Corbin County just after his daughter’s funeral. He only returns to oversee certain aspects of the ranch, other than that his manager handles everything. He’s separated himself from the entire situation, hasn’t he?” She knew he had. She had made it her business in the past few days to find out.
“Let it go, Cami,” Rafe warned her. “This isn’t your fight, and it’s a fight you’ll lose. For God’s sake, if any part of what you suspect is true, then can you imagine the danger it would place you in?”