“I’ve never pretended Rafe,” she told him, refusing to hide, refusing to back down. “I’ve simply learned how to accept reality.”
“Whose reality?” he snorted. “The truth or the reality the barons attempt to force feed everyone?”
It was better that he was angry, she told herself. So much better that he hate her. Because any other emotion would just cause her to break the promise she had made to herself. The promise that she would never risk her soul again to the extent that simply surviving seemed an insurmountable obstacle.
And the vow that he would never know what they had both lost. That he would never, ever know exactly how it had destroyed her.
“Good-bye, Rafer,” she said softly. “Take care.”
He didn’t speak as she turned and walked away, but she could feel his gaze on her back. It was like a caress. A dominant, fiery stroke of his hand along her body. A phantom reminder of everything she couldn’t have. Of everything she now denied herself.
CHAPTER 3
Eighteen months later
It was colder than a witch’s tit. The temperature hovered just below zero with the windchill and a hard western wind blew across the mountains with a banshee’s moan. The blizzard had become a whiteout, with the rapidly falling fluff piling fast and hard against the house in heavy pristine drifts.
The weatherman said to expect a blizzard, and he hadn’t been far off track. Problem was, this looked like blizzards combined. The previous year’s mild winter was cashing in interest during this late-season storm.
He was snowed in on a Saturday night watching the snow pile up and wondering what the hell he was doing back in Corbin County. And he was doing it just after yet another funeral. Just after the death of another man who tried to stand against his grandfather, Marshall Roberts, and his two business partners. The group everyone called the barons. He was half-drunk, damned morose, and fighting nightmares from a past he couldn’t seem to shake. And son of a bitch if he wasn’t so f**king horny for one damned woman that he could barely stand it. His dick was iron hard, his balls throbbed. They were so tight and the need to touch her was almost torture.
So it wasn’t exactly hard for Rafer Callahan to convince himself that the woman standing on his doorstep couldn’t be real.
Could she?
After all, why would this particular part of his past show up now, of all times? Hadn’t she already shown him that there wasn’t a chance in hell of ever having her again?
Which was the reason he just went ahead and convinced himself that she was the vision of his most explicit, his naughtiest, his nastiest fantasies.
Sometimes, a man just needed something to hold on to, and she was it for him.
“Hello, Rafer.”
Rafer stared hard at the young woman standing on his porch, watching him expectantly.
He lifted his gaze, checked the position of the moon, and gave a mental nod.
Yep, it was midnight.
Now all he had to decide was if this lovely, too-alluring vision was a figment of his fantasies coming to life or if fate was standing behind the lovely Cami Flannigan, laughing her ass off while he stood there with a hard dick.
Hell, he could always take his chances. After all, he’d made a huge gamble returning once again to the small town that had spawned him, hadn’t he? What was that if it wasn’t the dumbest decision of his life? This one couldn’t be any worse, now could it?
“You’re not naked,” he drawled, deciding to go with the fantasy idea. And boy, did he have enough fantasies where Cami Flannigan was concerned.
Black lace, candlelight, slick, wet flesh, and hungry-feminine-moaning type fantasies that he couldn’t manage to shake. He’d only had her three times in the past five years and the last time was three years ago. It wasn’t hardly enough.
The vision of creamy flesh and blue-ringed velvet gray eyes blinked back at him before narrowing in feminine offense. “I have to be na**d to knock on your door?”
There was a sudden snap to her tone that had a smile wanting to curl his lips. Damn, he surely did love that tone in her voice. It just made his dick harder, just made all his little perverted fantasies push to the forefront of his mind. But it also made him doubt that it was possible this was a fantasy. Only the real version of Cami spoke to him with that snap in her voice.
Yes she was acting less and less like a figment of a fantasy by the second. Especially when she propped a slender hand on her cocked hip and glared back at him as though he had crawled from beneath a rock. When had Cami begun looking at him like that?
A sigh of resignation escaped his chest. A man could dream, couldn’t he?
“It depends on why you’re here,” he still answered her, though, and he still kept to the program.
Fantasy. Erotic. Hard dick.
That little frown brewing between perfectly arched—plucked or waxed? he wondered—dark brows tightened.
Was her pu**y still waxed? The first time he’d glimpsed those perfectly bare folds he’d nearly come in the sheets rather than her snug little pu**y.
“I can’t imagine the reason why it would matter. Did one of those bulls you breed butt your head a little too hard or something? I’m stuck in the snow, Rafer. Why else would I be standing in the middle of a blizzard on your front porch?”
For his hard dick?
The words almost slipped past his lips.
“What did you say?” She blinked back at him in outraged amazement.
Oops, maybe he hadn’t meant to say that out loud.
He smiled back at her, still not certain. “I said something?”
He arched a brow. He’d learned early that the gesture tended to throw most people off and he used it shamelessly.
Hell, maybe he’d just drunk too much damned whisky. That was always a possibility.
Suspicion filled her eyes, narrowed them, and thinned her lips. “I’m pretty certain you did,” she informed him between clenched teeth. “And I’m really certain it was uncalled for.”
Well, he didn’t know how uncalled for it was. It was honest. A man could hope.
“I might be drunk.” He cleared his throat as she continued to stare, anger beginning to shadow her gray eyes. “Can I blame it on the booze?”
Hell, she did have pretty eyes. They looked like the finest dark gray velvet with a narrow ring of dark blue. He’d always said Cami Flannigan had the prettiest eyes. Anyone could just ask his cousins, Logan and Crowe, they’d tell it; Rafe said it often. So often sometimes that they told him to shut the f**k up.