by Lora Leigh
It was hotter, stronger, than it had been five years before. It was a flame growing in the pit of her belly and spreading outward, encompassing her clit, filling her cunt until the explosion tore through her with such voracity that it totally consumed her.
She jerked in his hold, her eyes opening wide, dazed, blurred as she felt the implosion tearing through her. The muscles of her pussy tightened on his shuttling cock, locking down on the stiff, exciting shaft and throbbing around it furiously as she gasped his name and she felt his release spurting hot and hard inside her.
Each heated ejaculation inside her, each flex of her pussy, sent repeated ecstasy rushing through her. A conflagration of sensations and rapture that whipped through her senses and finally left her limp and exhausted in his arms.
The past week had been heartrending for her; the pain of dealing with her mother’s condition and her father’s grief and heartache had sapped at Cami’s strength.
Lying beneath him, Cami realized with a flash of sudden insight that she had deliberately dared take that turn that brought her past Rafer’s. She knew the sky had darkened with snow. She had known there was a chance of being stranded. She had taken the risk because she had known she could make it as far as Rafer’s ranch.
Feeling the heavy shudders that wracked both their bodies, she realized it wasn’t the pleasure she had been fighting, and it hadn’t really been Rafer she had fought through the years. It had been this — what she could feel at this very moment building inside her.
Those emotional ties tightening inside her, tying knots in her heart that she wouldn’t have a chance of unraveling.
Jaymi had done that. She had let Tye wrap so many chains around her soul that when she lost him, she lost a part of herself.
Losing herself in such a way terrified Cami.
What would happen to her if Rafer was gone? If the dark danger that swirled around him decided to tighten and strike out with the same murderous intent she suspected it had struck out to destroy the rest of the Callahan family?
It wasn’t the danger to her that terrified her. It was the danger to Rafer. The danger to her soul if anything happened to him.
That was what she fought. That was what she continued to run from. Because she knew once she gave her heart to him fully, then if anything happened to him, it would destroy her as well.
The pain of Jaymi’s death had scarred her soul, but when she had lost Rafer’s child, she had never lost her will to live. The agony that had gripped her, the sheer depth of the pain that had held her in its grip had seemed never-ending.
It had followed her every second of her life, and even now, two years later, the realization of the life she had lost burned inside her continually.
It was another loss that had driven her when she had sensed the snowstorm coming. The days spent getting her mother settled into the rest home, feeling her father’s pain, his devotion to her mother, and the sense that his hatred for her had only grown.
She’d needed Rafer. She’d needed him to pull her out of the memories of the little girl who had begged her father to love her. The woman who had knelt before her mother and sobbed against her knee when she’d lost her own child.
Margaret Flannigan had lifted Cami’s chin and stared down at her with sudden, lucid sobriety and whispered, “Trust me, Cami, losing that child was the best thing that could have happened for the baby. Or for you.”
Cami had felt something inside her that had struggled to survive over the years simply fade away. Perhaps it was the love she should have known for her parents. Perhaps it was the compassion for their weaknesses that had seemed to hobble her all her life.
Whatever it was, it had just faded away inside her as though it had never existed.
She should have used her common sense rather than her emotions tonight. Her emotions were about to get her into more trouble than she wanted to deal with.
As Rafe lifted himself from her, Cami deliberately kept her eyes closed, her breathing even. She refused to leave that halfway place where the past the didn’t matter and the future hadn’t yet arrived. God knew she didn’t think she could handle any more upheaval inside her or around her. She wanted to stay right where she was, safe and warm inside. While the realizations and realities she faced remained at a distance.
Rather than forcing her from that place, Rafer slid his arms beneath her and carried her slowly up the huge staircase and into his bedroom. He didn’t speak or force her to speak. He simply took care of her.
She didn’t want to face what she had just done, what she had known she would end up doing the second she had stepped from her car after it slid into the snowdrift at the side of the main road.
Cami didn’t want to face the fact that she had complicated her life more than ever and ensured that she likely would see no peace for quite a while.
Rafer was like a dog with a bone; no, he was worse than that. Five years ago he had given her a clue exactly how serious he was about being her lover.
She couldn’t handle it then, and she couldn’t handle it now. There was too much between the two of them, as well as between him and the townsfolk of Sweetrock.
Her gaze fluttered open long seconds later, though, as she felt him parting her legs. As she watched, he ran a damp, warm cloth between her thighs and along the slick, wet folds of her pussy as he wiped the excess of both their releases from her body.
He had done this every time they were together. Pushing aside his own need to luxuriate in the satiation, or in his own release, he had instead cleaned her and ensured her comfort.
She couldn’t fault Rafer there. The three times they had been together he had taken excellent care of her. The first time, just after she’d turned twenty, she’d been shocked by it. She’d never heard her friends bragging of their lovers doing such a thing.
“This can’t last, Rafer,” she whispered as he drew back, her gaze caught by the dark sapphire of his eyes and the lazy, satisfied expression on his face.
“I never said it could, Cami.” He shrugged.
But wasn’t exactly agreeing with her either.
“Just for tonight,” she reaffirmed as he drew a dry towel between and over her thighs. “Then we forget it happened.”
And just as it had five years before, something seemed to explode in her chest at the very thought of it. She could feel the dark, forceful contradiction screaming inside her and couldn’t understand why.
“Until the storm is over, and the roads are clear enough for travel.”
He was hard again.
Kneeling with one knee on the bed, the furiously flushed, wide shaft of his cock pointed out at her, the flared crest dark and throbbing as she dampened her dry lips with a sudden hungry thought.
She could have him.
Dawn’s arrival didn’t mean discovery and there was no way she could run from whatever it was he made her feel. It just meant more snow as the system just edging in continued to dump the white stuff across the mountains.
Twenty-four to thirty inches within the first twenty-four hours based on the winds and the amount of precipitation coming through. They could be there for days. She could get the hunger and the need out of her system, and maybe, once it was over, she could find a way to live without the memory of Rafer Callahan tormenting her.
She reached out, her fingers curving beneath the heavy weight, her lips parting, her tongue reaching out to touch the furiously swollen flesh. Slightly salty, tinged with a hint of storm. The subtle tastes and male power sent a heavy fist to clench her womb, her suddenly aching pussy.
Shards of sizzling sensation raced from her scalp to her nipples, her clit, the inner muscles of her sex as his fingers clenched in her hair and tugged.
She licked, circled the silk-over-iron flesh, and tasted the pre-come that eased from the slit at the tip. Her fingers moved lower, cupped his balls, held them, tested their weight as well, and with a hungry cry she sucked the thickened crest deep into her mouth.
“Ah hell, Cami,
” he groaned. “There you go, suck my dick, sweetheart.”
His thighs were rock hard.
His hands controlled her head, moving it back and forth, fucking her mouth with slow, shallow thrusts.
Her lips burned. Her tongue flicked against the sensitive underside, tasting him, the freshness of soap where he had washed moments before, and the heat of his hunger.
As though they hadn’t just had each other, as though the pleasure hadn’t burned out of control, within seconds the need was once again raging.
“Come here,” Rafe growled as he pulled her head back, staring into the dark gray of her slitted gaze as he pulled his dick from her mouth.
Her tongue licked over her lips drawing the last taste of him to her tongue. The sight of it had his balls tightening furiously as adrenaline rushed through his system.
“Turn around, on your knees,” he ordered, his jaw tightened as she moved, the pretty curves of her ass tempting him as she lowered her shoulders to the bed and spread her thighs.
Juice gleamed once again on the flushed folds of her pussy. Then he watched as her hand moved beneath her body, her fingers, slender and graceful, parting the intimate lips, as she rubbed at the entrance in invitation. Then he watched, groaning in hunger and need as she pressed that finger slowly into the saturated entrance before easing back.
He gripped the shaft of his cock, moved to the bed on his knees, and over her.
The second the sensitive head met the fiery portal of her cunt, he nearly came instantly.
What was it about Cami? He’d never been able to control his lusts with her as he had with other women. Since the summer she turned eighteen, she had been his greatest weakness.
Easing forward, Rafe felt the slick, hot entrance begin to stretch and flare around his crest. One hand gripped her hip as he fought to hold back, to control the blazing hunger to fill her pussy with his come. To blast inside her and mark her forever with his semen.
Only Cami did this to him.
Only Cami had the power to make him want to beg her for just one more night, just to see if was better than the time before, only to learn that the time before hadn’t even compared. There was nothing so pleasurable as burying his cock in the sweet mindless ecstasy to be found inside the gripping depths of her fiery pussy. To feel it milking him in, rippling over his cock.
It was like having the tightest fist gripping his dick and pulling him to paradise. His balls clenched with painful need and his heart began to pound harder in his chest. Excitement and adrenaline poured through his system as her hips moved with him, her slender back arching, the shaggy cut of her hair feathering below her neck as she moaned his name.
He could feel her masturbating, her delicate fingers stroking her clit, and that knowledge had an animal lust pouring through him.
She knew what she wanted from him. She knew how to pleasure him, but she also knew how to pleasure herself. With Cami, it was simply about pleasuring and pleasing each other as they took for themselves as well.
Perhaps that was why he couldn’t forget the night he had her innocence. That despite her virginity, she had touched him with such hunger and with such need that there had been no hesitation or coy games.
Gripping her hips with his fingers, Rafe held on tight as he began to fuck her deeper. He slammed his cock into the flexing, ever-tightening depths of her cunt. The world narrowed to the steady hum of pleasure beginning to vibrate between them, and the need for release tearing through them.
Husky sensual cries fell from her lips as he glimpsed the fingers of one hand clenching in the sheets beneath her. Her back cushioned his chest as he let his lips move to her shoulder. There, he delivered a rough, sucking kiss that marred the flesh with a reddened love bite.
No one else might ever see it, but she would. If nothing else, she would be forced to acknowledge that for at least a brief period of time she had belonged to him.
At this moment in time, she was his. The tight, hot depths of her sex, the pebble-hard nipple his fingers found, the gasping, breathless little moans that fell from her lips.
God yes, she was his.
“I feel you stroking your clit,” he growled at her ear. “I’m going to get you some toys, Cami. A nice, thick dildo, one that vibrates in that pretty pussy of yours, and I’ll watch you use it. Then I’ll watch you stroke your hard little clit. I’ll watch you pleasure yourself, see the way your quick little fingers move against the swollen little knot.”
She was whimpering, her cheek pressed to the comforter. Her fingers moving faster against her clit. Her pussy was clenching, fisting.
“And one night, I’ll show you exactly how much I love your pretty ass,” he promised, the thought of it causing his cock to throb harder, to feel thicker, hotter, the need for release more imperative.
“I’ll stretch you there so sweet, Cami. I’ll watch as you take my fingers, then a select toy or two, and when the need for that pleasure, so close to the most erotic pain you’ll ever know, overwhelms you, then I’ll push my dick up that tight little ass and listen to you scream for me.”
Harder. He was gasping for air himself as his hips began pounding into her ass, pushing his dick as deep as possible, feeling her pussy began to convulse, to spasm around the rapidly throbbing cock head until they both began to come. Simultaneously, his head buried against her neck as he groaned her name, his seed pumping inside her, filling her, marking her.
He’d never given another woman the intimacy of coming inside her, of feeling his seed spurting hot and hard in the blistering heat of her vagina.
Not until Cami. He trusted her that first time when she had said she was protected. But even more, Rafe knew if she wasn’t, if she conceived his child, then it would only bind her to him. It would ensure she never ran from him again. That she never left him again.
Buried as deep inside her as possible. Holding her as close to him as possible, he felt a steady glow radiate in the pit of his stomach that he’d only felt with Cami.
CHAPTER 5
She slept peacefully, deeply, her head resting against his heart as her deep, even breaths feathered over the light dusting of hair on his chest.
Rafe kept his arm curled around her shoulders, kept her as close to his body as he could get her, allowing his fingers to stroke the silk of her hair every so often.
He’d waited years to get her here, and now that she was, rather than sleeping as peacefully as he had that first time with her, Rafe was left staring into the darkness of the bedroom.
He was damned wary about going to sleep and he fully admitted why. Every time he had done so, he had wakened to a missing Cami and an empty bed. Not even so much as a letter or a short good-bye written in lipstick on the hotel mirror.
If she ran out on him again in such a way, he’d end up doing more than busting a hole in a hotel wall with his fist. Rafe would go looking for her, and that might be the worst idea he’d had in years. He could just imagine the shock, the fear, and the suspicion that would fill her neighbors’ faces if he did such a thing.
She would probably have every male within three blocks in front of her home within minutes, and every one of them would be armed. Every one of them would have murder in his heart and hatred in his gaze, and Rafe had never fully understood that. Because it had begun long before the year six young women had died at the hands of a brutal rapist and torturing murderer.
Cami’s older sister, Jaymi, had been one of the victims.
For a second, he heard her screams as clearly as he, Logan, and Crowe had heard them that hot summer night they had been quietly fishing on the bank of Sweetrock Lake, in the densely covered forest outside of town.
He didn’t want to remember that night. He’d spent too many years trying to forget it. But the facts were that the Callahans had been ostracized far sooner than that year. They’d been ostracized decades before that, and there had been no explanation why.
There had only been that barely disguised distrust and wariness, as well the
thinly veiled dislike.
There had been days Rafer had existed in such a state of rage during his teenage years that even his Uncle Clyde had been wary of him. Hell, even his cousins had steered a wide path around him in those days.
He reminded himself that he hadn’t allowed their opinions to bother him since then though and he wouldn’t allow them to matter now. Never again would he allow such destructive fury to rise inside of him because of such pettiness and never again would he run from it.
But it would matter to Cami and he couldn’t even blame her for it. There were times when he had been able to view the situation logically. Had he believed a man responsible for such heinous crimes, he then too would have gone out of his way to make his life hell.
And even before the murders, the years he and his cousins had endured the scorn of the citizens of Corbin County, he’d understood, sort of, why they had done so.
The barons of Corbin County were a powerful force in not just the county, but also in the state of Colorado. Their anger could have far-reaching consequences.
No doubt Cami knew exactly what those consequences could be. She had seen the many jobs her sister had gone through and knew what Rafe had only suspected, that Jaymi had lost those jobs because of him.
She was a teacher; her job depended on the goodwill of the other teachers, the school board, and the parents. No parent in Sweetrock would want a teacher instructing their children who was sleeping with the man suspected of having murdered her sister twelve years ago. A man suspected of conspiring with his two cousins to rape, torture, and murder five other young women between Sweetrock and Aspen, Colorado, during that same time period as well.
Rafe had learned years before not to worry about what the good people of Sweetrock might believe. His mind was invariably set on shocking and scaring any adult who dared to offend him. Hell, they didn’t have to offend him. He was ready to shock, piss off, or frighten any adult who found the courage to confront him in any manner. The inheritance left to him by his mother might have still been tied up in the court system, but the interest from it was not. He was financially secure enough that he didn’t need the barons’ goodwill to survive. Hell, he didn’t even need their ignorance of his existence to make it in Corbin County. All he needed was the military check he received and the considerable interest payment he received each month. After that he could piss off or nearly frighten anyone who attempted to foolishly confront him.
