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.
And he didn’t care a bit to do so.
There were even times he had even gained a hint of morbid satisfaction in doing so.
He couldn’t do it to Cami, though. It wasn’t her fault the school board was filled with the high-minded, panty-starched little prudes. The bastards had seemed to actually enjoy each punishment they had dealt out to him during the few years he had attended the high school.
But he’d seen in the shamed, regretful gazes of a few of them that they hadn’t agreed with it. He could find no respect for them, but there was a part of him that could understand it.
Thankfully, he’d managed to graduate early. By the first semester of the final year he had had the credits needed to bypass attendance for the rest of the year.
The school board had been more than willing to allow him to simply return home until the end of the school year. What they hadn’t told him? Unless he was in attendance a required number of days he would lose that year and the credits he had accumulated. Had it not been for the recruiting officer who’d been shadowing Rafe during those last months of high school, then he would have never managed to graduate. He would have been forced to get a GED rather than the diploma he had busted his ass for and had suffered at the local high school to attain.
He’d been determined to have that diploma, even if getting it had been hell. It had been a fight that both he, and the soldier who had befriended him, grew frustrated with.
But Rafe had learned why that soldier had been there. Why he had befriended the three outcast cousins and drawn them into the armed forces, and away from Corbin County. Because he, too, was a Callahan. Given up for adoption by his parents when he was barely six months old, the only knowledge he had of his birth family was what his adopted parents had given him.
When he’d arrived in Corbin County, first during Rafe’s final year of high school and again six months before Jaymi had been killed, he had seen the hell his nephews had endured. It had been on that trip to see them that he had convinced them to join the Marines.
Rafe looked down at the woman in his arms and felt that familiar dark anger from his youth rising inside him. He knew that any moment she could bolt and run, then she would be gone. And the thought of it infuriated him.
He was too damned restless to sleep now. It was one of the reasons he had been drinking himself into a drunk when she showed up on his doorstep. So he could sleep. So he could escape the restlessness and the wary sense of foreboding that had haunted most of his life. Well, at least that part of his life spent in Corbin County. Twelve years in the Marines and eight of those years spent as a sniper, and not once had he felt that same dark foreboding mission. Step his ass into Corbin County with the intent to stay, though, and once again it became a near daily companion.
Easing from the bed, he felt his heart clench at her disappointed little murmur when his warmth eased away from her. She shifted on the bed, searching for him for a moment before settling back to sleep with an unconscious little pout to her lips.
She would walk away, he warned himself again. As easily as, perhaps more easily than, she had walked into his life once again.
It was better that neither one of them grew used to sleeping with the other. Better that he simply let her go. If he could. He had a feeling that letting her go again would be impossible.
Moving to the dresser on the other side of the room, Rafe pulled on jeans and a heavy flannel shirt before sliding his feet into a pair of comfortable sneakers. He collected one of the slim, fragrant cigars he preferred, a lighter, and moved to the balcony doors.
Slipping quietly onto the balcony and easing the door closed Rafe let the night settle around him.
The acrid, spicy sweet taste mixed with the smoke had the immediate effect of easing the worse of the tension that had begun to fill him.
This wasn’t the same warning, or foreboding as his recruiting officer had called it, that had served Rafe so well in the Marines. This was something he had only felt when heading into the most dangerous of the missions he’d undertaken. This wasn’t just a foreboding, it was a straight-up fucking warning.
From the moment Cami’s firm little knock had sounded on his door, those inner sirens had begun going off. And now, staring into the night, he wondered at the sense of danger he could feel edging closer.
He had hoped he could return home, slip in without too much of a ripple, keep to himself, and find the life he’d searched for around the world.
And God knew he’d searched for that place in the world where he could, at the very least, be content. He wasn’t asking for happiness. He’d learned long ago that was far too much to ask for. Contentment, though, hadn’t seemed too high a price to charge for the years he had spent defending his country. After all, he’d also been defending this little corner of America that had decided he and his cousins had no place in their midst.
Or perhaps those other places just weren’t the place whose proud mountains sustained them. That place where their fathers, their grandfather, and his father before him had planted Callahan roots. Those other “places” hadn’t been home.
Logan and Crowe too had found that contentment eluding them. Crowe had actually resigned from the Marines the year before Rafe and Logan had and spent those months alone searching for a place he could call home. Crowe had traveled around for a while, but as he’d written in his last e-mail before they’d returned, evidently there really was no place like home.
For Crowe no place like the cabin his mother had left him that overlooked the sheltered valley below. For Rafe it was the small ranch his Uncle Clyde had owned. The one that his grandmother had been raised on before marrying JR Callahan.
For Logan it had been the house his mother had owned before her death. The one she and his father had lived on. The one he had been born in. It was flat in the middle of Sweetrock. A two-story traditional American with a wide porch surrounding all sides. In the back was the roomy yard he and his cousins had played in as toddlers. Next to it was the garage where his father had allowed him to “help” work on the family car.
The house was surrounded by other similar houses. Once, long, long ago, before his mother had given in and married the father of her child, Logan had played with the neighborhood children there. He had been accepted, and had known a childhood happiness that Rafe only barely remembered while Logan refused to discuss. And none of them could pinpoint why it had changed. Why had their grandfathers, their entire families, turned on the children left behind? What had made them suddenly hate and despise the sons that cherished daughters had given birth to? And why didn’t anyone seem to have the answers to those questions?