“They were, until Lard Ass stomped down the stairs,” Crowe groused as he rolled over in the sleeping bag and jerked the extra-down-filled material over his head.
It wasn’t exactly cold, but a fire would have been nice. Before she’d acquired three grown male bodyguards, she would have had the fire ready to light and the coffee set to have already been made.
She held back the sigh that would have slipped past her lips and looked at the clock.
Before she had acquired her bodyguards, she would have had a job to go to. The fire would have waited until evening, and then it would have been a nice glass of wine rather than coffee as she graded papers.
She was going to have to call the principal, though her Uncle Eddy had promised to talk to his other niece himself. Serena Carlyle was Ella’s sister’s daughter and had taken the post of principal the year before when the previous principal had retired.
A resident of Aspen, Serena wasn’t influenced by the barons though. Thank God!
“Someone needs to make coffee,” Logan grumbled from somewhere inside his sleeping bag.
“Get your lazy ass up,” Rafe ordered as he stepped into the living room and began stepping over the bodies. “We have a busy day ahead of us.”
“And what is ahead of you that’s going to be so busy?” Cami asked as she followed behind him, albeit picking her way through the living room more slowly.
She was still incredibly tender, her hip was still one large bruise, and though the headaches weren’t as severe or as often as they had been at first, they were still prone to hit and last for hours at a time.
The bruising to her skull could have resulted in much, much more serious complications. Thankfully, the initial concussion and disorientation was the worst she had suffered.
She could have returned to work, though she admitted it wouldn’t have been easy. Cami was guessing she could look forward to spending the rest of the school year out on leave and when the new fall season began she doubted she would have a job.
Moving to Aspen was out of the question, she thought as she stepped into the kitchen, greeted by the tempting scent of coffee beginning.
“And what are you doing today that’s going to be so busy?” she asked as she pulled the edges of the gray sweater she wore snugly around the white cotton shirt she had tucked into her jeans.
“We have a few errands to run,” Rafe told her as he moved to the cabinets and, as he had the day before, began preparing breakfast.
They never asked her to fix breakfast, though Rafe had acted like a kid in a candy store the morning she had cooked during their snowbound adventure.
“Logan and I have to check the ranch and my house before meeting you and Rafe at the courthouse,” Crowe finished as he too stepped into the kitchen.
“Meeting us at the courthouse?” She arched a brow as she looked over to where Rafe was loading one of her larger skillets with bacon. “And why are we going to the courthouse?”
“My lawyer and I have a meeting with the county attorney to discuss Deputy Eisner and his lack of talent in navigating private drives with a piece of county equipment.”
She almost winced. “You’ve sued the county?”
“Not yet.” Rafe flashed her a grin over his shoulder before turning back to the two pounds of bacon Logan had brought in the day before. “That’s what we’re discussing.”
Cami lowered her head, shaking it at the impossible sense of fun that seemed to fill Rafe’s face.
“You know this is insane, right?” she accused him. “Rafe, suing the county is only going to piss more people off.”
“Fuck ’em,” Logan drawled as he moved plates from the cabinet and handed them to Rafe before taking Cami’s cup from her hand and filling it with coffee. “You’re probably the only one in this county that likes us anyway.”
“Who says I like you?” She arched her brow, hiding the fact that she did like him.
She had always liked the Callahan cousins, even when she was younger. Especially when she was younger, when the cousins had been like fables, larger than life and used as a bogeyman threat against little children who refused to behave.
Logan pouted good-naturedly as Crowe grunted at the response. She noticed he did that a lot. He didn’t talk much, but he watched, listened, and he waited. There was always a sense of waiting where Crowe was concerned, as though he knew something was about to happen and was determined to be prepared.
“So I have to go to this meeting why?” She turned back to Rafe as he moved to the refrigerator and pulled a dozen eggs from the inside.
He flicked her a look that assured her he meant for her to go, one way or the other.
She crossed her arms over her breasts, cocked a hip, and tapped her toe against the floor twice as she waited.
“Ignoring me isn’t going to get you your way automatically,” she assured him as he returned to the sizzling bacon. “I have things to do today myself.”
“And I have no intentions of leaving you here alone,” he informed her, his tone hardening. “And I can’t miss this meeting. Eisner deliberately took that fence out, and he was too damned gleeful about the results to suit me; now he’s going to pay for it.”
“And you don’t think it would be a good time to take the high road and let it go?” she asked him. “Give it a rest, Rafe. No one is going to care if Deputy Eisner is fired or not, except Eisner. But what they will do is come together against you, rather than for him.”
Rafe shrugged. “Good luck to them.”
She turned to Crowe, wondering if, as the oldest cousin, he would at least show a bit more maturity.
“You should stay out of this one,” he told her instead, his darker voice rumbling more than usual. “Let Eisner pay for his sins. He’s quick enough to attempt to make others pay for sins that aren’t theirs.”
“Stay out of it?” She let her brows arch in amused disbelief. “There’s not the first one of you that could possibly keep your nose out of my business at this point, and you have the nerve to tell me to keep mine out of a part of yours? Or his?” She nodded to Rafe. “Not as long as he’s sleeping in my bed I won’t.”
Rafe had to turn back to the sizzling bacon to hide the grin tugging at his lips as Cami turned that teacher’s attitude on Crowe without a thought.
There were very few people Rafe had ever known who were willing to stand and stare at his older cousin as though he were a mischievous schoolboy stepping out of line.
“I’m not sleeping in your bed, though,” he pointed out.
“No, you’re sleeping on my living room floor,” she retorted with false sweetness. “If you don’t like my opinion, then you’re more than welcome to sleep in the backyard.”
Logan’s snort of laughter was followed by another of Crowe’s less than impressed male grunts.
“The backyard is probably more comfortable,” Crowe informed her. “Unfortunately, not as secure.”
“Yeah, like someone’s going to get past Rafe while he’s pacing the bedroom floor,” she stated.
Rafe arched his brows at the acidic little comment. He had no idea she was aware of the fact that sleep was often a long time coming for him.
He wasn’t exactly pacing the bedroom floor, though. That would have been counterproductive. More often than not he was standing by the bedroom window, silent, still, and watching the shadowed edge of her back garden carefully.
Crowe had managed to pinpoint the location where her attacker had come into her yard and slipped into the window well that hadn’t been as secure as it should have been.
There had been no prints, just as Archer said there hadn’t been. But what Crowe had found was that the back door lock had been broken from the inside, not the outside. Someone hadn’t wanted it known that the basement had been used for the entrance point into the house. That window had been opened from the inside as well, not from the outside.