AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She didn’t know why it was so important that Cam not leave. Shoot, he could do better anywhere than he could in this dusty little county they lived in. But she didn’t want to lose him. Not yet.
“Maybe. ” He finally cleared his throat. “Maybe I’ll just leave for a little while. ”
His voice was faint, aching with pain. She wanted so bad to ease that pain, and she didn’t know how.
“I’m your friend, Cam,” she told him fiercely. “I’ll always wait for you to come back. I’m not like Laida Jones, always wanting to hang on you and run your friends off. I want you to have lots of friends. And I’ll always be here when you come back. ”
He turned and looked at her again, those eyes piercing inside her.
“What do you want from me, little Jaci Wright?” His voice was hard, like her daddy’s got when she said something he didn’t approve of.
Her hand tightened on his wrist then pulled away as she stared back at him in confusion.
“I don’t want anything from you, Cam. I just want to see you smile. And I don’t want you to go away. ”
“Why?” his voice was ragged. “Why does it matter?”
“Because you’re my friend, and because I love you. I love you better than anything, Cameron Falladay. I love you enough to know that if you left, one of these days I would find you. And when I do, I’ll show you what being a friend really means. ”
And he was her friend. A friend she never wanted to lose.
He blinked back at her and she realized how fierce she sounded. Like her mom sounded when she was telling her daddy how much she loved him. Sometimes, Jaci heard them talking at night when she shouldn’t. And her mom’s voice sounded just like that.
Cam shook his head then. “You’re dangerous. ” He sighed.
Her eyes widened. “Shoot, Cam, then we’re best friends. ’Cause that’s what Daddy says about you. ”
Cam watched as Jaci Wright rode her horse back toward home, and he breathed out roughly. The fingers of his left hand were still clenched around the pistol, the single bullet lodged inside just waiting to be released.
He lifted it and stared at it. It was his father’s service weapon. The military pistol he had used before his death.
One bullet. But he’d only need one.
He stared back to where Jaci had ridden off. Dumb-ass kid. She was wilder than the wind. Her father didn’t have a hope in hell of keeping up with her and keeping her out of trouble.
Somehow—he hadn’t figured out how—it had fallen to him to keep the molesting bastards in town away from her. The boys that were too old for her, and sure as hell old enough to know better than to fool with a baby. But she was right. Who would run them off if he left?
He laid the pistol on the dash and capped the whisky.
If he was too fucking weak to take the easy way out, then that left the hard way. Son of a bitch. The hard way sucked, too.
Eight Years Later
It was the bad boy party of the year, held outside the small Oklahoma town Jaci Wright had been raised in. The music was a hard, throbbing pulse through the night air. A bonfire burned in the center of the clearing, huge speakers were set up in the back of a pickup, the rocking music pounding through them as the beer and moonshine flowed freely.
Bodies danced in abandon, whoops and yells could be heard through the clearing as the scent of burning wood filled her nostrils.
It was her first year attending, not that she hadn’t tried to slip in over the years. Unfortunately, Cameron was usually here, and he never failed to pull her out within the first few minutes. Cameron might well be here now, but his excuse for pulling her out no longer applied.
She leaned against the bed of one of the pickups, her beer in hand, and watched the antics of the partygoers. The first faint chill of fall was in the air, the university would be beginning its first semester next week, and the yearly party to celebrate the end of summer was under way with all the excitement and desperate exuberance of the crowd and the vacation that was soon to end. Many of those here had been attending for years and no one wanted to miss out on it.
She let her gaze rove over the crowd once again, searching for the tall, dangerous form of her tormentor. Cameron had been pulling her out of this party since she was sixteen, when she’d tried to attend for the first time. He was always here.
In the center of the clearing bodies gyrated, male and female, dancing with abandon. She wondered if Cameron danced when he was here. With his tall, hard-muscled body, the graceful way he moved, he would be a sexual fantasy come true out there. But she doubted he did. Cameron wasn’t the type of man to shake his booty for the crowd.
She smiled as she lifted her beer to her lips, intent on taking the first drink of the cold, bitter liquid. She had been putting it off as long as she could.
As it touched her lips, a hard, well-tanned hand came from behind her, gripped the bottle, and held it still. She could barely taste it against her lips, barely felt the icy sensation of liquid. But behind her, the heat of the man seared her back.
