The Callahan's: Secret Sins Part 11

He was taking more than her virginity, more than the sensitive depths of her responsive body. With each fierce, plunging thrust, she swore he was stealing her heart.

Building, rapturous pleasure, violent in its intensity, began exploding through her. As though there were too many sensations, too much heat- Anna exploded again, crying out his name, her head tilting to the side as stinging kisses were delivered to the sensitive flesh of her neck.

The additional pleasure-pain amplified the explosions, the pleasure, until Anna could only cry out again with the force of them. She gave herself wholly to the force of the o.r.g.a.s.m as it possessed every molecule of her body, every ounce of her emotions.

She was only dimly aware of Archer's ragged groan as the force of her own climax began to ease. Her v.a.g.i.n.a still clenching, rippling around his erection, her breath caught as he forcefully pulled free of the clenched grip she had on his c.o.c.k.

A ragged male growl echoed through her senses as the heated, damp spurts of his release spilled against the swollen, sensitive flesh of her c.l.i.t.

His lips were parted against the side of her neck, the burning bite of a fierce, possessive kiss against her flesh mixing with the echoing waves of her completion.

Exhausted, physically sated, she lay beneath him, unable to move, barely able to breathe. Lying against her, his hold still tight and possessive despite his completion, Anna luxuriated in the warmth of his flesh, the beat of his heart.

She could lie in his arms, just like this, forever.

She didn't have to move, she decided. There was no reason to even consider leaving the bed and his hold, until she simply had no other choice.

Archer was moving, though. Easing from her, she expected him to collapse beside her, but instead he was moving away. The feel of him leaving the bed sent regret and aching hurt racing through her.

Keeping her eyes closed, she told herself she wasn't going to call him back. She wouldn't beg, rage, or cry as she had heard of other women doing when their lovers eased away from them and found another bed to sleep in.

He'd given her a pleasure she couldn't have expected- The sound of the bedroom door closing behind him wasn't what she heard, though.

A frown flitted between her brows as she heard water running in the bathroom. Seconds later her eyes opened quickly at the feel of his hands parting her thighs.

Archer moved between her legs, his expression pensive as he took the cloth he carried and tenderly cleaned the wetness from the tender flesh between her thighs.

"What are you doing?" She was shocked at the action.

She had never heard the girls who bragged of their s.e.xual conquests saying anything about this.

"You'll sleep better," he promised, as his lips quirked at the side in a slight smile.

She would sleep better?

Watching as he finished cleaning the proof of their release from her, Anna admitted that Archer wasn't a man she would ever figure out easily.

But she wanted to.

She wanted to know him, to know his touch, his pleasure, his agonies, and even his regrets.

She wanted to know why he wanted her, and why he hadn't let her know before now that he desired her.

And she would ask him about it, she promised herself, just as soon as she had slept and recovered from the pleasure that had sapped the last of her strength.

Moving from the bed and returning to the bathroom, Archer ran more water, then, as Anna felt drowsiness stealing over her, returned to the bedroom and the bed.

Even more shocking, he eased her back into his arms as he settled in beside her, her head coming to rest against his chest.

"We'll talk in the morning," he stated, his voice quiet and intent.

"Okay," she agreed, though she wasn't certain what the discussion was going to be about.

No doubt he wanted to discuss the whole lack of emotion, lack of relations.h.i.+p rules. She almost smiled at the thought of it. Too late for that on her end.

For now, all Anna wanted to do was lie against him, to sleep, and to luxuriate in the completion that filled her.

She might never actually recover from it, though.

She knew she would never recover from the man and the intensity of the pleasure he'd given her.

Anna knew there would never be another touch that could ever compare to that of the man who held her now.

A man she feared she could never possess as he now possessed her.

Body.

Heart.

Soul.

She just might well belong to Archer Tobias.

CHAPTER 7.

A man was stepping into a minefield when a woman had the power to make him forget something as important as the meeting he had scheduled several hours before dawn that morning.

Archer was just beginning to drift off to sleep, Anna held securely against his chest, when the silent vibrating alarm in his watch went off. It wasn't a response to alert him to the time, but a trigger set off by the alarm system in the house.

Gently detaching himself from the fragrant warmth of the woman resting against his chest, Archer quickly slid from the bed, found the pants he had kicked off earlier, and pulled them over his legs hastily.

As he moved from the bed he collected the weapon he kept tucked just beneath the head of the mattress.

He doubted the weapon was needed, but it was better to be safe than sorry. Archer had never considered John Corbin an enemy, but, now that Anna was here, in his bed, anything was possible.

With the Glock tucked against the side of his leg, he moved to the door of the study that he'd left ajar by several inches before going to bed and angled his head to look inside the room.

He could see John Corbin standing in front of the large map of Corbin County that Archer's grandfather had commissioned. Using yellow tacks, Archer had marked the position of each body the Slasher had left for the authorities to find.

John was frowning at the map, his heavily lined expression reflecting his grief over the situation he'd found himself in, and his inability to find a way to resolve it.

Archer narrowed his eyes at the older man, waiting to see if he moved.

It had been John who had come to him ten years before, when Archer's father had first begun showing the signs of Alzheimer's.

Randal Tobias had been quietly investigating the Slasher's kills, attempting to pinpoint some common individual the girls had a.s.sociated with, besides the Callahan cousins, who might have had such murderous tendencies, or such an overriding hatred for the three young men.

With Randal's illness, John had been desperate. His granddaughter, Anna, had been a teenager, barely fourteen, but already begging to return to Corbin County when her parents moved back to the ranch for the spring to help John with the ranch during calving.

The older man had claimed he kept his granddaughter from the county because of the Slasher, and because of Anna's curiosity where her Callahan cousin, Crowe, was concerned. It seemed no matter the excuses they made or how often they tried to tell her it was too dangerous for her in Corbin County, she refused to believe it.

The Slasher only struck at the Callahans' lovers, she argued once she'd understood the significance of the targets the killer chose. She wasn't a lover, she was simply a cousin.

Every occasion the young girl had been home it seemed the opportunity arose that she'd run into Crowe or one of the other cousins. She'd always spoken to them, always attempted to draw them into conversation, and always ended up in tears when they refused to talk to her.

How the new job working as Mikhail Resnova's personal a.s.sistant was going to work out for her, Archer had no idea, because Mikhail's and Crowe's offices were side by side.

Not that Archer could blame the cousins, especially in those days. It seemed every move they made while home on leave was watched suspiciously. As though Rafer, Logan, or Crowe would fall upon some hapless female and murder her in front of the whole town.

When John didn't move from his position, Archer pushed the door open slowly and stepped inside.

John's silver head turned in his direction, his fingers burrowing through the thick coa.r.s.eness of his hair as Archer came to a surprised stop and stared at the other two men in the room.

"You said you wanted answers tonight," John stated. "They aren't mine alone to give."

Of course not, Archer thought sarcastically. He should have guessed that.

The "Barons" were called such because they owned the largest ranches in the area, had the most employees of any businesses in the County, and because their family, along with the Callahans, had first founded the County more than a hundred years before, their claim on the land extending even before the first recorded non-native settlement.

Along with John Corbin was Marshal Roberts, Rafer Callahan's paternal grandfather, and Saul Rafferty, Logan's grandfather.

Each man was around seventy-one or seventy-two, and each moved like a man two decades younger, despite the heavily lined weariness in their expressions.

"Now why didn't I guess that if one of you was involved in something, then all of you would be?" Archer snorted as he moved to the front of the heavy walnut desk that had once been his grandfather's and rested against it, his arms crossed over his chest as he watched each man demandingly.

Breathing out roughly, John paced across the room before turning and moving back to the chairs that sat in front of the desk.

Grabbing a matching chair from along the wall, he placed it to the side of Saul Rafferty before taking his seat and staring up at Archer imperiously. "You'll want to sit down for this."

He would want to sit down for it.

Great.

Whatever might be stalking the cousins, there was little doubt that it originally stemmed from these three men.

Archer's father had first made the prediction, his expression tight with anger, as he'd pushed a red pin into place on the map.

Moving behind the desk Archer took his seat, leaned back, and waited.

"Forty years ago, there was an unfortunate event that the three of us happened to come upon. None of us were involved in it, but having arrived when we did, it gave someone we still have yet to identify the opportunity to frame us for it," John began heavily. "Because of that one situation, and our inability to foresee that by not telling anyone what had happened, whoever had set it up would be able to destroy our lives.

"Because of that event, Archer, we were forced to disown our daughters when they married men who interfered in whatever plans this person had. Then we were forced to turn our backs on our grandsons and disown them as well. Because of whatever G.o.dforsaken plans the b.a.s.t.a.r.d has, nearly a dozen women have been murdered because of their connections to our grandsons. And now"-John's voice roughened-"because of a situation we could not control, and could not prove had not happened, I've had to disown my granddaughter because this person finds it, for whatever reason, inconvenient for her to be in Corbin County. If you don't convince her to leave, if you don't get her out of Colorado, then she could die for her stubbornness in staying, and for aligning herself with her cousin in that job she's accepted at the head offices of Brute Force. You have to get her to leave, Archer. You're my last hope to save her."

He didn't pretend to hide his shock.

Sitting back in his chair, he stared at the three "Barons," wondering if his father had ever suspected any of this.

No, he couldn't have, Archer thought. If his father had suspected it, he would have surely told Archer, or left him that information before Alzheimer's had taken his mind and a ma.s.sive heart attack had taken his life.

"Well, f.u.c.k me," Archer breathed out roughly as he stared at the three men, not even pretending he wasn't speechless.

h.e.l.l, his father had always surmised the Barons had more to do with all of this than any of them could ever imagine, and how right he had been.

"What happened?" He let his gaze touch on each man.

John answered for them all. "Once you figure out the ident.i.ty of the Slasher and his partner, then we'll tell you everything. We'll tell you about a conspiracy of blood and death that possibly stretches back far longer than any of us want to consider. But until both killers are taken into custody, revealing the secrets we've kept for so long will do none of us any good. Least of all my granddaughter."

Archer stared back at him silently.

He remembered the first time he'd met the older man. Archer had been no more than seven, motherless after Mera Tobias' death, and lost. His father hadn't quite known what to do with him, so Randal had taken his son to the Corbin Ranch and left him with his friends, John and Genoa Corbin, for the summer.

Archer had grown fond of the fatherly John, and he'd begun looking forward to those visits. As he entered his teens he'd taken summer jobs at the Corbin Ranch until he joined the Marines.

He'd gotten to know John well enough that he could read the determination in the older man's gaze. That glitter of stubbornness ate at Archer. For ten years, even before he'd left the Marines, Archer had been investigating the rapes and murders of the original six women, and any possible connections they could have had to the Callahan cousins and whoever had been attempting to frame the boys for those murders.

To learn that the killings might have begun long before he'd imagined made fury churn in his gut. It was bad enough he couldn't even come up with one suspect, let alone a list from which to identify the Slasher and his partner, but to have what could be vital information held back from him only p.i.s.sed him off further.

"You have knowledge of a series of murders that could predate twelve years before, and you're refusing to reveal that information to an officer of the law?" he asked the three men, careful to keep his tone quiet and controlled.

"To tell you now, without proof, will only hurt us," Saul Rafferty spoke up, his voice a dark rasp that still held the deep baritone of command. "You will still have no suspect, and without proof of what happened, no way to identify even a possible suspect. But if knowledge of it became known, then the three of us could be blamed for it, and for so much more. Forty years, Archer. We've had to stand aside, disown the daughters we love more than life, and then to disown their children, or see their blood spilled and our hands appear to be stained by their blood. I'd rather die than see those boys suffer further."

"And now I've lost Anna as well," John grated out, his voice filled with bitterness. "If we tell you what we suspect, and what we know of the past that's being held against us, it then endangers not just our grandsons, but our entire families. If we wait until you identify the Slasher, or at the very least his partner, then you can pin far more on him than the murders the Slasher thus far claims."

"That's not enough," Archer informed the three men as his jaw tightened with anger. "You could have information that would help me identify the b.a.s.t.a.r.d and you're withholding it."

"No, there's nothing that could help you," Marshal Roberts promised as he spoke up, decades of grief lining his face and filling his voice. "Nothing we know could help you. If it could have, I swear to you on my own life, you'd have the entire story, no matter the danger to us personally. My grandson means everything to me, and to my wife. Just as the others meant everything to John and Saul. We'll only endanger them further if it's ever learned we told you even this much."

h.e.l.l, this was going to come back and bite him on the a.s.s, and Archer knew it. But he could also sense that the three men weren't going to give him whatever it was they were holding back.

At least not yet.

"Does any of it tie into the murders that have been used to attempt to frame Crowe, Logan, and Rafer?" he asked them.

"I suspect they're tied together by the killer, the Slasher himself." John sighed.

And he was supposed to accept their word for that, of course.

Archer didn't think so. What he would do instead was look into any major events that had occurred in the time frame he had just been given.

"And this is why the three of you came together to this meeting?" he asked mockingly. "Why can't I believe that, John?"

"We came together because it's not a story that belongs to just one of us, or to just one of our family members. It involves all of us," Saul reaffirmed. "Besides, Anna's as close to my family and Marshal's as our grandchildren are to John. Seeing her hurt because of this would break us all." For a second, moisture sheened his eyes. "Archer, we've lost too much already. None of us can bear to lose more."