Cam relaxed against him. She was still upset that Maxine hadn’t survived, but damned glad that Luke had. “Did you find out why Kate had left the dooryard?”
“She told us she was looking for a special rock in the pool of pretty pebbles she remembered seeing that summer, when she and André had been fishing in the river.”
“What made her think she could find it with snow on the ground?”
“Five-year-olds don’t think about silly details like that; they just go after what they want.” His lips touched her hair again. “All Kate was focused on was finding a special rock so she could give it to me for Christmas. Because, she told me that night when she came to my room after we got back from the hospital, she didn’t want me returning to college without something to remind me of home . . . and of her.”
He took a ragged breath. “I came unglued. She’d nearly died trying to find some stupid rock for me, and I started yelling at her. But instead of bursting into tears like a normal kid, you know what she did?”
Camry said nothing, because she couldn’t.
“She wrapped her tiny arms around my legs and told me that she loved me so much, her heart hurt when she thought of my missing her the way she missed me.” He took another shuddering breath. “And then she explained that she could sit in my room whenever she missed me, but that I didn’t have anything to remind me of her when I was away at college.”
“My knees buckled,” he continued, his voice raspy, “and I knelt down to hug her. But before I could, Kate held up her tiny fist and opened her fingers to reveal a black-and-white speckled pebble in her palm. She told me it was a lot smaller than the rock she’d wanted to find for me, but that she’d been forced to grab the beautifulest one she could reach in the pool of open water, because Maxine had kept pulling on her coat.”
Luke ducked his head to press his cheek against hers. “You know what love really is, Camry? It’s uncompromising, unpretentious, and unconditional, and sometimes it makes your heart hurt. I apologized to Kate for yelling at her, and she patted my cheek and said that she knew I was angry because I loved her—just like Maxine had growled at her when she’d climbed down to the water. Kate said, and I quote, ‘Maxine didn’t let me fall in the river because he knew I was going to love him forever.’ ”
Luke rested his chin on her head with a sigh. “I had never paid much attention to Kate for the first five years of her life. I didn’t have a clue what to do with an infant, and by the time she was a toddler, I was away at college most of the year or working in town and hanging out with my friends all summer. But that didn’t stop her from loving me so much that her heart hurt when I was gone.”
He lifted Cam’s chin to make her look at him, his smile tender in the glow of the dash lights. “I tucked Kate in bed, then went downstairs to the living room, got down on my knees, and apologized to my mother for running away when I was fourteen. Then I apologized to André for being such a self-centered bastard, and thanked him for not giving up on me.”
He shifted beneath her without breaking his embrace, then pressed something into the palm of her hand. “Here. If you try real hard, I bet you can feel the love, too,” he whispered, folding her fingers over the tiny, smooth object. “The next summer, just before I headed off to college again, I took Kate down to the river and we built a huge rock cairn in honor of Maxine. Then I searched until I found a very special rock, and gave it to Kate. She hugged it to her heart and said it was the beautifulest rock she’d ever seen.” He squeezed Cam’s fist. “I’ve carried this pebble since that Christmas. No matter where I am in the world, or what I’m doing, I just have to reach in my pocket to know that I am uncompromisingly, unpretentiously, and unconditionally loved.”
He lifted her hand to his mouth and kissed it. “And the moral of my story, I’ve since realized, is that sometimes our most profound lessons come from a five-year-old child, and sometimes they show up as a mangy old dog.”
“Or as a fellow scientist who for some reason has clamped his teeth into me, and refuses to let go until I go home and apologize to my mother?”
He suddenly stiffened. “No,” he said with a growl. He set her back over the console and into her seat. “Don’t compare me to Maxine. That dog was a gutsy, selfless hero, whereas I’m a self-serving bastard who didn’t think twice about stealing someone’s life’s work.”
She gasped softly. “Is that how you see yourself?”
He looked over at her, the dash lights accentuating the harsh planes of his face. “Fiona had it wrong, Camry. I’m nobody’s miracle.”
“But you didn’t mean to destroy Podly.”
“I sure as hell meant to use the data I was trying to download,” he said, turning away to look out his side window.
Camry stared out the windshield, desperately wanting to tell Luke that he hadn’t caused Podly to crash, Fiona had. But even though she knew they would have to talk about it eventually, she simply didn’t have the courage to open that particular Pandora’s box quite yet.
She started the truck, checked for oncoming traffic, and accelerated back onto the interstate. Maybe Fiona did have it wrong. Miracles were the stuff of magic, after all, and the magic wasn’t known for rewarding hijackers and no-good, rotten liars. It was more prone to toying with them the way a cat toyed with a mouse—or the way an impish niece with a thing for satellites did—just before sending down some seriously bad karma.
Yeah, well . . . if she and Luke had some dues to pay, Camry couldn’t think of a better person to pay them with. Because contrary to what he might think of himself, she knew that, just like Maxine, Lucian Renoir had no intention of letting the raging river sweep her away.
Chapter Twelve
They arrived in Pine Creek shortly after midnight, but it took them another two hours to get their hands on a snowcat—which they virtually stole out from under the noses of the TarStone Mountain Ski Resort night-grooming crew. It was nearly three in the morning before they got back to the truck they’d hidden several miles from the resort, and Luke couldn’t decide if Camry had a death wish or if she just got her jollies from skulking around in the shadows.
He did learn some interesting things about himself, however. One, he probably should stick to physics, as he’d likely starve to death if he had to steal for a living; and two, even if he had spent the entire night in a cold sweat, he rather liked performing any number of illegal acts with Camry. At one point he’d even been tempted to look down the front of her pants to see what equipment she was packing; the woman appeared to have nerves of steel, the focus of a Navy Seal, and the mind of a master criminal.
She also had a rather perverse sense of timing; like when they’d been hiding in the maintenance garage while they’d waited for one of the workers to kindly refuel the groomer they intended to . . . borrow. Apparently having grown bored, Camry had gone after Luke’s package. But just as he’d been trying to wrestle her hands away from his belt buckle, the garage lights had suddenly gone out and the man had left.
Camry had immediately returned to criminal mode, leaving Luke—and his bewildered lower brain—sprawled in the corner, in total darkness, wondering when exactly he had lost his mind.
Camry finally pulled the snowcat to a stop beside her SUV and shut off the engine, snapped on the interior lights, and shot him a smug smile.