She leaned back and started toying with the transmitter. “That was a good answer for a fourteen-year-old kid.”
“But incomplete, according to André.”
“Why didn’t he just tell you the whole answer?”
“Don’t think I didn’t ask him to. But he said it’s not something one person can explain to another; I had to feellove to know it.”
She suddenly smiled. “Then you can’t tell me, either, which means you just gave up your chance to blackmail me into staying.”
He arched a brow. “Or I just made you curious enough to let me stay.”
“How do you figure that?”
“I told you that I apologized to my mother when I was twenty. Aren’t you even a little bit curious as to why then?”
She looked down at the transmitter, shrugging indifferently. “Maybe.”
But Luke knew she was dying to know—likely wondering if some girl had broken his heart. “Can I stay?” he asked softly.
She looked up, the gleam of challenge in her eyes. “Only if you give me a hint as to what happened when you were twenty that led you to have your great epiphany.”
Oh yeah, he had her now—he just had to reel her in. Luke stared off over her head as if considering her offer, then finally locked his gaze on hers. “I died.”
Chapter Eleven
Camry pulled out of the L.L.Bean parking lot in Freeport late Tuesday afternoon, her partner in crime sitting beside her, two dogs and all their paraphernalia in the rear seat, and the back of her SUV crammed full of cold-weather camping equipment and supplies.
Luke immediately became engrossed in the new and supposedly improved GPS tracking device he’d just purchased, and Camry turned north onto Interstate 95 with a smile of anticipation. As much as she loved her doggie friends and tending bar at Dave’s, she realized there was nothing like a winter camping trip to blow off the cobwebs—and a dream guy who just happened to be in lust with her to add a bit of interest.
Cam thought back to all the boyfriends she’d had over the years, and tried to decide if she had spent time with any of them that even came close to the weekend she’d just spent with Luke. The last three days had been amazingly intimate—which Cam found rather interesting, since she had always equated intimacy with lovemaking. But she’d shared her bed with Luke for three wonderfully celibate nights, and she couldn’t remember the last time she’d slept so soundly.
Cam merged into traffic with a silent giggle, remembering what had happened Sunday morning. Since Fiona had blown his cover, Lucian Renoir the physicist had suddenly emerged, and Luke had risen long before sunrise, dug out his laptop, and started crunching numbers. When she’d run into the living room in her pajamas, frantic that hehad suddenly decided to ditch her,she’d found him writing on one of her walls.
Apparently so engrossed in his work that he wasn’t even aware he was using her wall as a whiteboard, Luke had appeared confused when she’d shouted. He’d apologized profusely as he went to the kitchen to get a wet rag, but then hehad shouted when he’d returned to find her overwriting one of his equations. They’d spent the rest of the day covering two more walls with equations as they retraced Podly’s solstice descent—a trajectory that defied every law of physics. And not only had Camry not bothered to change out of her pajamas, she had completely forgotten to be grumpy and miserable.
She was still a bit shaken by how quickly Luke had figured out her little game of letting her boyfriends think they were having mind-blowing sex. Hell, she’d gotten so good at it, she had practically convinced herself that she was utterly, totally fulfilled.
The men certainly had never complained.
Except Luke: after only two days, he’d wanted to wring her neck. She still couldn’t believe he’d actually pulled out a condom, opened the damn thing, and then asked if she knew what it was. She should have been outraged, but instead she had found herself wondering what he planned to do about her . . . virginity. Would he continue their lusty little affair on her terms, or did he see her as a challenge now? Did he have hopes of taking things to the next level?
She wasn’t worried he’d push her into going all the way; Luke didn’t seem to have a pushy bone in his body. Camry smiled at the road ahead. He certainly would try nudging her, though, because for all of his civilized trappings, he was still a perfectly functioning male.
But then, she also loved a good challenge.
“According to my GPS, we’re going seventy-six miles per hour,” he said into the silence, glancing over at the odometer.
Camry kept her foot steady on the accelerator. “I’m just keeping up with what little traffic there is.”
A moan came from the backseat, and Luke glanced over his shoulder. “Um . . . Max doesn’t look so good. He’s drooling, and his eyes are watery.”
“He gets carsick. The pill I gave him in Freeport will kick in soon.”
“You intend to keep him drugged the entire trip?”
“Max won’t need his medicine once he gets in the snowcat; he’ll be too excited about being on an adventure. He only gets sick in cars because he worries he might be going to the vet.”
Luke started pushing buttons on his GPS again.
Camry swiped it out of his hand and set it on the dash on her side of the truck, out of his reach. “Okay. I didn’t make you go back to your hotel, and we’re on the road. So pony up, Dr. Renoir. If you died when you were twenty, how come you’re still breathing?”
“Because the raging river that killed me also slammed me into a rock and knocked the air back into my lungs.”
She scowled over at him. “From the beginning, Luke. And your intriguing little story had better explain what made you apologize to your mother.”
He started repacking everything that had come with the GPS. “You already know I have a kid sister named Kate. Well, when she was five, Mom and André and I took her to the pound on Christmas Eve, and she picked out a monster of a dog that appeared to be eight or nine years old. He was coal black with wiry hair, half of one of his ears was missing, and his eyes were clouded with developing cataracts. I tried to get her to choose one of the puppies, or at least something less pathetic-looking, but Kate claimed she wanted that one because it was the beautifulest dog in the world and she was going to love it forever.”
He shrugged. “She insisted on naming it Maxine, even though I explained it was a male dog. But on Christmas morning, when Kate took Maxine out to play, almost two hours went by before anyone realized they weren’t in the yard.”
“Two hours?”
“It was one of those ‘I thought she was with you’ things. Mom thought Kate had ridden over to check on our neighbor with André, and André had driven away thinking she was in the house playing with the toys Santa had brought her.”
He leaned his head back and closed his eyes, and Camry realized that even though he’d promised to tell her his story, it obviously wasn’t going to be easy for him.
“When André got back and Mom realized Kate wasn’t with him, we all started looking for her. When we hadn’t found her an hour later, we went back to the house and Mom called our local conservation officer to start an organized search. André and I put on snowshoes and split up, and started searching in opposite directions.”
“But if you needed snowshoes, didn’t Kate and the dog leave tracks you could follow?” Cam whispered, suddenly afraid this wasn’t going to be any easier for her to hear than it was for him to tell.