“There are towels in the bathroom closet,” she said, nodding toward the downstairs hall. “And there’s a bed set up in the room on the left. You can sleep there tonight.” She turned and walked to the fridge. “Dinner’s in an hour.”
Jack hobbled through the hall door, entered the tiny bedroom on the left, and nearly dropped to his knees. The place was packed full of baby things. A crank-up swing, a car seat, toys, tiny clothes, and colorful little blankets were stacked to the ceiling on one side of the room, the single bed teeming with more baby stuff on the other.
Jack broke into a cold sweat. Holy hell, he was going to be a daddy.
Chapter Ten
C amry didn’t even try hiding her smile as she approached Jack’s bandaged hand with the sewing shears. She was beginning to understand why Megan had fallen for the guy. He was sort of endearing, she decided, her smile widening when she took a large snip of the shower-soaked gauze and Jack flinched.
“I really can do this myself,” he said, trying to take the scissors from her with his good hand.
Camry firmed her grip on his wrist and took another snip. “I can see what a great job you’ve been doing. Those are some mean-looking scars on your hands and wrists. They look like burn marks.” She stopped snipping and arched an inquiring brow. “Are they reminders not to tug on the devil’s tail?”
Jack turned his uninjured palm up to look at it, then slowly closed his hand into a fist and dropped it to his lap under the table. “No, they’re to remind me why I became a pacifist.”
She snorted. “How’s that been working for you?” She loosened the wet bandage. “So tell me, Jack, are you really half Canadian Cree?”
Camry looked up again to meet Jack’s assessing gaze. She had to agree with Megan that his size did make him approachable. Not that he was wimpy by any means. Jack Stone was compact, sculpted with obvious strength, and had sharp, intelligent, compelling blue eyes. Maybe Robbie could give him a couple of lessons in basic self-defense.
“My mother was a woodland Cree from Medicine Lake, Alberta.”
“And your father?”
“He was American, from Montana. They met at a Greenpeace rally in Vancouver.” He held up his good hand when she started to ask him another question. “Mom was a conservation agent working to get large logging concerns to practice sustainable harvesting, and Dad was a biochemist who was fed up with chemical farming practices,” he continued. “It was love at first sight for my father, but it took him three years to convince my mother that she couldn’t live without him.”
“Do they still live in Medicine Lake?”
He shook his head. “They died in an auto accident when I was nine.”
“Oh. Sorry,” she muttered, turning her attention back to his hand. “So who raised you after that?”
“My maternal great-grandfather, for the most part. We lived just outside of Medicine Lake until he died when I was fifteen.”
Camry looked up. “Then where did you go?”
“I finished raising myself. When I was twenty I joined the Canadian Air Force, but after four years I decided I wasn’t warrior material,” he said, darting a glance toward the kitchen where Megan was putting the finishing touches on dinner. “I kicked around Ottawa, Toronto, and Montreal for another couple of years, working different jobs. Then one summer when I was visiting Medicine Lake, I found out that a friend’s sixteen-year-old daughter had run away from home, and I offered to find her.”
“Did you?”
Jack nodded, his eyes lighting with satisfaction. “Had her back home in less than three weeks.”
Intrigued, Camry also glanced toward the kitchen to see if her sister was listening—which she obviously was. Megan had her back to them, but she was perfectly still.
“Where’d you find the girl?” Cam asked.
“In Vancouver, living with a young man she’d run off with.”
“And you talked her into going home?”
“She had realized her mistake within days of landing in Vancouver; her boyfriend was a jerk and they were living in a crack house. She didn’t know how to call her parents and ask if she could come home.” He shot Camry a crooked grin. “Curiosity might get a person in trouble, but it’s usually pride that keeps them there.”
“So you found out you had a knack for tracking down runaways, and you turned it into a profession?”
“Something like that.”
“How do you go about finding those kids?”
“Personal experience,” he said evenly. “I ran away from half a dozen foster homes before I went to live with my great-grandfather.”
“When you were only nine?”
Jack finished unwrapping the bandage himself. “I was trying to get to Grand-père in Medicine Lake. I didn’t know he was fighting the courts for custody for me.”
“Why wouldn’t they give him custody? He was family.”
“He was also eighty years old at the time.”
“But he eventually won?”
“Only because after a year of arguing with the courts, he up and stole me from the foster home I was staying at. He took me to live deep in the forest until he died. When I came walking out of the woods alone, social services got their hands on me again and took me back to Edmonton. Not that I stayed long; I simply disappeared again.”
Camry gaped at him. He’d been running away since he was nine years old? She flinched when the oven door suddenly slammed shut. Jack grabbed his crutches, stood up and scooped the tape and gauze off the table, then hobbled into the downstairs bedroom without saying another word.
Camry turned in her seat to find her sister glaring at her. “What?” she asked quietly.
“Please tell me you don’t believe one word of that,” Megan hissed.
“Nobody could make something like that up, Meg. It’s too heart-wrenching.”
“You can’t honestly believe that a nine-year-old child would run off on his own like that.”
“But what if he did? Can you imagine what he went through, and how scared he was? And then his great-grandfather died. He must have had to bury him all by himself. And then he walked out of the woods, alone again.”
“He made it up, Cam. He’s trying to gain our sympathy.”
“What if it’s true?”
“Okay, what if it is?” Megan raised her chin defensively. “What does his childhood have to do with anything?”
Cam stood up and walked over to the counter in order to look her sister directly in the eye. “You and your baby are it, Meg. The two of you are the only family he’s got.”
Megan cringed away. “Whose side are you on?”
Cam took hold of her shoulders. “Yours. I’m on your side, sis. But can’t you see why he’s come here? He’s looking for a family of his own.”
“But how can I trust him?” Megan whispered. “He’s done nothing but lie to me since we met.”
“You do what any smart woman does,” Cam said. “You have him investigated. And if Jack’s story doesn’t check out, then you get Winter to turn him into a toad.”
“And if it does check out?”
Camry sighed. “That’s your call. But you heard the man; our pride is what usually keeps us in trouble. You and the baby are the ones who will have to live with your decision.”
Jack was unsure whether he was helping his cause or hurting it. The abbreviated version of his childhood had bothered Megan for some reason, yet it may have nudged her sister closer to his camp.
He pushed his empty plate away and leaned back in his chair with satisfaction. Who knew Megan could cook? The university funding the tundra study had provided a meal tent, and it had never occurred to him that she might have a domestic side. Not that he’d been thinking of hearth and home when he’d met her; he had been focused only on experiencing that passion she exuded like an elixir.
Thank God she’d been thinking along those same lines, albeit light-years ahead of him. Now, though, she was acting as if she wished the ground would open up and swallow him whole. She had spoken maybe three sentences toward him during the entire meal, delivered with an aloof politeness.