Secrets of the Highlander

by Janet Chapman

  “Robbie isn’t the man who attacked me.”

  “How come you’re so sure?”

  “The guy who jumped me had the same smell that was all through Rose’s store, only not quite as strong. MacBain smells sort of like pine pitch.”

  Camry wrinkled her nose. “I swear I’ll never get that foul odor out of my nose hairs. And the slime…” She shuddered, then walked over to Megan. “You’re a biologist. What does this smell like to you?”

  Megan leaned close to take a whiff of Camry’s sleeve, then jerked away. “Eewww, that’s awful,” she said, wiping her nose on her own sleeve.

  “But do you recognize it?”

  If Jack hadn’t been watching carefully, he might have missed Megan’s reaction. But when she stilled with her face buried in her sleeve, and her eyes widened before she suddenly turned back to the sink, he was certain she did recognize the odor.

  “I can’t say what it is, exactly,” she said, her back to them. She started washing the dishes again. “It’s definitely organic, though.”

  Jack remained silent, but Camry, bless her pushy heart, was like a dog with a bone. “Take another whiff,” she suggest, lifting her arm again. “You’re sure you don’t recognize it? It’s sort of pungent. And stagnant.”

  Megan wiped her hands on a towel, then walked to the oven and opened it. “One whiff was enough. Let me think about it; maybe it will come to me later.”

  Camry seemed puzzled by Megan’s unwillingness to even hazard a guess. She walked to the stairs again, and looked back at Jack. “Rose said Simon told her the bakery break-in had the same slimy goo all over the place, and that the state forensics lab hasn’t been able to identify it.”

  “Not yet,” Jack confirmed.

  She cast a sidelong glance at her sister, then told Jack, “I think it’s reptilian.”

  “Reptiles aren’t slimy,” Megan interjected. “It’s more likely from an amphibian, like a frog or salamander.”

  Camry gave Jack a smug smile, obviously proud of herself for finally getting Megan to comment. “Rose’s store was covered with it,” she said. “That’s an awful lot of frogs.”

  Megan became very busy again.

  Camry shrugged at Jack and ran up the stairs. “I’m taking a shower,” she called as she disappeared.

  Jack studied Megan. What could she possibly know about the break-ins?

  Or had she recognized the smell from hermit boy?

  So what secret was the bastard hiding? No, make that Secrets with an S, to include the favor he’d asked from Megan. Hermit boy had hugged her, and that’s what Megan had just noticed on her own sweater. Kenzie Gregor smelled like a bog.

  He was the right size to be Jack’s attacker, too.

  Jack pulled his crutches out from under the couch and slowly got to his feet. “Thank you for letting me stay, Megan. I can’t imagine how I’d lug firewood to keep the stove going. It’s all I have for heat.”

  She twirled to face him, her hands on her hips and her beautiful green eyes snapping fire. “Just don’t get the wrong idea. I’d do the same for a stranger I found on the side of the road. Understand?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And if you so much as allude to us getting back together, you’re out of here. Got that?”

  “Got it.”

  “And no talking about the baby.”

  “Come on, Meg. You can’t ask me to ignore our baby.”

  “It’s not our baby, it’s mine. You blew any chance of it being ours four months ago.”

  Jack felt his neck heat up. “I didn’t have any choice. You were in danger.”

  “Did it ever once occur to you to simply tell me about the danger, instead of treating me like a mindless idiot?”

  “Of course it did,” he snapped. “And it also occurred to me that you’d dig in your heels and try to get to the bottom of it yourself.”

  As suddenly as the tension had built, it disappeared. Megan gave Jack a speculative look. “So let me get this straight. I had to leave because it was dangerous, but it was okay for you to stay?”

  “I was in the middle of a job.”

  “So was I.”

  “But I wasn’t pregnant. Look, I’m sorry if you don’t care for double standards, but those with wombs are to be protected by those without. Especially if that womb happens to be occupied.”

  “So if I hadn’t been pregnant, you wouldn’t have sent me away?”

  Jack wiped a hand over his face. Dammit, he was digging this hole deeper and deeper, and she was about to start throwing dirt on top of him.

  “Unfair. That’s one of those questions women ask like, ‘Do these pants make my butt look fat?’ If I say yes, I’m still in the doghouse, and if I say no, you’re going to assume I’m lying.”

  “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

  Camry 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 ki
cked 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.

  He did learn that she was conducting an environmental study for a man named Mark Collins, whom neither woman appeared to know much about. The majority of the conversation had been about Camry’s work. Ion propulsion was going to put Earth on the cosmic map, apparently, once Camry figured out how to stabilize the stuff.

  What must the MacKeage household be like when all seven daughters and their scientist mother got together? Jack was gaining a whole new respect for Greylen MacKeage, considering his own head was still spinning from a conversation that had quite literally been out of this world.

  “We should hurry up, Meg. I’ll clear the table and pack the dishwasher,” Camry offered, gathering up the plates. “You go to the baby’s room and decide how you want to arrange it before everyone gets here.”

  “You have company coming?” Jack asked, also getting to his feet.

  “Just Mom and Elizabeth and Chelsea,” Camry told him, her eyes sparkling with mischief. “And Daddy.”

  Jack froze as he was reached for his crutches.

  “Actually, it’s good that you’re here,” she continued, rinsing the plates in the sink. “You can entertain Daddy while we work on the baby’s room.”

  Holy hell! “Maybe I should head over to my house. I don’t want to be in the way.”

  Camry straightened from putting the plates in the dishwasher. “You won’t be in the way, Jack. Besides, when I ran over to get you some clean clothes, your house was cold. It can’t be more than fifty degrees in there.”

  The perfect excuse! “Then I should go start a fire so the pipes don’t freeze.” At the sound of a giggle, Jack turned and found Megan with her hand over her mouth, her eyes shining with amusement. “What?” he snapped, forgetting he was trying to get back in her good graces.

  “Nothing,” she said, making a futile attempt to stifle her smile. “I’m just remembering a conversation my family had over Christmas vacation. Your great-grandfather didn’t happen to be a Cree chief, did he?”

  “Because our father is probably going to call you Chief,” Camry stated, also laughing at their little joke, which he seemed to be the brunt of. “To show his respect.”

  “Grand-père wasn’t a chief,” he growled. “He was a shaman.”

  Jack wanted to kick himself the moment he saw Megan’s reaction. She went perfectly still, her face blanching to the color of new snow.

  Hell. What woman wouldn’t love hearing the child she was carrying descended from shamans?

  “He—he practiced the magic?” Camry squeaked.

  Jack turned toward the kitchen and saw that Camry was as pale as her sister. Wonderful. Now they both thought he was weird.

  “He was a medicine man,” he growled. “He used herbs and prayers to heal people.”

  “Did you, ah…inherit his gift?” Megan asked.

  “No.”

  “How do you know for sure?” Camry asked.

  Jack held his crutches away from his body. “I’m thirty-four years old. Don’t you think I’d know something like that by now, and would heal myself if I could?”

  “That’s not how the magic
works,” Megan blurted out, then looked just as surprised at what she’d said as he was.

  The magic? What was going on here? These two woman—scientists, for Pete’s sake—appeared both fascinated and horrified that his great-grandfather had been a shaman.

  “Exactly how does the magic work, then?” he asked. “And what good would it do me, if I can’t heal myself?”

  Megan narrowed her eyes, and there went her hands to her hips again. “Could your grandfather heal himself?”

  “Great-grandfather,” he reminded her. “He used his medicinal herbs and sweat lodge whenever he was ill. You didn’t answer my question. How does the magic work?”

  “How should I know? I’m a biologist, not a wizard.”

  Wizard? Where had that come from?

  “They’re here!” Camry said, rushing to the door and opening it to look outside.

  Jack didn’t hear any vehicle driving in, no car doors shutting, nobody talking.

  “Oh, I thought I heard something,” Camry said, closing the door. She then rushed across the room to the stairs. “I’ll be back in a minute. Let them in when they get here, will you, Jack?” she called out.

  Jack turned to Megan, but she had disappeared, too. “Guess that ended that conversation,” he muttered to the empty room, only to realize this was his own chance to escape. He tucked his crutches under one arm and limped out onto the porch, then carefully made his way down the shadowed driveway.

  A dark Suburban rounded the corner and pulled into the driveway, bathing Jack in blinding light just as he hit a patch of ice and his feet headed in two different directions. He fought to keep his balance for several seconds, realized it wasn’t going to happen, and threw himself toward the nearest snowbank.

  His crutches landed on top of him, driving his face into the snow. Jack gave a pained sigh of defeat. He might as well stay here until he froze to death, rather than continue to be beaten up by everyone—including himself.

  He could swear he heard Grand-père laughing his head off. For five years, Forest Dreamwalker had tried to persuade Jack that his brother’s gift had passed down to him, always ending each lecture with a warning that the longer Jack continued to deny his calling, the louder it would become.