“Absolutely not,” she said. “I dragged you into this. I’m buying these tickets.” She paused for a moment and raised her head to look at him. “Are you sure you have the time to travel? You didn’t bank on anything like this when you said you’d help me.”
“I have a couple of months off.”
“Yeah, but you’re here to settle your grandfather’s estate.”
He couldn’t help smiling. “That description sounds far more involved than the reality. I needed to whack some weeds, toss some junk, and list the place. The only thing left to do is list it, and I can do that when we get back.” Or maybe even from the road. He’d already taken photographs of the front and the rooms he’d cleared. No one was going to buy the place because it was their dream home. Any buyer was most likely going to rehaul the house. He’d just wanted to make sure it didn’t appear that it needed so much work it wouldn’t be worthwhile.
She released a breath. “Again, thank you. But I’ll buy the tickets.”
“I’ll rent the car.” She opened her mouth as if to argue, but then apparently decided against it as she turned back to the screen to purchase their tickets. “We leave at five thirty tonight.”
He checked the time. “That gives you at least an hour to take a nap. I’ll stay and watch Cyrus while you sleep, and then I’ll go home and throw some items in a bag and meet you back here.”
But she shook her head. “It’s an almost five-hour flight. I’ll sleep on the plane. You go home and pack a few things, and so will I. I also need to call my work and let them know ...” She trailed off, obviously not having formed a plan about what she’d tell them. “Well, I’ll tell them something came up.” She picked up the laptop and stood. “And I’ll take this with me as I do what I need to do here.”
He stood as well. “Okay. I’ll pick you up at three. We can park my truck at the airport.”
She gave a distracted nod. “See you then.”
She let him out, and he heard her lock the door behind him and the soft beeps of the alarm being reset. He turned and walked to his truck, got inside, and took a moment to recalibrate his mind, the same way he’d gotten used to doing in his profession, where plans and missions tended to change on a dime.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Cami woke up just as the plane touched down at San Francisco International Airport, shaking away the cobwebs of the dream she’d been having. She’d seen her mother. She’d been repeating the words she’d said before she’d died.Do of ...Where had that phrase been going? Cami had wondered a million times. The loud overhead ding brought her further from the fog, and reality filtered in slowly as the aircraft bumped to a stop along the runway. They were in Northern California to get ahead of the curve in the effort to locate—and rescue—her son, who’d been kidnapped for unknown reasons. She let that astonishing truth settle point by point, the absolute shock of it bringing her quickly to the here and now.
Something amazing met her nose, the scent of man and some eucalyptus deodorant mingling in the air around her. As she lifted her head, she came to another reality. She was currently drooling on Rex Lowe’s shoulder. She sat up fully, wincing at the painful twinge in her neck.
“Sorry about that,” she murmured, bending her head from side to side.
“I’m glad you slept,” Rex said, his low, masculine voice rolling over her nerve endings and tightening her already-sore muscles. She was too. Despite her current discombobulation and awareness of Rex’s closeness, she felt light-years better, and her brain felt clear once again. Or it was beginning to, at least.
The plane came to a slow stop, idling at the gate as Cami got her bearings and ensured all her items hadn’t shifted so far away that she couldn’t locate them. “How is he?” she asked, nodding to the closed computer on his lap. The fact that she had been instructed not to log on to the site on more than one device had worked out fine when she was in her apartment, but not so much on the road. Still, as long as the laptop was charged, it was small enough to travel with. Thankfully she hadn’t logged on to some desktop computer with no anticipation of what they were doing right now.
“He’s sleeping,” Rex said. “I hated to look away at all. I’ll open it back up the minute we’re off the plane.”
“Thanks for keeping watch. Anything to report on?” The ding overhead indicated the seat belt sign was off, and passengers began standing and collecting their baggage from the overhead bins.
“No, the last five hours didn’t offer much, fortunately and unfortunately.” She understood what he meant about thefortunatepart. If something had happened that indicated his whereabouts, they couldn’t have done anything from thirty thousand feet in the air.
They stood when it was their turn, and Rex gathered their travel bags and they deplaned, walking into the crowded corridors of SFO. Rex opened the laptop and used his arm as a makeshift shelf as they moved toward the airport exit. No one looked at him twice, either too rushed or unfazed by the seeming level of screen obsession.
It took them less than forty-five minutes to take a shuttle to the car rental agency, collect the SUV Rex had reserved online, and pull out of the lot, headed for the Pacific Coast Highway.
They had talked about staying in San Francisco—after all, the city had plenty of coastline. But a cabin in the woods near the ocean was much more likely to be somewhere outside the city than within its borders. Their goal was simply to be as close to the likeliest place as possible, so that when and if they figured out Cyrus’s exact whereabouts, they’d be in a position to help him. Cami already felt a smidge calmer now that they’d touched down in the state where he was.
Cami stretched, again twisting her neck to work out the last of the sleep kink. She glanced at the laptop they’d situated on the console between them and noticed that Cyrus was just waking up. The little boy stretched in a similar way as she’d just done, and her heart gave a sharp squeeze. She knew what it was to wake up afraid, and she longed to comfort him with everything in her, to tell him everything would be okay.
Only, she could not guarantee that, especially from the other side of a screen.
“I forgot to ask how your work took the news that you’d be gone for a few days,” Rex said, breaking her from her memories of her own victimization.
“They were surprised but supportive.” She’d only told them a personal situation had come up and she had to deal with it, and then she’d gotten off the phone quickly. “They’ll be fine. We don’t have anything out of the ordinary going on this week. And they can call if they need me.”
“How’d you end up in the butterfly business anyway?” he asked, glancing over at her with a smile.
“It was something my sister, Elle, and I used to do together when we were kids. Our mom showed us how to identify a butterfly egg on a leaf. They’re tiny and hard to find. We’d search for hours and were usually successful. Then we’d put them in jars with lots of leaves and watch the process as it became a caterpillar and then a butterfly.” Cami smiled even as her heart ached. She loved talking about them, though, and appreciated any opportunity to do so. It felt like her stories and her words were the only things keeping them alive now. Her father spoke of them occasionally, she supposed, but it also had to pose somewhat of a conflict in the last few years since he’d met Gigi to talk about his dead wife and daughter too much and cause his new wife to feel like she lived in the shadow of his past. “Anyway, Elle called them flutterflies when she was little.”
“Ah,” Rex said. “So that’s where the name comes from.”
