Clearly, Rob took notice of that fact, as his grin broadened when I pressed up against him. "Well, now it is definitely a good morning." He leaned in for a kiss, and gods above, the man didn't even have morning breath. How the hell did he manage that?
"I should probably brush my teeth," I began, but Rob's arms closed around me and he pulled me to him.
"That can wait a few minutes."
"Just a few minutes?"
His lips paused as they kissed a trail down the line of my neck, headed for more intimate areas. "Perhaps twenty."
"Ooh, twenty. Ahh, yeah, focus on that part."
He nipped at me, sucking my skin into his lips before releasing it, making me draw in my breath sharply. "There are lots of parts that demand my attention."
"Over the next twenty minutes."
"Maybe thirty."
In fact, nearly forty-five minutes passed before we finally struggled out of bed, both of us flushed and gasping, the sheets left in a hopelessly sweat-soaked twist behind us. Rob gallantly let me use the bathroom first, and I risked taking a look at myself in the mirror.
Good lord, I thought to myself as I examined my reflection. Strands of brown hair sticking out in all directions, making me look like I'd just been touching one of those Tesla coils charged with all the static electricity. I didn't have any makeup on my cheeks, and the little bit of mascara that clung to my eyelids was smeared hopelessly, and my cheeks were flushed and pink as I sucked in deep breaths of air-
I looked alive, I thought with surprise. And even more than that; I felt alive, more alive than I'd felt in weeks, maybe months.
It was probably just the aftermath of all the danger-induced adrenaline from yesterday, I tried to tell myself. I definitely wasn't grinning like an idiot because of all the feelings rushing through me, swirling out of me and surrounding the man who still lay on top of the sweat-soaked bedsheets in the room outside.
I did my best to brush my hair back, only barely managing to make myself appear slightly presentable, and then headed back out to the bedroom.
Rob wasn't there.
I paused, frowning and looking around. He wasn't hiding to jump out at me, was he? I was currently all but trapped here, in his bedroom, with no clothing options available to me except for the sand-covered outfit I'd worn, and then shed, last night. I needed to get to the rest of my clothes, upstairs in my own bedroom.
I opened the door, intending to just zip up the stairs and get to my room before anyone happened to spot me.
There, on the other side, stood Rob, smiling - and holding two cups of coffee.
"I brought this for you," he said, his eyes tracking downwards and sweeping over me in a manner that suggested that the coffee was entirely secondary in his mind to what he really wanted.
"Control yourself," I told him, reaching out and patting him on the chest - and trying to ignore the mirrored thrill that shot through me when I brushed my fingers against his bare skin. "Let me slip past you, so I can go get some fresh clothes."
"Not exactly the idea I had in mind," he answered, but he moved aside, and I dashed up to go grab some fresh clothes before my baser instincts rose up and sent me back into Rob's bedroom for another round.
While up in my room, I decided to duck down the hall to the upstairs bathroom at the same time, just to get rid of a few lingering grains of sand that clung to uncomfortable places. Feeling miles better when I emerged, I toweled myself mostly dry and pulled on some fresh clothes before heading downstairs to find Rob.
I found him sitting in the living room, his feet propped up on the coffee table and the laptop on his lap. "This is fascinating," he said to me as I entered, although he didn't look up from the computer screen. "I'm starting to see the truth behind what Hook said. Cartmann was up to some very nasty stuff."
"Like what?" I asked, noting that Rob had dropped off my cup of coffee in the living room for me as well. I picked it up and took a sip as I moved around Rob so I could peer over his shoulder. I sensed another great twist in my story.
Sure enough, my nose was correct. I looked on as Rob showed that plenty of the money, the money that Cartmann Securities claimed to receive from law-abiding private citizens of the United States, actually came in from abroad, through a series of dummy accounts. "I can't say for certain, but I bet that when the Feds trace this money back, they'll find that it came from the Mexican cartels," Rob stated.
"Wow," I breathed out, looking at the staggering sums displayed on the computer's screen. "So they gave all that money to Cartmann to invest, and he blew it?"
Rob frowned. "Well, no. Cartmann made the same trades that he declared publicly. He didn't lose any of the money. It's just - not there."
"So he stole it and put it somewhere else?" I said.
A nod. "I just need to figure out where. I'm sure there's a record of it somewhere on here."
I finished off my coffee, took a couple steps away towards the kitchen to drop off my empty mug, but glanced back at Rob. Sitting on the couch with a computer on his lap, he didn't look quite like my mental image of the Bad Boy of Wall Street. Sure, I could imagine him in a suit making high-powered deals, but at the same time, I could now just as easily imagine him bare-chested in a pair of pajama pants, padding up behind me to wrap his arms around me and draw me in for a kiss as he tugged me off to bed...
"What?" Rob asked, a little smile appearing on his face as he looked up at me.
I realized that I'd been staring at him. "Nothing. Mind if I get my computer and join you? I've got to start writing up my story, after all."
With a smile, he patted the couch cushion next to him. "Plenty of room here... if you think that I won't be too distracting."
"Maybe I'll need some distraction after a bit of writing," I bantered back, grinning as I headed off to get my own computer.
Chapter Twenty-Six
*
Just as the sun started to drop down behind the tree line, I finally pushed my computer's lid closed. "Now I'm done."
Originally, I'd intended the story to be a fairly short piece, no more than five thousand words at the longest. But the more I wrote, the more I bounced ideas off of Rob, and the more facts he uncovered on the stolen copy of Chad Cartmann's files, the longer the story grew. I kept on finding juicy new twists and details that I just couldn't bring myself to leave out.
Now, the epic that sat open in a Word document was more than twice as long as I'd originally intended, and more gripping than I could have imagined.
"Can I read it?" Rob asked as he came back into the living room.
I looked up in surprise. "I didn't hear you get back. How were the investigators?"
Rob sat beside me on the couch as I'd started writing, but just after we finished off the cold cuts sandwiches we put together for lunch, federal investigators showed up on the front stoop of Diana's cottage, politely but firmly requesting that Rob come with them. They didn't quite break out the handcuffs, but something about their formal tones, the way that they glared back at us from where they stood, told me that they weren't unwilling to bring out the metal bracelets if they felt them necessary.
Rob, however, agreed to go without a fight, only pausing long enough to grab his computer and bring it so that he could hand over the files. He still hadn't managed to work out where all of the cartel's money ended up; he'd discovered that Cartmann was making regular withdrawals and sending it off to some company with an unpronounceable jumble of letters as a name, but he wasn't able to uncover any evidence of that company existing anywhere else on the web, much less what services it might provide.
"Essentially, it's like Cartmann was just shoveling the money into a black hole," he complained to me as we spread mayonnaise on our sandwiches.
"Maybe the Feds will get him to confess?" I suggested. "If he's going to go to jail, he'll probably want to bargain. Especially since, now that their first hitman failed, the cartels will probably want to send another to get the job done."
I hadn't heard
anything more about what happened to Hook, or whatever the man's real name was. His arrest didn't make any of the newspapers I checked, and it seemed like the man had just vanished.
"Trust me, the government will be keeping his disappearance quiet," Rob told me when I asked. "After all, if he's been working cleanup for the cartels, it means that he knows a lot of their dirty secrets. The Feds will be more than willing to make a deal with him, if they can get their hands on those secrets."
I shivered at the thought of Hook getting out, but hopefully he wouldn't get off that easily, even if he did end up spilling every dirty little secret that he knew. At the very least, I told myself, he'd want to get far away from anyone who might recognize him and connect him back to his old life. After all, if the cartels wanted Chad Cartmann dead, I couldn't even begin to imagine how much hatred and rage they'd feel towards Hook, their faithful hitman of many years who'd flipped on them.
Hopefully, I told myself, Hook's path would never intersect with mine again.
With Rob no longer in the house, I spent the rest of the afternoon struggling to get all of the details of my story poured out onto the digital paper in front of me. There were definitely a few weak sections that I'd need to rewrite, but the story was done.
I still had a few loose ends, however, which were begging for an answer.
First and foremost of those, of course, was what would happen to Rob, now that we'd uncovered all this new information. Would the SEC and other federal agencies drop all charges against him, let him go free? Or would they still continue trying to bring him to trial, even though he was clearly innocent?
And what did that mean for the two of us having any sort of relationship together?
Also, just behind this question about Rob's future was the whole issue of the money. Chad had been buying something regularly, Rob had discovered. Something expensive, but there wasn't any other sign of the money coming back into his accounts. So where had it all gone?
I ran a fingertip over the lid of my closed computer, trying to think like Chad. Pretend that I was a criminal with millions of stolen dollars that I needed to hide. Where could I put it?
Ideally, I said to myself, I'd buy something valuable, something solid that I could hide somewhere or bring with me. That way, no one would be able to raid my bank accounts. And in order to avoid suspicion, I'd buy whatever items I was purchasing in increments, not all at once, so that I wouldn't arouse any suspicion.
That, it seemed, was what Chad had been doing. But what had he bought, and where could he have hidden it?
Millions of dollars could certainly buy a lot of... of whatever he bought. Even if he bought bars of gold, a million dollars' worth of gold would be a lot, wouldn't it?
I re-opened my computer and did a few searches. A single bar of gold, it turned out, was worth around half a million dollars. So Chad would have been buying at least a dozen bars of gold that he'd have to hide somewhere.
Obviously, he wouldn't hide them under a floorboard or in a safe in his apartment. That would be the first place that the police would search. Similarly, he probably wouldn't hide them in his Hamptons home, since that would be the second destination of investigators.
So then where? Not anywhere that he'd leave a record behind, but someplace that he could access, someplace that he'd find easy enough to remember, but that would be absolutely hidden to anyone else who came looking.
I wondered how paranoid Cartmann might have been about keeping the location secret. What if he sent whatever he bought to someone else, so that it never passed through his hands? He could have someone else hide it in a place that he knew, and then, once this whole thing passed, he could go and retrieve it...
For a minute, a strange image of Chad Cartmann as a pirate flashed into my head. He was still wearing his fancy, expensive suit, but he now had added a huge black beard and an eye patch, and waved a big, notched saber around as he jumped across the rigging of his ship. The mental picture made me giggle.
But was I onto something here? Where did pirates hide their treasure?
I'd opened my computer to look up the price of gold bars, but I pushed it closed. "Now I'm done," I said aloud, trying to let go of my picture of Chad Cartmann as a pirate, my unanswered questions about where all that money went.
"Can I read it?" Rob asked as he came into the room.
Rob explained to me that the investigators hadn't stated anything for certain yet, but they'd accepted all the new evidence that he gave them, and their questions made it clear that they'd already shifted the focus of their investigation from Rob over to Chad Cartmann. "They wouldn't tell me anything about what happened to Hook, or what they'd found on Cartmann so far, but their eyes really lit up when I gave them all the files from Cartmann's computer," he told me. "I think that they'll announce in a day or two that I'm in the clear."
"You don't sound especially happy about that," I said, looking up at him.
He shrugged. "It's great, really. But what do I do now? I'm still out a job, and with my boss indicted for fraud and maybe even attempted murder, I can't exactly use him as a reference."
"Take a vacation? Some time off for yourself? Maybe go on a trip?"
Rob looked back at me. "A vacation does sound nice... but I think that it would be better if I didn't go on it alone."
I felt a rush of heat flood through me, coursing up and down my spine, suffusing my cheeks with a blush and dropping down to also heat up other, more sensitive areas. "Well, before anything, I need to get this story off to my editor," I said, trying to not let that rush of heat distract me too much.
"Can I read it?"
I hesitated for a moment, but Rob was one of the main characters in the story, after all, and he deserved to read what I'd written about him. I opened the computer back up and spun it around so that he could peruse the story.
Sitting down at the kitchen table across from me, Rob started reading. I sat anxiously, watching his eyebrows rise. A couple of times, he frowned and his eyebrows drew down like storm clouds, but a couple other passages made him smile - at one, he even tilted his head back and laughed out loud! Throughout it all, I sat there, trying to keep from letting my nervousness and impatience show.
Annoyingly, in my head, the image of Chad Cartmann as a pirate kept on creeping back in. There was something about the man and buried treasure, treasure maps, X marks the spot, that my brain didn't want to abandon. Not that I could ever see Cartmann getting his hands dirty by using a shovel to bury his ill-gotten gains. Instead, he'd probably just get some cabin boy to do all of the digging for him-
I froze. No. It couldn't be. That would be crazy.
But what if it was true?
Across from me, not noticing how I'd frozen at my sudden wild, crazy, totally unlikely revelation, Rob pushed the computer away. "Wow, that's a great story," he said, smiling up at me. "You've got a really good hand at writing!"
His smile faded after a second, however, when I didn't respond. "What's wrong?"
"Um, nothing," I said, still turning the idea over in my head. It did make some sense, in a wild way. And there was a way for us to find out if it was true or if it was just a bunch of total nonsense.
I glanced over at the window, frowning as I noted that the sun was already dropping down below the trees. We probably only had another ten or fifteen minutes of daylight left. "Do you have a flashlight?"
"Sure," he answered, still frowning at me. "What's going on?"
"I have an idea, and even though I'm all but certain that it's just a load of craziness, I want to find out for certain," I said, hoping that I didn't sound crazy. "Can you get the flashlight and come with me, out to the beach?"
"The beach?"
"Yeah. Your beach." I stood up abruptly from my seat, trying to think through this idea, to see if I saw any holes in the plan. I couldn't find anything that stood out as wrong. "Come on, let's go before the sun goes all the way down and it gets too dark."
Rob kept on frowning, but he went
to fetch the flashlight. I tried to think through it. They'd need to pick a spot of course, but there were only so many options. And maybe we could see some evidence of it...
I tried not to let any excitement build up inside of me, but it was too late. This could really be it!
Chapter Twenty-Seven
*
Five minutes later, as we arrived at the beach, the sun was barely a sliver poking up above the horizon. The trees cast long shadows across the beach, and everything looked like it was painted in tones of yellow and orange.
"So, what are we doing out here?" Rob asked, as we stepped out onto the sand.
I looked around, hoping desperately that I hadn't been making up the whole thing. But sure enough, I saw the shovel standing off to the side, leaning up against one of the trees closest to the water. I dashed over to it, picking it up.
"Is this yours?" I asked Rob, holding it out to him.
He shook his head. "Nope, not mine. I figure that someone else left it here. Wasn't it out here when we first came out?"
I nodded. "And I think that this is the key to everything," I replied, as I looked around and tried to figure out where would be the best place to dig.
"I don't understand." Rob followed behind me as I climbed up one of the tall dunes, trying to get a better view. "What are we looking for?"
"Buried treasure!" I said, looking around. There! Right at the base, above the high water line, equally distance between the two trees that were nearest. That seemed like the sort of spot that I'd pick. Still holding the shovel in my hands, I started down towards the location.
"Buried treasure?" Rob echoed, following after me. "Who buried it?"
I shoved the blade of the shovel into the soft sand, and then thought better of it and handed it over to Rob. "You dig, I'll explain, and you tell me if I'm totally crazy and off base in this."
He took the shovel from me and started to dig as I laid out my thoughts. "See, Chad was buying something, something expensive, so that he could hide it. He couldn't leave all the money sitting in a bank account somewhere, so he had to buy something with it, right?"
Bad Boy of Wall Street: A Bad Boy Billionaire Romance Page 16