by Piper Rayne
“Shit, yeah,” Wiley said, stepping into the bar and looking around with appreciative eyes. It was a western-style tavern with a huge, long oak bar spanning one full end of the room.
“Cool, right?” My brother asked him, crossing his arms and standing in the center of the room as Wiley slowly made a tour.
The walls were covered with photographs, most of them black and white and all of them showing someone famous standing somewhere in this very space along with Uncle Marvin. There were movie stars and socialites, cowboys and athletes. I watched Wiley take in the photos of Marilyn Monroe, John Wayne, Elvis, and Mohammad Ali. Each one was signed by the celebrity, and in every one, Uncle Marvin stood there grinning, that mysterious gleam in his eye.
“These are worth a fortune right here,” Wiley pointed out, scanning the photos.
“Probably,” Archie agreed. “What do you think of the bar?”
Wiley walked the length of it, running a hand over the brass rail at its edge. I watched the big strong hand caress the bar top and an unwanted shiver of desire swept through me. What would that hand feel like running along my arm? Up my side?
He lifted the door and moved behind the bar, walking back toward me on the other side. “It’s perfect,” he said. He nodded to the dusty window at one side of the room, which let in very little light through the years of buildup on its surface. “Get that puppy cleaned up, get some natural light in here, shine things up . . .” I could almost see the bar taking a new shape inside his head. He grinned at both of us. “Yeah.”
“Awesome,” Archie said. “Come see the rest of the place.”
We toured Wiley through all three floors and both wings of the massive old hotel, pointing out the work we’d already commissioned and asking his opinion on many of the things left to be approached. Then we headed out back, past the wide sweeping deck that Archie promised would one day soon hold legions of travelers, lounging around fire pits and kicking back with a drink while overlooking the incredible vistas of the Rocky Mountains. We followed a rough trail through the trees and around a little bend to a wide clearing, hopefully far enough from the resort to provide some sanctuary when construction was underway over there.
“And this,” Archie announced, “is Aubrey’s baby.”
We stood between the four big yurts I’d had constructed, near the enormous round fire pit we’d built from long wide stones. High-end Adirondack chairs with plush cushions dotted the open spaces, and men were at work already building the outdoor kitchen, which was set off to one side. It was mostly an enormous barbecue along with a built-in oven and refrigeration unit, along with another bar, tucked into a log structure that had retractable walls. We could lock it up at night, and keep it open and staffed during the day, serving food and drinks to glampers on demand.
Wiley stepped up onto one of the low platforms where the yurts had been set up and walked into one, glancing behind him at me with a grin.
From inside, his voice rang out, “Holy shit, this is nicer than my house.”
“Right?” I asked, forgetting my strange nervousness around him and following him inside. Archie had been skeptical about my glamping plan, and the appreciation for its realization was rewarding.
“Seriously, this place is nice.” Wiley turned and shot that high-wattage smile at me, practically melting my clothes from my body.
I caught his eyes, my cheeks burning hot, and we held a look that felt like it might set the whole place on fire before I ripped my gaze away. “That was the idea,” I said, attempting to gather my thoughts in the aftermath of whatever had just rippled through the air between us. Could Wiley feel it too? “We want to offer a really high-end mountain resort experience, even though we are still in the process of getting the high-end mountain resort set up. So we went for a slightly different angle. It might not attract the same level of travelers, but people with money who like a unique experience instead of the same exact five-star accommodations over and over might appreciate it.”
Wiley was nodding, walking around the space. “It’s bigger than it looks,” he said. “And this bed . . .” he trailed off, shaking his head in clear amazement at the uber plush king-sized beds I’d outfitted the spaces with.
Watching him run his hand over the end of the dove gray duvet had me imagining hurling myself at him, knocking him to his back on top of that bed and seeing what might happen next. But my instincts when it came to men were generally not on target. I was the friend, not the seductress. And most guys didn’t appreciate being tackled. So I stood my ground.
He explored the sitting area off to one side, poked his head into the bathroom—complete with rain shower—and gazed out the windows at the views of the forest on one side and towering mountains on the other.
“This is really cool,” he said, coming back to the center of the room to stand beside me. “When do the first guests arrive?”
“A couple weeks,” I told him. “The kitchen staff should be getting here next week, and renovation starts on the resort in a couple days. For now, it’s just the three of us here, but soon this place will be rocking.”
Wiley smiled as I said this and his eyes remained on my face after I’d finished speaking, trailing from my eyes down to my lips and then slowly back up. His eyes were a golden brown that matched his hair, and there was a glint of fun in them, even as they darkened with something I couldn’t quite name, or didn’t dare to hope for.
I cleared my throat, uncomfortable under his scrutiny, but also dreading the moment it would end. I couldn’t remember the last time a man had looked at me this way. Like he was hungry, and I was the only thing that might offer satisfaction. It sent anticipatory tingles shooting through me.
“It’s really nice to see you again, Aubrey,” Wiley said.
The air inside the yurt suddenly felt stifling. “You too,” I managed, risking a look back into those eyes and regretting it instantly as everything inside me begged to get closer to the big magnetic force in front of me.
“You guys get lost in there?” Archie called through the door, breaking the spell.
I spun, heading for the entrance. “Nah, we’re coming.” I needed to get away from the pull of Wiley’s gaze, his presence.
I had to be imagining the way he was looking at me, right? I was just his friend’s little sister. Or at least that was the relationship I was used to. But I wasn’t twelve anymore.
Chapter Five
Wiley
The three of us had dinner together, sitting around the little table up in Aubrey and Archie’s suite, which was clearly something close to the presidential suite, or the king’s rooms, or whatever name would indicate that the place was meant to be the pimp daddy of hotel rooms.
They’d fixed up their own rooms as much as they’d been able to prior to bringing in the heavy guns, which I understood were going to start rolling in within the next few days, and though we grilled our own food out on their sweeping balcony under the watchful gaze of the mountains around us, it was a lot like eating in a five-star restaurant. Not that I’d done a hell of a lot of that.
“You know, when you guys get this place fixed up, it’ll be way too nice for me to stay here,” I told them, swallowing a delicious bite of steak.
“Well, us too,” Archie pointed out. “Not like we grew up staying in places like this.”
“Well, I mean, we kind of did,” Aubrey corrected. “We stayed in a place just like this. With Uncle Marv.”
I glanced at her, something I’d been trying to stop doing because every time I looked at her the most uncomfortable thoughts flew through my head, and more than once I’d been fighting a pretty embarrassing physical reaction to her too. “What was it like back then?”
“It wasn’t all that long ago,” Aubrey pointed out. “I’m only twenty-three.”
“Right.” I took a sip of the water in front of me, working to keep my reactions to her under control. Aubrey had turned into a gorgeous woman, and I was working hard to keep my head right around her.
She was Archie’s little sister, after all. And I was here because he’d invited me. To set up a liquor program and run the bar—not to take advantage of his spitfire little sister. And besides, I’d broken off a four-year long engagement about a week ago. My head and my heart needed time to process that, didn’t they?
But as Aubrey talked about growing up, spending her summers here with her uncle even as the place was beginning to decay around them, I couldn’t help the way I felt. Like she was the most interesting woman I’d ever met. Like there was something so compelling and attractive about her that it might be physically impossible to be around her all summer and not get to touch her, to hold her, to see what it would be like to pull all that energy close and try to channel it toward me.
“I guess it was possible he was losing it even then, and my parents just didn’t really know because they never came up here.”
“So every summer they shipped us off to hang out in a dilapidated hotel with our nutty uncle,” Archie said.
“He was your dad’s brother?” I asked.
Aubrey shook her head, taking a sip of wine. “Dad’s uncle, actually. He was our great uncle.”
“The guy was as old as dirt.”
“Didn’t stop him from climbing around these hills like a kid,” Aubrey pointed out.
“That’s what I’m worrying about,” Archie said, almost under his breath.
“What do you mean?” I asked. There’d been an undercurrent of something between the siblings, something to do with this project, and I hadn’t figured out what it was. “Why would that matter now?”
They exchanged a look, and Aubrey squared her shoulders at her brother, like she was prepared to fight him if they didn’t agree on whatever thing they were silently debating. “Just tell him,” Aubrey suggested.
Archie leaned back in his chair and a half-smile took over his lips. “If you don’t already think we’re nuts, you will now.”
“You guys have been to Singletree. Most people don’t know nuts, but you have to keep in mind the place I grew up,” I pointed out.
“This is true,” Aubrey said. “Do they still change the name at Christmas to Christmas Tree?”
I grinned. “No one gets mail in December. Drives the post office crazy.”
“And is your ex-future-mother in law still sharing her house with a bunch of rodents in hats?” Archie asked.
I stiffened, a little protective of my Singletree family. “They’re chinchillas,” I told him. “And they’re very well behaved. It’s not their fault Lottie likes to dress them up.” The free-range chinchillas were harmless, really. Unless you wanted to display a gingerbread house or left a bowl of rolls on the counter.
“All right. You have some experience in nuts,” Archie agreed.
“Uncle Marv left us a treasure map,” Aubrey blurted out, grinning.
“Like a pirate map? With an X and everything?” I asked, intrigued.
“Not quite,” Archie said, leaning in and lowering his voice as if there might be someone else around to hear. “There’s a poem, first of all. That’s what he left us in the will. And the poem came with one piece of the map. It’s supposed to lead us to the others and ultimately the treasure, but we’ve been getting lucky so far and just kind of discovering pieces of the map.”
“Seriously?” I asked, marveling at what sounded like a really cool adventure. “That’s like a real-life escape room or something.”
“Yeah, but there are no hints,” Aubrey pointed out.
“What’s the treasure?” I asked, imagining a huge chest buried somewhere on the property.
Archie shrugged. “We don’t know for sure. But the guy had a fortune at one point, and he didn’t trust banks or accountants, so he had all kinds of weird ways of hiding his money.”
This whole conversation was fascinating. The idea of a treasure hunt had me excited in a way I didn’t think I had been since I was a little kid. “So you’re figuring it all out?”
Aubrey laughed. “Not really. We haven’t had a ton of time, trying to get this place back together so we can haul it out of debt.”
That didn’t sound good. “So you kind of need to find the treasure, and you’re hoping it’s cold hard cash.”
“Or something valuable at least,” Archie said. “But knowing our uncle, it’s probably something bizarre that had value to him alone.”
“Or it’s cash,” Aubrey suggested, looking hopeful.
“We do think the bulk of his fortune didn’t convey with the will,” Archie agreed. “That it’s here somewhere. If not hidden at the end of the map, then just stashed somewhere in the building. That’s why we’re only bringing in contractors who will sign some paperwork our lawyer drew up.”
“Paperwork?” I tried to picture your average plumber being presented with a complicated legal document and asked to sign before he could get the pipes working up here again.
“If they find anything in the course of their duties here, they get ten percent if they present it to us immediately. But we’ll prosecute to the fullest extent of the law if they keep it from us.”
We finished up our meal and took some of the Half Cat whiskey I’d brought out to the hot tub they’d gotten running on their deck. As I slipped into the hot bubbling water, I stared around myself, marveling at how much my life had changed in a short period of time. The dark green of the trees and the towering mountains off to one side gave me the sense of being very small, and of the world and my life stretching ahead of me being much bigger than it had felt in Maryland. I let my eyes search the scenery, partly because it was breathtaking, and partly to keep them from falling on the beautiful woman sitting across from me in the hot water with her hair piled up on top of her head.
Every time Aubrey reached for her glass, her top half popped out of the bubbling water and I had to fight not to stare. She wore a red bikini in a sporty design. Not the triangle top thing that Amber had liked, the one that was made mostly for sitting still. Aubrey’s suit made me think of beach volleyball players—it was made to move in. Practical, but still ridiculously sexy.
And the soft swell of her breasts was almost more than I could take.
When Archie announced he was going to turn in for the night and left the two of us alone beneath the warm water and the cool Colorado sky, I realized two things:
He trusted me with his little sister, and he absolutely shouldn’t have.
Chapter Six
Aubrey
I wanted Wiley in a way I didn’t think I’d wanted anyone before. I didn’t know if it was because of our previous relationship—if you could even call it that—when we’d been young. Or if it was something completely independent of the vague familiarity I felt around him.
But when he’d walked across our deck in a low-slung pair of swim trunks and whipped his shirt off over his head to reveal the most perfectly chiseled set of pecs and abs I’d ever seen, I’d realized that this summer was going to be sheer torture. How could I be around a guy I found this insanely attractive and not go insane myself?
And the way he looked at me . . . I suspected he might have at least a vague interest in me too.
So when Archie said goodnight, I figured we might as well get this out of the way. I wasn’t above making the first move, and if Wiley rejected me, I’d put the whole thing behind me, and we could get on with the business at hand.
The night was sliding down the sky around us, casting darkness to the distant reaches of the deck, and the lights beneath the water glowed in an otherworldly way. It felt like we were alone in the world, Wiley and me, everything else drowned out by the sound of bubbles, the feel of hot water on my limbs, and whiskey sliding down my throat.
“So,” I began, not exactly sure where women who were good at seduction might instruct me to start this effort.
Wiley’s eyes found mine and a slow smile spread over his lips. “So,” he repeated.
“Do you think you’re going to like it here, Wiley?” I watched him as he watched me, saw th
e way his lids hooded his dark eyes, the way he licked his lips before he answered.
The smile faded a bit. “I guess that depends,” he said.
“On what?”
“On a few things,” he said. “Mostly on whether I’m going to be able to keep reminding myself that you’re my buddy’s sister.”
I let that sink in. There was only one reason I could think of why he’d need to remind himself of that. I set down my glass on the edge of the tub and slowly crossed the distance between us, crouching in the hot water just in front of Wiley, watching him.
“Is that hard to remember?” I asked, my voice almost a whisper, just loud enough to be heard over the bubbles.
A big hand came up and Wiley mopped his face as if he was trying to ground himself, keep himself in check. He let out a long breath and then answered, “yeah. Sometimes it is.”
“Like now?” I asked sliding closer, letting my hands come to rest on his outer thighs beneath the water.
He hissed in a breath, his eyes hot on mine. “Yeah, like now.”
I slid my hands up his legs, letting them ghost up his abdomen as I moved closer still, straddling him and coming to rest on his knees, my hands on his chest. His skin was slick and his chest was firm beneath my fingers, the ridges of his body doing things to my insides that had me clenching muscles I’d ignored far too long.
Those eyes were gleaming now, dark with what I suspected was desire, and his breath was coming faster, but he didn’t lay a hand on me. “Aubrey,” he said, his voice a strained whisper. “Your brother is my friend.”
“I’m your friend,” I pointed out, sliding a little closer down his thighs.
His hands found my waist beneath the water and the last of my worry that he’d reject me dissolved in the silky hot water around us. “I don’t think Archie would want—”
“Would you like to know what I want?” I asked him, leaning in close enough that my breasts ghosted against his chest, making his grip tighten reflexively on my hips.