Hidden Treasures

by Judith Arnold

  Maybe it hadn’t been good solid stuff when Jed had obtained it. Maybe it had been splintered and teetering, and he’d repaired it like a surgeon mending a broken body. Maybe these pieces looked so good only because of Jed’s talent and labor.

  He would probably be friendly when he saw her, she prepped herself. He’d ask how she was doing, and he’d be surprised when she told him. Perhaps he’d ask her if she was free for dinner. Possibly he’d even invite her back to his bed. They’d had quite a spectacular time that one night.

  But she cautioned herself to lower her expectations. He could be involved with someone, already claimed. He could be a whole lot different in the city than he was in his hometown. She’d come to New York to learn about herself, not because he was here.

  Yeah, right.

  “Hey,” his familiar voice rolled over her from behind. She spun around and saw—a surgeon.

  No, he wasn’t a surgeon. He had a surgical mask dangling by its ties around his neck like a surgeon emerging from the operating room, but he was dressed in a T-shirt, jeans and a leather bib apron. Clear plastic goggles perched on the crown of his head and his shoes were covered in pale dust.

  “Great T-shirt,” he said.

  She smiled hesitantly.

  He lifted the neck strap of his apron over his head, managing not to dislodge the goggles, and let the bib fall to his waist. His T-shirt read, Rockwell—the Town of Hidden Treasures. “You got one, too?”

  “Just before I left. Glenn Rideout was so scared of my supposed shark of a lawyer, he sold it to me for ten bucks.”

  “Ten? I paid eighteen for mine at the Superette!” She tried to muster the proper indignation at this gross injustice.

  Jed chuckled, a deep, sexy sound. “What are you doing here?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “I’ve got time.” He motioned with his head toward a hallway near the office. “Leave your bag here and come on.” The blond clerk stared at them, as if to object to Jed’s taking some woman where customers weren’t allowed to go, but she belatedly seemed to remember that Jed was the boss, and she fell back a step and let them pass.

  The hallway led to a freight elevator. Jed pulled a key from the pocket of his jeans and used it to activate the elevator.

  He still hadn’t touched her. He hadn’t kissed her cheek, let alone her mouth. He hadn’t even spoken her name. Maybe he couldn’t remember it.

  That was all right. She’d refresh his memory, tell an abridged version of her long story and catch a cab to the hotel. She would survive. She wouldn’t fall apart until she was locked safely inside her hotel room, where she could wail and moan and curse his soul to hell.

  The elevator rumbled to a halt and Jed shoved open the hinged metal grating. Not surprisingly, the car was enormous. He could fit an entire bedroom set inside it if he had to. In his line of work, he probably had to on a regular basis.

  They stepped into the car. Jed shoved the door shut and yanked a lever to make the elevator rise. His eyes narrowed on her, silvery cool and beautiful. Abruptly, he shoved the lever to stop the car. “In case you were wondering,” he said, “I’d be jumping your bones right now if I didn’t have sawdust all over me.”

  Well. That had to mean something.

  “Sawdust has its drawbacks,” she said, feeling slightly more confident than she had minutes ago.

  He reactivated the elevator, which crept up to the second floor and bumped to a stop. Pushing open the grating, he gestured for her to precede him into a vast, well-lit workshop jammed with merchandise in various stages of disrepair. Sofas with stuffing oozing from them stood side by side with Chippendale-style highboys, butcher-block kitchen tables, three-legged chairs, tarnished silver trays and a carved wooden rocking horse in desperate need of a competent groom. Bright fluorescent lights stretched overhead, and the room smelled of raw wood, lacquer and solvent.

  He led her down an aisle between piles of clutter to an open area where a long trestle table stood on a canvas drop cloth, its finish sanded off in places and flaked and chipped in others. An electric sander rested on the table. A bench along one wall held an array of carpentry tools, paintbrushes and cans of paint, stains and varnish.

  “This is where you perform magic,” Erica said.

  Jed snorted. “It’s not magic. It’s a sander.” He lifted the bulky tool, then placed it back on the table and dropped his goggles next to it.

  “Do you work here all alone?”

  “Not usually. A guy who specializes in reupholstery is here three days a week, and some students come in after school for a couple of hours every day so they can learn some skills and make a little money. Then I’ve got experts like your professor friend, when I pick up a piece I think might be really old. They’ll come in and appraise it, and if it needs work I’ll hire a pro who can repair it without ruining its value as an antique.” He shrugged, untied his apron and draped it over a hook on the wall by his tool bench.

  Erica stared at his Rockwell T-shirt because it was easier than staring at his face. He looked a little tired, a little tousled, smudged here and there with sawdust. Even unkempt, he was absurdly attractive.

  Did he really want to jump her bones, or was that just his idea of friendly small talk? Whichever it was, now wasn’t the time to renew their sexual acquaintanceship. She wasn’t the person she’d been when they’d last seen each other. He might not even recognize her bones by the time she was done telling him her long story.

  Which wasn’t all that long, really. “I’ve left Rockwell,” she began, because he seemed to be waiting for her to say something.

  “What do you mean?”

  She suddenly felt weary, but she saw no place to sit. A gazillion pieces of furniture filled this workshop, but nowhere for a woman to rest her tired feet.

  Jed must have sensed her fatigue, because he dragged over a frumpy armchair that his reupholstery specialist had obviously not gotten around to refurbishing yet. She settled into it, adjusting her bottom on the lumpy cushions, and waited while he hauled over a vinyl dinette chair. He straddled it backward, rested his hands on the back and his chin on his hands, and peered into her face. He looked curious, she decided. Not excited, not eager to jump her bones but willing to hear her out.

  “The box turned out to be worth a lot,” she began. “Well, not the box itself. That was worth something, of course. I donated it to Harvard. I also donated two of the coins, which will be included in the display they’re arranging for the box. It’s not as if I’m some sort of altruist—I got a tax break for making the donation.”

  Jed nodded slightly. His eyes glowed brighter than the overhead fixtures.

  “The rest of the coins I sold to a rare-coin dealer. They were worth almost two hundred thousand dollars.”

  “Nice.” Jed brushed the edge of his jaw with his knuckles, loosening some sawdust. “It must’ve made Rideout nuts, your making all that money off the coins.”

  “Well, I shared it with him.” She cut off Jed’s scowl by adding, “Actually, not with him. I shared it with Randy. I set up a trust fund so his father can’t touch a penny of that money. It’ll all be waiting for Randy when he’s ready to go to college.”

  Jed appeared mollified. “All right. Just as long as Rideout doesn’t get his greedy paws on it.”

  “In a way, he does get his greedy paws on the money, because now he won’t have to pay for Randy’s education out of his own pocket. But I had the feeling that if Randy got into college, his father wouldn’t have paid for it anyway. I set things up so I’m the trustee of the fund. That way I can make sure it isn’t mishandled.” She smiled, still proud of how well she’d finessed Glenn Rideout. “Talk about making Glenn nuts! How could he sue me when I was so generous in sharing my bounty with his son?”

  Jed chuckled appreciatively.

  “Anyway, that’s the story of the box. Maybe you heard about it from your father.”

  “As if I talk to my father on a regular basis,” Jed scoffed. “Ev
ery now and then he calls and asks me when I’m going to sell my grandfather’s place and what I’m going to do with the money I make from the sale. That’s about the sum of it.”

  “I thought he was interested in the box. He certainly talked to me about it.”

  “He probably offered to invest some of your profits for you.”

  “He had some ideas. So did just about everybody else in town.” Her smile grew pensive. All those people with their ideas had been her neighbors, her compatriots, the folks who’d populated her dream.

  But that dream had died, and she’d buried it as effectively as Jed had buried his grandfather’s ashes. Now she’d reached the hard part of her story, the part that still hurt, the part about her failures and the end of her dream. “My garden is a disaster.”

  Jed didn’t seem startled by the abrupt change in subject. “No more treasures buried there, huh?”

  “The zucchini is overgrowing everything in sight. Most of the tomato plants died. The peas are anemic. There are weeds everywhere. I was weeding every day, Jed, every single day, and the weeds just kept coming back. And I put some fencing in to keep the deer out, but something small kept burrowing under the fence and munching on the plants. Randy thought it might be a groundhog.”

  “They’re known to do that.”

  “But it doesn’t matter, because even if my garden produced a good crop, I wouldn’t know what to do with the vegetables. I’m an awful cook, Jed.”

  His nod of agreement didn’t flatter her.

  “I studied everything I could about canning, but I knew I’d make a mess of it. I probably wouldn’t get the jars sealed properly and everything would rot, and I’d poison myself with rancid tomato sauce next winter.”

  “You’re not stupid, Erica. You could have figured it out.”

  “It has nothing to do with stupidity. We all have our strengths and weaknesses, Jed. My strengths are intellectual. I’m a scholar and a teacher—a damn good teacher. But I’m not an earth mother. I always wanted to be one, and I tried really hard—but it’s not what I am.”

  To her chagrin, she felt a tear leak from her eye and skitter down her cheek.

  Jed didn’t comment on it or hand her a handkerchief. She would have hated it if he had. She didn’t want his pity.

  “I wanted to belong in Rockwell, but I never did. So I sold my house.”

  “No kidding?” He leaned back in apparent shock. “Someone actually bought that old shack?”

  “I bought that old shack not too long ago,” she reminded him.

  “Well, okay. Sorry.” He appeared to be suppressing a grin. “What about your teaching job?”

  “School districts all over the place are desperate for talented teachers. Especially teachers with credentials like mine. I’ve been offered a job at a primary school on the Upper West Side,” she told him, watching him, searching for any sign of panic or dread in his face.

  He maintained his poker face. “Where else have you applied?” he asked.

  She should lie, but she didn’t. “Just New York City.”

  Then she saw him relax, finally allowing a smile to claim him. “Good,” he said. Just that one simple word.

  “Jed, when you asked me to come to New York back in April, you were just, I don’t know, caught up in the moment. I have no expectations here, no hopes beyond the fact that you’re one of the very few people I know in the city. Your invitation was never about commitment or everlasting love or anything like that. I’m sure we both understand that.” Which hardly explained why the first thing she’d done after disembarking from the bus was to track Jed down.

  He reached out and pulled one of her hands from her lap. She hadn’t been aware until that moment of how much her fingers had been fidgeting. “I’m glad you’re so positive about what that invitation meant. Because I sure as hell never figured it out.”

  She wished his hand didn’t feel so warm and enveloping. He was telling her he had no idea why he’d even asked her to join him in New York. Why did his hand seem to say that he knew exactly why he’d asked?

  “The few times I phoned my dad, I asked about you. He said you were rich and snooty and didn’t give a damn about him or anybody else. Then he moved on to badgering me about my grandfather’s place.”

  “I did give a damn!” Erica protested. “About him and everybody else! I would have probably given up on Rockwell a long time ago if I hadn’t cared so much.”

  “Hey, you don’t have to convince me. I’m just saying, I wanted to hear about you. I wanted to know what you were doing. I wanted to know if you were missing me. Because I missed you—pretty much nonstop.”

  She gaped at him. “Why didn’t you call me? Why didn’t you let me know?”

  “Erica, I asked you to come with me and you said no. What am I, a masochist? One no got the job done.” He stroked his thumb across the back of her hand, slowly, tenderly. “You chose Rockwell over me. It didn’t matter how much I missed you. As long as you chose Rockwell, nothing would ever work between us.”

  “It wasn’t Rockwell I chose,” she tried to explain. “It was a dream, this fantasy idea of myself that I didn’t want to give up. Erica Leitner, the gardener, the baker, the small-town woman connected to the earth and the sky and the mountains.” She sighed. “After you left, the dream just shriveled up and blew away. So I told Burt Johnson I’d be resigning at the end of the school year and I put my house up for sale.”

  “And you came to New York.”

  “I considered some openings in the Boston area. Fern Bernard was really pushing for those, since she goes down there practically every weekend to see Avery Gilman.”

  “But you came to New York.”

  “Tell me I’m not making a mistake this time,” she whispered. “Tell me this is a dream worth pursuing.”

  His hand tightened around hers. “I don’t have any fancy college degree,” he reminded her. “I’m a junk dealer, just like my father.”

  “You’re not a junk dealer, Jed. I see what’s up here, and I saw what’s downstairs in your store. What you are is a miracle worker. You transform all this stuff—” she gestured toward the jumble of items awaiting repair “—into beautiful things people would love to have in their homes. You see below the surface, below the dirt and the damage. You know how to tell the treasures from the junk. You know what’s valuable.”

  “You’re what’s valuable to me,” he said. “You’re incredible, Erica. You lose a dream, and you just pick yourself up and start dreaming something new. You’ve got so much courage, so much strength.” He lifted her hand to his lips and pressed a kiss against her palm. “Take the job in New York. We’ll dream something new together.”

  For the first time since she’d gotten off the bus—for the first time since she’d gotten on it…For the first time since she’d told Jed, back in Rockwell, that she wouldn’t go to New York with him, she felt her soul flower open and fill with light. She didn’t need mud and a garden and an L.L. Bean sun hat to feel connected to something bigger than herself, something more important, more vital. She felt connected now.

  This was who she was. Not an earth mother, not a small-town rustic but a woman who had found the man with whom she wanted to share her dreams.

  He swung his leg over his chair and stood, then pulled her to her feet and wrapped his arms around her. His mouth met hers in a long, loving kiss. “Just tell me one thing,” he murmured once they’d come up for air.

  “Yes,” she whispered. “Anything.”

  “Who the hell bought your house?”

  She grinned. “The town did.”

  “What?”

  “The town of Rockwell. They’re going to turn it into a tourist destination—the house where the hidden treasure was found. They’re calling it a museum, and they’re going to charge admission. For an extra fee, a visitor will be permitted to shovel in the backyard for ten minutes, in case there are any other treasures buried there. Sewell McCormick predicts the town will make a fortune on it.”<
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  Jed threw back his head and let loose a laugh. “Oh, God, what a town,” he roared.

  She plucked at his shirt. “Rockwell is in your blood, Jed. Mine, too. Look at us, wearing these shirts.”

  “Well, they’re true,” he said before dropping a gentle kiss onto her mouth. “We found a treasure there, didn’t we?” He kissed her again, a lot less gently, and she decided this new dream was going to turn out fine.

  ISBN: 978-1-4268-4914-5

  HIDDEN TREASURES

  Copyright © 2003 by Barbara Keiler.

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