This body—this woman—had given him the most amazing gifts in his life. He had to let her know how much it meant to him.
He had to make sure she was able to stay in the house she loved.
A sense that he was being watched had him shifting his focus from her body to her face. She watched him with a lazy smile.
“My eyes are up here,” she said, tapping the side of her temple.
He grinned. “Yeah, but I’ve spent a lot more time looking at those since I got here than I’ve spent looking at these.” He tickled the valley between her breasts. She giggled softly and reached for the blanket.
“You might want to keep the exploration to just your eyes at this point. Things are ready for the morning nursing session, if you get my drift.”
He wasn’t too worried about it, but since she seemed concerned, he happily shifted position to lie down and pull her flush against him.
“So,” he said against her hair. “I think we got a little carried away last night.”
“Do you know that was the first thing you said to me the morning after our first night together?”
“I did?” His memories of that morning centered around a whole lot of bliss and a boatload of thanks that it was a Sunday and neither of them had to run off anywhere.
“Mmm-hmm. I have to tell you, as morning-after lines go, that was a pretty good one. Especially because you didn’t vanish in the night.”
Funny, that. He had never been one for simply disappearing—he always said goodbye, in a note at the very least—but staying all night hadn’t been his usual style. Never the first time he slept with someone, for sure.
Not until Kate.
“I had to stick around. Had to make sure I’d made a good impression on you.”
“Oh, trust me, you had.” Her smile softened. “But you made an even better one by staying.”
“Best nonmove I ever made.”
“Really?” She hesitated, then added, “I’m serious, Boone. I know nothing turned out the way we planned, but for me, even though I could have lived without the shock, I just can’t imagine what it would be like without Jamie.” She snuggled closer to him. “Or without seeing what it did to you, how you stepped up, how you’re trying so hard to be the best dad you can.”
He didn’t even have to think. “Yeah. I mean it.”
Even he could see that he was making amazing strides in the fatherhood department. But it was killing him that he had yet to find a way to keep her and Jamie in the house.
The loan was a bust. He could try another bank, but realistically, finding one that would say yes was as likely as winning the lottery. Jill and Craig were already paying him as much as Project Sonqo could spare. Consulting jobs... Yeah, that had been a fail so far, though he was going to keep trying. Maybe if he applied for more grants...or if the project could find a celebrity in need of a cause...
A soft cry from the crib had Kate letting out a little moan.
“It awakes.”
Boone laughed softly. “Don’t let him hear you. He’ll get a complex.”
“That’s my job as his mother.” She stretched and frowned as another cry sounded, more insistent this time. “Make you a deal. I’ll go to the bathroom. You do diaper duty. Meet you back here in five.”
“You got it.”
He hopped out of the bed and padded over to the crib, where Jamie rocked from side to side, hand in his mouth. To say that his son was less than thrilled to see Daddy instead of Mommy would have been an understatement.
“Believe me, buddy, I know. I think she’s all that and a side of fries, too. But we have to cut her a break every once in a while, you know?” He carried Jamie into the office and placed him on the changing table. “She’s more than just your favorite feeding mechanism. Believe it or not, there are babies all over the world who like bottles just as much as—”
He froze, the diaper half off.
The bottles beneath the porch.
Before Boone fixed the porch, he had widened the hole enough that he could lower himself through it and fetch the bottles. Despite his jokes that he’d been hoping to find a treasure map in one of them, they had all been empty. A quick online search told him that even though they appeared to be from the Prohibition era, they weren’t worth enough to even try to sell them to an antiques shop. Kate had insisted on keeping them, claiming they would make perfect containers for flowers and candles, but it seemed that was as useful as they would be.
“But why were they there in the first place?”
Jamie’s response came in the form of a perfect arc of pee that shot straight into the air and just missed Boone’s arm.
“Holy—okay, wait, hang on.” He slapped the diaper back into place and grabbed some wipes to deal with the damage. But even as he mopped and fake-scolded Jamie, his mind whirled.
Kate saw the bottles as proof that Charlie had worked on the house, but did that make sense? Charlie wouldn’t have left them lying around on the ground. If he was using them to transport booze, he needed them to be clean. And if he’d needed a place to hide them, there had to be places where it would be easier to retrieve them.
“No one would build a porch over a pile of bottles,” Boone said as he lined up the fastenings on Jamie’s sleeper. “So someone had to put them there later.”
It could be that someone had simply been trying to hide evidence of some surreptitious nips.
But there was also a carefully hidden painting. And a quilt with a hidden footprint. And if someone—say, Great-great-uncle Fred—were to stumble across something secreted away in the house built by his brother the bootlegger...and if Fred didn’t dare reveal his findings, maybe because there could be something illegal about them...but if he wanted to leave a few clues for future generations...well, what would be the one item that everyone would associate with a rumrunner?
“Jamie, I might be totally off the wall here, but I have a feeling your Great-great-whatever-uncle Fred might have left us one of Charlie’s calling cards.”
* * *
BOONE SPENT THE next few days pondering the treasure.
When Kate ran to the library, he accompanied her, grabbing some local history books. “So I can appreciate where Jamie will be growing up,” he said when Kate looked at his reading material with raised eyebrows.
When she was busy with Jamie, he grabbed his laptop to research legends, lost treasures and people who had stumbled across unexpected things hidden in their walls.
When he was on the roof, he pulled out his phone and examined the photo of Daisy’s quilt, comparing it to one he managed to snap of the painting.
His first inclination was to check the turret. He could understand it not being in the painting, being a later addition and all, but why wouldn’t it have been included in the quilt? After all, Maggie remembered Fred inspecting Daisy’s work and deeming it correct. Unless the turret had been added significantly later in Fred’s life, that is, which struck Boone as highly unlikely.
No. There had to be something more to it.
He spent hours going over every inch of the house, stomping on floors, pounding on walls. He even poked his head into the small space at the roof’s peak, the equivalent of an attic, but all he’d found for his efforts was a lot of dust and the rodent skeletons that Kate had anticipated when she’d opened the cupboard.
When his hunt yielded nothing, he was forced to reconsider. Unless old Fred had been hiding money between the studs, there simply wasn’t enough space anywhere. And since the legend said that whatever Charlie found was of interest to American authorities, Boone thought it must be something more significant than cash.
No. Whatever Charlie had found, it had to be something major. Probably bigger than the proverbial breadbox. The only place to hide something like that would be in the basement.
Boone waited until Kate was settled upstairs
with her paint and her roller before he headed down the carved stone steps into the place she had referred to as the crypt. It was an apt name. He hadn’t been this creeped out since the time his mother had locked him a closet because he’d got into her wallet.
Halfway down the steps, he froze. He had forgotten all about that.
“Probably a good thing,” he said out loud. Because it sure as hell wasn’t a memory anyone would want to keep.
He thought of Jamie. Imagined him at five or six or seven. Imagined pushing him into a closet and closing the door and walking away from the sound of small fists pounding against the door, away from the crying and the pleas and the—
He jerked away from the thought, so violently that he almost lost his balance. What kind of person could do that to a kid?
Back when Kate was pregnant and he’d had to deal with the fact that he was about to be a father, he’d forced himself to read up on what makes a parent abusive. He knew that it was likely someone had done something equally heinous to his mother. It was cold comfort.
He wondered if she had ever vowed to never do anything like that to her kids, only to crumble when things got rough.
Kate believed in him. That helped. But still he wondered if he was strong enough to break the family tradition.
“Enough.” He picked his way down the remainder of the steps, ducking his head to avoid whacking himself on a giant wooden beam.
“I’ll give you this much, Charlie old boy, you sure knew how to build a house that would last.”
But had Charlie built anything special into the place? That was the question.
Boone cautiously crossed the stone floor, wishing he’d thought to grab a sweatshirt. Everything was so gray. So cold. So harsh. He almost hoped he didn’t find anything down here, because he could think of a whole lot of other places where he would rather spend his time. Like upstairs, holding Kate. Bright, warm, soft Kate.
Yeah. That was better.
The turret was located in the northeast corner of the house. It took him a few seconds to get oriented, and then a few more to figure out why the stone walls didn’t veer away from their straight lines to take the circular shape he’d expected.
“A crawl space? Seriously?”
Sure enough, the corner where the turret should branch off was as square as anything else in the basement, at least most of the way up. But the top quarter opened up to a yawning darkness that was guaranteed to be the stuff of nightmares.
“Great,” he muttered. “Just ducky.”
Now he knew how Indiana Jones felt when he pried up the stone and saw the Asp and Cobra Welcoming Committee.
“Hot shower,” he said, boosting himself up. He was definitely going to need some kind of reward to get himself through this. “Long hot shower. Cold beer. Soft Kate.” He forced a grin. “Hot Kate. Needy Kate.”
At least now he had a more pleasant explanation for the blood pounding in his ears.
He wriggled forward, forcing himself to go slow, reciting the alphabet in English, then Spanish, then Quechua, just so he’d have something to hear other than the rustling sounds that could only mean rodents of the live and frightened kind.
“Just so long as you’re not rabid,” he said, aiming his light in a slow path along the floor, the walls, the cracks.
Nothing.
He made himself keep going. He wasn’t coming this far only to miss something important because he was too chickenshit to go the distance. But he had to admit that it was nothing but sweet relief when he was able to say nope, nothing in there. He had no idea he could wriggle backward as fast as he did on his way out.
His feet hit the ground. He straightened with the kind of groan that came from the deepest parts of him, turned—
And let loose with a totally unheroic yelp when he came face-to-face with a frowning Kate.
“Jesus, Kate,” he said when he could breathe again. “You almost gave me a heart attack!”
“You? How do you think I felt when I came down here and saw feet sticking out of the crawl space?”
“Where’s Jamie? And why are you here?”
She crossed her arms. “Napping, and I should ask you the same thing.”
He could try to talk his way out of it, but he had a feeling she was going to put it all together anyway. “Looking for the treasure. Can we finish this upstairs? If I don’t have a shower in the next three minutes, I think I might self-destruct.”
He stepped past her in a beeline for the stairs. Behind him, the silence stretched, pulsed, and then—
“Hang on. What do you mean, looking for the treasure?”
Despite himself, he grinned.
This was gonna be interesting.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
LOOKING FOR THE TREASURE? What the heck was he talking about?
Kate paced back and forth outside the bathroom, listening for the sounds of clothing hitting the ground. Boone had refused to say anything. “After I shower,” was his answer to all her questions as she followed him up the stairs. She had trailed him into the bedroom just in time to see him enter the bathroom and close the door, leaving her with a sudden, painful insight into how it felt to be four years old and begging for Christmas hints.
But she wasn’t a little kid. And she had a very adult arsenal of weapons at her disposal.
So as soon as she heard the rush of the water and the scrape of the shower curtain being pulled back, she stripped out of her own clothes and let herself into the bathroom.
She’d never thought she would be grateful there was no lock on the bathroom door. Huh. First time for everything.
She crept across the floor, grabbed hold of the curtain and gave it a yank.
“What the—”
But Boone’s question died as she stepped into the shower.
“Slide over,” she ordered. “The crypt always makes me cold.”
Smart man that he was, he took a step back. She moved forward, positioning herself both beneath the spray and flush against him.
“Now,” she said sweetly, “tell me about your treasure hunt.”
“Is that the only reason you’re in here with me?”
“Absolutely.” She dipped slightly at the knees, rubbing ever so slightly against him. “Though you know, I do need to get cleaned up.”
With that, she reached over and past his shoulder, aiming for the body wash on the shelf. As she had totally expected, she was intercepted before she could grab it.
“You might have to drag the words out of me,” he said against her ear.
“Is that a promise or a threat?”
“Which one do you want it to be?”
She laughed and licked water from the crook of his neck. “Talk treasure to me, Boone.”
“I think it’s in the house. Have you ever done this before?”
“Done what?”
“This.” His hand slid between her legs. “In the shower.”
“Can’t say that I have. Why...um...are you serious about this? Why do you think it’s in the house?”
It took him a minute to answer, probably because she was kissing the corner of his mouth. “Why is what in the house?” he said at last.
She dragged her mind away from the rhythm taking over her body and back to the matter at—no, not hand. Bad word. Well, very good word, but not if she wanted to...
“The treasure,” she managed. “You think it’s—wait, I’m supposed to be torturing you—”
“Trust me, you are.”
She wrenched herself away from his probing fingers. “I haven’t even started.”
With that, she began kissing her way down his chest, her lips sliding over a muscled landscape until she hit his belly button. She was swimming in a sea of water and skin and steam and soap, and she couldn’t decide if she should prolong the moment or rush forward the
way her body wanted.
On the other hand, who said she had to choose?
“Tell me about the treasure, Boone.” Her tongue swirled around his belly button. Her hands gripped his hips. His hands tightened on her shoulders and she grinned. All this and she’d barely even started.
“The bottles,” he said. “The quilt. The...the...the round thing.”
“This round thing?” she asked with a strategic squeeze.
“Turret.”
Okay, she hadn’t expected that. She glanced up, unsure if she had heard right or if the rush of blood southward had robbed him of all his mental faculties. “You think Charlie hid the treasure in the turret?”
He shook his head back and forth, slowly. It might have been a negative. But since his movements were in perfect sync with those of her hand, it was difficult to be sure.
“It’s not there. I checked.”
“So you looked under it. In the crawl space.”
He gripped her under the arms, hauled her upright, and sandwiched her against the wall of the shower. “I have a thing for exploring places. Empty...hot...spaces.”
She would have pointed out that the crawl space was anything but hot, but he was kissing her and pushing against her, and the water was pounding, and breathing was almost impossible. So she wasn’t going to quibble about something like a word when there were so many better things to do with her time. And mouth. And hands.
She wriggled sideways, searching for a better angle, but her foot slipped and her arm flew up and her elbow bashed into the wall.
“Ow!”
He stopped kissing her neck. “Are you okay?”
“I just wish the shower was bigger,” she said before realizing the golden opportunity she was missing. “I mean, no. I’m horribly wounded. Boo-boos everywhere. You’d better kiss them.”
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