by Helen Brenna
“I’m sorry she’s gone.” She flicked a piece of mango skin onto the ground.
“She was the best boat I’ve ever owned.” He took a long, slow breath. “Boats can be replaced. Simon can’t.”
Simon’s lifeless face flashed in her mind. She hadn’t the opportunity to get to know him well, but no one deserved to die that way. “How long, do you think, before Westburne searches the boat for bodies?”
“They already know we’re alive.”
“What are they going to do about it?”
“Westburne’ll take what he can from the Concha site and leave when Harold gets here with the salvage vessel.” He threw another rock into the woods. “They’re probably loading his boat with the treasure as we speak.”
“No, they’re not.” She handed him a hunk of mango.
He popped it in his mouth and swallowed. “Mitch doesn’t mess around documenting a site. He blows it up with his prop wash to disperse what little sand’s covering the treasure, then starts hauling in the gold.”
He withdrew from his backpack the few items he’d found near the Concha’s main cargo hold. Why he’d risked his life taking the time to stuff them into his pack was beyond her.
“This is all we have to show for finding the biggest shipwreck in history.” He laid the items on the ground in front of him. “The brooch D.W. found. A spoon. A leather satchel. A stupid scrap of fabric—” He stopped in midsentence and studied the nearly illegible writing. He turned the thing around and around.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Annie, I think this is a map.”
She leaned over to look at the piece of fabric they’d discovered inside the satchel, marveling once more at how preserved it was. Again, she couldn’t shake the sense that the markings looked somehow familiar.
“This looks like the north part of Andros.” He pointed at one of the many fading black lines, a thumblike outline pointing to the left. “This is the northernmost tip, this is the bay at Lowe Sound, and this is Morgan’s Bluff on the other shore.”
His arm brushed against hers, and there it was again, desire, crazy and consuming, hitting her at a totally inappropriate moment. “Looks more like a man’s privates, if you ask me.” She smiled and sucked on some more fruit.
He glanced at her from the corner of his eyes, took his index finger to catch a drop of juice from her chin and tipped it onto her lips. She licked his finger and lured it into her mouth. “Just the way I like my women.” He moaned. “With one-track minds.”
It felt good to let off some steam, to play with him. She smiled, feeling so free to do what she wanted, to be anything she wanted. She twirled her tongue around his finger, and then moved to the next, and the next. She licked his palm and planted kisses along the inside of his wrist.
Swinging her leg over him, she straddled him and looked into his eyes. For simple playful banter, this felt awfully profound and whole. Important. Too important for lust. Maybe she was falling in love.
“Our waterfall!” he burst out. Edging her off his lap, he picked up the Concha fabric, stood and pointed to a series of pictures. “That’s it! Our waterfall. This is where we came ashore last night.” He pointed to some writings near the fabric’s top edge. “Annie, can you read Spanish?”
Here she was analyzing the deepest feelings in her heart and all he cared about was the Concha. Giving him a dirty look, she glanced at the writing. “It says something here about a storm. Maybe the hurricane that sunk it and its flotilla. Here it says something about…it’s not completely clear…a…a caterva, meaning like a collection, or something. Maybe it means the treasure.”
“That’s it?”
“Wait a minute. Not caterva. Could be…caverna…cave. That’s it. A cave.”
He grasped her arm, an intense look darkening his eyes. “You were right all along. The treasure wasn’t on the Concha. It’s on Andros. It’s on this island.”
“You mean this is a treasure map? Get real.” She sloughed off his arm and stood.
“You said yourself the Concha’s captain was a maverick.” He paced beside her. “If he really was in a bad financial situation, maybe he wasn’t saving the Concha’s treasure from the hurricane. Maybe he was stealing it.”
From what she knew of Captain Molinero, she couldn’t deny the possibility. Yet it seemed so farfetched. “Why did my parents find the Santidad Cross, the single most valuable item on the Concha, on the ocean’s bottom?”
“He might have believed in the curse and wanted to get rid of it. Maybe he sabotaged the Concha and let it sink in the hurricane. It certainly got rid of any evidence he’d been here. Plus potential witnesses.” He ran his hands through the curly waves of his hair. “Who knows what he was thinking? You have to admit it’s a possibility, Annie.” Gold lust twinkled in his eyes.
She took the fabric from his hand. There was no denying it could be a map. She handed it back. “So it’s a map. So what? We need to make it to Lowe Sound or Morgan’s Bluff and get the police involved. Make sure Claire and D.W. are all right. Call Harold. Get another boat.”
He was silent a moment. “What if Westburne’s loan shark sends someone out looking for us, and they find the waterfall? What if the treasure’s in one of those caves near where we slept last night?”
“They can have it.”
“This is the Concha, Annie.”
“So?” She met his gaze, hoping he’d make the right choice. There seemed to be so much more at stake here than a treasure.
“I’ve waited my whole life for this. I’m going back.” He reached for her hand. “Come with me, Annie. You can go back to Chicago anytime. How often do you get the opportunity to find something as big as the Concha?”
Her body ached at the thought of leaving him. She might as well tear off her right arm, her foot and cut out her heart. Besides, he needed her. He didn’t know that, but treasure lust blinded like nothing else. She’d seen it in her parents. She’d seen it in him. She wasn’t going to let him die. If she had to, she’d tie up the idiot to keep him from hurting himself. But she had to be with him to do it.
“Okay. Let’s go.”
He squeezed her hand. “Looks like we got ourselves a treasure hunt after all.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
“THIS SHOULD BE IT. The Concha cave should be right here.” Jake jabbed his finger at the map, then looked around the small clearing. The land was flat. There wasn’t a cave within miles.
Frustrated, he studied the drawing on the fabric, turning it every which way in an attempt to find anything he may have overlooked. Several hours earlier, they’d made it back to their waterfall. After an exhaustive search of the area, they’d determined those particular caves weren’t deep enough to hide anything of interest.
Their cave did appear, however, to be the starting point for the map. Using that assumption, they’d proceeded to go in and out of the jungle, around and through every possible landmark they could locate on the map, from stumps of huge, ancient palms to boulders arranged in barely discernable patterns.
Now that they’d finally reached the end of the map, Jake had no idea where the cave could possibly be. As a matter of fact, he really had no idea where they were on Andros, only where they were in relation to the map, which, he’d found throughout the day, wasn’t true to the outlay of the land itself.
The only thing he knew for certain was that they were near the beach, and that only because he could hear the crashing of large waves as the high winds whipped them up and tossed them onto shore. The storm was heating back up.
“That’s it.” Annie slumped onto the sand. “I need a break.”
Jake’s first reaction was to protest, to urge her back onto her feet. When he looked at her, took in the exhaustion showing in her normally bright eyes, something gave way. She’d trudged along behind him through the humid, thick jungle the entire morning without objection. He couldn’t think of a single person at OEI who would have done the same.
Dropping to his knees behind her, he m
assaged her shoulders and upper back, his stomach rumbling from eating nothing more substantial than fruit all day. “We’re close,” he said, continuing to massage her back. “I can feel it.”
She grunted when he hit a knot beneath her shoulder blade. “You’ve been saying we’re close for the past hour. Do you have any idea where we are?”
“Of course I do. We’re right here.” He pointed at the map.
“No. I mean where we really are.” She’d obviously caught on that Captain Molinero had been less than accurate in his depiction of the island.
He laughed. “This map’s a complete maze. You’d have to have a photographic memory to retrace your steps without it.”
“Give me that thing.” She picked the map up from the ground. “Men are terrible with directions.”
“Oh, is that so?” The urge to drop their search, no matter the consequences, and play with Annie for a while overwhelmed him. He quit with the massage, pushed her back to the ground and leaned over her. “Give me a few directions, and we’ll see how well I can follow them.”
She grinned back, challenging him. “I’m all sweaty and dirty from tramping through the jungle.”
“My thoughts exactly.” He licked a trail along her shoulder.
This was one distraction he was learning to enjoy. As a matter of fact, her presence seemed to add something to the entire treasure-hunting process he hadn’t known he’d been missing. Maybe he could get her to delay heading back to Chicago for a few months.
He drew back a few inches and stared at her, a vision with her hair fanned on the ground around her. “I don’t know about you, but I could get used to this. I might give up diving and take some time learning the ropes of treasure hunting on land.” He shrugged as nonchalantly as he could manage. “You. Me. Traveling around the world. How ’bout it?”
The smile on her face disappeared. Her eyes turned suddenly serious. “What are you saying?”
He swallowed. “I’m saying I like you. A lot. I don’t want you to go back to Chicago right away.”
“You like me. You don’t want me to go right away.” Her eyes darted around avoiding him. “Which means you’ll want me to go back eventually. When you don’t like me any longer.”
“I didn’t mean that. I may not want you to go back at all.”
“Oh, that’s rich.” She pushed him off, stood and brushed the leaves and dirt from her shorts in brisk, choppy strokes. “Because you’ve decided you like me, I’m supposed to ditch my life in Chicago in the hopes that you might come to the conclusion that you might want me to stay.”
He’d never asked a woman for anything like this. Having Annie actually throw it back in his face stung more than a little. “From what I’ve gathered, you didn’t have much of a life there to begin with.”
“That’s not the point.”
He reached out for her arms. “Annie—”
“What about love? Commitment? Children?”
“What about ’em?”
“I want them.”
“Me, too. Eventually. But that’s a little much to decide after knowing each other only a few days. Isn’t it?” He moved in to kiss her neck. She moaned, her head tilting back, her body sliding against him. “For now, can’t we have fun together?” he murmured against the soft skin under her chin. “We’re so good at it.”
“What kind of life is that?” She cupped his face in her hands and her mouth quirked in a sad twist of a smile. “Traveling around the world? Never settling down, never planting roots and growing where you stand? Adults have responsibilities. They can’t go traipsing around the world entertaining themselves. That’s no life for a child.”
He narrowed his eyes at her. “You’re still pissed off at your parents.”
“So what if I am?”
“I’m talking about you and me. We won’t make the same mistakes they did. For now, can’t we enjoy what we have?”
“No!” She pushed her palms flat against his chest. Breaking from the circle of his arms, she paced the small clearing. “I thought I could do that now that the cross is back where it belongs. I thought I could play around a little. Kick off my life again with a big bang. I was wrong.”
Raindrops started falling, lightly spattering her shirt.
“Annie, look, now’s obviously not the time to talk about this. When we get back to Miami—”
“This can’t wait until then. Sure, we’ve only know each other for a few days, and it may not seem long to you, but when you know what you want, when you’ve spent ten years thinking about it, letting it congeal in your mind, knowing exactly what’s missing from your life, a few days is all you need.” Breathless, she stopped in front of him and yelled, “I’ve already fallen in love with you!”
The forest hushed as if waiting for his reply. No words came to him. A few women had uttered the same phrase to him in the past. More often than not, it had come across as pat, in the end as meaningless to the speaker as it was to him.
This was different. Worlds apart from anything he’d ever experienced. Her words at once thrilled and frightened him. Before she’d given voice to her emotion, he felt it in her touch, knew it by the way she looked at him, believed it in his heart. Annie was in love with him.
“It doesn’t mean you’re the man I should have fallen in love with.” Her chest heaved. Tears pooled in her eyes. And the rain picked up. “In fact, you’re all wrong for me. I’d rather not be with you at all than live with the daily possibility of losing you. You’d be more than happy to die in the throes of a treasure hunt. I can’t—won’t—live like that, knowing that Spanish gold’s more important to you than I am.”
“That’s not true!”
She faced him down. “I lost my parents because they were too blind to see the risks they took. The hunt was more important to them than anything else. Including me. I won’t be second ever again. I want priority, Jake. I deserve it.”
“Look, once we find the treasure, everything will settle down.”
“Part of me wants to believe you.” Her eyes turned soft with sorrow. “Because I know there’s an entirely honorable side to your quest for the Concha. Fulfilling a promise in the memory of your father, your brother, for your family’s company. But the truth is, Jake, there’s always another Concha. Another conquest. Another mother lode.”
“It’s what I do for a living. It’s my job.”
“No, Jake. You said it yourself. It’s who you are. It’s your life.”
“It was my life,” he blurted out, not knowing where the words came from, knowing they were true all the same. “I never had anything else worthwhile. Before you. Give me a chance to prove it.”
“How can you prove it when you’re gone almost six months out of every year?”
“Then come with me.”
“I don’t want to live on a boat.”
“Then stay in Miami. I’ll figure something out.” He touched her cheek, buried his fingers in her rain-dampened hair. “Annie, I want to be with you. I care about you.” He’d never—ever—said that to another woman. There’d never been an Annie. “What else do you need?”
“Oh, I don’t know. A life, maybe.” She opened her arms in front of her and stepped away from him. “A regular life on land. With a normal job and a normal house. Kids and schools and grocery stores. Movies on Saturdays and church on Sundays.” Her hands flew everywhere, punctuating each example. “Soccer games and dance lessons. Gardens. Libraries. Dry cleaners. Camping.” She swiped impatiently at the silent tears streaming down her face, tears mingling with the steady rain now falling from the sky. “I want a bicycle, Jake. Everything I never had as a kid. You can’t give that to me, can you?”
Pain etched her face and he reached for her. When she shrugged away, an ache sprung from his chest and spread through him. “Annie, don’t blame me for the life your parents chose. My life’s different. I may not have a bike. And kids…I’d have to give them some thought. But I do have a house. With a pool in the backyard. A big couch in t
he family room. I can’t wait to curl up there with you and watch football games on Sunday afternoons.”
She didn’t crack a smile. “And when’s the last time you saw the Super Bowl, Jake?”
Unfortunately, she was right. During prime diving season, December to May, he usually had to listen to his favorite sports games. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been ashore to actually see the Super Bowl on a big screen. “I didn’t know you were that big a football fan.”
“That’s not my point.”
He looked away.
Emotion caught in her throat. “One little diving accident,” she choked out, “and you’re gone forever.” She strode off through the woods.
“You can’t walk away from this.”
“Oh, yes, I can,” she said over her shoulder.
“So let’s suppose you get all those things you want so badly!” he yelled after her. “A bicycle. A home. Groceries stores and gardens. Let’s throw in a white picket fence while we’re at it!” She stopped without turning, and he knew it wasn’t over. “If you really do love me, won’t it all seem wrong without me?”
With that, she doubled over and sobbed. Jake felt his own eyes filling with tears, emotions he never knew he could feel aching in his heart. He went to her, turned her to face him and cupped her soft cheeks between his hands. They were both soaked, but neither seemed to notice. “No one knows when their time’s up, Annie. We can make this work. I know we can.”
He stood there waiting for her to say something, anything. The only sound was the wind whipping the palm trees back and forth, causing them to creak and moan in resistance. The vulnerability in her eyes clawed at him.
One more shot. “What’s happening between us is too big to let go of without a fight.” He saw it, a brief flicker of hope alighting her eyes.
“No more taking chances diving,” she whispered.
“Mr. Textbook Diver, that’s me from now on.”
“You’re going to ease up like the rest of the industry.” Her voice got stronger with every demand. “When the dive site’s close enough, you’re home every night. When it’s not, you’re back on weekends. When you’re between dives, it’s strictly nine to five.”
