The Deeper the Passion...

by Jennifer Lewis

  “Could be something to do with where the treasure is hidden. Or not.” Vicki tapped away relentlessly at the plaster, which rained down on the bed, and sometimes on him, in a fine powder dust. “We’ll know more once we can see the whole thing.”

  “How about a break?” His legs also ached from standing on the bed. It made the deck of a ship seem downright steady. But the sight of Vicki’s lithe body, scant inches from his, kept his strength up enough to keep going.

  “No way. We need to get out there tomorrow. There’s a reward for the cup, remember?”

  “How is anyone else supposed to find the cup when they don’t even know it’s under the sea?”

  “They’ll figure it out.” She hadn’t even glanced at him. Too wrapped up in her task. “Believe me, it won’t be that hard. Something tells me there are books written about your ancestors and their treasure.”

  Jack shrugged. “I suppose. Still, the reward isn’t large enough to draw the big treasure hunters.”

  “No, but the treasure is, and once other people start looking for it, they’ll want in on the action. How would you feel if some metal detector hobbyist found it and claimed everything?”

  “That might make me cry.” He sneaked a sideways glance at her, and was rewarded by her turning to him. “But at least you’d be here to dry my tears.”

  “Don’t count on it. I’ll be out there cozying up to the finder.” Her teeth flashed in a sudden smile that made his breath stick in his lungs. How could she still be so beautiful? The passing years had chiseled her girlish features to a fine perfection—high cheekbones and determined chin. Her eyes had a dimension he didn’t remember seeing there, something wary and challenging that added depth to her proud beauty.

  “So you’d ditch me for the winner.”

  “Wouldn’t you do the same?”

  “Probably.” A grin pulled at his mouth. His arms, tired of all the chiseling, had fallen to his sides. “It’s not easy talking to someone who knows me so well.”

  “Even after all these years, huh? I guess you haven’t changed that much.”

  “I don’t think I’ve changed at all.” He put serious effort into not growing staid and boring like his former surfing buddies, with their McMansions and monster SUVs. “And if you haven’t changed, either, we’re still a team to be reckoned with.”

  “Which is why we’re not quitting on this fresco.” Her arms were still raised and her tool tap-tap-tapping gently against the brittle plaster. Jack’s eyes burned from the dust, but he was damned if he’d quit before she did. She wouldn’t respect him, for one thing, and for some strange reason he didn’t feel like analyzing, her respect was important to him. Suppressing a groan, he got back to the task, chipping away at his family history, when he’d much rather be stripping away Vicki’s dusty pajamas and tasting the lush body hidden beneath them.

  There’d be time for that later.

  “I think this is some kind of code.” Vicki murmured the words so low he could barely make them out. She’d stopped chiseling and was staring hard at the surface. “The white hatch marks. I keep seeing Roman numerals in them.”

  Jack stared at the pattern, which danced before his tired eyes. “Why would someone put hidden numbers on a map?”

  “I don’t know.” She pressed a long, slender finger to the surface of the mural, smearing away the layer of dust left behind. The action pulled her T-shirt firmly across her delicious, pointy breasts, and he suddenly had to grab a bedpost to keep his balance. “Don’t fall and hurt yourself.”

  The slight lift of her brow made him smile. Then he tried to focus on the painting again. He could make out vertical and horizontal lines that, when looked at with a forgiving eye, did look a bit like numbers. “I see what you mean.” He reached up, partly to steady himself on the ceiling, truth be told, and partly to focus his tired vision on the spot he was trying to read. He made out a VIII. “This looks like an eight.”

  “And look, this is an X, it’s just divided into two Vs so it isn’t so obvious.”

  “X marks the spot?” He squinted at the spot near her fingers.

  “No way. That would be too easy. And look, there are loads of them.”

  “Great. I’ve always loved looking for needles in haystacks.”

  “Me, too.” Her eyes were riveted on the painted surface. “There’s a pattern to the numbers. When were lines of latitude and longitude invented?”

  He shrugged. “We Drummonds are more into stealing history than learning about it.”

  “You can’t fool me.” Her bright gaze challenged him. Her whole face glowed with an excitement that he couldn’t help feel beginning to tingle at the tips of his own fingers and toes. And some other, more private places. “You’re a professional treasure hunter. I’m confident you know the histories of your wrecks better than you know what’s going on in the world today.”

  “Is there still a world out there?” It was too much fun to torment her and watch the impatience and frustration flash in her eyes. “I try to avoid contact with it.”

  “Easy enough to do when you have your own island, I suppose.” She shot him a glance. “But seriously, could these be latitude and longitude?”

  Jack peered at the faint patterns of numbers. They did look like Roman numerals, which as far as he knew had never been used to write location coordinates. “They did use latitude and longitude in the eighteenth century, sure. They found their location using a sextant, which measured the angle of the sun to the horizon, so they could know where they were in relation to the equator, and a chronometer, which kept Greenwich Mean Time so they could figure out which time zone they were in by how far off their high noon was from London’s.” He let out a sigh. “Latitude around here is about twenty-six degrees—we’re twenty-eight degrees north of the equator—and longitude is about eighty degrees west of London.”

  He peered at the painted hatch marks on the wall. They buzzed in front of his tired eyes. Then the number twenty—XX—popped out. Then VIII—the number eight. And IX—nine, then XIV—fourteen. “You might be on to something.”

  “Yes! Now all we have to do is write it down and find that treasure.” The shine in her eyes made his stomach do a weird flip. It even made him keep his mouth shut about how it was bound to be a lot more complicated than that. For some reason he didn’t want to disappoint Vicki. He wanted to make her happy.

  Now, that was disturbing.

  Four

  Vicki sat on the prow of the boat, squinting at her pages of notes in the blazing early morning sun. Above them, thousands of cotton-ball clouds scudded across the vast sky and not one provided a lick of shade. No sleep and an army of nonsensical numbers marching through her brain had driven her half-mad.

  And then there was Jack.

  He was being so nice. So helpful. It was disarming and troubling. This was not the Jack she knew and loved/hated. She was beginning to think he might be up to something a lot more complicated than wanting to seduce her and dump her again.

  “I still don’t get what we’re doing out here.” He called from the deck where he was steering them...somewhere. “Those numbers don’t mean anything that we can figure out.”

  “I hope coming out on the water will give us some perspective on the map.” It had been her idea, queasy stomach and all. A flask of stomach-calming ginger tea sat by her side, and so far, so good. “It’s right here in front of us somewhere. We have all the pieces. We just need to put them together.”

  Easier said than done, especially with the distraction of a barely clad Jack Drummond a few feet away, sun gleaming off his tanned, muscled form. She should probably just have sex with him and get it over with. That might be the only way to reduce the sexual tension pounding in the air like jungle drums.

  He kept shooting sly glances at her, from beneath that dark lock of hair that dipped to his eyes. She tried to convince herself that she’d already rowed his rowboat and there was nothing to get excited about...but her memories of Jack in the sack un
fortunately had the opposite effect.

  Was he still the tender and passionate lover she remembered? Or had time hardened him into a more impatient or guarded bedmate? Curiosity made her skin tingle and she pulled her attention back to the stack of papers in her hand. Printed images of the ceiling fresco with its ragged coastline and wispy sprawl of Roman numerals.

  They’d translated the numerals into familiar numbers as best they could, and Jack had pointed out that they weren’t coordinates, at least not according to any system he knew.

  They probably should have slept at that point, but the bed was covered with plaster chunks and dust and she didn’t want to risk a discussion of where else they might sleep because his agreement to help her was contingent on her agreeing to join him in his bed. With her luck, they’d end up in a single bed with his chest as her pillow.

  “Tired?” Jack must have seen her yawn.

  “Not at all.” She smiled briskly. Let him think she was a demon who didn’t need sleep. “Nothing like a little sunlight and salt air to recharge my fuel cells.”

  “I couldn’t agree more.” His gruff voice held a hint of laughter. She resisted the urge to turn around because she didn’t feel like being broadsided by a vision of his brawny body. “So where’s the wreck?”

  “It’s out there somewhere.”

  The ocean was so vast. Opaque and impenetrable, its blue surface heaved under the boat. Maybe the wreck had been pounded to smithereens over the centuries. Or washed far out to sea in a storm. Or been found and stripped clean by one of Jack’s more enterprising ancestors.

  “What if it’s a code?” Jack’s voice jolted her from her train of depressing thoughts.

  “Of course it’s a code. What else could it be?” Adrenaline surged through her. Why hadn’t she thought of that? She’d been so hung up on the latitude and longitude theory that it hadn’t crossed her mind that the numerals had some other meaning. She peered at the pages with fresh interest, while trying to hide her sudden enthusiasm from Jack.

  If the numbers were letters, there would be some that occurred more than others—A, for example. She scanned the pages. And sighed. Roman numerals were insanely repetitive already. Instead of having 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10, they had I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX and X. A grand total of three characters: I, V and X. Her careful transcription contained no higher numbers like C for a hundred or M for a thousand. Words were hardly jumping off the page at her.

  “Cracked it yet?” His teasing voice made her head jerk involuntarily in his direction.

  “Almost.” Great. Another eyeful of his bulging biceps as he pushed some button on the boat deck. “Maybe we should throw out a net and see if we can catch the wreck.”

  He chuckled. “Or maybe you’re just hungry for more fish.”

  Her stomach lurched at the prospect. It was barely 8:00 a.m. She reached for her ginger tea and took a bracing gulp. She stared at her pages of numbers. Of course she wasn’t even sure they were the right numbers. They’d tried to find gaps between the endless rows of Xs and Is and Vs and might have got some of them wrong.

  There were a lot of IXs, though. And IIIs. She squinted at the page. If those corresponded to a’s or o’s or e’s... The rolling, lurching motion of the ship was not helping her brain power. “Maybe we should go back.” She needed flat, hard land under her feet to figure out this mess.

  “I thought you were going to use your feminine intuition to find the wreck beneath the waves.”

  “It’s blown a gasket. And I need an egg sandwich. Let’s head into town.”

  “Your wish is my command.” The engine roared as he swung the boat around and headed for shore at an impressive clip. She grabbed up her papers to shield them from the salt spray. She watched his steady arms for a moment.

  “I do like that about boats.”

  “What?” He squinted in the bright sun, a half smile tugging at his mouth.

  “That you can just say, let’s go to town, or to the Bahamas, or Madagascar, and all you have to do is rev the engines and off you go. No roads or rules or traffic lights.”

  “You’re beginning to understand the pull of the sea.” He watched her steadily for a moment until his gaze felt as if it was going to burn a hole in her. “No speeding tickets, either.”

  He floored the accelerator, or whatever you called it with boats, and suddenly they seemed to be shooting across the surface of the water, bouncing hard. She grabbed a nearby chrome rail and hung on for dear life as she felt her hair unravel and stream behind her in the wind. Part of her wanted to scream, and the rest wanted to let out a whoop of joy, as cobwebs fled her mind and adrenaline shrieked to every corner of her body.

  By the time they reached the shore, she’d broken a sweat just sitting still—or attempting to—and she couldn’t wipe the goofy smile off her face. “You’re crazy.”

  “Always have been, always will be.”

  They had breakfast at an outdoor café with the decor of a truck stop and a million-dollar view of the ocean. Vicki scribbled on her papers, making notes and trying out code possibilities.

  “I can hear your brain working from here.” Jack relaxed in his chair with an iced tea.

  “Is the ticking keeping you awake?” She didn’t glance up. Something about the pattern of the Vs made her think she was on the verge of a breakthrough.

  “It’s more of a humming sound, like a laser.”

  She met his gaze. “Careful you don’t get zapped.”

  “I might like it.” Humor danced in his eyes. He was flirting again. Worse yet, she was liking it. Where was all the hatred and bitterness she’d hoped to feel?

  Don’t fall for him again. He’ll only get bored and dump you.

  Her mind knew the truth, but her body kept rippling with pleasurable tension. His broad, arrogant mouth was so annoyingly kissable. That confident sparkle in his eye promised heights of sensual pleasure she hadn’t scaled since...the last time she slept with Jack.

  Sunshine and lack of sleep were making her loopy. “I need sleep, and I mean sleep, or I’ll never figure this out.”

  “Paloma will have tidied up the bed by now.” His feral grin sent a shiver of...warning to her toes.

  “You have a housekeeper?” Hard to imagine surf-bum Jack with staff.

  He shrugged. “Sometimes I’m out on the water for a week or more at a time. The lizards would take over the house if someone didn’t come in and fight back the forces of nature.”

  “I guess that’s a hazard of living in a historic property.”

  “Built by pirates with no construction experience.” He stretched, giving her yet another annoying view of his biceps. “Amazing it hasn’t fallen down by now.”

  “I suppose if you can figure out how to keep a wooden vessel afloat on water 365 days a year, piling some rocks into a sturdy house doesn’t seem so hard. I wonder if they buried any treasure in the walls while they were building.”

  Jack lifted a brow. “Maybe we should start chiseling around the window frames?”

  “Let’s find the wreck first.” She lifted her bag onto her shoulder. “After I get some sleep.”

  * * *

  To her surprise, Jack did let her sleep, alone in the luxurious comfort of fresh white sheets. Jack’s silent and invisible housekeeper had removed every trace of plaster dust and left the room sparkling and smelling pleasantly of beeswax. When Vicki awoke, sometime late that afternoon, the newly revealed fresco hovered above her like a summer sky, its colors intense, unfaded by sunbeams and time. Why had someone covered it up? They must have wanted to hide the information contained in this map. Maybe they had it committed to memory and needed to conceal it from greedy family members or servants until they found the time and means to retrieve it.

  She could easily imagine the various Drummonds not trusting each other. They seemed like a pretty tormented family. Maybe there was a curse that needed to be lifted.

  Speaking of which, where was Jack? Her ears pricked as she lis
tened for sounds of him. As far as she knew, he hadn’t come near while she was sleeping.

  She slipped out of bed and walked over the cool tiled floors into the hallway. “Jack?” No sound of him. She really should enjoy the solitude while she had it. What was she doing trying to hunt him down and bring him back to torment her?

  She climbed up on the bed with her phone. Fifteen missed calls, all from the same number. Why couldn’t this jerk get the hint? She’d never even been out on a real date with him. Leo Parker had cornered her at an art opening and sweet-talked her with promises of a dinner at Nobu. The dinner was delicious, the company not so much. When he’d sidled up to her at an auction she was attending, with an invitation to dinner at Annisa, she’d found herself too hungry and impoverished to resist. It wasn’t hard to make conversation with him—all you had to do was nod while he talked about himself. The tricky part was getting away from him at the end of the night.

  Maybe he thought she was playing hard to get? She really shouldn’t have accepted his invitation to the U.S. Open. She didn’t even like tennis that much. But with money so tight and her valiant efforts to keep up appearances taking a toll, she figured it would at least give her a story to tell at all the art openings she attended nightly to eat the free hors d’oeuvres and cozy up to the rich art lovers she hoped would be her future clientele.

  He’d turned into an octopus behind court number eight. Lips like raw fish and arms of steel. She’d managed to fend him off with a sudden coughing fit and threats of a virulent sore throat, but since then he’d called at least once a day. Staying at Sinclair’s house on Long Island had kept him at bay, and she’d assumed coming to Florida would lose him for good.

  Most people would have taken a hint by now. That he hadn’t was troubling.

  Reluctantly, she listened to his plea. “Hey, babe, haven’t seen you around lately. We could catch the new South Pacific and go out for a late bite....” He droned on. Grrr. If only he was charming and handsome. Or at least one of those. And she didn’t like musicals, either.