THE BED WAS the logical location, but Kate found she wasn’t ready for that. Not yet. Instead, she took his hand and guided him to the pillow-lined window seat. She started to sit beside him, both feet on the floor, but he shook his head.
“Hang on.” He positioned himself sideways in the window, bracing himself at one end, then tugged her down so she was nestled against him. Her back was against his chest and his arms were around her waist and his legs stretched out on either side of hers. She closed her eyes and melted into him, not sure if it was more calming or arousing to be cradled against him this way. It felt as if bubbles were pushing out of her veins and popping against her skin, leaving it prickly and keenly aware of every breath he took, every play of his muscles against her.
This. I have to remember this.
For a few breaths they stayed silent. Anticipating. Reacquainting. Their right hands were laced together, but her left one rested on his thigh and his was nestled tantalizingly close to the underside of her breast, and just sitting there, she could swear the Eagerness Meter was jumping by the second.
“I don’t know how to say this without sounding like I have a one-track mind.” His words were low against her ear, the vibrations tickling her back and rippling through her. “But right after I booked my flight—before you set the, um, ground rules for while I was here—I did some reading. About, you know.” He kissed the spot below her ear. “The first time after having a baby.”
“I’m glad you did. It cuts down on how much I’ll have to explain.”
“Oh, consider me educated. And mildly terrified.” He laughed against her hair, sending spark-shivers down her spine. “Some of them made it sound so scary that I started to wonder how anyone ever...and then I reminded myself how many couples have second or third kids, and I thought, okay, this must be survivable.”
Second or third kids. “Kind of like labor,” she said, keeping it light to cover the sudden twist in her heart. What she would give to have another baby with Boone, to see what miracles their genes could produce another time...
No. She wasn’t going to waste time on who knows and if only. Not tonight, not for the rest of their time together.
Instead, she tipped her face up to look at him as directly as was possible.
“I’ll tell you if there’s a problem. I promise.”
He kissed her forehead. “I don’t want to hurt you, okay?”
“I’ll be fine.”
“Just swear to me you won’t let me hurt you.”
Wrapped in the cocoon of his arms, it was easy to feel the muscles of his biceps tensing, to hear the apprehension in his voice. And while a part of her was blown away by his concern, something about it felt off. Too much. Like that moment when she’d first handed Jamie to him in the bathroom and he’d stepped back.
But this was different.
Or was it?
What if I drop him?
I’m sorry I made you back up.
Swear to me you won’t let me hurt you.
She pulled herself out of his embrace and spun to face him, kneeling before him, her hands on his shoulders and her eyes locked on his. “Listen to me, Jackson Boone, and listen up good, okay? I trust you. No—I know you. I know that you have overcome odds that would have left other men knocked to the ground. I know that you’re full of care and compassion, even though there was practically none of it in your life for so long. And I know—well, I suspect—that you think your past is some sort of guarantee that you’re going to hurt me or Jamie or both of us.”
His fast intake of breath told her she’d hit that nail straight on the head.
“But let me tell you this. I might have spent most of the last year on a different frickin’ continent, but before that I spent an awful lot of hours with you, and never once did I see anything that made me fear for my safety. Not. Once. Just like I’ve never worried about you with Jamie.” She placed her palm on his chest, spreading her fingers wide. “All I’ve seen is a truly amazing father who keeps getting better every day.”
He wasn’t convinced. His doubts were reflected in his clouded eyes, in the tight line of his jaw.
“You have to believe me, Boone. I know what I’m talking about. Day care director, remember? I’ve been trained in recognizing problems. I’ve had to make the calls to Children’s Aid, and trust me, I’ve never been wrong about a situation. Do you honestly think I would let you near Jamie if I had any fears about you?”
“I...I guess I hadn’t thought about that.” He swallowed. “But—”
“But nothing. Boone. Listen. Do you have any idea how easy it would have been for me to send you back to Peru without ever telling you I was pregnant?”
The light dawning in his eyes gave her hope that she was getting through.
“I could have, you know. And I would have. Don’t think for a minute that I wouldn’t have kept it a secret if I had even the teensiest, tiniest worry about you.” She crept forward, sliding her hands back to his shoulders, daring a light kiss on his forehead. “But I didn’t do it. I told you right away. I did everything I could think of to make sure you were a part of our son’s life, and I’m still doing that, and I’ll keep on doing it, because you are a wonderful, loving, totally together father. And Jamie is beyond lucky to have you in his life, and I am damn lucky to have you as my—”
Husband. She wanted to say husband but caught herself in the nick of time.
“My partner,” she finished, sliding higher and closer, curling forward to kiss his chin. “In parenting. And in laughter. And in bed, because, Boone, if you had any idea how much I want you right now, you—”
The rest of her words were crushed out of her by his swift embrace. Silenced by his kiss. Sent squeaking when he swung his feet to the ground and grabbed her around the waist and tumbled her onto the bed, falling beside her, around her, above her. He grabbed her wrists and pulled them above her head and stared down at her, his gaze filled with all the heat and need she remembered in every aching cell, but this time there was more. She couldn’t place it until he kissed her again. Slowly this time. Tenderly. Gentle and lingering and yet with more emotion than she could ever remember.
“Thank you,” he whispered, and she had to swallow down the sudden rush of tears.
God, she loved him.
She wrapped her arms around him and pulled him tighter, clinging to the rightness of being with him again and pushing aside the truth she hadn’t dared say—that nothing he could do would compare to the pain she was going to face when he left.
* * *
WHEN BOONE WOKE the next morning, his first thought was that he couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept so soundly.
His second thought was that his deep slumber was only partly due to the sex, though he wasn’t going to discount that. But he was pretty sure the main reason he’d slept so well was because of Kate’s ability to hear beyond his words.
Do you have any idea how easy it would have been for me to send you back to Peru without ever telling you I was pregnant?
He had never thought of that. And the thing was, she was absolutely right. She could have broken up with him as soon as she knew Jamie was on the way, or at least before things became obvious. He could have gone back without ever even suspecting. And given her own experience with her father, Kate would have known that sometimes silence was the best choice.
Instead, she had given him both the gift of their son and the gift of her trust.
He had no idea what he’d done to deserve any of this. But he was damned well not taking it for granted.
In the early morning light, he drank in the sight of this woman who had upended everything about his world. She lay on her side half under the covers, the blankets pulled haphazardly across her torso and one arm tucked beneath her pillow. There was a thin blue line on her thigh, like a vein suddenly made visible. He stared at it in lazy surprise. Had that been there before? Or was that one of the changes brought about by nine months of carrying their son?
He hadn’t been around to watch her stomach grow large except via video feed, had never placed his hand on her abdomen and felt the kick from inside. But he could look now.
Slowly he eased the blankets back and gently touched his finger to her stomach. Was it softer than he remembered? Yeah. A little. The pink lines running up and down her lower abdomen were new, too. Were these stretch marks? He tried to remember everything he had read while she was pregnant. There had been something about those lines, something that made them sound almost like a trial to avoid, what with all the discussions of how to prevent them and the reassurances that they would fade over time. He didn’t know why. Other than looking like they might have hurt a bit, he didn’t see any problem with them. They were like a tattoo to him, an unspoken message to anyone who saw them that this body had made a miracle.
His gentle touch hadn’t seemed to bother her so he flattened his palm over her abdomen, wondering how it had felt to house someone inside her. She had tried to describe the sensation of Jamie’s kicks and twists, but it was still beyond his imagination. Not the physical part as much as the thought that there was another person living within. How the hell did women walk around and carry on with their everyday lives as if this was just a regular thing, when they were busy making another whole person? Jesus. If it were up to him, pregnant women would be entitled to nine months of nonstop massages and pampering, complete with a steady stream of fresh fruit and personal chefs.
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.