Chapter 6
6
Davis Remington, aka a man finally ready to do a little bit of talking, if he must
Most of Shipwreck is still sleeping when I swing my leg off my bike, softly stride down the alley, and then climb into the passenger seat of the black SUV parked behind the Thorny Rock Historical Museum after a long night of trying to ignore my own hero complex while studying the pictures of the journal that Sloane took for me.
Not the same as holding the real journal.
Not even close.
And that’s what I’m focusing on.
Not on the haunted expression in her bright blue eyes when she talked about the expectations her grandmother and other people from her past have of her, or the way she kept twirling her copper locks while she talked too fast, like I made her nervous.
I don’t want to make her nervous.
I want for her what I want for everyone—that she be safe and happy and healthy.
The end.
I don’t ever let myself want anything more because it will inevitably end in hurt, because it always does.
She’s a project. That’s it.
A project unfortunately related to the reason I’m climbing into this SUV in the pre-dawn hours, which means that no matter how much I want to not think about her, I’m going to think about her.
“Anyone see you?” I ask the woman in the driver’s seat.
Even in the dim pre-dawn light, I know she’s pinning me with a look that she’s been perfecting since before we were born. “You know this is why people ask you if you’re a spy, right?”
Says the spook herself.
Everything I learned about being mysterious, I learned from my twin sister.
Everything I learned about hacking, the internet, and all the reasons cloud backup is a bad idea for things you don’t want people to know you know, though, I taught myself.
Mostly.
I ignore Vanessa’s question. “Did you bring it?”
“No. I told you. We’re staying out of this.”
“You’re publicly staying out of this. I publicly stay out of everything.”
“Davis.”
“Someone’s gonna get hurt.”
“That is not your responsibility.”
Not even 6:00 a.m., and she’s hitting me with the phrase she usually reserves for much further into our conversations.
“Patrick Dixon’s looking for the treasure,” I tell her.
I feel her shoulders tighten as if my own were tightening for her.
Feel her suck in a breath too. Engine’s not running, so yes, I hear it, but I feel it also.
She turns in her seat to face me more fully. “I’m still not helping you with this.”
“This is the smallest favor I’ve ever asked for.”
She stares at me.
“In the last decade,” I add.
“This is not a small favor.”
“Do you know what happens to this town if they find out what we know?”
“Once again, not your responsibility.”
Except this one is.
If I’d kept my nosy ass out of my own business, I wouldn’t know what I don’t want to know.
But I do know what I don’t want to know, and thanks to Cooper Rock’s wedding here, all of the national attention on Shipwreck and Thorny Rock and the fucking treasure means someone else could figure it out too.
Someone like Patrick Dixon, who would use the information to hurt people.
People like the Rocks.
Vanessa.
Beck’s sister, Ellie.
And now Sloane, who I shouldn’t have any allegiance to whatsoever, but the same could be said about my lack of allegiance to any number of the other people that I’ve quietly helped in the past decade.
Often with my sister’s help, because she knows things.
Even things she denies knowing.
Like what random federal agencies might know about an old pirate and his crew.
“Nobody cares anymore once a treasure’s found,” I say. “It can go in a museum—one with actual security—and the legend will live on. But if Dixon finds it?—”
“He won’t find it.”
“He’s been in Shipwreck every day for the past two weeks. Including Saturday, when security had the entire town locked down for the wedding. He’s been dodging another of his ex-girlfriends while visiting the museum every single day. Nearly certain he’s the guy who broke in Saturday night too.”
“Sort of like you?”
“I’m the good guy. He’s a fucking fucknugget.”
Vanessa rolls her eyes.
We were the youngest of the crew growing up in our neighborhood. The other kids included us, but sometimes it felt like just barely.
That changed for me in late middle school and continued more when our parents agreed to let me drop out of high school and tour with the band, but Vanessa never joined in the neighborhood shenanigans.
Partially because she was uninterested in keeping up with the guys—there were only two other girls in the group besides her, both a couple years older—and partially because while we were playing basketball and getting in trouble, she liked reading and doing her math homework.
So when my sister realized that Ellie Ryder—Ellie Morgan now—was dating the same guy who’d dumped Vanessa for a woman in his office a couple years before that, she didn’t say anything.
Not even to me.
Not until the fucker cheated on Ellie with Sloane, who, as far as we can all tell, was completely clueless that he was dating someone else when they met.
When a dude has dated three women in my circles and none of them have anything good to say about him, he’s trash, and I’m gonna treat him as such.
“How much longer are you off work before you have to get back to the reactor?” Vanessa asks.
“I quit.”
“ Davis .”
“Got bored. They hired new staff. Younger kids. Next-level smart. They’ll be fine.”
She stares at me harder.
Not squirming is far harder in front of my sister than it is in front of anyone else.
“Is this Denver all over again?” she asks.
Denver.
Where Bro Code fell apart.
Because of me.
And because of something none of the five of us in the band have ever told anyone, but Vanessa knows.
She talked it out of me one night about four years ago.
I roll my shoulders. “Not if you tell me what the CIA knows about where Thorny Rock’s treasure is buried so I can get it and give it to the Rocks and pretend that’s the end of this.”
“The CIA doesn’t work on American soil.”
“Doesn’t mean you don’t know things.”
“ We don’t know things . Even if we did, I don’t have any need to know what we know. And what’s next? What’s next for you after you find a mythical treasure and need something new?”
I look out the passenger window at the back of the concession stand inside the water park on the other side of the alley.
Good question, what next?
And I don’t know.
Which is exactly what led to the disaster in Denver that made the band call it quits. Me not knowing what I’d do if my life fell apart.
And then I went and made it fall apart.
Probably because I didn’t actually like eighty percent of what I was doing. My every move being dissected by the tabloids. Interviews where people asked intrusive questions about our private lives. The inability to even come home without having reporters and gossips camped out around the old neighborhood.
The band? The band was great. Performing? Yeah, I liked the rush. Being with the guys? With the men I will call my brothers until my dying day?
Fantastic.
The rest of it?
I knew I’d break. I just didn’t know when.
It’s been fifteen years since Denver.
I’ve grown a lot since then.
Matured.
Found coping mechanisms. A purpose in life with my job.
Learned to deal with my feelings.
But I’m feeling the same restlessness that led to Denver, and Vanessa is the one person in the world I can’t lie to about it.
Doesn’t mean I can’t deflect though. “You busy this weekend? I told a friend I’d fake-marry her to get her grandmother off her back.”
“Again?”
“First time in this half of the country.”
“Are you going as yourself?”
“Yes.”
She snorts.
“What?”
“How are you going to explain that to all of your other fake wives’ families?”
“Most of them were very small ceremonies to appease dying grandparents who are no longer with us.”
“Is your friend ’s grandma dying?”
I don’t miss her emphasis on the word friend .
It’s not a word I use often when referring to anyone outside of the circle we grew up in.
“No idea. I’m just along for the ride until she’s ready to tell her family to fuck off. Bonus points to her if she also tells them that she hates men and will forever.”
Vanessa snorts again.
My sister already actively, publicly hates men forever. Probably partially due to one of the same men who sent Sloane down that path as well.
I’m occasionally an exception.
Probably not today though.
For either of them.
Sloane wasn’t happy when she left last night.
Can’t blame her.
I was a dick.
Easier to be a dick than to let her get close. And my dick wanted her to be close.
Fucking basic body part.
“Did you really drive down from DC in the middle of the night to tell me you won’t help me?” I ask her.
“No, I drove down from DC in the middle of the night to find out what’s wrong with you before you get yourself in trouble. And it’s worse than I was afraid of. Go back to school, Davis. Get another degree. Philosophy will keep you busy for a while. Learn a new foreign language. Travel. When’s the last time you left the country? What’s Cash up to? Isn’t he touring with Aspen? Join them. See something new. Get away from here.”
Ten years ago, it would’ve been what are Beck and Cash and Tripp and Levi up to? Go travel with one of them .
Now, all of my best buddies are married or on their way to marriage.
Hooked up.
None looking for a third wheel.
Only Cash is still traveling.
Levi’s home in Copper Valley all the time, raising his stepkids with his wife.
Beck’s home in Copper Valley or Shipwreck all the time, raising his kids with his wife, occasionally visiting his in-laws in LA.
Tripp’s home in Copper Valley all the time, raising his kids and running Copper Valley’s baseball team with his wife.
The Fireballs—Cooper Rock’s team—should’ve belonged to all of us in the band, but things didn’t end up happening that way, for reasons.
And that one still smarts.
The Fireballs should’ve been my what’s next .
I could ask Tripp for a job, but it’s not the same.
It’s not all five of us together again.
Like it used to be before we got famous.
“Cash and Aspen are in Copper Valley in two weeks. That’ll get me far.”
Vanessa sighs. “You know the CIA didn’t exist during the pirate age, right?”
“Like that would stop them from having information about historical events from before their time.”
“And also, there are these things called security clearances .”
“Yeah, a guy who got paid as a white hat hacker to look for vulnerabilities in nuclear power plant security systems definitely can’t be trusted.”
“You quit.”
“Maybe I should come work for the CIA.”
“I will actively recommend against that. And not to you. To them. I will actively recommend that they not hire you.”
As she should.
I’d be a shitty spy.
Can’t keep a straight face for anything.
Kidding.
But also, I don’t want the commitment and pressure of being a spy.
Have a few issues with boundaries when I believe in a cause.
Clearly.
I’m asking my sister to give me random info a government agency might have stumbled across and kept secret, aren’t I?
And I broke another rule when I asked Sloane for a favor.
I do favors for people. I don’t ask for favors. Not from people outside my tight, close-knit circle of friends.
Ask for favors from people you don’t trust with your life, and it gets complicated.
Like when they bring you pictures of the thing that you need to put your hands on and inspect for yourself.
Vanessa goes still.
Eerily still.
I look at her, and she reaches across me to hold me in my seat the way Mom used to when she’d brake too hard.
Except we’re not moving.
Vanessa might not be breathing.
I look at her, then out the car in the direction she’s looking.
And—
Ah, fuck.
Sloane.
She’s coming down the alley, chatting on her phone. Undoubtedly coming to check on the museum before her day shift.
She does that a lot, which I shouldn’t know, but I do.
She’s not the only one in our fake relationship who’s been watching the other.
She makes a frustrated face at the phone that I feel in my soul, and my heart does that annoying thing it’s done every time I’ve seen her since she kissed me where it flutters like I’m a fucking teenager.
I breathe through it.
Just because I’m as interested as Sloane is in never dating or getting married doesn’t mean I’ve fully mind-over-bodied my biological instincts yet to convince myself women in general aren’t inherently attractive, some more than others.
And it’s not like I’d never noticed her before.
Who wouldn’t notice a curvy redhead who’s always smiling? Especially one who wasn’t as subtle as she thought she was about taking my picture anytime I’ve seen her in Shipwreck lately.
That pretend boyfriend thing?
Wasn’t my first guess as to what she was doing, but it was on the list. And it was a short list.
“That her?” Vanessa says so softly I almost don’t hear it.
Shit.
I’m wearing my puppy dog eyes.
I scowl at my sister.
She takes that for the yes that it is. “And how long have you had a crush on her?”
“I do not have a crush on her.”
“Then what are the moon eyes all about?”
“She told me once she hated me because she finally got tickets to see one of our shows, but the band broke up before her ticket date. I feel guilty.”
Predictably, Vanessa snorts again. “You’re not even trying to lie effectively now.”
“It’s the truth. She was tipsy at a bar and challenged me to a game of darts. I don’t know if she even remembers. Tillie Jean told me she’d had a bad day. Got yelled at a bunch at work by people who were too ungrateful or something.”
Vanessa sucks in another breath and her eyes narrow. “No.”
“Everyone has a bad day now and—oh, fuck.”
She’s not objecting to my explanation.
She’s objecting to what’s happening in the alley.
And as soon as I see it too, I’m in motion.
Sloane isn’t alone.
And it’s unlikely that she knows she’s not alone.
I know she’s not alone.
Vanessa knows she’s not alone.
We both know who’s trailing Sloane in the shadows.
And while I’m flying out of the SUV as Sloane slips inside the back entrance of the museum, my sister’s staying put.
Because she doesn’t want Patrick Dixon to see her?
Or because she doesn’t want to be seen in general?
Motherfucker.
Is Vanessa working a Thorny Rock case? Is she here because the CIA wants Thorny Rock’s treasure and she knows something about what Dixon’s up to?
Problem for later.
My boots hit the ground with a crunch.
Vanessa turns on the SUV lights, illuminating the fucking blond caveman mere feet from the rear museum door.
He throws his hands in front of his face as Sloane swings the door open and sticks her head back outside. “Hello? Whoever’s there, you should know I have bear spray and I can scream loud enough to wake the dead, so—oh. It’s you.”
With the direction the door opened, she’s staring straight at me, and she can’t see Dixon, who’s also made me, and is now turning on his heel to sprint back down the alley.
Sloane frowns and turns her head in his direction—shoes on gravel aren’t quiet—as Vanessa’s engine roars to life.
Her SUV glides past me while Sloane looks between me and my sister in her getaway car, chasing Patrick down the alley and around the corner.
I’m gonna get a cryptic text about this later.
Be epic if she ran him over. Doubt she does though.
Not her style.
Plus, she’d get put on administrative leave while the incident was investigated, and she likes her job.
Sloane blinks at me. “What’s going on?”
“Let’s go inside.”
“Are you spying on me?”
“No.”
“Who was that?”
“Who?”
“ Oh my god , you have a girlfriend, don’t you? Was that your girlfriend? Were you telling her about us? The fake us. Not the real us. Oh my god . I am so over men. Over. Men.”
She ducks back into the museum.
The door slams behind her.
I slowly count to five, then punch in the code and follow her into the museum.
She and I need to talk.