Chapter 25
25
Davis
Mind over body. Mind over body. Mind over body .
Nope.
Not working.
Especially when every time Sloane sees something new on the map, she gasps, then squeals, then does a little butt wiggle.
It’s the butt wiggle that’s killing me.
I want to hold her ass while she wiggles it. I want to hold her ass while she’s riding me. I want to hold her ass while I’m kissing her. I want to hold her ass while she’s sleeping.
Mind over body. Mind over fucking body .
I should say something.
Something more than sorry .
Something like Sorry I kissed you, it won’t happen again, I like you, but I don’t do relationships, I know you understand, Jesus fuck, your pussy tastes like heaven and that was a good kiss .
Except everything I think to say ends with Jesus fuck, your pussy tasted like heaven and that was a good kiss .
And I can’t say that to her.
So it’s just been awkward silence since.
Well, awkward on my part.
If she’s feeling awkward, she’s hiding it well.
“ Look , Davis. Look . If this is Chicken Rock, look what’s due south. Your cabin . I mean, the cabin on your land. The one I wouldn’t set foot in if you paid me a pirate’s treasure. But it’s your cabin.”
“Been through the cabin.”
She squints at me. “But have you?” She taps the diary Uncle Guido brought, which is not, in fact, the same diary that Sloane took pictures of just a few days ago.
This diary has Walter Bombeck’s handwriting.
The real Walter Bombeck. The guy who founded Shipwreck while pretending to be Thorny Rock.
And while I’ve been looking over Sloane’s shoulder as she goes between reading the journal and studying the map, I haven’t processed a fucking word, because I’m too distracted by her ass.
“Look,” she says. “ This diary keeps saying when I finally go to the light, it’ll be at sunrise, not dusk . Does that mean you have to go east from the cabin, or east from Chicken Rock? Was there a clue in the cabin? Did it have writing on the walls? Anything buried behind the walls?”
“It’s falling apart.”
She suddenly squints at me. “Why did you buy that land?”
Fuck.
I look at the ceiling.
One more lie is about to catch up with me.
In three… two… one…
“ Oh my god, you’re squatting? And why that land? You know that was owned by someone from Sarcasm. What do you know, Davis Remington? And don’t fucking lie to me.”
“My great-grandfather owned it. I didn’t buy it. It’s been in my family for generations. We just didn’t know until the safe-deposit box at the bank.”
She makes a choking noise. “I thought he didn’t have any heirs.”
“ Didn’t have any heirs and didn’t acknowledge any heirs other than that one line in his will are two different things.”
She leans over the map again, then hops out of her seat and heads into the museum.
I watch her ass again as I follow.
Stop it stop it stop it .
No good comes from obsessing about a woman. Especially a woman who lives in a town that I like to visit.
We need to find this treasure so I can move.
Preferably somewhere halfway around the globe.
I like India. I could go back to India.
Sloane won’t be in India.
India fucking sucks.
“Look.” She aims her phone’s flashlight at a painting on the wall.
I know the painting well. “Tillie Jean painted that, and that’s Norfolk. Not Shipwreck or Sarcasm.”
“When Pop asked her to paint it, he demanded— demanded —that Long Beak Silver be in the picture, and that he be sitting on the Shipwreck town flag with a baseball bat as the flagpole. Tillie Jean was like, ‘I’m not feeding Cooper’s ego,’ but Pop insisted so much that she finally caved.”
I lift my brows at her.
She dashes across the room to another painting, this one much older, of Shipwreck from the late eighteen hundreds. “Look at the tree.”
I tilt my head, and I see it.
In the distance, back behind the buildings and nestled between two mountains, there’s some kind of tree that’s too large for its space. It looks like one of its branches is a baseball bat, with the leaves hanging off of it like a flag, and there’s a crow sitting where Long Beak Silver is sitting in the other painting.
She dashes to the third wall in the room. “Now look at this map.”
It takes me a minute, but when I see the tree again, this one in a field, I almost grab her again.
Almost.
But I stop myself.
And I think she notices.
She goes pink in the cheeks and takes a subtle step away from me before pointing at the painting again, this time above the tree. “Look. This land? That’s where the high school was eventually built. The county high school.” She points below the tree. “And this is your cabin. I doubt the tree still exists, but the diary I copied—that one talked about the curtained oak that the ravens loved. Both men had to have known where the treasure was buried. It all makes sense—they spent their lives trying to outsmart each other so that one of them could steal it out from under the other.”
And this is why she’s critical.
She knows this stuff.
It’s natural to want to hug her for putting puzzle pieces together.
I like puzzles.
This is a normal turn-on.
Focus, dumbass . “What’s after the curtained oak?”
She bites her lip and looks around the room. “I don’t know. You can’t tell what direction it’s pointing. Actually, I think it’s pointing different directions based on which map and painting you look at.”
Wait.
Wait.
“Curtained oak,” I repeat. “Ravens.”
She looks at me expectantly.
Fuck. “The cabin had a name. Raven’s Cloak. Curtains. Cloaks. That’s a…stretch. But?—”
“But pirates.”
“Exactly.”
“You’re sure that’s the cabin’s name?”
“It was in the papers my mom found in the safe-deposit box. Land history stuff. Letters from my great-grandfather too.”
She cringes. “We need to check the cabin.”
“It’s falling down, and there’s nothing in there.”
“Are you sure? Sure sure?”
Fuck.
No.
I’m not.
“How old is the cabin?”
Originally built in 1799.
Right in the Thorny Rock era. Only still standing because it’s been reinforced a few times over the years.
She’s right.
There could be clues.
I start to hold out a hand to her, then drop it before she can take it. We’re not doing the touching thing. Touching is bad. “Okay. Back to the cabin. Let’s go.”