Chapter 26
26
Sloane
I’d ask if it’s possible to be so horny you want to crawl out of your skin while also being so pissed that you can’t act on your horniness that the anger is actually making you hornier, except I’m starting to think that’s just how I’ll always be whenever I’m around Davis.
We need to find this treasure so he’ll leave and I can get back to living at my own house?—
After I clean it up.
Dammit .
Patrick violated me. He violated my house. And even when we find the treasure, I still need to deal with that.
Not just the physical cleaning up, but the thing where I suddenly don’t want to be alone.
Including in my own house.
Which doesn’t feel safe.
At least I’m over being embarrassed that the sheriff and her entire office have likely been documenting my dildos and vibrators as part of their investigation.
But I’m not over wanting Davis to sit closer to me in the SUV as we head back up the mountain.
Not that he can scoot closer.
He took the front seat.
Next to Chuck.
Leaving me all alone in the back.
He still hasn’t taken off his beanie, so I can’t see just how bad his hair is since he showered. It was pretty bad before that. Sticking up at all angles, uneven lengths—he might actually have to shave it off to fix it.
“You staying up all night?” Chuck asks us.
“Yes,” I answer as Davis says, “No.”
I don’t believe him.
He seems like an all-nighter kind of guy.
Which means he’s probably answering what he thinks is right for me.
I snort.
Chuck snorts too, but his is pure amusement, whereas mine is frustration.
“Chuck, can you get me a metal detector?” I ask.
“I have a metal detector,” Davis says.
“Two’s better than one.”
“You’re not going in the cabin.”
“Watch me.”
“I’ll make a phone call,” Chuck says.
Davis twists in his seat to look back at me, but since it’s black as midnight outside, I can’t tell much more than that.
“It’s falling down, Sloane.”
“Then maybe we need to help it along and take it apart from the outside in.”
That’ll take days.
Possibly weeks.
I don’t want to spend days or weeks taking apart an old cabin. I want to go check out the area south of the high school and north of the cabin.
Which will also take weeks unless that old oak tree is still there, which seems unlikely. Good news—if it’s there, it would have to be exceptionally large. It would be over two hundred years old. Probably closer to three hundred if it was already that large in the late seventeen hundreds.
So we should be able to spot it.
But aren’t pirates supposed to tell you how many paces to go when they leave clues like look south of Chicken Rock ?
And what if the treasure’s there, but it’s buried under the parking lot of the high school?
“You know that thing in TV shows where satellites can look underground to find things?” I say.
“Won’t help.”
“You’ve tried it?”
“Would’ve if I could’ve.”
“Why couldn’t you? Because it’s not real, or because you’d have to hack a system you can’t hack? Wait. Wait . I just remembered—I saw a pirate hunt documentary that used—what was it called? It was a thing that looked like a lawnmower but it could see underground with lasers—no, not lasers, it was—radar! It was radar. Can’t you buy one of those?”
“This conversation is over.”
“Are you on a ban list somewhere? Are you like, legally prohibited from buying one because of something you did in the past?”
“ Over ,” he repeats.
Somebody’s frustrated.
Chuck snorts again like he’s enjoying this.
I’d wonder how often he’s witnessed Davis being frustrated, and I decide never, since that makes sense, but there’s also a possibility that it’s all the time. I get the impression Davis sees his friends regularly, which means Chuck would see Davis regularly while working for Levi.
There’s also a possibility Chuck doesn’t like Davis and is amused anytime someone gets one over on him.
Relatable.
I dislike him right now too.
And I also like him more than I did when I woke up yesterday morning.
Especially after last night.
And you know what he hasn’t done?
Not once?
Hasn’t even hinted at?
He hasn’t once implied in even the subtlest of ways that I owe him an orgasm for the orgasm he gave me last night.
And that’s not something I could say for any of my exes.
C’mon, Sloane, you haven’t put out in days. Dudes have needs. You can’t just leave me walking around with a boner like this.
And that makes me mad too because it makes me like him even more.
So maybe I’m mad at myself for rekindling a crush on someone I formerly only had a parasocial relationship with but now have a real I kinda know you and we’ve traded some secrets and you’ve kissed me and touched me naked but we’re not planning on being friends forever relationship with.
My fingers itch to touch that tattoo at the base of his neck again.
The one he wouldn’t tell me about.
What in the world could three triangles and a coin mean?
Chuck pulls up to the camper, and we all pile out.
“Beck sent someone to watch Peggy,” Davis reminds me as we make our way to the door.
“Are you warning me so I won’t scream again?”
“Yes.”
“What if I want to scream because I enjoy it?”
Am I poking at him?
Yes.
Would I be if he’d just kiss me senseless and strip me naked and have crazy wild sex with me, with his penis and not just his tongue? And make me scream again in the good way?
I refuse to answer that question, even though I’m asking it of myself.
He opens the door while Chuck starts circling the camper.
“Why are you going inside?” I ask Davis. “We have to check the cabin.”
“Getting my metal detector. And raccoon deterrent.”
“What’s the metal detector for?” a familiar feminine voice says inside.
“Are you fucking serious?” Davis mutters as I peek around him.
And I’m instantly squealing. “Sarah!”
Sarah Ryder, Beck’s wife, smiles at me. She’s stroking Peggy, who’s melted into her lap on the couch, and her eyes are sparkling with mischief. “Hey, Sloane. Having fun?”
“Only when I’m not annoyed. Are you alone?”
“In here? Yes. Also, I have a taser and I can take Davis down in a sparring match.”
I grin at her.
She grins back. “I needed to see for myself that you’re okay, and I didn’t know you had a cat until just a couple days ago. I love cats. They’re so sweet. Little Miss Peggy has quite the purr-box on her, doesn’t she?”
Dammit.
My throat’s clogging and my eyes are getting hot. “Thank you for watching out for her.”
“Anytime. How goes the treasure hunt?”
“It’s a disaster.”
“As all good treasure hunts are, I assume.”
Peggy opens one eye—just a slit—and looks at me, meows a long, soft, satisfied mmeeeeeeeeooooooowww , and then closes her eyes again and flips to give Sarah her belly.
“Who is such a good kitty? Peggy is such a good kitty,” Sarah coos.
The cat stretches luxuriously.
Davis brushes past me, metal detector in hand, and I look between him and Sarah.
“Can you stay a little while longer?” I ask her.
“I’m bound by the laws of the universe to sit here as long as the cat has chosen me for her throne, so it’s really not up to me.”
Davis sighs audibly behind me.
Sarah’s brown eyes twinkle brighter as she smiles. “Must be an exceptionally difficult treasure hunt if you can make him sigh like that.”
“I’m not the problem. I didn’t bury it. Some stupid old pirates did. Excuse me. I have to go fight him over whether or not I’m allowed to also crawl around in a falling-down old cabin.”
“Good luck with that. Please don’t die.”
“Don’t fucking jinx it,” Davis mutters.
Sarah smiles wider and pulls out her phone.
Davis sighs again.
“Beck’s gonna be so mad he lost rock-paper-scissors,” Sarah murmurs.
Davis pauses at the door. “You cheated, didn’t you?”
“Yep. Put a cheese ball in front of him and then challenged him to see which of us got to come. Rafael’s outside, by the way. Beck wouldn’t let me come by myself, even if I can handle things just fine. Including raccoons. What’s the raccoon story, by the way? Levi and Ingrid both went silent in the group text after she said something cryptic about owing Giselle real Bavarian pretzels to apologize for the raccoon incident. And Rafael said he talked to Chuck and had orders to shoot any raccoons that try shit.”
I look at Davis.
His cheek tics. “Nature natures. You coming, Sloane?”
He opens the door, and I dash to follow with a quick, “I’ll explain later,” tossed over my shoulder to Sarah.
He doesn’t sigh again.
He also doesn’t hold my hand to help me across the ground past the decrepit outhouse to the back door of the cabin.
Can’t go in the front.
Not with the way the porch has collapsed.
This is okay though. We’ve made it safely to the cabin, so that’s something.
I pause and look back at the outhouse. “Is that?—”
“Yes,” he replies. “Just an outhouse. Yes. I checked. No, I don’t plan to do it again.”
“Okey-dokey. Good enough for me.”
“Lots of spiders inside,” he tells me as the hinges squeak ominously while he tugs the back door open.
“Any raccoons?” I ask.
“Unlikely, but we’ll handle them if we have to.”
“My orders don’t cover battling buildings to keep you safe,” Chuck says behind us. “You go in there, you’re on your own.”
“It probably won’t collapse tonight,” Davis says. “Probably.”
“At least they’ll have us to dig them out,” another voice says.
Rafael, I assume, who I also assume is either one of Sarah and Beck’s security guys, or possibly one of their nannies.
I’ve read a little about celebrity nannies.
They’re badasses and can do so much more than just teach a kid their ABCs.
Davis shines a flashlight inside the cabin.
No furniture.
Uneven wood plank floors. And not like today’s smooth wood plank floors. More like rough-hewn logs turned into floors.
No visible raccoons, but lots of cobwebs. They’re over the lone window in this back room. In the corners. Silver strands crisscrossing the room and lit up by the flashlight.
I gulp.
I can handle a spider or two. But I hate walking into spiderwebs.
Who doesn’t?
Even the National Park Service’s social media posts tell people to let their friends go first on early-morning walks so said friend takes the spiderweb out with their face.
Davis looks at me.
“You going in, or are you waiting for me to go first?” I ask him.
He sighs again. “Don’t get hurt.”
“I know first aid.”
He doesn’t smile.
Just looks at me for a long minute, then shakes his head and gingerly steps through the door.
The floorboards creak under his weight.
I wait until he’s several feet inside the room, then follow.
It’s not so much a spiderweb thing as it is not wanting both of us balancing on the same floorboards.
“What’s under the floor?” I ask Davis.
“Basement.”
Dammit .
I was afraid of that.
“You’ve searched the basement already?” I ask him.
“Yes.”
“With a metal detector?”
“No.”
He passes through another door, and I follow him into what was clearly the kitchen.
That’s an old stove.
An old kitchen stove. There’s also a fireplace hearth and a large porcelain sink without a faucet.
No refrigerator.
Obviously no dishwasher.
“Is there plumbing in this cabin?” I whisper in case I’m intruding on pirate spirits.
Could Davis’s great-grandfather have known Thorny Rock and Walter Bombeck? I try to do math in my head, and I fail. I don’t think so? But I don’t know.
“No,” he says.
“And your great-grandfather lived here in modern times?”
“He died in the 1950s.”
So the cabin’s been empty for roughly three-quarters of a century.
No wonder it’s falling down.
Also?
It’s small. Like he didn’t have a bedroom. Just a main room and a kitchen and a basement.
No visitors for Great-grandpa, I guess.
Nice cabin for a hermit.
Davis turns into a short doorway, ducks, and shines his flashlight down the stairs. “You sure you want to do this?”
No. No no no no no no no. “Yes.”
He stares at me like he knows my brain is protesting, then turns without a word and heads down the stairs.
They creak worse than the floor.
Much, much worse.
I flip on the flashlight on my phone and follow once he’s all the way downstairs, feeling the steps sag beneath my weight. As the wall beside me turns from wood to stone, I lean against it to try to take some of the weight off the steps.
No idea if that works, but it makes me feel better.
Davis is sweeping the metal detector over the dirt floor when I join him in the musty-scented basement that reminds me of my grandma’s basement back in Iowa.
And that reminds me that I still haven’t answered Nigel’s text from earlier tonight, which feels like it came in four days ago.
Was that really tonight?
It was.
Well, too bad, Nigel. You don’t get a response tonight because I’m hunting for a pirate treasure.
I take a minute to scan the walls with my phone.
They’re stone.
Old stones, piled like bricks with cracking mortar around them. I touch the mortar where it’s falling away, looking for loose stones that could hide something behind them, but I don’t find any loose.
I walk into three different cobwebs and handle it in silence.
Every once in a while, I catch Davis watching me.
“Did you already do this?” I ask him.
“Not as thoroughly.”
I don’t believe him.
I don’t think there’s anything the man doesn’t do thoroughly.
He kissed me thoroughly a few times, didn’t he?
He ate my pussy thoroughly, didn’t he?
He went diving in to protect me multiple times in the past two days, also thoroughly, didn’t he?
And now he’s thoroughly pretending none of it happened while he thoroughly sweeps the dirt floor with his metal detector.
Twice.
He even tests that it’s working by tossing a coin on the ground.
I watch him, fascinated not by the test, but by how he’s able to do it. “You still carry change?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Need it sometimes.”
See?
He’s even thorough in his preparations for what he might need in case of who knows what?
“Were you a Boy Scout?” I ask him.
“No.”
“But you’re always prepared now.”
“Life lessons.”
“Who cleared out your great-grandfather’s things?” It makes zero sense that this basement would be here but empty. If I died all alone— when I die alone—someone will have to go through my things and sell my house.
Not that I’ll be alone alone.
I’ll be single.
But not alone.
I’ll have friends who will take care of arrangements.
Everything I heard about the last owner of this cabin though—he was alone.
Alone alone.
Even what Davis has implied— having heirs and not claiming heirs are two different things —suggests that he was alone.
“Don’t know,” Davis finally says.
“Someone had to. If he lived here, he would’ve stored things in the basement and there would be furniture in the room. Even minimal furniture. Like a bed. Something to put a lamp or a candle on. Something to eat on. Or eat with. Maybe he gardened and stored canned vegetables down here. Or he was secretly a Halloween freak and used this space to store all of his skeletons and pumpkins. Everyone has things . Where are all of the things ?”
He stares at me a moment, then shakes his head and starts for the stairs. “I’ll ask a few people who might know.”
“Your sister?”
He doesn’t answer.
I roll my eyes at his back, and he catches me as he glances back. “You go up first.”
No point in arguing.
We’re done down here.
But about halfway up, there’s a more ominous creak than any I’ve heard before.
And as my brain clicks with the realization that we can’t see the underside of the stairs, the wood beneath me gives way.