Chapter 25
Twenty-Five
I’m already sweating when I cut the engine outside the chain-link fence.
One hand taps fingers on the steering wheel at the same over-worked rhythm of my pounding heart while the other hand—the one wearing the ring that doesn’t belong to me—hides in my pocket the way it has all afternoon.
But the stolen ring isn’t my concern now. Off a dirt road in the middle of nowhere as the twilight sky hangs on to the last minutes of light, breaking into a historically preserved tree is all I can focus on.
“We ready, fam?” Sunny belts out from the back seat, making me jump.
“You betcha,” Cap responds with too much enthusiasm.
Nash, who insisted we needed Sunny for this, looks at me from the passenger seat, mouthing, you okay?
I nod—slightly—meeting Sunny’s eyes in the rearview mirror. They narrow sharply between bites of the shrimp dinner she’s eating from one of the two Styrofoam boxes on her lap.
“You want some shrimp, honey child? You look sick.”
I shake my head, nauseous from both the smell of her fried seafood in the small quarters of my car and the tree trespassing I’m about to commit.
“Suit yourself,” she says. “Nash? Cappy?”
Nash waves her off, angling his head to look at the tree—our future crime scene—but Cap says, “I love shrimp.”
In the rearview mirror, Sunny puts a shrimp into Cap’s mouth, prompting him to moan.
Jesus.
I wring my hand around the steering wheel and eye the security sensors we spotted while casing the joint earlier.
I declared them unworking deterrents—I’ve seen antique store owners do this when they don’t want to spend the money on active systems. Now, with bolt cutters and flashlights in the trunk, I’m not so sure.
“Maybe this is a bad idea,” I tell Nash. “Maybe—”
“Uh-uh,” he says, opening his door. “We’re doing this.”
Outside the station wagon, Sunny puts the Styrofoam boxes on the hood and pulls a cellphone out of her bra to fire off a text. When she catches me watching, she purses her lips. “Can I help you with somethin’?”
“Um.” Even with a shrimp in one hand, I’m terrified of this woman. “No?”
“Oh, sweet summer child,” she sings out. “Do you ever relax?”
Nash chuckles, gesturing for me to open the trunk where we assess our tools on top of my suitcase.
“Why’s your luggage in here?”
“Oh, that.” Shit. “I’m staying at a different hotel tonight.”
He looks from the suitcase to me, skeptical. “Which one?”
“The one . . . by the water?” Another question I don’t mean to ask.
“The HarbourView?”
“Yes,” I lie. “The HarbourView. The one I was at last night—the not HarbourView—was, you know, dated. And the bed was bad.” That, at least, is not a lie. The futon is the worst. “And with my clients paying, I figured why not splurge. And so, I just want—”
The sound of tires crunching on the dirt road kills my shit attempt at a lie. Flashing lights strobe across Nash’s face. The cops are here.
The cops!
The car parks, a uniformed man emerges, and I’m going to faint.
The.
Cops.
Are.
Here.
“The hell you getting me wrapped up in, Sunny?” the man asks with a chuckle and hitch of his belt.
The hand with the stolen ring turns to a fist filled with excess pocket fabric while my free hand wraps around my own throat.
“This ain’t me, Leroy,” Sunny defends. “Nash and his crazy-ass wife.” She hands the man an unopened box of food while he, Nash, and Cap exchange pleasantries and introductions.
“What-what’s happening?” My voice is trembling. “Are you . . .” My eyes dart around. “Taking us to jail?”
At this, they all laugh.
“I didn’t know how to tell you,” Nash says, hands on his hips. “But your plan is shit, Rue.”
My jaw drops. “It is not.”
Another round of laughter that I don’t join in on.
“It is. And”—he points to the man in uniform—“Leroy here is Sunny’s cousin and works security for the city. He’s going to unlock the gate, answer the call when the sensors trigger, and give us time to look in the tree.”
If I wasn’t engaged and Nash wasn’t Nash and I wasn’t trying to fix my life or hide a stolen ring that was stuck on my finger, I’d kiss him square on the mouth.
Leroy gives me a stern-faced look as he opens his container of food. “You snap a branch and I’ll shoot ya.”
Cap makes a grim grunt.
At my wide eyes, they all laugh . . . again. Bastards.
“Ha. Ha,” I say dryly. “Glad everyone thinks my fear of prison is so funny.”
“We’d take you to the jail on Leeds Avenue before prison,” Leroy corrects, tossing a key to Nash who makes quick work of undoing the padlocks on the gate.
I grab the flashlights with one hand and give them both to Nash. My palm is too sweaty to hold on to anything.
“Ready?” he asks.
A nervous laugh puffs out of me. “Not even close.”
Leroy nods, setting his phone on the hood-turned-dinner table.
“Half hour,” he says, grabbing a shrimp by its tail then gesturing at us with it before biting the top off. Around his chewing: “You’ll trigger the alarm when you go in and come out. Go fast.”
Nash nods. “Let’s go.”
With a sharp exhale, I follow him, both of us jogging toward the tree. Within a minute, Leroy’s phone rings, and he answers with a muffled voice.
My pulse pounds at every nerve ending in my body. I’m breaking into a tree. I’m forty-two and turning to crime to fix my life. What is happening?
We assess the branches quickly and quietly, choosing the ones with the most gradual slopes to get us to the top of the trunk.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper to the old limb before climbing onto it. With my full weight, it doesn’t budge.
Nash climbs onto the one next to me and the whole thing shakes. Somewhere farther up, a crack rips through the quiet. We look at each other, stricken.
“Just you,” Nash says, gingerly sliding from his branch and coming to mine.
He’s right in front of me at eye level, just inches away, clicking a flashlight on and shining it at my face to make me wince. He laughs softly. “You scared?”
I snatch the flashlight from his hands and slip it into my front pocket. “Does terrified count?”
Because I am.
Bennie said treasure hunts require bravery, and dammit if this doesn’t feel like the bravest I’ve ever had to be in my life.
I’m illegally climbing a preserved tree in the dark so she can go to the school she wants to go to, my mom can have the surgery she needs, and I can keep working at the place I’ve worked my entire life.
Nash’s dusk-light-painted face in front of mine, smiling like there’s nothing else he’d rather be doing. We are in the middle of a heist without a single second to spare, yet I cannot move. I’m stuck staring at him like tarnish on an old penny.
He shines his light up the tree then moves it slowly down the branch. Where my hands grip the tree, the flashlight becomes a spotlight. The diamonds, pearl, and gold on my finger shine like a disco ball.
I am busted in a bad kind of way.
“That’s new.” His lips twitch.
I squeeze my eyes shut. “I accidentally found this.”
“Accidentally found it?” I hate his tone as much as I hate the way I love the ring. “I see.”
Heat consumes my neck as I open my eyes. “And it’s stuck.”
At this, he laughs. Loud. So loud you’d never know we were doing something illegal and trying not to get caught.
Like I just told him the funniest joke ever told and not that I was snooping in his bedroom and putting another woman’s ring on my finger that I found next to the condoms she’ll be impaled with later.
“Glad you think this is so funny.” I readjust myself on the branch. “Because I’m quite humiliated by the fact I have another woman’s ring stuck on my finger, thanks for asking.”
“Where’s your other one?”
Like a fool, I look at him. “My purse.”
“Ah.” His grin is dimly lit and completely unbothered by the fact I snooped in his bedroom or have his future fiancée’s ring held hostage on my hand. “So you like this one better?”
“Hate it,” I snap.
“Explains why you put it on.”
I huff an annoyed breath then redirect my focus to the tree and take my first crawled inches forward.
“Hey,” he says, stopping my movement while stepping along the branch. Once again, he’s close. “Earlier you said you didn’t know how to be around me.” His throat bobs with a swallow. “But I know how I want to be around you.”
His mouth is close enough to mine that I feel his breath on my lips. His heat. I’ll deny it later, but right now, I want this man to kiss me. I want to know if his mouth can still make me burn the way it once could.
The light stretching through the sky reveals enough of his face to make me think he might want the same thing.
“Yeah?” I shift my grip on the branch. “How’s that?”
“Like I wa—”
“The hell y’all doin’ in there?” Sunny’s voice cuts through the night and makes us both swear. “You fools better get movin’ if you don’t wanna end up on Leeds.”
Nash shakes his head and takes a step back. Nodding toward the branch, he says, “Go.”
Right.
I shift my focus to crawling on my hands and knees up the long limb without damaging it. The bark digs into every point of contact with my skin.
I am climbing a preserved tree in the dark in hopes of finding missing gold I desperately need, but all I can think of is the way Nash was just looking at me.
The way I was looking at him.
The way I wanted both of us to keep doing just that because there’s clearly something wrong with me.
At the top, I let out a shaky exhale and crouch at the base of the branch.
“What do you see?” Nash calls, farther away than I expect when I glance down.
I turn on my flashlight. “Leaves.” I sift through the crevices at the pit where the branches twist together to meet. “Moss.” I keep digging through the organic matter. “A used condom.”
“What?” he shouts.
This time, I laugh, peering over the edge so I can see him. “Just kidding.”
“Ten minutes,” Leroy shouts from the other side of the fence.
I continue to search—there’s nothing. Leaves, moss, sticks, small random bits of trash that must have blown in. Damn.
Think, think, think.