Chapter Fourteen
Hawk blazed a trail, selecting routes that concealed them better than the simpler paths. Ahead, a tree was down, and he picked his way through the underbrush to skirt the branches, glancing back at Sinead.
She wore her hair back and a ball cap pulled low in an effort to keep the gnats out of her eyes. As she stepped over a branch, she swatted at the small cloud of insects that stayed away from him.
She stopped walking and looked at the thick, fallen trunk. “How old do you think this tree is?”
He took in the size of the trunk. “I don’t know. Maybe a hundred fifty years old?”
She planted her hand on the bark and looked up at him with awe on her beautiful face. “Eli Winthrop could have walked past this very tree.”
His chest tightened. “He probably did.”
She trailed her fingers over it and shook her head. “Good to know that the DNA between generations didn’t change. If there really is a mine, it’s so far away from the cabin. That’s something my father would have done.” Her lips curved into a sad smile.
Hawk waited in silence for her to process the moment.
When she started walking again, he fell back into the slow rhythm of their pace. The birds flitted around the treetops. Somewhere in the distance, a woodpecker tapped on a tree.
“Do you miss him?” he asked after a few moments.
She glanced at him, surprise in her eyes. “My father? Of course I do.”
“I just wondered, since he wasn’t as supportive as you would have liked.” He ducked under a branch.
“Doesn’t mean I didn’t have good times with him.”
They skirted the tree at last and he located the best route through the forest again.
“What about your father, Heath?”
He stepped wrong and almost lost his footing but righted himself by grabbing a sapling.
“I don’t remember him. He left when my brother and I were young.
All I know is he worked in construction.
One day he just never came home. I never missed him.
I had my grandpa for the things boys need—playing catch and going to Boy Scout meetings. ”
“I’m glad you had him.”
They continued in silence a while, but as usual, they didn’t seem to need words to fill a void—their quiet came with a feeling of ease, as if they’d been friends forever.
As the forest opened up, sunlight brightened the world. He paused to scan the area and excitement tugged at him.
“I think this is it. Booth Ridge.” The view between the trees revealed open air as the ground fell away.
“Really?” Sticks crunched as Sinead rushed up beside him. She had her phone in hand, the photo of the ceiling carving pulled up. She looked around. “Where are the springs?”
He searched the landscape. “Let’s look for them. We’re searching for wet spots on the ground or clusters of rocks where water would bubble between them.”
The chill of the morning still lingered in the shadows, a cooling relief after their hot march through the thick woods. The ridge ran for a good half mile, and he didn’t let Sinead out of his sight, aware of her position at all times as well as their surroundings.
He clocked that the forest hadn’t gone silent, but a prickle on his nape kept him vigilant.
“Heath!” Excitement echoed in her voice. “I think I found one!”
He hurried over to her and stared at the ground at her feet. Sure enough, the leaves were damp. He crouched and sifted through them, gauging whether the water came from the last rain.
Seeing a fresh trickle of clear water, he tipped his head back to shoot her a grin. “You’re right.”
They set off again in search of the two other springs. Within twenty minutes, they located both of them.
She grabbed his hand, eyes twinkling with excitement.
“Get out your phone again. Let’s check the carving.”
They hunched over the photo, studying the line of the ridge and the three springs. Then he expanded the corner where a cluster of small strike marks caught his eye. They were straight, evenly spaced. Nothing like the flowing lines of the route itself.
“These at the bottom. Looks like they’re counting something.”
Sinead leaned in close, her hair catching a stray beam of morning light, and they both stared at the marks.
At the same time, they spoke. “Paces.”
She let out a short laugh, eyes bright in a way that made his heart flex hard. She started counting, murmuring under her breath, finger tracing each strike.
“Okay—I’m getting somewhere around forty, but a few of these look lighter. They might just be scratches, not actual tally marks.”
“It’s an estimate either way. Winthrop’s stride wouldn’t match his prospector buddies’. His pace would differ depending on his height, gait. Yours will be shorter than mine too.”
“We’ll be close enough.”
He grinned, and she grinned back. Electricity snapped between them as they both buzzed with the same current of excitement.
They set off, and he deliberately slowed the pace, refusing to grow careless in their rush. They couldn’t afford missteps that would end in disaster. Behind him, Sinead counted paces low under her breath.
The air was sharp with resin and damp earth, threaded with the bite of pine. Somewhere off to the left, one of the springs trickled over the ground, the sound rising and falling depending on the wind.
A twig snapped behind them.
He froze instantly, hand out to stop her. His senses prickled as he sliced a look through the brush, analyzing shapes and shadows to pick out anything that didn’t belong.
He pitched his voice low. “You see anything?”
She edged another inch closer to him. “No.”
A branch shifted twenty yards out, leaves trembling like something had brushed past. Hawk’s hand drifted toward his weapon on reflex, every instinct from years of ambushes screaming at him not to assume it was nothing, not after the shots fired days ago.
They waited, holding their breath. The only sound was the stream and the wind raking through the canopy. Nothing else moved.
“Just wind.” Though he didn’t let his guard down even as he indicated they should move on.
“I don’t see any squirrels with scopes.”
Their gazes met, the joke she’d made on the last ridge echoing between them. Tension still coiled in his shoulders, but he huffed out a laugh, grateful for her easygoing manner even as his instincts refused to stand down.
They set off again, counting paces, the only sounds the ordinary rustle of nature being nature.
Then the trees broke—
And there it was.
A dark opening in the rock face, half-swallowed by decades of fallen branches, rocks and debris piled thick across the opening like the mountain tried to forget it existed.
Sinead whipped out a hand and grasped his arm hard, nails biting into his skin. “That’s it! That’s the mine!”
She took a hasty step forward, and he caught her against him. “Let me check it out first.”
She quivered against his side, practical. “You’re right. There might be a sleeping bear in there.”
His eyes crinkled with amusement. “With three cubs.”
“Or a whole den of wolves.”
“A whole den of rattlesnakes.”
They shared a smile.
He motioned for her to step aside, ensuring her back was to the rock. He drew out his flashlight and shined a beam into the small slit between trees. Seeing that no eyes were looking back at him, he began to clear the debris.
Sinead pitched in, moving rotted branches while he hauled the rock until the opening was clear enough to reveal a shaft cut into the stone. Beyond the first few feet of daylight, the inside was a dark void.
He swung his gaze to her, then back at the mouth of the mine, weighing his options. “You can wait here. I’ll go inside first.”
She raised a brow. “Sure you don’t want me to check for those rattlesnakes first?”
“Ha-ha,” he said in a flat voice, though the corner of his mouth twitched.
She stepped up beside him. “We go in together.”
He didn’t argue, just lifted his flashlight. It cut through the dark, illuminating old timber supports and the glint of metal deeper in. The hush seemed to swell in his ears. Dust hung in the beam of light, the air thick with the smell of wet stone and time.
Sinead stood close to him, her warmth stroking his skin. She sucked in a gasp and turned in a slow circle, taking it all in, awe written plain across her face, eyes wide and bright when she turned to him.
“Heath.”
His heart pounded hard. “What is it, darlin’?”
Her lips were parted on a puff of air, her eyes suddenly burning. “I love you.”
The words hit him harder than anything in that mine ever could.
* * * * *
Hawk couldn’t look more astounded if one of those snakes they joked about bit him in the ass.
“Sinead—”
Before he could tell her that he didn’t feel the same, that they’d only known each other days, that no one could fall so fast, Sinead turned and marched deeper into the mine.
She heard his boots behind her a beat later. She didn’t need to see his face again to sense the shock rolling off him in waves.
She could hardly believe she’d blurted it out—three words she hadn’t planned, hadn’t rehearsed, hadn’t meant to say while standing in, of all places, an old mine.
It had to be the discovery mixed with everything they’d survived to get here that made her blurt that out. Maybe she was having a poisoned fever dream after eating so many wild nuts and mushrooms.
He shone his flashlight in front of her, and she used the glow of her phone to illuminate the rock walls. They were streaked with minerals, and the timber supports were black and looked soft with age but still held after all these decades.
The air felt different than outside. Cooler, heavier, carrying the musty scent of a place that never saw daylight and probably held the ghosts of those who lost their lives for this mine.
Her phone screen blacked out as her phone fully lost battery life, plunging half the space into shadow.
“Do you want the battery pack to charge your phone?” he asked.
“Later. We can use your flashlight for now.”
They worked their way forward by the glow of Hawk’s flashlight. A few feet ahead, a rusted metal box sat along one wall.
“There.” She pointed and he beamed the light on it. The metal box was filled with old candles, their wax yellow with time. She reached for one, and Hawk’s voice echoed through the space, making her pull her hand back.
“We shouldn’t light it. We don’t know if the air’s good back here. Old mines trap gas sometimes, and I don’t want us to find out the hard way. Not after everything it took to get here.”
She nodded. “We’ll stick with the flashlight.”
They slowly made their way farther inside. Stacked against the wall in a haphazard pile were crates, the slats gray and the nails rusted orange. Hawk passed her the light, and she held it on the nearest crate.
He pried it open with careful fingers. The wood splintered, and she gasped before she fully registered why.
Gold.
Nuggets of every size. Some no bigger than a pebble, others the size of her fist.
“Oh my god.” Her voice was barely a whisper. “Heath. It’s real. It’s actually real.”
He ran his fingers through the nuggets. “A hundred fifty years and no one found this,” he murmured.
He opened a second crate and then a third, all filled to the top with a fortune in gold. The fourth crate held glass jars filled with gold dust.
They kept moving deeper, testing the ground with each step as the shaft narrowed the farther back they went. Suddenly, Hawk’s arm banded around her chest and he hauled her back against him hard enough to force the breath out of her.
“What—”
Whatever she was about to say cut off as he waved the flashlight into the empty black space where her boot had been about to land. A chasm of blackness that would have swallowed her whole.
Her heart hammered under his arm, and her breath came in sharp hitches as she realized the hole was large enough, deep enough, that the flashlight beam never found a bottom.
She quivered.
“It’s okay,” he murmured against her hair, arm still locked tight around her, not loosening even after the danger passed.
She gave a jerky nod, leaning into him a moment longer. Eventually, her mind returned to the crates of gold behind them and what it all meant.
“I know exactly what I’m doing with it. I’m going to use every cent for the ranch.” She spun to face him.
In the dim glow of the flashlight, his lips tugged at one corner. “You’re going to buy a ranch?”
“No.” She shook her head, already turning over the plan in her mind. Pieces dropped into place faster than she could speak them aloud.
She searched his eyes. “This is for the Black Heart. For the vets there. I have so many ideas, Hawk. Proper funding for the program can go so much further! It means more resources instead of scraping by on government grants and family support.”
Something unreadable moved behind his eyes. “See, this is exactly why you’re so annoying.” A small smile tugged at his lips. “You found a fortune but you won’t get anything out of it besides a building with your name on it.”
“I don’t want my name on a building.” The words came out in a fierce rush.
“I don’t need the tax write-off, Heath. I want to help, without any strings.
I don’t need a gala where people clap politely and forget my name by dessert.
I’ve watched those guys at the ranch. The way they gravitate toward Navy and treat each other…
taking care of the people around them like instinct.
They still have so much to give, and I want to make sure they keep healing so they can give it. ”
Her throat closed around the sudden lump in her throat.
Hawk’s gaze roamed over her face. His expression made her throat tighter.
He reached for her hand, and she squeezed his, letting him lead her toward the sunlight. She was still sketching out logistics in her head—top-of-the-line prosthetics for every vet who needed one and more horses for therapy if they needed them.
But underneath all if it, an insistent thought ran through her mind. How was she supposed to take back what she’d said to Hawk in that mine?
She could laugh it off, blame the adrenaline rush of the discovery or the thin mountain air. She could pretend she’d never said it at all.
But walking beside her lover, she realized she didn’t want to take it back.
She hadn’t told him she loved him in the heat of the moment. She hadn’t said it in some rush of victory.
She’d meant it.
Every. Single. Word.