Holly

  “Sure,” Holly said as she slipped into the dressing room. As soon as she was in decent clothes again, she planned to go to the library. Maybe Nick would still be there.

  For a moment she looked at herself in the dressing room mirror. She had on white underwear, lacy and nice, but not exactly set-a-man-on-fire. Between her breasts lay the necklace Nick had given her. What had he said? He liked the display case.

  Maybe instead of going to the library she’d go shopping. About fifty miles away was a huge shopping center. Maybe she’d see about buying some new underwear. For Lorrie, she told herself. For Lorrie.

  Once on the street, Taylor snapped open her cell phone and dialed a number from the memory. It was answered on the second ring.

  “If you want her, you’d better get down here,” Taylor said, then waited. “I really couldn’t care less about what I’m sure is your very interesting and unique sex life. Something is going on with her and I don’t like it.” She paused. “If I knew what it was, I’d fix it. I think it has to do with that guy who cuts the grass.” Pause. “No, she’s not having sex with him. She’s a prude. She—Good Lord! You might be right. Maybe he’s the one she—” Taylor cut herself off. “If you want to save that rotting old house of yours, I suggest that you get down here now!” She snapped the phone closed, then smiled at the memory of her stepsister in that awful bridesmaid dress. Dear, sweet, lovable, rich Holly, she thought. Holly, who everyone loved, who everyone adored. Holly, who had been given everything all her life.

  Still smiling, Taylor looked through the restaurant window at her fiancé Charles and waved. How much do I hate thee? she thought. Let me count the ways. Smiling more broadly, she went inside.

  Chapter Thirteen

  IT WAS AFTER DINNER AND HOLLY WAS IN HER bedroom. Her parents were in the sitting room downstairs, watching a movie on the TV, and Taylor was in her room talking on the phone to someone.

  Holly was cutting the price tags off her many new sets of underwear while watching the driveway for lights from Nick’s truck. It was already after nine, so where had he been all afternoon? She knew he wasn’t driving that monster truck he’d had in the garage when she’d met him, but was his beat-up old truck secretly a racer? Had he met with other truck-racing people and started placing bets? Was he now in the backseat with some girl with four feet of black hair and hoop earrings six inches in diameter?

  She told herself to get a grip. She had no right to be jealous. No right—

  She broke off because she saw Nick’s headlights coming down the long drive. Hastily, she shoved her new underwear into the shopping bag and pushed it under her bed. It wasn’t that she wanted to hide anything, but if Taylor saw, she’d tease Holly a lot.

  Quietly, Holly tiptoed down the stairs, grateful to the people who’d restored the house that the steps didn’t creak. She slipped out the kitchen door, down the stairs, and across the lawn to the tiny house where Nick was living. By rights the house should have been given to Roger and Phyllis, the couple who’d taken care of her parents for over twenty years. But a year ago, after James Latham had called Roger at 3:00 A.M. four nights in a row, they made new rules, one of which was that they would live off-site.

  She saw the back of Nick disappear into the little house, a grocery bag in each arm. She went to the truck, hauled out two more bags, and went to the house. She met Nick on his way out again. She saw his surprise, then his look of pleasure, then the way he tried to look emotionless.

  “Out for a walk?” he asked.

  She held the back door open for him. “Out to find out if you discovered anything.”

  “Maybe,” he said, setting the groceries on the counter. He began to put them away.

  The kitchen was tiny and there wasn’t room for two of them, so Holly sat on the countertop. Shamelessly, she stretched her bare legs, exposed by her short shorts, across the doorway to the other counter.

  “Like maybe what?” she asked, picking up a package of rice and pretending to read the label.

  Nick took the package out of her hand and put it in the cabinet. “So what’s this all about?” he asked, nodding toward her bare legs. “You want me to scratch your itch while your boyfriend’s out of town?”

  Holly started to pull her legs up, but made herself stay where she was. “So what’s put you in a bad mood? Get a librarian who wasn’t interested? Or did you make a pass at some motorcycle chick and she turned you down?”

  “None of the above. Could you move?”

  Holly hesitated, but Nick was frowning so deeply she pulled her legs up to let him pass. “What’s wrong with you?” she asked as he left the kitchen.

  “I’ve been wrestling with my conscience,” he said over his shoulder as he went down the hall to where there was a bedroom and bath.

  Holly got off the counter, went into the little living room, and looked about. It was as she remembered the building, nothing interesting or special about it. Marguerite had furnished it prettily, with a sofa and chairs and a few knickknacks that wouldn’t fit into the main house.

  But there wasn’t one item in the room that was personal to Nick. There were no photographs, no souvenirs, no books, not even any magazines.

  Nick came into the room, slipping a T-shirt over his head. “So what do you want?” Turning, he went back to the kitchen.

  What was wrong with him? She stood in the kitchen door and watched as he opened the refrigerator door and looked inside. She went to him, put her hands on his shoulders, and pushed him to sit down at the little two-seat table in front of the window. “You talk and I’ll make you a six-egg omelet. Deal?”

  “Yeah, okay,” he said with a grudging smile. He took a beer out of the ’fridge, opened it, then sat down at the table and watched her as he started talking. “The story wasn’t exactly as you told me. First of all, Jason’s trial and hanging were in a town a hundred miles from here.”

  “A hundred miles?!” She broke eggs into a bowl and began to mince onions and green pepper.

  “As far as I could tell, Arthur was worse than we thought. An early newspaper account said that Arthur had begged to have the trial moved to another town so Jason would be sure to receive justice.”

  “Because people in Edenton knew the victims?”

  “That’s what was reported, but one newspaper said the victim was ‘notorious’ for his dishonest scales. Half the men in town had threatened to kill him and his wife since she worked with him.”

  Holly stopped chopping and looked at Nick. “If that’s so, then it makes no sense to move the trial. The defense attorney could have put lots of people on the stand to swear that they, too, had threatened the victim.”

  Nick sipped his beer. “Wait. This gets better.”

  “You like mushrooms?”

  “Sure. The newspapers reported that Jason was very relaxed during the trial. In fact, one time he fell asleep and the judge bawled him out.”

  “He wasn’t worried about four witnesses against him?”

  “Apparently not, but then his three lawyers—”

  “Three!”

  “Yeah, three attorneys and two assistants. They made mincemeat of the witnesses. It was dark, they’d been drinking, and their characters weren’t of the best. This was before a person’s past criminal record was inadmissable in court, so every crime those four had been involved in was told to the jury.”

  Holly mixed the eggs and dumped them into a hot skillet lavished with butter. “So that left Arthur’s testimony to get his brother off.”

  When Nick didn’t answer, she looked at him, saw that he was frowning. “What’s upset you?” she asked.

  “I believe in family loyalty. It’s something my family thinks highly of. We’ve always believed—” He took a breath and looked at her. “Jason could sleep in the courtroom because he knew his brother would get him off by telling the truth. But when Arthur got on the stand he started crying and said he couldn’t lie, that Jason had not been with him that night.”

  “And the
lawyers couldn’t discredit him,” Holly said, sliding the fat, juicy omelet onto a plate and putting it in front of Nick.

  “Right. Hey! This is good. Arthur had been very careful to show no jealousy when Julia broke their engagement to marry his younger brother. In fact, Arthur had told half a dozen people that his brother had done him a favor. He hinted that he’d been planning to break the engagement anyway and that Jason had taken ‘used goods’ off his hands.”

  “ ‘Used goods,’ ” Holly said, sneering. “What a horrible concept. No one saw it as sour grapes?”

  “I guess not. Arthur had been too good an actor; he fooled everyone.”

  Holly finished cleaning the skillet and sat down across from Nick. “So Arthur cried on the stand and sent his innocent brother to the gallows.”

  “Exactly.”

  Absently, Holly picked up Nick’s bottle of beer and drank from it. “What about when Jason married Julia? That happened three days before he was hanged. Was he actually allowed out of jail or was he allowed to marry her while he was in jail because she was pregnant?” She looked at him. “Do you think Jason really took all of Belle Chere’s movable wealth and buried it? Or is that a myth?”

  Nick drained the beer and got up to get another bottle. “It’s true. Big hole with a tree planted over it.” As soon as he said it, his eyes widened and he put the beer to his lips.

  Holly picked up his fork and took a bite of his omelet. “Tree, huh?”

  “At least that’s my fantasy,” he said as he grinned much too wide.

  “A big hole with a tree planted over it. Your very own…? What did you call it? A fantasy?”

  “Yeah,” Nick said, eyes on his plate, his mouth full.

  “Golly. Most men I know fantasize about silk underwear.”

  “Yeah,” he said, looking at her with hot eyes. “A white bra and panties and a great big fan.”

  When he reached out his hand to take hers, she leaned back in her chair. “But you fantasize about big holes full of gold with a tree growing over it. So who planted the tree?”

  “How would I know? I didn’t get that far in my fantasy. Who do you think planted the tree?”

  She narrowed her eyes at him. “So help me, Nick Taggert, if you don’t tell me what you know I’ll go crying to my father and tell him I had sex with you and you broke my heart.”

  “Blackmail?” His eyes were twinkling.

  “The blackest.”

  He pushed his empty plate away and leaned back in his chair. “It’s not that I don’t want to tell you, it’s just that you won’t believe me.”

  “Why not? Disreputable source?”

  “Not really. I mean, she’s very reputable, it’s just that…”

  “What?” Holly asked, looking hard at him and racking her brain to figure out what he was being so hesitant about. She watched him open his mouth four times, but no words came out. If the treasure hadn’t been buried in 1842, she’d have thought that he was hiding the fact that he got the news from a criminal. From some pal of one of the participants. Maybe a cousin of his who was “doin’ time” for armed robbery.

  Nick kept nursing his beer, then seemed to become interested in the darkness outside the window.

  Who? she thought. What? “A clairvoyant,” Holly said at last, smiling at her own cleverness. “Did she look into a crystal ball or did you call someone over the Internet?”

  When Nick looked at her in anger, she frowned. He was certainly in a bad mood tonight. He got out of his chair and held the door open for her. “Good night, Miss Latham,” he said formally.

  Holly didn’t move and stayed in her chair. “You want to tell me what’s wrong with you?” she said.

  “Why? So you can share it with the man you plan to marry?”

  “No,” she said slowly, “because we’re friends. We can be friends, can’t we?”

  Nick took a while before he answered, while still holding the back door open. “The woman who told me this information is a clairvoyant, but she’s not a charlatan. She doesn’t take clients in person or over the Internet. In private, with no praise, and no reward, she helps the government find criminals, especially child molesters. She’s a relative of mine by marriage and I’ll hear no disparaging word against her.”

  “Okay,” Holly said softly, looking at him. He really did take family loyalty seriously!

  Nick closed the door, got two beers out of the refrigerator, handed her one, then went into the living room, Holly following him. She sat on the couch and he took a chair across from her.

  “You okay?” she asked after a while.

  “Yeah. Too soft a heart, I guess. Brother against brother. I hate that.”

  “Have any of your brothers betrayed you?”

  “You want to quit treating me like I’m a nut case?”

  “Actually, I was thinking that if you don’t tell me soon what the clairvoyant said I’ll throw this bottle of beer at you.”

  Nick smiled, drank deeply of his beer, and smiled more. “That’s better.”

  “You’re not an alcoholic, are you?”

  “Nymphomaniac,” he said seriously. “It’s a real problem with me.” He looked at her with lazy, sexy eyes.

  She picked up a pillow and threw it at him, but he caught it. “Tell me!” she demanded.

  “The treasure is in a small cave with a hole in the top. The two men who stole it put it in there, then covered the hole and planted a tree over it. The tree’s big now so you can’t see the hole.”

  “And?”

  “And if we search through the records and use our brains we’ll be able to find it.”

  “What else?”

  “That’s it. We can find the treasure.”

  Holly blinked at him. “Did you get a date on that discovery? How long before we find it? How much research do we have to do? If I have to read all the papers in the attic I’ll be a hundred years old before—”

  “Before you can present it to Lorrie and claim the prize of becoming Mrs. Belle Chere?”

  Suddenly, she was sick of his bad mood. “What should I do? Marry you instead? Maybe we could live here, in this house. Maybe my father would give this house to us as a wedding present.”

  “At least it would be better than selling your soul for a house!”

  “You make me sick,” she said, standing up.

  He stood up. “You don’t exactly make me feel great. What twenty-first-century woman connives as you have to get a man to the altar? You’re throwing yourself at me, parading around in your tiny underwear, but you’re trying to buy him.”

  “That’s disgusting! I’m doing no such thing. I was on my way here to see Lorrie when I met you.”

  “Yeah and what did you do? Attacked me in the backseat of the car, that’s what.”

  She stepped close to him, looking him in the eye. “I was grateful and stupid. I should have known that a man like you wouldn’t know the meaning of the word ‘honor.’ ”

  “And this Lorrie does? Today I read of a trial in which one of your Lorrie’s ancestors sent his own brother to be hanged. All for that house you’re selling yourself for. You’re a fitting match for the Beaumonts.”

  “Why you—”

  Holly drew back her hand to strike him, but Nick caught her wrist. For a moment they stood there, breathing hard in anger, then the next moment their mouths were together and they fell onto the couch.

  Shirts, buttons, shorts, trousers, all came off in seconds. To Holly it seemed as though it had been years since she’d felt Nick’s hands on her body. Today, in that stifling attic, with sweat dripping off her, she’d wanted him, wanted to feel his damp, hot body against hers, but, as he’d promised, he’d stayed away from her.

  Now the desire of the morning, and the wait of the evening, fueled her passion until her fingertips were digging into his skin and pulling him closer and closer.

  Her left leg was flung over the back of the couch, and her right knee was bent as Nick entered her hard. She moaned and his mo
uth overtook hers.

  Their passion had built throughout the day until they were desperate for each other. When the top half of Holly slid off the couch, Nick went with her until they were making love on the floor, pounding, desperate, hot love.

  When they came, Holly arched her hips and Nick held her to him.

  For a moment they stayed together, shuddering in the aftershock of their passion.

  Nick rolled off of her, then pulled her head onto his shoulder. “Feel better?” he asked and she nodded against him. “Me, too. You wouldn’t want to move to the bedroom, would you?”

  “I can’t,” she said. “My father—”

  He kissed her to silence. “Tomorrow’s my day off. How about if I rent a boat and we go—”

  “Treasure hunting?” Holly asked.

  “I was thinking we could go fishing.”

  “Belle Chere has—”

  “No Belle Chere, no Beaumonts, no Jason or Arthur. Just a boat and some fishing poles.” When she didn’t answer he said, “Okay, you win. Picnic on the dock at Belle Chere and I’ll haul down six of those trunks full of papers for you.”

  “Oh, Nick, would you?” She sat up on one elbow and looked at him. “That really would be wonderful. You could fish and I could read.” She kissed him to thank him, but he put his hand on the back of her head and deepened the kiss.

  After a moment she pulled away and saw the clock on the top of the bookcase. “It’s nearly eleven! I have to go. If my father…” She waved her hand to indicate she had no idea what he’d do if he found out she was gone.

  “And you’re how old?”

  “To him, I’m about eight.”

  Hastily, Holly dressed, then stood and looked at Nick, still lying on the floor, completely nude. For a moment she fought the urge to throw off her clothes and lie down beside him. She’d like to spend the night with him. She’d like to lie in his arms and snuggle all night.

  “I have to go,” she said quickly before she changed her mind, then she turned on her heel and ran out of the house. Minutes later she quietly opened the kitchen door of the big house—and nearly ran into Taylor.