Dangerous Tease (14 page)

As threats went, this was a good one. Glenda Layton had been a helicopter parent before
there was even a word for it. Since she'd retired, she'd devoted most of her energy to trying to run her four children's lives, something the siblings resisted more than a cat fights taking a bath.

A crash in the office sounded before Sam got a chance to respond to Hank's challenge. He, Hank and Josie sprinted toward the ruckus.

“I'm telling you, I didn't do this!” Uncle Harlan shook with
emotion as he jabbed his finger into the campus police officer's chest. “I was sitting her waiting for my nephew when I heard a noise. The next thing I know, I'm waking up in here staring at the spit-shine of your boots.”

The man, identified as Smith on his name badge, swept aside Uncle Harlan's finger. “The office was unlocked when you entered?”

A flush rose fast across Uncle Harlan's cheeks.
“Not exactly.”

“And exactly how was it?” The officer waited, eyebrows arched, for whatever tale Uncle Harlan planned to spin.

Sam couldn't wait to hear this answer himself. He locked his office whenever he left—and sometimes when he was still there, depending on the grades he'd given out during midterms.

“Alright, I may have fiddled with the lock a bit, but I did not do this.” Uncle Harlan
waved his hand toward the worst of the disaster zone.

“Uh-huh.” Smith glanced up at Sam. “Any ideas?”

Plenty
. “Not a single one.”

Smith eyeballed him skeptically, but Sam refused to give an inch. His orderly world had been shuffled and he would be the one to set it to rights again.

“Can I go now? I need to go get my nose X-rayed.”

Smith leveled a cop-to-cop gaze at Hank. “Can you vouch your
uncle won't disappear?”

“He won't unless he wants to miss out on Mom's baked mac and cheese for the rest of his life.” Hank led Uncle Harlan to the door, stopping just under the archway. “We'll talk soon, Sam.”

Not if he could help it.

After a quick discussion with Smith, Josie and Sam were back in his spanking-clean Volvo, a stark reminder of the mess they'd just left. Damn, the whole thing
pissed him off and put him right in the center of attention for Dry Creek's gossips. The place he'd hated being more than anywhere else.

Then again, he seemed to be doing all sorts of things that were out of character whenever he was near Josie. It wasn't that she pushed him to be someone different. Strangely enough, he just felt more himself around her.

Josie cleared her throat. “So where
to now?”

“O'Neill's.” The single word was all he could manage as he pulled out of the parking lot, the smell of her amber perfume swirling around him in the enclosed space, distracting him from the plan he'd started working on as soon as he'd gotten the news about the break-in. Years of research about Rebecca and the family jewels she'd supposedly brought West, along with the map in his pocket,
meant he had the best chance of finding Rebecca's Bounty. Once he found it, the woman who beguiled him could go back to Vegas and his life would return to normal. Exactly what he wanted. He didn't give a damn about the treasure itself. Now he wanted to find it just to check that off his to-do list and get his life back to the way it always had been. And should be.

They drove in silence, if not
in peace. Josie sat ramrod straight in the passenger's seat, the afternoon sun glinting in her hair as they drove south from Dry Creek. Tension as tightly wound as the platinum curls surrounding her heart-shaped face filled the car's interior.

“Okay, so what's the plan you're cooking up in that head of yours?” She arched an eyebrow at him.

“What makes you think I have a plan?”

“Of course you
do. You wouldn't make breakfast without a plan so you sure as hell wouldn’t go on a treasure hunt without one.”

“You know me that well, do you?”

“You’re the one who just told me all about how much you love routine, but I know plenty more about you than just that. I know you love your family and this town. I know you are curious about everything. And I know that if you'd ever let anyone close
enough to scratch your anal-retentive surface, they'd find there's so much more to you than tan furniture and mad organizational skills.”

Sam concentrated on the empty road ahead of them much more than needed. He had no clue how to respond to her declaration. On unsure emotional ground, he resorted to the best self-defense move he had—being a prick.

“What makes you think I'm going to help you
find the treasure? Maybe I'm planning to turn you and that buffoon Linc over to Hank as soon as I get back to town.”

For once, Josie didn't have a smart-mouthed rejoinder—something Sam didn't realize he'd miss until it wasn't there.

The fallow, snow-covered fields whipped by as they sped down the highway, clocking in at fifteen miles over the speed limit. Being the sheriff's brother in a small
town had its benefits, but getting out of speeding tickets from the state patrol wasn't one of them. He eased his foot off the gas and settled back into a more professorial pace. Much more like him.

“Are you going to tell Hank?”

Her soft question thrummed his conscience. “No, I won't tell him.”

“So you'll help me find Rebecca's Bounty?”

“No.” He was going to find the treasure on his own. At
this point, getting her any deeper involved than she'd already made herself would just put her in more danger, and he wasn't willing to risk that—even if they did have to go their separate ways. Josie had burrowed her way into him, making a place for herself in the nooks and crannies of his soul that had stayed vacant for far too long. If he wasn't careful, he'd never be able to get her back out.
Hell, it was probably too late.

“Then what is your plan?” Her cheeks had turned beet red.

He parked the car in front of the only guest cabin at O’Neill’s where the windows hadn't been shuttered for the winter. “Not to see you until I have the treasure.”

U
nder the cover of darkness, Josie inched up the window to Sam's house. Her held breath burned in her chest as she strained to hear the slightest noise—or the blaring of an alarm system. After two break-ins in two days, if anyone in this small town needed a security system, it was him. But instead of an alarm, the only sound she heard was the rushing of blood in her ears.

Light bounced off the glass and Josie ducked behind a snow-covered bush. The beam hadn't come from inside, but from a car rolling toward the house. As it neared, Josie picked out the Dry Creek County Sheriff's decal on the passenger door. The cruiser drove slowly down the block and past Sam's pin-neat yard. Even though she knew the evergreen shrub shielded her from exposure, the urge to skulk away
didn't abate until the cruiser turned the corner.

She didn’t know where Sam had hidden the map, but she hoped like hell it was filed away in his office just waiting to be liberated.

After he dropped his bomb earlier in the car before dumping her at the cabin, she'd gone shopping. She now owned a heavy coat, gloves and some butt-ugly hiking boots that could withstand the snow while she hunted
down Rebecca’s Bounty. Glancing down, she saw the ankle-deep snow surrounding her new boots but her toes were toasty warm inside. Grudgingly, she had to admit the boots felt much better than the shoes she'd brought with her from Vegas.

Enough procrastinating, Winarsky. Just climb in the window already
.

Girding herself for her first breaking and entering, she pushed the window the rest of the
way up, then grasped the shoulder-high ledge. It took a couple of tries, but she managed to haul her ass through the window, balance precariously for a few seconds with the ledge biting into her hips and then she oh-so-graciously slid face first onto the floor. She remained immobile for a few minutes, her right cheek on the cool hardwood floor, listening to see if her entry had been detected. Getting
to catch her breath was icing on the cake.

After examining the world's smallest dust bunny under Sam's desk for a few minutes, Josie figured her career as a cat burglar had begun in earnest. Time to get off the floor.

She targeted the file cabinet first, stepping as softly as possible while wearing heavy hiking boots. Every whispered clomp on the wood floor made her blood pressure shoot higher.

Finally at her destination, she pulled the metal handle on the drawer marked Q—S. Flicking her fingers across the files, she discovered the fat file marked Rebecca's Bounty. She'd say one thing for Sam's intense organizational skills: he sure made B and E easy. Josie plucked the file from its spot and shuffled through the papers inside in search of the map or another clue that would help find
the treasure. True, she didn't know exactly what she was looking for, but it had to be there.

“Nice boots.”

Josie jumped at the sound of the all-too-familiar voice that had called out her name the other night as he’d squeezed her ass and pounded his cock deep inside her.

The overhead light snapped on. Sam sat in a chair by the office door, wearing only a pair of navy pinstriped pajama pants
and a crooked smile. “Looking for this?”

“Yes.” The man or the piece of paper rolled up in his hands? Fuck if she knew.

Deliciously tousled, he didn't look anything like an uptight history professor. Gone were the starched collars, replaced with rippled abs and an ornery glint in his tawny eyes. Josie had to avert her gaze before she drowned in a testosterone wave. How many times had she challenged
him to stop hiding behind the ironed Chinos? What the hell had she been thinking? A shiver ran up her spine.

“And you were just going to take it and then hunt down Rebecca's Bounty on your own, huh?”

“Yes.” The short answer was all she could manage without drooling on herself as the memory of trailing her fingers through the springy hair dusting his pecs hardened her nipples. Her gaze followed
his happy trail to where it disappeared beneath his string-tie waistband, the growing bulge a bit lower giving away that he wasn't unaffected, either. The realization sparked the synapses in her brain, pulling her out of the haze of lust.

Leaning forward until his elbows rested on his knees, Sam flashed a predatory smile her way. “That's not going to happen.”

Irked at his overblown confidence,
Josie cocked out a hip and curled her lips into a sardonic smile. “Says who?”

“Reality.” He waved the sheet of paper at her. “Without this, you don't know where the starting point is. You're not familiar with the area. And I think I'm putting it mildly when I say you're not exactly the outdoorsy type.”

Right, right and right. She hated that. “I figured Uncle Harlan would probably be willing
to help me look.”

Sam grinned. “If he was still in town, I'm sure he'd be more than happy to help. But one visit from Mom while he was in the ER and he hoofed it back to his home in Oklahoma.”

The urge to scream her frustration nearly overwhelmed her. Every nerve in her body pinched and pulled and heat washed over her skin like a tsunami of anger. Her life had gone completely out of her command.
For all the shit she gave Sam about being an anal-retentive control freak, she was his Xerox copy in every way except color. Not something she wanted to clue him in on—ever.

“So that leaves you.”

“Yep.” His eyes crinkled at the corners in a way that made her stomach do a flip.

Damn her traitorous body and that supreme look of confidence on his handsome face. He thought he'd won, the little
shit. Time to regain the upper hand, though how the hell she lost it still baffled her. “You're not getting rid of me. I'm going with you in the morning.”

“Well, looks like we'll be partnering up after all.” He leaned back in the chair, not even trying to conceal the look of superiority on his face. “Working with me will be a lot easier than clocking me over the head with a blunt object and trying
to figure out the starting point on your own.”

She hefted up a thick book about the history of Dry Creek County. Just holding it in her hand made her wrist shake. “I don't know, you bring out the compulsion to chuck things in your direction.”

His deep laugh caressed her skin as he bolted up from the chair. In an instant, he stood beside her. Her skin vibrated at his nearness and yearning filled
her like a fast-building summer storm.

One of his long fingers traced down the open V of her black T-shirt, stopping only when he reached the pointed end. There he lingered, not pulling her shirt lower but also not removing the digit. Her pulse raced.

“We already know we work well together in private.” His lips teased along her temple. “Why not see how we function in public?”

“Why the change
of heart? I thought you were going all Lone Ranger on me?”

“Because tonight just proves you'll dog my steps no matter where I go.” He pulled a curl straight and let it boing back into place.

“True.” Being within three feet of Sam Layton for longer than five minutes had her squeezing her thighs together in a vain attempt to ease the ache building in her clit. But she couldn't see a way around
it. If she wanted to save her parents, she needed the map and a guide. She needed Sam. “So let's do this.”

“Since you asked so nicely.” He unrolled the paper and laid it down in the middle of his desk, securing the edges with a magnifying glass on one end and a cornhusk paperweight on the other.

Josie couldn't hold back her groan. It wasn't the treasure map, but instead another damn map.

“This is a historical map of Dry Creek County.” He pointed to a rectangle in the northwest corner, his thigh pressing from knee to hip against hers. “That is McPherson's Bluff. The marking behind it represent the badlands.”

“What are badlands?” Her voice cracked on badlands as she tried to ignore the sexual havoc his nearness evoked.

“It's a barren area that's suffered serious erosion. It has
lots of dry ravines and rock formations. Even back in Rebecca's day, it was an inhospitable place to be.” His finger traced a line a few inches east. “This was Rebecca's homestead, the place she bought after leaving the wagon train. People have been using this as the starting point for a treasure hunt for decades and coming up empty.”