Madison's Quest (5 page)

He imagined her fingers replacing his, followed by her
mouth, by a trail of kisses to his dick.

He forced his hand downward, realized where that’d lead
Madison’s gaze and stopped rather than have the hard-on get more painful. Fuck.
He needed to get his head in the game!

“So there was no lead-up? Just out of the blue, Bio-dad found
you?”

“That about sums it up.”

She lifted the paper with the clue on it. “Thoughts?”

“Let me read it again.”

It’d buy him some time before putting Tyler and Madison
together.

He looked at the clue. It hadn’t changed or become any
clearer.

From low to high, four steps beneath oak trees meant to
broaden, narrow instead. Dreams and desire are obliterated with rigid focus and
a tenacious, dog-like climb toward a fifth step that heads toward an unwanted
destination. Heart’s passion and blue-sky promise become lost in a clouded view
as Days progress by the dozens, counting down like a shuffled dance 5-3-1.

Madison said, “The numbers sound like a combination lock with
the shuffled dance meaning something like left five, right three, left one, or
the same sequence, only starting to the right. Any place with a view famous for
its oak trees? Though I guess that begs the question, do we assume San
Francisco?”

“The Bay Area covers a lot of territory, but I’d put my
money on the city. There are plenty of famous views. Nothing pops as far as an
oak grove goes.”

She sucked on her bottom lip.

He suppressed a moan, shifted in his seat, trying to keep
his thoughts from going where they naturally wanted to go—where part of him
thought they were
supposed
to go.

Maybe he should swing by Cole’s place.

The poker game would still be going. He could introduce
Madison… And what? Ask Lyric or Braden if Madison was the piece of his personal
puzzle that’d been missing?

And if they said yes, wonder how much they’d
seen
when
it came to his thing for Tyler?

Pass.

“Bulldog said this is about you getting to know your bio-dad,
so a view isn’t important unless it tells you something about this guy, right?”

“Right.” She rubbed her bottom lip. “The lawyer in Richmond
said the exact same thing, about Bio-dad wanting me to get to know him.”

“So what do you usually do when you meet someone?”

“Look for things in common.”

“Exactly. So what does Bio-dad think you have in common with
him? Dreams and desires. What does that mean for you?”

“Music. Making it as a musician, as a songwriter.”

Until her mother’s call, and learning about her father’s
cancer, the need had overshadowed everything else in her life since restoring
Myrtle and getting over Elijah’s death. And even before then, music had
dominated her life. That’s why she’d gone to a different high school than the
majority of her friends, that’s where she’d met Elijah, because he’d done the
same.

Her breath caught. “High school. That’s what this clue is
about. That’s what he means when he says the
rigid focus to climb onto a
fifth step
. My parents wanted me to go to college. I couldn’t put off the
music, but that’s not even the main reason I think he wants us to go to his
high school.”

She used her finger to underline
a tenacious, dog-like
climb
. “When I saw your grandfather, I thought he probably got his nickname
by being tenacious, but he also kind of resembles a Bulldog. That was our high-school
mascot. A bulldog.”

Her finger moved along the clue. “
Heart’s passion
would
be the color red. Then there’s
blue-sky promise,
followed by
a
clouded view
, which would be white.”

Shane grinned. “Let me guess, your school colors were red,
white and blue.”

“You got it.
Beneath oak trees
has to mean the
campus. Or maybe it’s part of the school name.”

“On it.” Shane was already lifting his phone, Googling,
feeling juiced a minute later. “How about Oakhurst Preparatory? Does that sound
like a winner to you?”

“Yes.”

The huskiness in her voice had him nearly pitching forward,
a dive that would have carried her down and put him on top.

He resisted the urge, but only because they weren’t alone.

Standing, he said, “The keycard will tell us if we’re
right.”

He offered her a hand because he wanted at least that much contact.

She took it and he tugged, bringing her nearly flush against
him. Close enough their breaths mingled and the heat from their bodies merged.

She was the perfect height. For him. For Tyler.

Don’t go there!

Only it was already too late, too easy to see them in a
tangle of arms and legs and sweat-slick bodies.

He stepped back, releasing her.

She said, “If we’re looking for a combination lock, the most
likely place is on a locker. There are probably going to be hundreds of them to
choose from.”

“Could also be a locked cabinet in a classroom. Something
with the letter D since he’s made a point of capitalizing it in
days
,
when it normally wouldn’t be. He only provided the one cardkey. Doubt it’s
going to open anything other than the front door.”

Shane stopped in Bulldog’s doorway. “We’re checking out a
place called Oakhurst Prep. You know anything about it?”

Bulldog leaned back in his chair. “A lot of very rich, very
powerful people send their kids there.”

Shane’s gut iced. Easy to think someone in Bio-dad’s family
didn’t want Madison brought into the family fold. Easy to imagine someone
hoping she’d be shaken badly enough by a hit-and-run to go straight back to the
airport and catch a flight away from San Francisco.

Tough fucking luck for them. She had him now and he’d keep
her safe the same way Cole had kept Renata safe. He’d help Madison see this
thing through.

“Did whoever called in the favor go to Oakhurst?”

“I don’t know.”

Which wasn’t the same as
I can’t know
.

“You’ll check into it?”

A nod said yes.

“Okay. We’re gone.”

“Be careful, Shane.”

He flashed a grin at his grandfather. “Always.”

Oakhurst Prep was ivy-covered red brick and what had to be a
multi-million-dollar view of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Looking at it, it was easy for Madison to silently tell
Bio-dad,
you should have walked away at eighteen, lived your own life even
if it meant waiting tables or tending bar instead of taking Mom and Dad’s money
and dancing to their tune
.

But even thinking it, her stomach roiled because wasn’t she
doing the same, jumping through
his
hoops for money?

If her parents had pushed harder for her to go to college,
used love as a weapon or the fear of disappointing and hurting them, if they
hadn’t encouraged her music, believed in her…

I might have caved
.
But that doesn’t mean I’m like
Bio-dad.

Shane’s hand covered hers.

She was grateful for the warmth, the support. She was glad
he was with her.

“Ready?” he asked.

“As I’ll ever be.”

They got out of the Jeep, his hand recapturing hers for the
walk to a front door engraved with a crest that included a pair of lions.

She took the folded envelope from her pocket and fished out
the cardkey. “No guarantee that going in won’t set off an alarm.”

“True. But this was too well-orchestrated. Wouldn’t surprise
me if the place has been cleared to keep some dedicated teacher or after-hours
janitor from calling the cops if they caught us prowling the halls. Can’t see Bio-dad
going to all this trouble just so he can play the hero and bail you out of
jail.”

That brought a smile. She could picture Shane charging in
and
being
the hero.

“Here goes,” she said, sliding the keycard into the entry
system to the right of the front door.

A green light flashed.

A lock disengaged with a muted click.

She opened the door. Exhaled when they entered the building
and the only sound to fill her ears was the banging of her heart.

Shane placed his hand at the base of her spine. “I called
it. Am I good or am I good?”

She laughed, turned her head to look at him. “I wouldn’t
have figured you for one of those insecure guys who needs feedback on his
performance.”

His thumb stroked her back. “You could always try me and
find out.”

It was getting harder to think about leaving California
without doing just that. “I’ll take that under consideration.”

He sent her a bad-boy smile. “Let’s find what we came here
for.”

The keycard didn’t open the school office.

“Onward,” Shane said.

They walked down a cream-colored hallway that held smaller
offices, all needing keycards to enter and all with names engraved on small
bronze plates.

Shane stroked her back. “Let’s make this more interesting. Last
door on the right, fifty bucks says the name has a
p
in it.”

She had to smile. Being with Shane made her want to take chances.

“Okay, fifty bucks on there
not
being a
p
in
the name.”

They got to the end of the hallway. The hand at her back
slid to curl around her waist, halting her. It burned through shirt and skin,
pouring crazy need straight into her bloodstream.

“Damn,” Shane muttered as they both read the name Blanchard
on the plaque.

Shane’s hand left her waist and she felt the loss.

He pulled out a wallet, flipped it open and extracted a
crisp fifty.

Handing it to her, he said, “Doubt it’ll stay in your
possession long enough to spend.”

“We’ll see. I plan on doubling it.”

He grinned. “You can try. Right or left?”

The hallways were nearly identical. Each of them was lined
with lockers and closed classroom doors.

“Left,” she said, looking at the lettering on the first
locker, 001. Across from it, lettering above a doorway indicated A-1.

Ninth through twelfth grades, how many classrooms? How many
lockers? If the hallways were lettered, then everyone would know locker one
would be in the As, but further out, a kid would probably add a letter to their
locker number as shorthand.

She tucked the money into her pocket. “Fifty dollars says we’re
looking for a locker.”

“Too easy. How about, double that says were looking for
locker one-eighty.”

“Done.”

He started jogging.

Locker 050 was the last locker in the hallway.

They turned the corner. The classrooms began at B-1. The
lockers started at 051.

“Damn,” she muttered. If the pattern held, the lockers would
be numbered one-fifty to two hundred where the classrooms became Ds.

He laughed. “Don’t worry, I’ll accept your IOU.”

She was pretty sure that particular IOU could be paid off
with sex.

She sped up.

He easily matched her.

She stopped in front of locker 180. “Why this one?”

He gave her a slow smile. “The first numbers in the clue are
four and five. Add them for nine or double forty-five for ninety, double it
again for one-eighty. The second set of numbers, five, three, one, also add up
to nine. Add both sets and get eighteen. Throw in the D in days…”

“Locker one-eighty.”

He caged her with his body and her natural inclination was
to move into him, grind against him.

“Moment of truth,” he said, warm breath striking her neck,
making her wish his mouth was about to follow. “If this is the right locker,
you’re going to owe me a hundred. Want a chance to wipe out that debt by doing
a substitution bet? A right-left-right sequence, you win. A left-right-left and
I do. What do you say?”

“I lose and I’m out one-fifty of my own money, plus the
fifty I just took off you.”

“There is that. But like I said, I’ll take your IOU.”

With his sulky, bad-boy mouth so close to her neck and ear,
it was hard to care whether she won or lost. “Deal.”

“You do the honors then.”

The five, three, one in the clue was too small a movement. But
fifty, thirty, ten…

She twirled the combination lock.

Right.

Left.

Right.

Click.

The lock opened.

“You owe me,” she said.

“For now.”

She removed the lock.

Shane jacked the handle upward, opening the door.

It’d been cleaned out except for a few items left at the bottom.

Madison’s eyes locked onto the pair of broken drum sticks.

“Dreams and desire obliterated,” she said, crouching,
picking up the sticks.

Unwillingly she cared, maybe because she understood
this
dream
,
this desire
. “Why not contact me if he already knows we have
things in common? Why not have some go-between set up a meeting if he didn’t
want to do it himself?”

“Got me.”

Shane crouched, his chest touched to her back.

He reached around her and lifted the check that’d been
beneath the sticks. He flipped it so they both saw the amount. Fifteen thousand
dollars, written on a San Francisco law firm’s account.

Her heart bounded. She said, “The lawyer in Richmond gave me
one for five thousand. He said it was a small portion of what I’ll get if I
continue the quest to get to know Bio-dad.”

Shane whistled softly. “So Bio-dad either feels guilty about
not stepping forward to raise you, a stretch unless Bio-mom lied about not
knowing who’d gotten her pregnant, or he’s afraid you won’t want to have
anything to do with him unless you get to know him this way first.”

“I asked if the money was dirty.”

Shane rubbed his cheek against her hair. “Smart. What’d the
lawyer say?”

“No. And I believe him.”

Only a single, folded sheet of paper remained in the locker.
She lifted it, thumbed it open and held it so Shane could read their next clue.