No Limits (26 page)

“Like buried treasures?” Simon asked.

“Pirate chests? Bags of gold from stagecoach holdups? Diamonds and jewels from train robberies? Unmarked bills from bank heists?” Micky added. Both men looked at her before Simon told his cousin, “She watches too much TV.”

King went on with no more than an absent nod, an elbow on the table, his cup in his other hand. “One of these treasures, one there isn’t a lot of info on—and trust me, if it was there, I’d’ve found it. The Internet is a seasonally employed man’s best friend.”

Simon arched a brow at that, but King didn’t wait for him to comment. “Anyway, one of these treasures is a cache of gold coins a Confederate soldier stole before the Union seized New Orleans. They hunted for him, and his body found in what is now Vermilion Parish.”

“What about the gold?” Micky asked before raising her cup to her mouth. Simon thought about the coin his father had found on Le Hasard and carried with him for good luck. A grin pulled at his mouth. “It’s still there.”

“How do you know? For that matter, how would Bear know?” Micky asked.

“Did I mention the soldier’s family’s name?” King asked.

“Landry,” Simon and Micky said as one.

King grinned. “That’s got to be what Lisa discovered. Either where the gold is or how to find it.”

“And why Bear doesn’t want anyone on the land,” Simon said, striking the table with his fist. “The poker game has nothing to do with any of this. He just wanted us out of his way. But if he still hasn’t found the treasure—”

“And he wouldn’t still be here if he had—”

“Then Lisa obviously never told him what he wanted to know.”

“Meaning,” King concluded, “that she’s too valuable for him to have hurt her.”

“He’s got her stashed away somewhere.”

“Any ideas?” King asked on top of Micky’s, “We’ve got to find her!”

“So where do we start?” Simon asked.

They started by splitting up. Micky went to find Bear and keep him occupied with more seemingly innocent questions about Lisa—though with King this time, not on her own—

while Simon headed to town. Lorna knew he was coming by for his money. It was the perfect time to get her to talk.

To make that happen, he needed to see her alone. Not only alone without Bear putting words in her mouth and pulling her strings, but alone without Micky there to remind Lorna that she wasn’t thirty years old anymore.

Getting what he wanted out of Lorna would be a tough sale with another woman around, no matter how much he would have preferred having Micky with him. It wasn’t about not trusting King, but about wanting to see for himself that she stayed safe and out of harm’s way.

He was glad to have King for backup. Not thinking things were going to get so complicated, he hadn’t called in another SG-5 operative to help. If this entire scenario was about finding a buried treasure, then he’d truly underestimated Bear Landry’s level of sanity. No man in his right mind would threaten a member of his family to increase his material wealth.

Oh, sure. It happened al
l
the time. Like he’d said. No man in his right mind. And not much of a man at that, to Simon’s way of thinking. He wanted an example of a man? He had only to look to Hank Smithson. Or to any member of the Smithson Group team. Looking at King is what hung Simon up. And a big part of that was recognizing that he, most of al
l
, had let his cousin down. Having watched from a distance he’d known King was struggling. He’d seen what he’d tried to do with the land. He’d witnessed him fail time after time after time—whether the fault of money, Mother Nature, or the man. Simon had been in a position to help. He hadn’t. He’d let a single incident from their past—granted, a big, fat, nasty one—get in the way of doing the right thing, seeing to the needs of his family.

It had eaten at him. All this time it had eaten at him. And until he’d seen his cousin again, he hadn’t known how much. He thought they might finally be on the road to making amends. Their first meeting hadn’t been stellar, but during the last two, the tide had seemed to change.

Whatever he had to do to keep it rolling, he would, drawing the line at enabling. But the rest…There wasn’t a single reason to keep him from offering Kingdom a hand. And if some of that was the result of being here with Micky, well, so be it. Caught up in his thoughts, Simon almost didn’t see the truck that flew past him headed the other way—and driven by Lorna Savoy. She was going east, into the sun, which sat like a fireball in the sky above the road. He doubted she’d seen him through the glare off her windshield.

He pulled over, made a U-turn, maintained enough of a distance between their vehicles to keep his New York plates out of sight, and then followed her all the way to the parish library in Abbeville.

Thirty-six

S ince most of Bayou Allain’s business district closed for the weekend, Micky and King had no luck finding Bear at his land office in town. They checked to see if he might be at Savoy Realty, but Lorna’s place was closed, too. Strange, Micky thought, for a Realtor not to be working on a Saturday. She could only hope Simon was having more success. Even so, she wasn’t overjoyed with the idea of his questioning the other woman. And, yes. It was a silly possessive response based on nothing but the story he’d told her of Lorna crawling into his bed twenty years ago.

Well, that and the way Lorna had seemed desperate for a repeat performance when she’d seen him in her office lobby. At first, Micky had been too caught up in the drama to pay much attention to the woman and her claws. But when Lorna had grabbed him to keep him from walking out the door…grr.

Micky had no reason to be jealous. No matter the night they’d just spent, Simon wasn’t really hers. She’d known him for two days, and he was about to put her on a plane. One did not belong after two days.

So why did she feel like she did, to him? That he did, to her? And that if she never saw him again, well, she would curl up in a ball and just die?

This emotion was new and frightening, and her biggest fear was that she wasn’t going to have a chance to explore its potential, to nurture it, to watch it grow, to enjoy the ful
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beauty when it blossomed into what she knew would last forever. King made a sudden, screaming U-turn, taking up most of the street, sending Micky flying into her door and on-coming cars off the road. There were only a few, but he just kept driving. The honking didn’t faze him a bit.

She looked over at him wide-eyed. “What are you doing?”

Her question didn’t faze him either. “Bear’s not in town. It’s too early for him to be at Red’s. Next stop? His house.”

They were in this together, yet he was running plays on his own. She wondered if he knew there was no “I” in team. “We’re supposed to keep him from getting to Lorna before Simon does. If she’s at his house, there’s not much we can do.”

“True, but I figure it can’t hurt to see what the old guy is up to. I’d like to know how much you showing up alive after the bridge thing really spooked him.”

Again, making it about what he wanted instead of what best served the plan. “He saw me yesterday. If it spooked him, I’m sure he’s gotten over it by now.”

“Then we’ll spook him again,” he said, waggling both brows like he was in junior high and getting ready to hijack the school’s public-address system. She rolled her eyes, but she couldn’t help thinking his being a jerk was mostly for show.

“You like this, don’t you? Stirring up trouble. Running people off the road.” She pointed behind them toward the town they’d just left. “Did you even hear those cars honking?”

He rolled his shoulders in a careless shrug. “They’d honk at me if I was driving to church. That’s how they are, how this place is.”

Or his behavior deserved such reactions. “Then why do you stay?”

“Are you kidding? He laughed, a wicked sound of enjoyment. “With good ol’ cuz paying the taxes on the land and not charging me a dime in rent?”

She faced forward, crossed her arms, glad he wasn’t the cousin she’d fallen for. His recklessness scared her. “He needs to charge you rent.”

“Oh-ho. I see whose side you’re on.”

“It’s not about sides.”

“Then what’s it about,
chère
?” he asked, his voice silky. “You just met the both of us. He just happened to be the first one to get in your pants. If you hadn’t run out that night at Red’s, I can guarantee you wouldn’t be sitting all the way over there hugging that door right now.”

“I’m hugging the door so you don’t kill me with your driving,” she said, ignoring his cocky cheek.

“Whatever you say,
chère
.”

“What about Paschelle?”

“What about her?”

“I don’t think she’d like me sitting any closer than this.”

“Aww, Chelle and me, we’re just friends with benefits.” He cast her a dangerous glance.

“And a man can’t have too many friends.”

He was so ful
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of shit, but she couldn’t help but wonder if he was using that shit to cover up things he’d never told Simon. Micky had met Paschelle. A cute girl, but one smart enough not to be taken in by a man who looked like King. She had to see something more.

Micky wanted to know what it was. Not for herself, but for Simon. She wanted this thing between the two men to go away. She wanted the two of them to have each other, to know each other, to be family. To not be alone.

Papi was everything to her. Her mother had gone away so long ago that she was nothing but a collection of memories. But Papi. Micky’s chest tightened. She knew she was holding on too tight, using him to keep men at a distance because he loved her for herself, just the way she was.

“Well, what have we here?” King asked, and Micky returned from her musings to look up.

They’d driven onto what she assumed was Judge Landry’s property, but they hadn’t stopped at his house. King had kept going, and all Micky saw was fields. Fields, and the tree line beyond edging a plot of uncleared acreage. Fields, the tree line, a plot of uncleared acreage…and a vehicle driving through the first, toward the second, and into the third.

King looked at her. She looked at him.

“You game?” he asked.

“Why not?” she answered.

So they followed Bear into the woods.

Thirty-seven

B ear pulled his International Scout up to the tarpaper shelter that squatted on the edge of Snickers Bayou. He’d sent Lorna to the parish library’s Abbevil e branch to get the Landry family Bible held there on display, and he couldn’t do what he needed to do until she got here. He cut the engine to wait.

Lorna had argued that the Bible was considered reference material. It could be viewed only on the premises. It was not to be removed. He’d told her to get it anyway, dumb bitch. If he’d had any idea of its true value, he would never have made the donation, and that made him just as dumb.

Unless he was psychic, he couldn’t have anticipated the hunt for the treasure would heat up as it had. And though Lisa had wound up at the center of it al
l
, he had never wanted her hurt. What he’d expected was that she’d tire of having very little water and even less food and eventually tell him what he wanted to know. She hadn’t come close. Once he’d revealed to her his part in her kidnapping and what her freedom would cost, she’d said she’d die before she’d tell him a thing. Said she knew he’d be forced to kil
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her anyway. Said she wanted to enjoy thinking about him living the rest of his life stil
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searching.

He hadn’t told her he’d been doing it since his childhood. Bear’s father had told him the treasure story—though like his grandfather before, his old man had written off the tale of the treasure as legend. Bear hadn’t been so quick to do the same. Finding something that incredible was a dream. He’d been an only child with nothing much to do and acres to roam. Bayou Allain had not even been the speck on the map then that it was now. There hadn’t been any boys in school who lived near enough to be regular playmates. He’d played soldiers and cowboys and pirates with his imagination instead.

Harlan Baptiste’s coin was the first bit of evidence proving the treasure’s existence. After seeing the piece for himself, Bear had no doubt that the cache was buried on the land Zachary Benoit had won from Ross Landry in that poker game decades before. Until Lisa started her genealogy project, Bear hadn’t realized he’d been holding on to a piece of the puzzle for years. He’d found the slip of paper in his father’s effects. It was old, brittle, and looked as if it had been used to record Morse code. He’d thought the markings meaningless. They weren’t meaningless at al
l
.

He’d come close to suffering a stroke the day Lisa had asked him to meet her at the main branch of the parish library. He’d always liked the girl, didn’t mind indulging her whims, so had driven to Abbeville to meet her for lunch.

She’d taken him to see the Bible afterward. It had originally belonged to one of his forefathers, had been passed down through generations and lost—only to be unearthed when he’d razed an old barn on his property.

What Lisa had found in the binding made the cost of tearing down the structure and having the rubble carted off worth every penny. The letter hidden between the back parchment and the leather cover explained the purpose of the markings. And to think how close he’d come to throwing the doodlings away.