Romancing the Alpha: An Action-Adventure Romance Boxed Set (63 page)

“That’s the thing,” he said. “I had no idea.” He remembered the night he’d given her the atlas—the way her eyes had lit up like he was giving her the world. He saw the way that, even now, her fingers curled protectively around the book’s edges, and it made his chest ache with an emotion he didn’t want to analyze.

“That atlas belonged to a man named Vincent Rinaldi,” he continued. “I bought it at his estate auction.”

“Was he someone famous? I don’t think I’ve ever heard of him.”

“Not famous, no—at least not outside the treasure hunting world. But he was rich. Incredibly rich. He was also what you might call an eccentric.”

She let out a short, incredulous laugh. “Are you sure you aren’t making any of this up?”

“It sounds like a joke, I know,” he said. “And trust me—it gets even more ridiculous. Vincent Rinaldi was… well, he was a little touched in the head. There are a lot of different kinds of treasure hunters out there, Goose. Some will slit your throat as soon as look at you,”—he caught her throwing a glance behind them—“and others just want to play at being adventurers. Rinaldi was one of the latter. He was, for many years, the laughing stock of the treasure hunting community. He’d follow all sorts of rumors and stories and pour hundreds of thousands of dollars into dives for sunken ships or digs for Inca gold. I’ve even met a fellow who once swindled him into paying ten thousand for a plain old map of Australia.”

“And this atlas was his?” she asked. There was something almost tender in her voice as she looked down at the book in her lap.

“Yeah,” he said, suddenly feeling like a jackass again. Why’d she have to love that damn atlas so much?

“As I said, I bought it at an auction,” he continued. “Rinaldi died last year. Left everything to Alyssa Berry, his fiancée. According to reports, there was very little cash left, so she mostly just got a bunch of treasure-hunting equipment. State-of-the-art stuff, but not exactly anything a young bride-to-be wants or needs when her intended dies. She turned around and auctioned most of it off immediately. My teammates and I made a few purchases. Mostly tools and stuff, but some of us picked up a few of his personal things—his old journals and notes and that sort of thing—just for fun. Rinaldi was a loony, but he was one of us, you know? He was a legend, in his own way.”

“And the atlas?”

“I thought of you the moment I saw it. I knew you’d love it.”
And now I’m going to take it away again like a heartless bastard.
He tried to assuage his guilt by reminding himself that it was safer this way, that as long as she had the atlas, she was in danger—but it didn’t make him feel like any less of a shithead.

“Why now?” she asked softly. “What’s changed?”

His eyes flicked to the rear-view mirror. For a split second, he thought he’d seen the headlights again, but it was a false alarm.
Pull it together, man.

“Alexei—that’s one of my teammates—he was looking through some of Rinaldi’s old travel journals,” he said, still keeping an eye on the road behind them. “I’ll give Rinaldi one thing—the man kept great records. Wrote down everything he encountered, every detail of his expeditions. Of course, most of his instincts were wrong, but he had an adventurous spirit. And there was something interesting about the last journal he kept before his death.” Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her lean a little closer to him, her eyes bright with interest. “In most of the notebooks, he wrote almost like he was addressing himself—making notes of things for future voyages and all that. But in the last one, he kept addressing his fiancée. He was writing to her.”

He cast another glance behind them, but he was beginning to think he might have lost their pursuers after all.

“It took us a while to figure out what was going on,” he continued. “We’re still unraveling bits and pieces. But it was clear that Rinaldi knew his health was suffering. And the details he provided were odd—he was no longer giving thorough accounts of his expeditions, though it was obvious from what he did write that he was still traveling regularly. And sometimes he seemed to be writing in riddles, almost as if his mind was going along with his heart. And then one day, Roth—that’s our team’s captain—figured it out. Rinaldi wasn’t going on expeditions during that last year. He was
creating
one. Making his own treasure hunt, and leaving the clues for his fiancée. She rarely went with him on his expeditions, and she must have thought that he’d wasted his entire fortune on his hobby. In fact, it appears that he just decided to leave it to her in the most spectacular way possible.”

Charlie leaned back in her seat. After a moment, she said, “This sounds like a bad TV movie.”

“I haven’t even gotten to the best part. Our first clue about his fortune was a riddle he wrote toward the end of his journal.” He hated himself for knowing it by heart—because honestly, it might have been the worst bit of poetry ever written in the history of the world—but the entire team had studied it so many times, from so many angles, that it was hard
not
to have it memorized. He cleared his throat.

“It said,

‘
The greatest treasure God ever gave me

Was that first look upon your face.

The greatest treasure I can leave you

Might be hunted from that place.
’ ”

Naturally, Charlie laughed—a real laugh this time, and his cock was suddenly reminded of the last time he heard that bright, sweet sound from those lips. He’d been on top of her, and his tongue had discovered a spot behind her ear where she—

Headlights flashed in the mirror.

Focus, you idiot!
he yelled internally at himself. He pressed down on the gas, but the car behind him turned onto a side street.
False alarm
.

“Obviously, Rinaldi wasn’t much of a poet,” he said, fighting back his paranoia. “You can see why we thought this was a joke for so long. But the more we looked into it, the more we realized that we might be onto something. There was a lot of speculation about where all of Rinaldi’s money went. His fiancée was supposedly furious she received so little.”

“Sounds like true love.”

“She recovered pretty quickly—I think she married some French billionaire about two months after Rinaldi’s funeral. Which is why we don’t feel the need to rush to her with our suspicions about what he did with all that money. I’m not sure she ever even opened his journals.”

Charlie slid her hand over the cover of the book in her lap. “Where does the atlas come in?”

“That riddle seems to suggest that we need to find the place where he first met Alyssa. One of his earlier journals seems to suggest he met her when he was sailing off the coast of Croatia, but that’s still a lot of area to search. And even if we narrowed it down to an island or a port, how do we know where to go from there? Fortunately, he left a clue for us—for her. At the very end of his last journal, on the inside of the back cover, he scribbled, ‘
If you have trouble, my love, remember—trusted maps will always steer you true.
’”

“And he trusted this atlas.”

Strangely, she didn’t pose it as a question, but he answered it anyway. “We spent days studying his other maps—the ones we had, anyway—including a couple of the Mediterranean and the Adriatic. But he mentioned that atlas several times in his journals. He loved it. Took it with him all over the world.”

“I knew it.” Her voice was full of wonder.

“Knew what?” He glanced over at her, and he could have sworn he saw her blush—though that might have been a trick of the passing street lamps.

“I knew he loved this atlas,” she admitted, and there was something so sweet, so innocent in her voice that he felt his body stir again. “He left that love on every page. I didn’t know him—didn’t even know his name—and I always imagined he was some grand adventurer, traveling around the world and facing everything with wonder.” She shook her head. “I know that sounds stupid and cheesy, but—”

“No,” he said quickly, gently. “No, I understand.”

She smiled, but she was no longer looking at him, and he knew her well enough to sense her embarrassment. He’d known when he came here that it would be difficult seeing her, but he’d expected that challenge to come in the form of the burning hunger for her that had never quite left his system—a hunger that even now throbbed through his veins, just being close to her again. He’d always been drawn to her, and he’d known he’d have one hell of a time not grabbing her and pushing her up against the wall at first sight, but he hadn’t fully anticipated the depth of the tenderness he’d still feel for her. She didn’t belong in the middle of this mess.

“What about the men chasing us?” she asked. “If you—or your team—just figured this out, then how do these men know?”

“That’s what I’d like to find out,” he muttered. But in his gut, he knew the truth. They’d been betrayed by one of their own—and there was only one person who could have done it. They were lucky that nothing else had been compromised—and that no one had been seriously injured—in the incident in Prague. The appearance of Nash’s guys here meant their enemies weren’t planning on letting this one go.

Just get Charlie away from everything as soon as you can
, he told himself.

“If I’d known any of this about the atlas, I never would have given it to you,” he said. “I’m going to make sure you get somewhere safe. Do you have family or friends you can stay with? Your mom, maybe?”

Her silence made him realize his mistake immediately.

How the fuck had he forgotten?
“She’s not… Fuck, Goose. She isn’t…?”

“In March,” she said, her voice suddenly cold. Distant.

Fuck.
He’d known when he left that Charlie’s mom had been sick, but he hadn’t thought about the inevitable outcome of that.

He wanted to pull the car to the side of the road. Wanted to take her in his arms and hold her and let her spill everything to him, the way she once did. Wanted to kiss away her tears and draw out her sadness with his touch until she’d forgotten all of the pain, forgotten everything but the comfort of his body.

But before he could do it, she said, “Where are you going?”

He forced his mind back to the issue at hand. “Wherever you need me to take you.”

“No, I mean where are you going with the atlas? Where’s your team?”

“Most of them are already in Croatia, waiting for me.” He adjusted his grip on the steering wheel. “We didn’t anticipate that I’d run into trouble over here, or there’d be others here with me. But don’t worry—those guys only want the atlas. Once I’m away with it, they’ll have no reason to bother you.” And if they did, he’d personally hunt them down and exact his own brand of justice.

Charlie was silent for a long moment, and then, “I want to come with you.”

He was so surprised he nearly slammed his foot down on the brake pedal. “No. Absolutely out of the question.”

“Why not?”

“It’s too dangerous.”

“It’s dangerous here! Men just broke into my house!”

She had a point, but he wasn’t about to have this discussion. “It’s still safer than where I’ll be going. Besides, you need your passport to get to Croatia, and there’s no way in hell I’m taking you back to that house tonight.”

“As a matter of fact, I have my passport right here,” she said, pulling it out of her purse. “I had to get my driver’s license renewed this week and needed an extra form of ID.”

Shit.
He’d walked right into that one. “It’s still out of the question.”

“Why?” she said.

“Because I say it is.” There was no way in hell he was getting her more tangled up in this. “Look, Goose, I—”

“Don’t call me that!” she said. “You don’t get to call me that anymore.”

He wanted to argue, but fuck him, she was right. But that didn’t change his decision.

They were both quiet for far too long before she said, “Maybe you should pull over. I’ll find my own way from here.”

He wasn’t about to drop her off in the middle of Atlanta, but he didn’t trust himself to continue this conversation while driving. He pulled into an empty parking lot and killed the engine.

“Look, Charlie,” he said, turning toward her. “I know I had no right to come back here, but you’ve seen how dangerous this is.” And one look at her made him more determined than ever to protect her. This was his sweet, gentle Charlie—she belonged somewhere safe. Somewhere far, far away from this life.

Still, a small part of him couldn’t help but imagine what it might be like to take Charlie along with him—to have her by his side during his days of exploring and have her in his arms again at night. He’d only just been reunited with her, and his cock had wanted one thing and one thing only since she’d opened her door and he’d realized she was even more beautiful than he remembered. The idea of walking away from her now seemed insane.

Stop being a selfish idiot
, he told himself.
She can’t come with you. Stop pretending otherwise.

But before he could tell her so, the corners of her mouth curled up.

“Your opinion on the matter is all well and good,” she said, “but you’ve forgotten one thing.” She took the atlas from her lap and tucked it halfway behind her. “I still have the atlas, and I have no intention of letting it go.”

Split, Croatia

This was, quite possibly, the stupidest thing she’d ever done.

Or the best.

She was in Croatia. Standing on Croatian soil. Breathing Croatian air. It felt like a dream—though the twenty-one straight hours of travel she and Jackson had just endured were probably partially to blame for that. Two restless flights and a layover after leaving Atlanta, the two of them stood outside the airport in Split, a small city on the Croatian coast.

She was still in shock that Jackson had agreed to let her come. When she’d threatened to keep the atlas, she’d half expected him to leap across the car and wrestle it out of her hands anyway. He could have easily overpowered her. Instead, he’d just stared at her—long enough to make her squirm in her seat and make her entire body go hot—before giving a single nod of agreement. She still had no idea what was going on, but she wasn’t about to question it. This was her chance to have the adventure she’d always dreamed of, wasn’t it?