Page 26

Chapter Twenty-Five

“D on’t jump to conclusions,” I said over the roar of the engine. “You yourself said Richard was good at his job. He could have figured this location out on his own.”

Andrew glanced at me with an apologetic smile. “Our visit to the árbol Hueco Isla had nothing to do with Augustine Pérez.”

A mix of confusion, nerves, and excitement churned in my stomach. “I don’t understand.”

“Richard wouldn’t have known about the island unless Carlos told him. I made up the location of the clue. I just wanted an excuse to take you on a date, spend time alone with you, and woo you with my cheesy lines.” His mouth twitched. “Are you mad I lied?”

Joy exploded inside of me. If he weren’t driving, I would have grabbed his shirt by its collar and pulled his face to mine. “I’m devastated.” I laughed at his reaction. “Why would I be mad? Today was the most romantic date anybody has ever planned for me.”

“Once we’re done with this trip, I’m taking you on a proper date.” He brought my hand to his mouth and kissed my knuckles. “On many dates.”

Andrew’s words made my heart soar. He didn’t care about our different social backgrounds, and the ocean that separated our lives. He wanted more dates with me. He wanted more of me.

* * *

“You were right!” I barged into our hotel room, my mind and heart full of all sorts of feelings. William was on his bed, his legs crossed at the ankles. He dropped his iPhone on his chest.

“Jesus, you scared me,” he said. “Of course I’m right. Just tell me about what.”

“Dr. Garcia is a traitor.” I walked to the bed and dropped next to him. “Dickhead was waiting for us at the marina parking lot. The island wasn’t part of the job. It was just a date,” I said dreamily, a smile working up my lips at the memory of my time with Andrew. Except for the unfortunate news, it was a really, really good date.

“Brandon said that old rat sold out Andrew for half a million dollars. They had him before we arrived in Colombia,” William said, shaking his head. “I can’t believe we were leading that asswipe to your treasure all this time.”

I raised an eyebrow. “It’s not mine.”

“Given the time and energy you’ve put into searching for this damn thing, I think you have all the right to call it yours.” William prodded my shoulder with a finger. “BTW, you’re glowing. Tell me about your day with Dr. Long Dong Silver. Did he tell you I helped him with the basket? Did you two have fun?”

A stupid grin grew on my face so wide it hurt. “We sure did. Twice.”

William’s eyes went round—good thing the FDA didn’t approve Botox into eyelids. “He only asked for one condom.”

I sheepishly smiled. “I took one before I left the room.”

“Thief.”

I rolled my eyes. “You stole a good bottle of wine from my apartment.” I pointed my finger at him. “Don’t think I didn’t notice that. And that bottle cost five times more than the box of condoms you bought at Costco.”

“Hey, condoms cost a lot. And there’ll be none left at the rate you and Dr. Hot Ass are going.”

“Are you serious?” I gawked at him. “You brought a box of forty. Were you actually thinking you’d need that many on our vacation?”

He shrugged nonchalantly. “You never know who you’ll meet. And I was thinking of both of us. Only, so far, you’re the only one taking advantage of it.”

Wait. What?

“What about the night you spent with Brandon?” I said, puzzled. “Didn’t you guys…?”

“Nope, we just talked,” William said with a sigh, his face relaxing into a dreamy expression, probably matching my earlier one. “We fooled around a bit but that was it. It was a magical night. I’ve never experienced anything like this before.”

Five days ago, I would have rolled my eyes hard because William had never-before-like-this affairs with pretty much every new guy he temporarily fell in love with. But now I understood how he felt because I was in the same never-before-like-this boat with Andrew. And it felt wonderful.

“I assume you’ve been keeping in touch all this time?”

William grinned, showing most of his beautiful white teeth. “Are you going to be mad if I say yes?”

“Only if you share our research with him.”

“We mutually agreed not to bring up Augustine Pérez.” He lifted his left hand, holding up three fingers. “I swear.”

“Put your hand down. You aren’t a Boy Scout. And it’s the right hand, not the left.” I picked up his phone and handed it to him. “Please unlock it.”

“What for?” He did as I asked and gave it back to me.

“I want to see if Brandon has been totally honest with you and didn’t install some spy tracking app.” I flipped through his screens with millions of colorful icons unsure what I was looking for. “Good grief, why do you need so many apps? There is no way I could know if any of?—”

A message appeared on the screen from none other than the man himself.

Brandon

I found the cutest B Dr. Garcia was a mole; my brother wanted to move to a different country.

“Oh, goofy.” He wrapped his arms around me and pulled me to his chest. “You won’t be alone. Dr. Darcy Andrew Jones will be with you.”

“Not all the time, only when he can visit me.” I shook my head, wiping my nose—not intentionally—on his shirt.

“Stop crying. It’s bad for your skin.”

I took a deep breath, tightened my arms around William’s waist, and enjoyed his big brotherly warmth. God, what would I be without him? For thirty-three years, the furthest we lived apart was an hour. After a moment, I extracted myself from his hug and wiped my face with the hem of my shirt. “I’ll miss you if you move, but I’ll be okay.”

William glanced at his chest and cringed. “I know you’ll be okay. It’s not like I’ve moved already. Don’t forget I also have a clinic.”

He got up, unbuttoned his shirt, and limped to his suitcase.

“William,” I said. “What’s wrong with your leg?” And only then did I notice that there was a pillow under his feet. His feet weren’t crossed at the ankle as I’d initially thought, he was elevating one of them.

He took his shirt off, grimaced at the wet spot my face had left, and then folded it neatly and placed it in his dirty pile. His left side and part of his back had red marks and bluish-purple bruises. I jumped to my feet and rushed to him.

“What happened?”

“It’s not so bad.” He stepped away and shrugged on the shirt.

“Not so bad?” My mouth dropped open. “William, let me see your leg. Is it broken?”

“No. Just a sprained ankle.”

“Who did this?”

“OMG, Adriana. What’s with all the questions? I did. Okay?”

“What? How?” I stared at him.

William wobbled back to the bed, doubled over the pillow and rested his right leg on it. He leaned against the headboard, checked his watch, and finally met my eyes. “I wanted to see Brandon. He said he wasn’t far, just in the next town. So I rented a scooter.”

I was thunderstruck. “You rented a scooter?” He nodded. I hadn’t seen any rental places around here. “Where did you find it?”

He shrugged. “A guy at the shop next door let me use his.”

“William,” I said, but I wanted to yell. “You don’t know how to ride a regular bike, why would you think you can handle a scooter?”

“I handled it just fine.”

“Yeah. Clearly.” I waved my hands at him. “Did you at least wear a helmet?”

“Please.” He rolled his eyes.

“Please what?”

“Of course I did. It was the grossest, but I’m not an idiot.”

That was debatable.

“Wow. Yeah. You must really like Brandon if you were willing not only to drive half an hour on a vehicle you’ve never used before, but also,” I said with a snort, “to put on someone else’s greasy, nasty, dirty, filthy, infested with dead skin and maybe even,”—I gasped—“lice helmet. It touched and rubbed against your skin and?—”

“Okay! Enough.” He shuddered. “I get your point.”

I laughed. “So, your leg. Is it mostly okay?”

“Yes. I just twisted it when I fell trying to make a sharp turn.”

“Did you at least make it to Brandon?”

William’s smile dropped. “No. The accident happened two streets from here.”

“I’m sorry.” I felt terrible for him. Truly . I did. “Why didn’t Brandon come to visit you?”

“He couldn’t. He was working with Brie. He was going to excuse himself and run out to say hi. I have a feeling Brandon keeps it a secret from them that we talk.”

Someone knocked and I opened the door to find Andrew standing on the other side. In an instant, my heart started a happy dance to a song called He Wants to Date Me.

“Hey, stranger,” I said, stepping aside. “Come in.”

Andrew’s eyes narrowed on me. “Were you crying?”

“No,” I lied.

“Honey, he knows you are lying. You have some…” William tapped under his eye.

Oh shoot, my mascara.

“Do we need to talk about it?” Andrew arched an eyebrow.

I shook my head, backing away in the direction of the bathroom. “I’ll be just one second.”

The reflection in the mirror was something I hoped was a lie. My hair stuck out in different directions, my messy bun resembling a tumbleweed, and my mascara was smeared under both eyes, with black streaks running down my cheeks. I got to work.

Several minutes later, I emerged from the bathroom. My hair was brushed and neatly braided, and my washed face had freshly applied mascara and lip gloss.

My heart sank a little. Andrew was gone.

“Where did he go?”

“He came to apologize to me and asked if we wanted to eat dinner in his room while brainstorming where to go next. I said to text us when he’s back.” William patted a spot next to him. “Now, while we’re alone, tell me everything about your date.”

* * *

The empty containers with traces of sancocho and pandebono we’d had for dinner littered the desk in Andrew’s room. For an hour, we’d scoured the possible location of the palace, joining the maps Andrew had sketched from the bracelets and trying to compare them to a real map.

William perched on the bed with his right leg elevated, searching the historical maps archive website. Andrew and I were on the floor in a mess of papers. Andrew sat with his left elbow balanced on a bent knee, his hand supporting his head. The other hand held his iPad, on which he was using the Library of Congress website to study maps of Colombia. Google Maps had worked for a while but each time he zoomed out, a river or road would disappear, and it’d become annoying, so he’d switched to the old-fashioned atlases.

I was lying on my stomach, feet kicking in the air while poring over two pages with faded lines that looked like an unfinished floor design. Augustine had many strange sketches of flora, and animals, half-finished portolans with seaport names, and numerous designs of devices that resembled works of Leonardo da Vinci I had seen on display in museums. But these two sheets were nothing like the other. They could have been early architectural plans for Maria’s palace. And I wasn’t an architect by any means, and yes, with time the pencil marks had faded in many parts of the sketch, but my gut feeling was that something about them was off.

I sat up, my back screaming bloody murder after laying on a hard surface for too long. Placing one of the sheets on the floor at my feet, I opened my camera app. Trying to avoid the light reflection of the plastic, I maneuvered my phone above it.

“What are you doing?” William asked.

“I want to try a trick in the Photoshop Express app. There’s a way to mess with brightness levels or whatever it’s called. I used it another time and”—I snapped a picture, replaced the first sheet with the other, and hovered my phone over it—“some of the barely visible lines became more noticeable.” I took the second picture. “Anyway, I want to try it on these to see if anything pops up.”

William threw his head backward, dropping his phone on his lap. “This is so taxing. My head hurts.” He groaned. “How can you do it for hours? I close my eyes, and all I see are rivers and outlines of mountains. What if you’re wrong and Augustine didn’t build it near their old ranch? Maybe he thought he could drug Maria and transfer her passed out from one place to another.”

Andrew looked up, and I could clearly see gears turning in his head, thinking about it. Then he shook his head. “No. I don’t think he would do that.”

“Okay, fine, so he was this super nice pirate,” William said, making air quotes with his fingers, “who robbed others and killed anyone who got in his way, and who loved ciphers and made everything super secretive and complicated for subsequent generations of venturesome treasure hunters who tried to lay claim to it.”

I sighed. “Where are you going with this?”

He held one finger out. “What if, to make it more pain in the ass for people like us, the bracelet map is a reversed image of a real map? Hm?”

Andrew and I exchanged glances.

“We need a mirror,” I said, looking around. “I have a small one in my bag.”

“We could use the one in the bathroom,” Andrew suggested.

“But it’s mounted,” I said, rising to my feet.

“I can hold it next to it, and you can take a photo.” Andrew also got up.

“Or,” William chimed in, “you can take a photo and flip the image using your fancy Photoshop app.” He dropped an imaginary microphone, making me chuckle.

We took a picture of the sketched map and then I flipped it in the app and airdropped it to Andrew’s and William’s phones.

“Oh, look at the time.” William shook his head, sitting up and slowly moving his legs to the edge of the bed. “You love birds can continue with the chase, but I’m going to my room.” William shuffled to the door, but before he left, he paused. “Also, if I’m not mistaken, you can make the image translucent, overlay it on the Colombia map, and see if you can line up rivers and such.”

Once William left, Andrew’s gaze met mine, and the corners of his eyes crinkled. “Will you spend the night here with me?”

Elation soared through me and landed straight in my core.

“I’d love to,” I said, trying and failing not to grin too wide. “I promise not to be distracting.”

Andrew’s eyebrow went up, and his lips pulled into a sexy smirk. “That’s impossible. You can be in the building next door, and my concentration will still be on you.”

My skin lit on fire, and it took all the willpower I had not to set my phone aside and straddle Andrew. “So, want to work for an hour or two and then go to bed?” I bit my bottom lip.

“Sounds like a good plan.”

I scooted towards him. “Why don’t you download the app on your iPad and we could use my login? It would be easier to do what William suggested on a larger screen.”

Andrew tapped on the App Store icon and typed in Photoshop.

“What are you going to do about Dr. Garcia?”

“I can’t forgive him for betraying me and sabotaging my work. Professionally, there isn’t enough evidence he’s done anything wrong, so he goes unpunished, but after this trip, I won’t be staying in touch with him.” He stared at the screen, focusing on a blue line slowly drawing a circle. “Whether or not we find a possible location of the ruins tonight, tomorrow morning I’ll leave him a message to say that we’re going to the history museum in Nava de Luenga. It’s seven hours from here, which should send Richard on a nice wild goose chase. The further they are from us, the better off we are.”

Several minutes went by while we familiarized ourselves with the app functions, and then we uploaded the images and got to work. At first, the modern map we were using was too dark, so we searched for a better one to use as a base layer, eventually downloading the 1997 map from The Library of Congress website. We played with the sketched map, changing its saturation and sharpness. Then we dropped translucence to fifty percent and began slowly moving the sketch over the base layer in search of the perfect alignment between the two.

My heart skipped a bit when a line from both layers merged into one. “Stop.”

Andrew’s finger paused.

“There.” I pointed to the top right corner where the zigzag of the rivers in both images had consolidated. Andrew carefully scrolled until the rivers and mountains with the old ranch and hallmark representing the alleged location of the palace were in the center of the screen.

“Oh wow,” I breathed out and gaped at Andrew. “We found it.”

Andrew lowered his mouth to mine, his nose gently rubbing my nose, his lips caressing my lips. “Thank you,” he said, and then he gave me the most toe-curling kiss ever. I never wanted it to end.

His tongue explored my mouth, making me whimper and turn into melting goo. His free hand cupped my neck, and he groaned when his teeth made the slightest bite on my lower lip. Andrew’s hand drifted lower, he lifted my shirt, and his hot palm smoothed up my skin until it found the curve of my breast, and his fingers generously massaged it. He deepened the kiss, rolling a hard nipple between his thumb and index finger.

“Should we finish pinpointing the location first?” I said, breaking our kiss, breathless, soaking wet, and irritated at my own words.

Pressing his forehead to mine, Andrew closed his eyes and exhaled. “Yes. We should.” He squeezed my nipple again, withdrawing a moan from me. “I need maybe an hour to map our route. And then I’ll thank you properly.”

While Andrew began working on GPS coordinates, I used Photoshop to alter the two photos I had taken earlier of Augustine’s sketches, first making lines bolder and more defined, and then stacking them and making the top layer sixty percent translucent. For the second time that day, my heart skipped a beat. It wasn’t a layout of a floor plan as we’d originally assumed. On the screen, I had a rectangle made out of an irregular network of paths. A labyrinth of some sort. It wasn’t as uniform or complicated as a maze—it didn’t have concentric repeating patterns—but it did have a continuous path with few smaller paths that branched out with a squiggle or a letter at the end. It was hard to understand what these symbols meant, even after I’d adjusted the brightness of the picture.

“Andrew, look at this,” I said, stretching my arm out with my iPhone. “Do you know what this could be?”

Andrew took my phone and examined it, his eyebrows pulled together. “I don’t…” He made a surprised sound. “It’s a passage… But the image looks incomplete.” He handed it back to me.

I rubbed my eyes, exhaustion having slowly distorted my vision, and looked at the image again, noticing that in some places the lines had gaps. “You might be right. Where did you get these outlines?”

“Carlos.”

“Damn. It would be foolish of us to ask him if he knows anything about them or if he could locate the other piece of the image.”

Andrew nodded. “No need to bring Richards’s attention to whatever this is. For all we know, it could be the path to the Asiento de Padua cargo in the palace’s basement.”

I gave myself another ten minutes to study the image before I left Andrew on the floor to figure out tomorrow’s journey, and went to the bathroom to wash my face and brush my teeth before climbing into his bed, wearing absolutely nothing—not being distracting at all. Closer to ten, someone—William—slid condoms under the door. Andrew took it as a clue he was done working. He closed his journal, plugged in the iPad to charge, went to the bathroom, took out his contacts, and brushed his teeth. He stripped off his clothes, plucked the long row of silver packets off the floor, and before I knew it, he was lording over me, the hardness of his erection pressing between my thighs.

“Do we know our next chess move?” I asked.

“Yes.” His mouth was next to my ear, his hot breaths sending ripples of lust down my skin.

“And you’re not tired?” I wholeheartedly hoped he would say no. I was spent but didn’t want to pass on another treat of Andrew’s body.

“No.” He nuzzled my neck, then his lips traveled from my jaw to my neck. “But you will be in the morning.” And then he pressed his entire length into me.