Bad Boy of Wall Street: A Bad Boy Billionaire Romance (23 page)

I glanced over at the window, frowning as I noted that the sun was already dropping down below the trees. We probably only had another ten or fifteen minutes of daylight left. "Do you have a flashlight?"

"Sure," he answered, still frowning at me. "What's going on?"

"I have an idea, and even though I'm all but certain that it's just a load of craziness, I want to find out for certain," I said, hoping that I didn't sound crazy. "Can you get the flashlight and come with me, out to the beach?"

"The beach?"

"Yeah. Your beach." I stood up abruptly from my seat, trying to think through this idea, to see if I saw any holes in the plan. I couldn't find anything that stood out as wrong. "Come on, let's go before the sun goes all the way down and it gets too dark."

Rob kept on frowning, but he went to fetch the flashlight. I tried to think through it. They'd need to pick a spot of course, but there were only so many options. And maybe we could see some evidence of it...

I tried not to let any excitement build up inside of me, but it was too late. This could really be it!

Chapter Twenty-Seven

*

Five minutes later, as we arrived at the beach, the sun was barely a sliver poking up above the horizon. The trees cast long shadows across the beach, and everything looked like it was painted in tones of yellow and orange.

"So, what are we doing out here?" Rob asked, as we stepped out onto the sand.

I looked around, hoping desperately that I hadn't been making up the whole thing. But sure enough, I saw the shovel standing off to the side, leaning up against one of the trees closest to the water. I dashed over to it, picking it up.

"Is this yours?" I asked Rob, holding it out to him.

He shook his head. "Nope, not mine. I figure that someone else left it here. Wasn't it out here when we first came out?"

I nodded. "And I think that this is the key to everything," I replied, as I looked around and tried to figure out where would be the best place to dig.

"I don't understand." Rob followed behind me as I climbed up one of the tall dunes, trying to get a better view. "What are we looking for?"

"Buried treasure!" I said, looking around. There! Right at the base, above the high water line, equally distance between the two trees that were nearest. That seemed like the sort of spot that I'd pick. Still holding the shovel in my hands, I started down towards the location.

"Buried treasure?" Rob echoed, following after me. "Who buried it?"

I shoved the blade of the shovel into the soft sand, and then thought better of it and handed it over to Rob. "You dig, I'll explain, and you tell me if I'm totally crazy and off base in this."

He took the shovel from me and started to dig as I laid out my thoughts. "See, Chad was buying something, something expensive, so that he could hide it. He couldn't leave all the money sitting in a bank account somewhere, so he had to buy something with it, right?"

"Sure," Rob grunted, as he heaved another shovel's worth of sand out of the hole and onto the ground beside him.

"But he couldn't hide whatever he bought on his property anywhere, because that would be one of the places that the Feds and other investigators would check, right? He needed to hide it in a place where he could easily get to it, but no one else knew that it was his. And he probably didn't want anyone seeing or catching him hiding it, so he'd use someone else to do it for him."

"Yeah, all of that makes sense," Rob agreed, grunting as he stepped on the blade to drive the shovel deeper in to the sand. The sand at the bottom of the hole was no longer loose and dry; we'd reached the wet, harder-packed layer. "But why am I digging?"

"Alfred," I answered. "The caretaker at Cartmann's house. I think he's in on it!"

Rob paused for a moment to look up at me, leaning on the handle of the shovel. "How is Alfred involved?"

I took a deep breath. Here went nothing. "I think that Chad bought something valuable and had it sent up to his house up here," I burst out. "Then, I think that Alfred came out here and buried whatever the items were, so that the investigators wouldn't find it when they searched Chad's house."

"Why?" Rob didn't sound disbelieving, at least. He just looked at me and waited for me to explain.

I swept my hands around. "Didn't you say that Chad technically owned this property, but Diana put up so much of a fuss that he just dropped the issue? That means that no one would look here, since it seems like Diana's land - but if Chad really needed to, he could always go back to the survey documents or whatever to prove that anything buried here is his. It's the perfect place where no one would look, but he knows that it's his!"

"But why Alfred? He didn't seem like the treasure burying type."

I thought back to our visit to the Cartmann house. "Sand," I recalled. "When we came into the house, there was a pair of sandy boots sitting near the front door. I didn't think anything of them; maybe Alfred just liked taking walks on the beach. But what if he wore them when he came over here to bury the treasure?"

As I spoke, Rob had resumed digging. I didn't know if he believed me, or if he just wanted to humor me. "It still seems like pretty thin evidence," he said - or at least, he started to say.

As he finished this sentence, he drove the shovel down into the sand at the bottom of the hole. But instead of sliding in with a soft swishing sound, it slid halfway in - and then stopped with a loud "clunk."

Rob and I looked at each other for one frozen moment, both of us wide-eyed.

"No way," I whispered, but Rob had already tossed the shovel aside and dropped down to his knees, using his hands to brush away dirt.

"Can you hold the light for me?" he called out, and I jumped to obey, moving in to aim the beam of the flashlight up and overhead so that it aimed straight down into the hole.

As Rob brushed away more clumps of the wet sand, a sheet of dirty, stained canvas came into view. The canvas moved under Rob's touch, but there was clearly something hard beneath it, something that his shovel had encountered with that heavy clunk sound. Rob pulled away more dirt and sand, revealing more canvas, his fingers probing for its edges.

"Here we go," he said after a minute, as his fingers found an edge to the canvas. "Now, let's see what's under here. Probably just rocks, maybe some old bricks."

"Yeah, probably," I agreed with him, not believing the words coming out of my own mouth for a single second. This had to be it!

Rob pulled back the canvas, revealing some rectangular, blocky shapes. "See? Bricks," he said, just before the beam of the flashlight played over them and his words dried up in his throat.

The shapes were bricks, sure enough - but their sides and faces were smooth, not pitted like normal construction bricks. They seemed remarkably even. And as the light of the flashlight beam hit them, they reflected back a rich, lustrous gold color.

"No way," I gasped, as Rob paused for a minute, just staring. Slowly, almost trembling, his hands reached down and wrapped around one of the bricks, lifting it up from where it sat nestled among its fellows.

"Gold," he said in a half-strangled voice, staring at the brick.

"And there's more," I added, tilting the flashlight down into the hole. "There have to be at least a dozen of them!"

My words spurred a new flurry of activity, as Rob dug around, hauling the bricks up and out of the hole, stacking them up on the sand on the edge of the sandy depression. By the time he'd pulled all of them out, tossing out the canvas sheet and rooting around at the edges to make sure he hadn't missed any, eighteen bars of gold sat stacked neatly on the edge of the hole.

Rob finally stopped, dropping the canvas back into the bottom of the damp hole as he stared at the stacked rows of gold bars. "Nine million, give or take," he whispered softly, in awe.

I nodded, dropping down to sit on the edge of the hole. Almost unconsciously, one of my hands reached out so that my fingers could stroke along the edge of the nearest gold bar. The metal felt cool and smooth beneath my touch, like stroking the side of a brand new automobile.

"What do we do now?" I asked.

Rob looked at the bars wordlessly for a moment, and then pulled himself up out of the hole, sitting down beside me. "I don't know," he confessed. "I mean, we ought to turn them in. After all, even if the money belonged to the drug cartels, the government probably wants it back."

I sighed. "Do we have to give it all back?"

"It's the right thing to do," Rob pointed out softly.

I sighed. "So much for you sticking to your bad boy roots."

"My bad boy roots?" he echoed back, turning to stare at me. Even in the dim light of the reflected flashlight beam, I could see his raised eyebrows. "April, I grew up decidedly middle class, and as your own article reveals, I didn't do anything wrong!" His hands grabbed me, drawing me towards him, into his lap. "Where do you keep on getting this idea that I'm such a bad boy?"

I started to answer, but every time I reached for words, I found myself distracted by his lips kissing me, his fingers wandering to wonderfully inappropriate places. "I don't really know," I finally gasped out, as he tugged me closer, into his lap and embrace. "Must just be something about how you look, that's all."

"That's very frustrating," Rob murmured back to me, his voice slightly muffled as he traced his way downward, easing me backwards onto the sandy beach behind me. "It almost feels like discrimination."

I couldn't manage to reply, as I bit my lip to keep from moaning out as he teased off various articles of clothing, the whole time continuing to complain about how I assumed that he was a sexy bad boy, after only the most carnal of activities.

"That definitely changed my mind," I managed to get out ten minutes later, after my breathing had finally slowed to something that vaguely resembled normal once again. "Now I see you as a totally good guy."

"Glad to hear it," Rob replied, climbing up from the hole. It turns out that being a little lower than me let him try a couple very exciting angles that felt wonderfully different and made my heart thump even faster, to the point where I almost worried that I might end up dying of pleasure, right here on the beach.

"But we still have this," I continued, rolling over to look at the pile of gold beside us. "I know that the right thing to do is to turn it in, but a part of me just wants to keep it!"

"Trust me, after dealing with all this finance stuff, keeping it would end up being more of a headache than we can afford, even with all that gold," Rob answered. But as I sighed, he hauled himself up beside me, dropping down to lay on his side on the sand with his head propped up on one elbow. "But I do have two words that might make you feel a little better about the whole thing."

"Oh yeah?" I turned towards him, looking up at those light blue eyes that seemed almost to glow, even in the darkness. "And what might those two words be?"

I saw the glint of his white teeth as he smiled back at me. "Finder's fee."

It took a moment before the significance of these words clicked. "Maybe - it's not guaranteed," he cautioned me, as I squealed and threw my arms around him. "But if the government treats this like it usually regards most of these cases, it's a pretty good possibility. We'll have to wait and see."

"I still like those two words," I replied, kissing him to cut off his words. "And in exchange, I can think of a couple of words that describe what I want to do to you right now."

"And what might those be?"

I leaned in to whisper them into Rob's ear, and he laughed, a laugh of pure happiness, as he pulled me towards him.

Epilogue

*

A month later...

"It's here! It's here!"

I burst into the main living area of the apartment, my hands clutching the stack of magazines. As soon as I spotted the cover in the news stand outside, I'd snatched up the entire pile, dumping a twenty onto the little checkout area and dashing away without waiting for the bemused seller to hand me my change.

After a moment, Rob poked his head out from the second bedroom, which he'd adapted into an office. "What's here?"

I threw a copy of Grit at him, dropping the rest onto the living room coffee table as he caught the magazine out of the air. "The New York Times, silly. No, my article! What else could it be?"

It was hard to miss. As soon as Sandy got the first draft in his email inbox, my phone had lit up with his number. Instead of calling me to badger me about the expense report or the extra time that it took for me to put it all together, he immediately heaped praise on the story, sounding half-amazed that I was the one receiving such wonderful words from his own mouth. He insisted that I get back into the office as soon as possible - and that I bring Rob, so that the photographer could get some pictures!

"Hell, we might even be talking about the cover," he finished before he hung up, leaving me speechless as I looked down at the phone in my hand.

It turned out that this call came at a good time; the SEC had finally started digging through all of the evidence that Rob turned over to them, and they demanded that he come down for an in-person interview - in Manhattan, at their main offices. "I suspect, however, that I won't likely still have my apartment, given how it was partly paid for and supplied by Cartmann Securities," he remarked to me after getting off the phone with the investigators.