Barefoot in Pearls (Barefoot Bay Brides Book 3) (37 page)

He turned at another sound from the house and saw two figures coming out the back. Two women—and one was Arielle. He opened his mouth to shout, but suddenly she started running full speed toward the man with the box. The other woman held back, but Arielle was determined to get him, her dark hair flying as she ran silently over the grass.

Not silently enough. The man turned, froze, and Arielle kept going straight at him. Every cell in Luke’s body went on alert as he watched the scene unfold in slow motion. The man lifting the box, Arielle reaching out her hands, and the woman by the house slowly walking toward them both.

Arielle tried to seize the box from the man, but he yanked it away, and she leaped on him, both of them rolling to the ground.

“You thief!” the man called. “You can’t have it!”

Luke started toward the melee, but paused as he saw the woman coming toward them both, a gun in her hand. As that registered, so did her identity. Michelle.

“Get him, Ari! Get the box!”

She was in on this? Part of this? Betrayal, like bile, rose up, taking him right back to that same jungle again, to another moment when the woman he’d thought he could love—he’d thought he did love—proved him wrong.

No, she wasn’t like Cerisse. Not even close. What he was seeing was simply…what he was seeing. And that wasn’t always
all there was
.

“Get the box!” Michelle yelled.

Arielle yanked the crate from the man’s hand, but he gave her a solid push and whipped around. “It’s mine!” he growled at her. “You’re a thief!”

Behind them, Michelle took slow, measured steps, her hands raised to aim a gun. “Get the box, Ari.”

Arielle looked over her shoulder, then back at the man. “Give me the box, or we’re both dead.” She was right. Michelle’s bullet could go right through Arielle and into the man. He’d seen it happen.

Luke had to shoot Michelle.

The man gave Arielle a vicious shove backward, pivoting to run toward the water. As he took off, his hood flew back, and Luke could see his face perfectly. He recognized the mason, Duane Dissick. Of course, a man who had access, time, and tools to look for gold he must have known was hidden somewhere.

“Go get him!” Michelle ordered.

Arielle stayed on the ground, shaking her head.

“Get him. He has the map, the letters, everything. Everything we need to be rich and free.”

That’s what Arielle wanted? Of course not, but…

Still on the ground, she barely turned, fighting for breath. “You get him. I don’t care about any of that.”

“Then you’re dead.”

“No, you are.” Luke’s voice echoed through the night, shocking both of them.

“What?”

“Luke!”

In an instant, Michelle dropped to the ground behind Arielle, her gun at Arielle’s head. “Go get that guy and that box, or I’ll put a bullet right through her brain.”

“Please, Luke. Please.” The terror in her voice sliced right through him. “Do what she says. I don’t want to die. Please!”

Wordlessly, a plan forming, he took off toward the water, in the same direction as the mason, slowing only when he was in the shadows, then slipping behind the office building to line up his shot. He didn’t give a shit about Duane Dissick, but he’d die before he let anything happen to Arielle.

Leaning around the corner, he saw Michelle force Arielle to a stand, spin her around, and push her about a foot ahead, making her walk toward the water.

Luke’s blood turned to ice as his posture mirrored hers. Lifting his gun. Finger on the trigger. Steady. If Michelle took five or six more steps, Luke could shoot her…and his bullet could go through her and right into Arielle.

He had to shoot that pistol out of Michelle’s hands.

Off by a millimeter, and Arielle would be dead. But this time…this time…he closed his eyes and believed what he couldn’t see. Then he fired.

* * *

The sound shocked her, like a cannon in her head. Ari threw her body to the ground, waiting for the agonizing pain of a bullet.

“Arielle! Arielle!”

That was Luke’s voice, coming from the darkness, desperate and ragged and drowned out by Michelle’s unearthly screams.

“Oh my God! Oh my God!”

“You’re not hit!” Luke shouted, the words giving Ari the ability to stop holding every cell frozen in fear. She rolled over, seeing Luke running toward her.

“I’m not hit,” she confirmed, more to assure herself than him.

Michelle wasn’t shot either, but her screams got louder as she dropped to her knees and held out empty hands. Before Ari could blink, Luke scooped up her pistol with his other hand. He dropped next to Arielle, and she reached both her arms to him and squeezed him so hard she could have cracked a rib.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

“For losing the map?” Michelle hollered. “He has the map, you idiots! Get him! He has it all! The maps, the letters from that Balls guy, everything! It’s in the crate!”

“No worries,” Luke said, pulling out his phone. “I know who he is. The sheriff will get him, and we don’t give a crap about gold.”

“Then what about all those bones and masks and thousand-year-old dead Indians buried on that land?”

Ari gasped softly. “What?”

“That hill is full of caves and graves and shit.”

“A grave for Jim Purty,” Luke said dryly.

Michelle choked. “What? He’s dead?” The utter horror in her voice told Ari that her instincts had been wrong. Michelle hadn’t killed the builder. “I thought he…I thought he…left me.”

“We found his body on the hill this morning,” Ari said softly.

“He’s dead?” She sobbed the word this time, folding in half. “Who killed him?”

“I thought you did,” Ari said.

“Me?” She covered her mouth with both hands. “I love him. Loved him.” Another sob racked her. “He didn’t leave me. He didn’t leave me!”

“Luke, you know that was the mason who just ran off?” Ari asked.

“I know, Duane Dissick.”

Michelle shot up. “That bastard! He killed Jim! I know it. He figured everything out and knew we were looking for gold. He killed him.”

Luke stood, glancing to the water.

“You can’t let him get away, Luke,” Ari said. “He’s a murderer.”

He didn’t answer, but handed Michelle’s gun to Arielle. “Can you handle this?”

She gave him a look that she knew he understood as
no
, but took it anyway. “Get him, and I’ll call the sheriff. She’s not going to hurt me. I know it.”

“If she does…”

“I know what to do.” She elbowed him. “Go.”

“I’ll be back.” He kissed her forehead, turned, and disappeared into the darkness. After a second, she heard the splash of one of the canoes left near the water’s edge and a paddle. Ari stood in the silence with a gun, a phone, and a weeping woman.

Keeping her distance and the gun—purely the most foreign thing she’d ever held—on Michelle, she called the deputy on Luke’s contact list, told him where they were and why, and then settled down to wait.

Michelle’s sobs had turned to shudders.

“You really loved him.” It wasn’t a question, because Ari already knew the answer.

“He wasn’t like anyone I’d ever met. As soon as he came into our offices, I felt something. Like my whole chest would explode.”

“He was The One for you,” Ari said softly.

Michelle looked up. “Yeah. And now he’s dead.”

She wanted to say there’d be another One, but Ari wasn’t at all sure that was true. One is, well, One. “Can you tell me about the bones and graves in the hill?”

“Jim found stuff in the house,” she said, swiping at her running nose. “Letters from the guy who owned it, written to that baseball player.”

“Cutter Valentine,” Ari supplied.

She nodded. “He was supposed to find them when he took the house down. I guess Balls—that’s how he signed his letters, honestly, Uncle Balls—thought the builder would give the whole box of letters to Cutter. But he…” She looked sheepish. “He kept it all when he read about the gold.” She sighed hard. “And now he’s dead.”

The universe had a way of working like that, Ari thought. But she didn’t have to tell Michelle. Her expression said she knew all about retribution.

“How did Balls find the gold?”

“His wife found it,” she said. “She was some kind of, you know, like you. A Native American. She found all those shells and stuff that you saw in that box, and then she found gold and jewels. Even found those pearls. But I hid them in the kitchen of the house, and that bastard Dissick must have found them.”

And he used them to mark Jim Purty’s grave. “What about the maps?”

“Oh, they’re in the bottom of that crate where Jim and I hid them.”

“Didn’t you make copies?”

“Jim did and put them in a safe-deposit box, but I don’t know where it is or who has a key. I don’t have any idea. I trusted him, and then I figured he ditched me—that he wanted the gold all to himself. I helped him fake the core sampling so it looked like there was nothing but shells in the mound. I helped him delay and delay the building. We wanted enough time to find the gold. Then he got fired.” She practically spat the word. “And now I know who told the owner that Jim was purposely delaying things.”

“Duane Dissick.”

“Of course. He figured it out, or maybe Jim brought him in and offered him a cut so he could help us find it. He said he might do that and I told him not to. Then he…disappeared. I thought he’d double-crossed me.”

“How could you not find the gold if you had maps?”

“They’re not in English, and the pictures are really hard to understand. We tried, and we thought we were following the map, but the gold was never where we thought it would be.”

In the distance, Ari heard a siren and breathed easier. But where was Luke? No gunshot, no shouting, no nothing. Where was he?

“Maybe someone beat you to the gold,” she suggested to Michelle.

But Michelle shook her head. “I don’t think so. The maps of the underground part? They’re falling apart they’re so old, but they show all these, like, tunnels and graves and shit. The gold has to be buried there.”

Red and blue lights cut through the darkness as the sirens grew louder, the cavalry coming to save her.

No, Luke had done that. She stole a glance at the dark water in the distance, still seeing and hearing nothing. For a second, she closed her eyes and listened, trying to hear beyond the screech of sirens to the universe, to listen to the message. Was he successful? Safe? Alive?

But the universe was silent.

Three sheriff’s cars thundered over the lawn toward them, bullhorn out, demanding they drop their weapons. Ari waited until Michelle stood and put her hands behind her head, and then she set the gun on the ground and did the same.

She recognized Deputy Brennan from the afternoon and walked to him.

“Duane Dissick killed Jim Purty, and Luke’s gone after him on the water.”

He drew back, bushy brows cinching together. “Is that so?”

“Yes, it is so.” She was too tired to argue and too worried about Luke. “You better go help him because he’s been gone—”

“He doesn’t need help.” His gaze had shifted over her shoulder, narrowing in disbelief. Ari turned and sucked in a soft breath at the sight. Luke had Duane Dissick’s hands locked, forcing the man to stumble forward. They were both soaking wet, head to toe. With his other hand, Luke carried the Cracker Jack crate.

Ari let out a soft whimper, pressing her hands to her chest as if that could keep it from bursting apart with so much admiration and joy and pride and love.

Sheriff’s deputies came forward in a group, and Luke practically tossed the man at one of them. “He confessed,” Luke said gruffly. “Here’s the murder weapon.” He yanked another pistol from behind his back. “Should match ballistics on Purdy.”

“What’s in the box?” Deputy Brennan asked.

“Absolutely nothing.” Luke turned it upside down and pounded it. “Everything got lost in the water, and it’s nothing but shreds of dissolved paper now.” He turned to Ari, angling his head. “Sorry, I tried to save it for you.”

Sorry? Was he crazy? She practically leaped into his arms, not caring that he smelled like saltwater and soaked her clothes. All she wanted to do was kiss him. Which she did, hard and long.

“Good work, McBain,” Deputy Brennan said. “Stick around for a few questions, then we’ll let you go.”

As the sheriff’s deputies went to work arresting and questioning, Luke pulled Ari to the side, away from them, bringing her close for more kisses. But instead of her mouth, he put his lips over her ear.

“Sit on the crate, Little Mermaid. Don’t let anyone take it.”

She drew back, her eyes wide and jaw loose.

“Shhh.” He hushed her with a soft kiss to the lips.

“You know, you’re the great American hero, Luke McBain.”

He smiled and eased her onto the crate. “Got that right, baby.”

A deputy slapped a hand on Luke’s shoulder, pulling them apart, indicating Michelle. “Who is that?” he asked.