The Treasure Hunters (9 page)

Some time
later, after her heartbeat had returned to normal, she sat up when Sin held out
his hand. She scooted over to him. He pulled her onto his lap and kissed her,
right there in front of Merridie. His lips were cool but when his tongue
slipped into her mouth, her chilled skin heated right up. One of his hands slid
up her neck, holding her in place, and she couldn’t help but remember how he
said he liked sex:

Hard.

Hot.

Often.

It made her body quiver and her pussy
throb, and just when she began to go a little light-headed, he pulled back and
pressed his forehead against hers.

“I want you,” he whispered. “But
not with an audience.”

Ruby remembered Merridie’s
presence, and her face flooded with heat.

Shit
.
How’d she forget her best friend?

Ruby turned her head and saw
Merridie gawking at her with her mouth open.

“I see now that Robert was really
the wrong man for me,” she said and Ruby thought about jumping into the river
and letting it wash her away. “You wouldn’t happen to have a twin brother,
would you, Sin?”

He chuckled and shook his head as
he pushed to his feet. When he quickly turned away from them, Ruby realized he
must have been trying to hide his erection. She’d felt it against her thigh. Oh
yes, she had definitely felt how much he wanted her. Hard, hot, and she was
more than willing for the ‘often’.

“Look,” he said and pointed.

She and Merridie looked and could see
an old torch wedged in some boulders. He stood and walked toward it, removing
it from its holder, and that’s when Ruby realized a tunnel lay built into the
rock.

“I guess that’s the walk of night,”
Merridie replied. “Seriously, this
Vouleigh
must have
thought he was a poet.”

Sin squatted down and inspected
something on the ground. “Huh. Flint. Thank fucking god.”

In a few seconds they had the torch
lit and they stood hesitantly at the mouth of the tunnel. Cobwebs hung from the
ceiling and they couldn’t see more than a foot or two in front of them. Ruby’s
stomach clenched with fear.

“Do we really want to go in there?”
Ruby asked. “We could climb those rocks and be out of here.”

“We’ve come this far,” Sin said.

She looked up at him. Yes, they’d
come that far and if they didn’t find the treasure then all of this had been
for nothing. She took a deep breath, reined in her wayward
nyctophobia
,
and nodded. Sin held out his hand and she took it, clinging tightly, as he led
the way.

****

Eden and Asia sat by the lagoon,
drying off. The jungle surrounded them and without the map, or Merridie, she
was hesitant which way to go. The last thing she wanted to do was run into the
native population again.

“They must have gone the other way.”

“Sin will take care of them,” Asia
said in a deep gruff voice.

“I know,” she replied. “Sin is a
good man. I just worry a little too much when they aren’t with me.”

Asia didn’t reply and she didn’t
expect him to. She knew he thought she was odd. Most people did, and that was
okay. Truth was, she wasn’t all that innocent or dumb, but it was easier to
play along. When people underestimated her, she was able to discover so many
interesting things.

“The lagoon trickles that way so
we’ll follow it,” Asia said as he stood and looked down at her.

“All right.”
 

She was glad he was with her. Had
she been alone she probably would’ve been okay, but she wasn’t ashamed to say
that the jungle intimidated her. As she followed, she looked him over from head
to toe. He was such an interesting man: quite different from all the other men
she’d known in New York, and she didn’t mean his skin color. Of all the people
she would’ve thought to be a sailor, Asia did not seem the part of a man at one
with the sea. In fact, he seemed more a big ball of tightly coiled energy.

“How did you ever wind up sailing
with Sin?” she asked, unable to contain her curiosity.

“It was in the Caribbean.”

“Okay. That’s the where. What’s the
how?”

“Got into a
fight.
A man behind me had a pistol. Sin stepped in and knocked him out.
Been sailing with him ever since.”

Eden rather thought there was more
to the story. His answer was far from satisfactory for her curiosity. “Why were
you in the Caribbean?”

He didn’t answer and that’s when
she knew there definitely was more to the story.

“My father was in business with
Ruby’s,” she said, hoping to get him to open up more. “That’s how I met her. My
mother died when I was two, so I spent a lot of time with Ruby, and Ruby spent
a lot of time at the docks. I’ve seen a lot of things, Asia.”

He paused and she came up to his
side. He looked down at her and she smiled benignly at him.

“You’re a little funny, aren’t
you?”

Eden stared at him, maintaining her
‘wide-eyed innocence’ façade, but something about Asia made her hang back. So
she straightened her shoulders and lost the ditzy girl persona. Her eyes
narrowed a bit, as she looked him up and down. Their eyes met and for a moment,
she allowed all the intelligence she possessed to shine through. Then she
lifted a finger and held it up to her mouth, as if to shush him.

 
Asia pursed his lips and winked, silently
letting her know he’d keep her secret. Then the moment died and Eden slipped
back into the role she felt comfortable in.

Asia turned, leading the way
through the jungle. The trickle of water was wider now, more like a brook that
snaked its way through the island. Eden followed, glad she’d shown him a bit of
who
she really was, and could only hope that he felt
as trusting with her.

“I had to leave New York,” he said,
about ten minutes later. “I––I hurt someone.”

“Who?”

He shrugged.
“A
bootlegger.
I was moving the cargo. He short-paid me, and when I
confronted him he had his thugs work me over. So when I healed, I came after
him and I got my money. But I had to leave New York.”

She grabbed his arm, halting him,
and his incredibly tense muscles strained against her touch.

“The world is different now,” she
said softly. “I don’t see it as black and white anymore. None of us do.”

She stared into his dark eyes,
trying to show him that whatever happened back then was exactly that: the past.
It didn’t define who he was now. Little by little, he relaxed and nodded, and
then he took her hand and led
her the
rest of the way.
A few minutes later, the jungle gave way to sand and Eden realized they had
reached the beach, albeit on the opposite side of the island. She was ready to
go running into the sun when Asia held her back and pointed. Through the
brambles, she saw another ship anchored in the small harbor. This must be the
harbor that Sin had tried to sail to, in hopes of avoiding the very rocks that
had drowned the
Paradise
. A rowboat
had pulled up on the beach, and eight seedy-looking men rested and milled around.

“Who are they?” she whispered.

“That was the boat following us,”
Asia answered, voice equally as soft.

“Following us? Do you think they
know about the map?”

He shifted a little to the left. “That’s
Ramzee’s ship, the
Predator
,” he
said. “I’d say it’s a good bet he does.”

“Who’s Ramzee?”

“A self-proclaimed
pursuer of antiquities.
Only he’s not exactly the legit kind. Sin and I
have had a few run-ins with him.”

“Bad run-ins?”

“The
Predator
was the sister ship of the
Paradise
,” he replied. “He lost her in a game of poker to Sin. Unfortunately,
Ramzee doesn’t like to lose. One night, he brought some men along to take her
back, but…”

“But what?”

“We came in the
Paradise
, didn’t we?”

“Are we going to steal that boat?”

Asia looked at her and she saw the
confusion on his face. “What?”

She pointed to the
Predator
, which did indeed look a lot
like the
Paradise
. “Well, they have a
boat and we don’t and they’re obviously the bad guys. Plus, I’d say trying to
sneak up on us to steal the treasure doesn’t constitute good neighbors.”

“Hold on, Annie Oakley,” he said. “Just
how do you think we can manage to get past eight armed men?”

All of a sudden, seven of the men
stood and began gathering their gear to head into the jungle, leaving only two
men to guard the rowboat. Asia gave a big sigh, but all Eden could do was smile
as an idea formed in her head.

****

Sin led the way through the narrow
tunnel, the fire throwing ominous shadows all over the place. It didn’t help
that there were cobwebs all over. Ruby was glad Sin was there, taking care of
them at the front.

“Do you think this is man-made?”
Merridie asked.

“Yes,” Sin replied. “You see those marks
in the wall? Those are hand-drilled grooves to set dynamite sticks in, like in
mines. They blast away specific areas to create tunnels.
Vouleigh
must have been planning this for some time, so it’s got to have an outlet to
the surface somewhere, other than the village.”

“Just watch out for the creepy
crawly things,” Merridie said.

“I won’t tell you how many creepy
crawly things I’ve encountered so far.”

Ruby shivered. It took all her
strength to keep her fear of the darkness at bay, but her heart raced and her
skin turned clammy. The test of her mettle illuminated her strength, but it
also pointed out she was still afraid of the dark.

They walked until they came to a
large chamber with a doorway to a smaller room attached. Sin pointed at several
more torches on the walls and lit them from his torch.
 
Light flooded the area with a dull glow,
revealing a lot of odd-looking items in the chamber. Why would someone need
chairs, a table, pottery, barrels, and ropes?

“Watch out!” Sin barked and grabbed
her arm. Her foot skidded, sending some rubble over the edge of a black hole.

“God!”
Merridie said. “How far does it go down?”

“I don’t know, and I have no desire
to find out,” Sin replied.

Ruby studied the rotten furniture
pieces. “There’s nothing here.”

“Is this it?” Merridie demanded.
“The end?
We came all this way for nothing?”

“
Merri
––”

“No! This is bullshit!” she raged,
pacing back and forth. “I’ve lost my fiancé, Eden’s lost her father. We were
dragged to England, I’ve been forced to polish silver, the boat sank, and now a
dead end. For Christ’s sake, what else can happen?”

Sin opened his mouth to say
something, but Ruby grabbed his arm and shook her head. His eyebrows shot up
but he took her advice.

“Is there anything around here that
can burn?” Ruby asked, looking around. “Perhaps if that chasm isn’t that wide,
we can jump.”

“Of course, jump,” Merridie
muttered to herself. “It’s not like we haven’t done that before.”
 

 
Sin stomped on the chair, which broke apart
easily, and then ripped his shirt’s sleeve off to wrap around the end. He lit
it and then threw the torch, which surprisingly, landed on the other side.

“It’s only about three feet wide,”
Sin said.

“So we could jump it.” Sin gave her
an incredulous look. Ruby shrugged. “I grew up around the docks playing pirates.”

Sin studied the chasm. “Perhaps
there’s a path. Look, there’s a dip around the rock face. Let’s check that
out.”

He led the way to the hook in the
chamber, but as much as they searched for another way to continue, it was a
dead end. The first thing Ruby realized when they returned was that Merridie
was gone.

“Merridie?”

“What’s wrong?” Sin asked.

Ruby looked at the chasm and put
her hands on her hips. “She jumped.”

“What do you mean, she jumped?”

Ruby made hand gestures with her
fingers of running and jumping high in the air.

“Are you sure?” he asked dubiously.

Ruby sighed.
“Yeah.
She’s angry and frustrated, which makes her do irrational things.”

“Very irrational.”

“Merridie!” she yelled. Only
silence came back. “We’re going to have to follow her.”

“Ruby, we could jump the chasm and
be confronted with another one. We don’t know what’s ahead of us.”

“And I can’t let her go by herself.
We’re family, Sin. Family sticks together.”

He pursed his lips as he studied
her for a long minute. Finally, he nodded.
“All right.
But let me go first.”

Ruby ignored him and backed up. Centering,
concentrating, she studied the ground to find the right place to jump from. She
took off, running hard, and hit the edge of the chasm, and flying. It was the
brief second of weightlessness, flight, and then she hit the ground on the
other side and came to a sliding halt.

She looked back at Sin. “Throw me the
torch.”

He tossed the one he was holding
and she let it fall onto the sandy floor before picking it up. She held it high
into the darkness of the continuing tunnel.

“Merridie?” she called out but only
her voice reverberated back at her. “Damn it! Once she gets in a mood, she
could take off without a backward glance. How far back do you think this tunnel
goes?”

“Hold on,” he said. A moment later
he joined her on the other side. She gave him back the torch. “She’s got the
book, so I’ve no idea how far this extends. We could be down here a while. And
once this torch runs out? We might as well be dead. It’ll be hopeless.”