AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Even if there’s a real treasure at the end?” If there was a chance for finding it, it would literally make my career. But it wasn’t my treasure. I had to convince Archie to let me help, to keep the hunt going. Maybe I could solve it.
Archie didn’t look wholly convinced.
Time for the big guns. “How bad do you feel about that elevator thing?”
“Pretty bad,” he said, his voice lowering.
“Well, if you’ll let me write about the hunt, and maybe help you finish it, it will all be forgiven.”
“Plus the comped room.” He smiled as he said this, his eyes sparking as they met mine.
“Well that’s nice too,” I agreed. “It’s in the name Christine Werner, by the way. My roommate.”
He reached over the bar for a pen and wrote Christine’s name on a coaster. “Got it.” And then his eyes met mine and warmth rushed through me, some of that tension from the elevator making the space between my body and his feel charged, electric. Archie was quiet for a minute. I waited while he considered. “You know what? Yeah. Let’s do it.”
“Really?” Relief sang coolly through my veins—that was one obstacle removed. And I couldn’t pretend the idea of spending more time with Archie Kasper wasn’t part of the appeal. My stomach tightened as I thought about that.
He nodded. “I’ve been thinking it might be time for me to move on anyway, and the hunt is the one thing that needs wrapping up before I go.”
“Go where?”
The blue eyes darkened, and his expression dimmed. “I don’t know. Just time to find something else, I think.”
The sadness in his statement pulled at my heart. I wanted to dig into it, to learn more, but I needed to focus on my objective first. He’d agreed to let me in, and the next step was getting what I needed to secure my career. “When can we start?”
Chapter Six
How Much Hunt is in You?
GHOST
Idon’t know what made me decide to agree to let Emily help with the treasure hunt. The hunt itself had been all but abandoned since we’d discovered the last “clue.” And I’d been ready to resign myself to the idea that we’d figured out what it was he’d wanted. Even if a lawsuit didn’t feel much like the guy I’d known.
But Emily, who didn’t even know my uncle, had a good point. He wasn’t the kind of guy who cried over spilled milk. He didn’t stew over his losses or worry when things didn’t go his way.
I had a lot to learn from him, I knew...but Uncle Marvin had never killed anyone, either. I wasn’t sure that was the kind of thing you just chinned up and moved past.
I faced the woman next to me, thoughts flying through my head as I considered how to fulfill her request, how to get her involved in what might really be a completed mystery.
“I guess you’ll kind of need to understand how it all started,” I said, trying to focus on the topic at hand and not on the way Emily’s dark eyes glinted with intelligence or the way the point of her chin turned her whole face into a heart.
“That makes sense,” she said, sipping her beer.
The lights of the bar gleamed in strands of gold in her long chestnut hair, and her fingernails matched, glittering as she gripped her glass. She was the most interesting thing I’d seen in a really long time, and sorting through my responses to her was like wandering a familiar but overgrown trail through the forest.
“Do you still have the map or anything?”
“We have a lot of ‘or anything,’” I said, laughing as I thought through the last few years of clues. “But yeah, we still have the map.”
Her eyes widened with interest.
“Can I see it?”
“Yeah.”
Her eyes widened even more. A silent question: when?
“I’m trying to figure out what makes the most sense. Everything is in my room, for the most part, but I know it might be a little?—”
