He grinned at her, his heart filled for the first time in forever. “Promise.”
He kissed her. She was his heart.
His heart. The heart of the house.
“Shit. I know where the treasure is.” David took her hand, and they ran back in the house.
Chapter Eleven
Tessa stood in front of the big mural and studied it carefully. “You think there’s something behind this?”
David was running his hands where the mural met with the wall. “Yes. I looked at the blueprints again. The lounge should be behind this wall, but the square footage doesn’t add up.”
“There’s really treasure?” Ian was standing to the side with a sandwich in his big hand. He hadn’t minded all the dead bodies. The man was hungry.
He’d also taken the whole “she was now with his nephew” news with pure Taggart calm. He’d patted her on the back and told her to make sure David wore a condom, and now she was part of the family. The man was seriously into safe sex.
“David thinks so.” Eddie stood to the side. He’d used the satellite phone to talk to Camila after Sean had gotten Grace on the phone with David.
Tessa had been the one to tell him his treasure hunt could wait long enough for him to assure his mom he was okay. He could be single-minded when he was working. She would be the one to drag her gorgeous professor back into the real world.
“You think the poem refers to the heart on the mural.” Sean stood in front of the mural, considering it. “Where the river flows.”
That got David’s attention. “You’ve read it?”
Sean nodded. “Yeah, I looked up Ricardo Montez because you’re so fascinated with him. I read up on him, and it led to the legends about the treasure.”
“Huh, that’s nice,” David said with a smile. “It’s nice that someone in my family knows about my work.”
She got the feeling Sean had done that so he could talk to his stepson.
Kyle was sitting on a chair with his leg up. “It wasn’t going to be me. That stuff is boring.”
“I’ve never heard anything about a hidden door here.” Eddie had lightened up considerably after talking to Camila and ensuring that his son was all right. They would be here in a couple of hours, and he’d already called in a cleaning team to dispose of her afternoon’s work.
All in all, not a bad day, and there still might be some treasure.
“Are we talking cash or like art and stuff?” Big Tag asked.
She’d quietly briefed her boss on what had gone down, and he’d agreed to keep Marta’s cover even from the rest of the group. They owed her. She was investigating some of the business leaders Eddie was meeting with. There were rumors the businessmen might be involved in some shady shit the government was interested in.
“I think it’s the contents of a ship.” David was back to running his fingers along the seam. “A couple of years before he died, Montez covered the costs of the recovery of a ship that sank off the coast of the island in 1763. We know he accepted several items from the ship, but they weren’t accounted for when he died and the contents of the place became Eddie’s.”
“Wasn’t there something about numbers?” She hadn’t expected to feel so comfortable with his family, but the Taggarts made it easy. Ian was distracted with food and or violence. Sean just wanted his stepson happy, and Kyle was half asleep from the pain meds MaeBe had slipped into his backpack.
“I don’t know what it meant,” David admitted. “There might be a safe we have to get into.”
She didn’t think so. The numbers had been at the beginning of the poem, so she thought they likely had something to do with the door and getting it open. The mural was painted on a grid, the lines of the grid still visible. “What if one of these squares is a button?”
David stepped back, looking at the whole of the mural again. “That’s an interesting idea.”
“So you count the squares?” Sean asked. “How do you know where to start?”
“Where the river begins,” Eddie said with a sigh. “That’s where my father would have started. He did this for me.”
David turned to his friend. “You were his heart. It was always for you. That’s what dads do. Sometimes they even do it when they don’t share a drop of blood.”
“Blood doesn’t make a family,” Sean said quietly.
“No, but sperm does, and you should remember that,” Big Tag snarked. “What? You guys know I can ruin any tender moment.”
“But he’s right about the sperm,” Kyle said with a yawn. “I’m not ready to be an uncle. I’m better at being a bad influence big brother.”
David had gone back to ignoring his family. He was intently counting squares from the center of the heart down the river.
“What kind of bad influence?” Sean asked, standing over Kyle. “I mean besides ignoring doctor’s orders and generally being a pain in the ass to your girlfriend?”
“MaeBe is not my girlfriend,” Kyle corrected. “She’s a girl who is a friend.”
“Good because Charlie’s got this cousin she thinks MaeBe should meet,” Ian offered.
Kyle’s eyes flared. “Absolutely not. Charlotte’s cousins are all Russian mob. What the hell is she thinking? MaeBe’s not going out with a gangster. And no IT guys either. She’s already too invested in her computer. She needs a guy who’ll get her outside and take her hiking. Someone who’s different from her but has the same values.”
“The kind of dude who duct tapes himself up after getting shot?” Tag polished off his last sandwich. “The kind who stows away on a private plane when he’s injured?”
“I just think she needs someone to shake her up a little. Or she’s happy on her own. You know she doesn’t need a man to make her complete,” Kyle snapped back. “She’s a fully realized person without some dude hanging around.”
Except Kyle was the dude who was always hanging around.
There was a snick, and the mural moved slightly.
“You did it.” She should have known he would find it. He was good at finding lost things. Like her.
The most beautiful smile came over his face. “I did. But not without your help, baby.”
David kissed her, seeming to forget that he’d opened a door that had been closed for years, but then the treasure didn’t really matter to her guy. It was the journey he cared about.
But she wanted to see the treasure.
“Are you going to let Eddie go first?” she asked.
David kissed her again and then stepped back, sliding the panel to the side and exposing the stairwell. “This was the treasure your dad wanted you to find. The one you can share with your son one day.”
There was a sheen of tears in Eddie’s eyes as he put a hand on David’s shoulder. “The gift was always the game, wasn’t it? Not what I found at the end. It was in the hours he put into making the puzzle, into giving us something we could share. That’s what my dad truly left for me.”
“But it could be money, too, right?” Ian asked. “I’m serious. It was a big bill.”