“Don’t move,” he said, knocking down the finger she still held up. “Don’t even think about moving. I will be back in exactly three minutes, and you had better be right here where I left you.”
She gave him a tight smile as he backed away. Damn. He just knew she was going to move as soon as he was through the door.
JOSIE WATCHED HIM GO, keeping her smile in place until she could hear him thudding down the stairs. Back to his little trollop.
Be calm, she told herself. No emotions. You must show him that last night didn’t matter to you. You must keep this partnership professional.
Josie hadn’t lied about seeing the two of them as she came in through the servants’ door. She walked in on the one thing she had not expected to see. She should have been glad he was seducing another woman. She could have pilfered the whole house while he was thus occupied, but for some reason his liaison made her irrationally angry.
How dare he! How dare he, when he had just been with her last night? How could he go from her to—that?
Well, Josie had seen the trollop, so she supposed she knew how he could do so. The woman was everything Josie was not. And didn’t it boost her confidence to have to admit that?
The real confidence crusher was that she had cared so much. Josie kicked a pile of straw out of her way and went back to sorting through the contents of the last crate she’d opened. Actually, she hadn’t sorted the contents of any of the crates. She had only opened them, loudly and with as much force and pent-up anger as she could muster. She’d wanted him to know she was here. She’d wanted to interrupt his little plans for the evening.
Not that she wanted to be his trollop. When they finally shared a bed, she would be using him, not the other way around. And she wouldn’t feel anything more than pleasure. She wouldn’t allow it to mean anything more to her than their liaison last night had meant to him.
But her new attitude didn’t imply that, in the meantime, she was going to allow him to swive some woman while she did all the work searching for the treasure. And with all this work, who had time to take a lover? If she wasn’t going to take a lover while they searched for the treasure, he wasn’t either.
There was nothing but old silver in the crate, so she moved on to the next, filled with books and papers. A spark of hope ignited inside her, and she bent to remove the topmost items. Below her, she could hear the faint sounds of Westman and his trollop. It sounded as though he were showing her out. Good. She didn’t want to have to start slamming the crowbar into things again.
On the other hand, she thought as she leafed through one book of poems and then set it aside, she didn’t want to see Westman without his shirt again. Lord. She lifted another book. That had been a sight she was unprepared for. She’d never really given a man’s chest much thought before. She’d seen her brothers shirtless from time to time and never took much notice. They were thin and tall like she, their chests scrawny and pale.
But Westman—well. She looked up, imagining him again. There was nothing scrawny about the man. His shoulders were impossibly broad and impossibly chiseled. He looked like a statue, each muscle and plane beautifully molded into perfection. His arms were muscled as well, so much so that she could see where one muscle merged into another. He was not beefy, but defined.
Josie forced herself to lift another book from the crate and flip through it. The house was quiet now. Westman would be on his way back, and she really should at least appear to be busy.
And then there was his abdomen. She had never even thought twice about a man’s abdomen, but now she could hardly turn the thoughts off. She wanted to touch that hard flat expanse of skin. She wanted to run her fingers over those ridges of muscle and see what happened to Westman’s blue eyes when she did so.
She wanted . . .
Frowning, Josie read the sentence her finger was on in the book she held.
“Corsicana was not at all what we’d hoped. In the future, as long as The Good Groom doesn’t need repairs, we’ll skip that port.”
Josie’s heart was beating so fast she couldn’t even turn the page. The words were mere scratches in the leather-bound journal. They could have been written by anyone. She didn’t recognize the handwriting, but she knew who had penned the entry.
James Doubleday.
And he’d been writing about his pirate ship—the ship he had shared with her grandfather—The Good Groom. She knew the name almost as well as her own. Her grandfather had spoken of that ship like a man speaks of his first true love. With shaking fingers, she turned another page and saw the date above.
12 January 1759.
One year before the treasure had been found and hidden. One year.
“I thought I told you not to move.”
Josie jumped at Westman’s voice. He was standing in the doorway, holding his shirt, but she barely noticed that he was still bare-chested. Wordlessly, she held out the journal, and he, seeing something of what she was feeling, didn’t say another word, but crossed to her and took the book in his hands.
He looked at several pages, then flipped to the front. “My grandfather’s journal,” he said. He showed her the name on the inside cover, confirming what she already knew.
“We’ve found it,” she whispered. Then, with more excitement, “We’ve found it!”
He looked at the book in his hands, flipped pages as though trying to believe what he saw was real. All his scowling from a moment before was gone, and his face broke into a huge grin. “We’re going to be rich.”
She laughed, and he reached down and pulled her to her feet. “We’re going to be rich,” he said, spinning her around. “We’re going to be rich as kings.”
Josie started laughing too, her mirth increasing when Westman took her in his arms and danced a little jig with her. Up and down the attic, stepping over boxes, spinning around they went, both of them laughing like loons.
