Page 28 of These Reckless Hearts

My stomach knots. “Not ever?”

“Not unless you want your former friends to hunt you down and kill you,” Dave chuckles.

I’ve learned that the “other guard” is a little off. He’s awkward as fuck without very many personable personality traits. He loves guns and violence though. The only time I hear him animated is when they’re discussing dark things like what they’ll do if the team Lance hired follows us up the mountains.

Thankfully, he doesn’t talk all that much.

With everything else going on, I’m relieved we never placed my family’s treasure map in Stone’s safe. We kept it in our bags along with all the other modern maps we bring with us. The ex-military team didn’t think to search there. Considering they don’t know we have a map, I can breathe easy about it.

I tried talking to Stone about the fact that we still have the map, and he brushed it off, telling me he should’ve been able to keep everything safe.

We stop a few more times for water breaks. The weather is absolutely gorgeous today, but there’s no way Ninja or Dave would be able to handle this trek in the summer. They’d be puddles of sweat soaking into the mountain floor, the sun making them evaporate right in front of our eyes.

When we get to camp, they’re absolutely exhausted. We take another break while we bring out the equipment, deciding what we’re going to focus on first. It’s later in the day than it usually is when we arrive at our search destination, so we’re working on limited time.

Stone pulls the metal detector out. I walk toward him, knowing there’s nowhere he can avoid me up here.

Behind me, Wyatt answers Dave’s question about how we all go to the bathroom. That’s important mountain etiquette right there, and I’m glad he’s explaining it to them.

I wrap my fingers around Stone’s arm, and he flinches. I pull back with a sigh. “You know, you’ve got to stop that. I’m going to get a complex that you don’t want me to touch you.”

“I want you to. I just want to be worthy of it.”

I place my hands on my hips, anger rushing to the surface as I watch Stone try to deflect me again. “Okay, this is seriously getting frustrating. I let you have your little pity party but enough is enough, Stone. It’s done. It happened. We can be pissed about it or we can make something out of it. Cole’s working on getting it back.”

Stone’s lip curls. “Ishould be finding it.”

I close my eyes. His reaction is so uniquely him, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it. “You don’t have to save the day every single time. You’re of better use up here, and also, you know, alive and uninjured.” I’m still not over the fact that he was going to track his father down into who knows what mess.

“You entrusted me with one thing,” he growls.

“I’ve entrusted you with more than one thing. The ring and the papers, yes. But this,” I say, pulling his hand away from the metal detector and placing it on my chest. “This is the most important thing, and right now, you’re breaking it.”

His gray-blue eyes soften. “I just—”

“I know, I know. Blah, blah, blah. You’re gonna say something about you sucking and I’m going to turn around and say what I just fucking said. We’ll get the ring back. We’ll get the other stuff, too. And even if we don’t, you know what we can do to get back at the fuckers who took them from us?”

He hides a smile, but his eyes are still fierce. “What?”

“We can find the rest of the treasure and throw it in their faces.”

He lets the smirk out now. I positively glow under the curve of his lips like it’s the first daybreak I’ve seen in a hundred years. “That’s true.”

“Now, can we be the Wilder-Jacobs team again and actually put all these investors’ money to good use by finding the treasure? We have a shot to do what your father never could. Won’t all those buttoned-up business blowholes who didn’t side with us be super pissed? They’ll probably have heart attacks on the spot.”

Stone chuckles. “You’ve been spending too much time with Cole. He’s warped your brain.”

I stretch onto my tiptoes and kiss his lips. He doesn’t take it further which tells me he’s still not one hundred percent okay. It’s fine. I have all the time in the world up here on this mountain. I can keep working on him.

Stone brings out the grid map, using what we worked on in previous trips to narrow down the area that we’re going to search today. He informs the newcomers that the item he’s holding is probably the most precious thing we have in our possession. In fact, when everyone else gets down to business after his little speech, he takes a picture of it with his phone.

He’s not wrong. This map tells us where we’ve already searched so we don’t waste our time looking in the same places again.

Even though Stone still hasn’t let me back in completely, he makes sure we’re partners for the rest of the time we have left to search tonight. Ninja tells us he’s been ordered to stay wherever I am, so the three of us head to our new search grid.

Once we get there, I stare out over the landscape and see familiar landmarks of where we’ve already searched. It’s starting to look like we’ve actually accomplished something. No, we haven’t found the lantern yet, but we have found where it’s not. It’s like what Edison supposedly said about making the first lightbulb:I didn’t fail. I just found 2,000 ways not to make a lightbulb.

If that kind of thinking worked for Edison, it’ll work for us, too.

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