Read the book: «The Treasure Man»

Chapter One

Chloe Timberlake knew that she had truly reached the end of her long journey to Sanluca, Florida, when the earthy scent of the Everglades muck gave way to the fragrance of the Atlantic Ocean wafting on the breeze. She leaned her head out the car window and let go an exuberant whoop that was heard by no one except perhaps a few tree frogs chirring in the scrub oaks overarching the road. And her cat, of course.

“Come on out, Butch,” she said. “We’re a long way from Farish, Texas. The Frangipani Inn is straight ahead.” She nudged open the tattered carpetbag where the big orange tomcat liked to sleep when traveling.

Butch poked his head out and twitched his whiskers. No litter box for him; Butch was toilet trained and hadn’t forgiven her for that last grungy rest stop on the Glades Highway. He looked down his nose at her before indulging in an indolent stretch, then sniffed appreciatively at the brine and seaweed.

When the car emerged from the shelter of the trees, Chloe turned off at 1200 Beach Road, the shell-rock driveway crunching under the old blue Volvo’s tires. Ahead of them, her father’s family home was surrounded by an encroaching tangle of vegetation, growing thick and lush now, in late May. Nearby, a boardwalk led down to the beach.

“I wonder whose Jeep that is,” Chloe mused as the headlights swung past a decrepit vehicle, its pockmarked sides spattered with mud. As she braked to a stop under a gumbo-limbo tree at the rear of the inn, a lithe shape detached itself from the side of the building and moved toward her. Chloe was wary; the inn, her cousin Gwynne had assured her, was unoccupied.

The shape morphed into a man and, still suspicious, Chloe rammed the car into Reverse for a quick getaway. His presence rattled her, even though Sanluca’s crime rate ranked so low it wasn’t even on the charts. Yet why was this fellow, who was now sauntering toward her car, lurking in the shadows of the Frangipani Inn?

He stepped within the circle of headlights, and with a jolt, she recognized him. She hadn’t seen Ben Derrick in years, not since that summer when she was sixteen; but she would have known him anywhere. He’d been unrepentantly handsome and sexy as sin, though he’d never seemed to realize it. Now he was barefoot—ill-advised considering the incidence of sandspurs in the native scrub. Baggy shorts rode low on his hips, and his hair—dark, generously sun-streaked and needing cutting—was tousled by the breeze from the ocean. He looked scruffy and nondescript, and he was sixteen years older than when she’d last seen him, but he was still Ben Derrick. And still a heartbreaker, no doubt.

He squinted into the glare. “Gwynne?” he said.

Of course. He’d always preferred her cousin, teasing her, joking with her and ignoring Chloe. When Ben had disappeared late in that summer of her sixteenth year, Chloe had been devastated. She’d been shy in those days, had never done anything to draw attention to herself, had been content to hang out in Gwynne’s shadow. She’d never told anyone that she’d fallen hopelessly in love with Ben Derrick.

Chloe rested a restraining hand on Butch’s head so that he wouldn’t take it into his fool head to make a grand leap from the car. “I’m Chloe Timberlake,” she said over the stutter of the Volvo’s engine. “Gwynne’s my cousin.” She didn’t add, You remember—I was the redheaded, flat-chested girl who hung on your every word, who followed you around like a lovesick fool for two whole months. And you couldn’t have cared less.

Ben leaned down and peered in the window, studying her. “You’re Chloe?” His voice was a rumble in his chest.

“Right,” Chloe said. “I was here one summer a long time ago. Actually, I visited a lot of summers, but we only ran into each other that year.” He’d worked as a diver for Sea Search, Inc., the local marine salvage company whose search for sunken treasure had been the subject of many National Geographic television programs.

“I boarded here sometimes when Gwynne and her mom ran the place as a bed-and-breakfast.”

“I remember.” Oh, yes. He’d been a charismatic character in those days, tall and tanned and utterly charming.

If Ben recognized her, he gave no sign. “I’ve just rolled into town and was counting on Gwynne and Tayloe’s having a room for me.”

“You didn’t call first?”

“I got a recorded message about the number not being in service at this time.”

“That’s because the Frangipani Inn is no longer a bed-and-breakfast.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.” For someone who needed a place to sleep for the night, he delivered the line with a bit too much nonchalance. He slapped absently at a whining mosquito. “Where have Gwynne and Tayloe gone?”

“Gwynne’s off finishing her master’s degree in speech pathology, and my aunt Tayloe remarried last year and lives in Mexico with her husband. I’m here to work for the summer. I design jewelry.”

This was the season for thunderstorms riding in on warm moist air from the Gulf of Mexico, and over the sound of her voice, Chloe detected a rumble of thunder in the distance. Tonight’s predicted stormy weather was fast closing in.

“I don’t suppose you’d rent me a room anyway,” he said.

The crash of the breakers on the other side of the dunes filled the silence. She gazed up at the clouds scudding past the turret of the inn for a long moment before answering. “I’m not planning to run the house as a B and B.”

Chloe felt the first spatter of rain. As she raised the window and cut the Volvo’s engine, the scene went dark, and all she could see was the white stripes of Ben’s shirt a few feet away.

“C’mon, Butch,” Chloe said. She grabbed the cat and her backpack. Fortunately, the clouds from the oncoming storm had not yet obscured the moon, and as she slid out of the car she was able to get a good look at Ben Derrick. His eyes were murky in the darkness, and she couldn’t recall their color. Strange, since she’d thought she’d never forget anything about him. Were they blue? Gray? She had no idea.

“Can I help you with that?” He reached for her pack, but she sidestepped quickly and whipped it out of his reach.

“No, I’ll handle it. Thanks.”

“I’d better check out the house with you this first time,” Ben said gruffly.

“I don’t think so,” Chloe retorted. She turned, wondering what it would take to make this guy get in his Jeep and go. Couldn’t he take a hint?

“The reason I suggested going in with you,” Ben said with great patience, “is that if the house has been vacant, no telling what’s inside.”

Chloe was mindful of Gwynne’s stated reasons for offering to let her live in the sea-worn old mansion. She’d mentioned concerns about vagrants, beach bums, kids partying inside and no one detecting their presence until much harm had been done. Maybe it would be a good idea to let Ben check out the place.

“Let’s hurry. It’s beginning to rain,” Chloe said tersely. She started along the winding sandy path to the house as huge raindrops began to fall. The wind kicked up, and the air took on a sudden chill as rain sluiced down in great torrents, drenching them both.

They ran past thrashing clumps of sea oats and salt grass. When she reached the haven of the porch, Chloe set Butch down. The cat, spooked by the change in weather, shook himself and immediately bounded into the bushes below.

“Butch! Get back here!” She could barely make herself heard over the wind and rain.

Of course the cat didn’t. Chloe wasn’t concerned that Butch would try a disappearing act, since he knew who his food came from, but she wished he hadn’t left her alone with Ben.

Who conveniently produced a flashlight from his pocket and beamed it on the rusty old lock. Chloe, clumsy in her haste, fumbled with the key, inserted it and swung the door open on a cavernous front hall.

A flock of dust bunnies scattered in the fresh gusts admitted through the open door as something dark scurried toward the nether regions of the house. Chloe groped for the light switch and flipped it. The lone bulb remaining in the overhead fixture flared and died.

“I’ll turn on a lamp,” Chloe said, wiping her face with her forearm before dropping her backpack on the hall settee. As she spoke, Ben trained the flashlight on the parlor to her right.

The house had been in her father’s family since the early part of the century, and she and her older sister, Naomi, had spent many glorious summer vacations in the big Victorian mansion when she was growing up. A year ago when she’d last visited, the Frangipani Inn hadn’t been in this state of disrepair. The furniture, layered with white covers, loomed eerily as she felt her way into the parlor’s depths, where she knocked into a table, caught herself before keeling over and managed to turn on the light over the piano. It cast the shrouded shapes into gloomy shadows.

Dust was everywhere, and cobwebs trailed spookily from the high ceiling. The windows were coated with a thick coat of salt spray, and the air smelled musty. As she stood taking in all the decrepitude of a place that she remembered as bright, light and uplifting, Ben said, “Things deteriorate rapidly near the ocean. The place has been unoccupied for how long?”

“Almost a year,” Chloe told him, her voice echoing because of the high ceiling. In order to see what was what, she shoved aside white muslin to reveal a wicker chair that belonged on the porch. One of its wooden rockers was split, and she tugged the cover back over it. As she did so, something scrambled frantically across her toes, something warm and furry with quick little feet.

At the same time, a flash of lightning and an earsplitting clap of thunder rent the silence. Chloe screamed and would have bolted if Ben hadn’t caught her and held her steady.

“Easy,” he said. “That was only a field mouse.” His arms were hard-muscled and strong, she noticed through her panic. His heart beat steadily beneath his damp shirt, and his wet skin was slick beneath her fingers.

“I h-hate mice,” she stammered.

He released her, and she saw that his eyes were a deep, velvety brown. He smelled of sun and salt, of the sea and sand, bringing back memories of that summer so long ago.

“There are bound to be one or two mice in here,” he said, the voice of reason.

She recovered enough to scoff at that. “One or two? Ha! They breed,” she said. She stalked toward the door. “I can’t live with mice. I’m leaving.”

Ben cocked a head toward one of the windows, which was rattling in its frame due to the energetic pummeling of the elements. “It’s raining hard now, and there’s lightning. Besides, there’s nowhere else to go.”

“Where is that cat when I need him?” she muttered. She threw the door open. “Butch? Butch!” Rain blew in her face; it tasted of salt. There was no sign of a big orange cat, no glimmer of his white bib under the shelter of the rubbery round leaves of the sea grapes.

Ben walked up behind her. “I saw him run under the house. He’ll have a grand old time there chasing the mice and palmetto bugs.”

“Palmetto bugs?”

“The state insect of Florida. See, there’s one on the curtain.” He pointed at a huge cockroachlike bug in the library on the other side of the foyer. It was an ugly dark brown, almost two inches long and waving curious feelers in their direction.

Chloe shuddered. She’d rather eat roadkill than bunk near that creature. “I’ll sleep in the car. I’ll—”

“No need to do any such thing. I’ll run over to the other part of the house and get the bug spray.” He started toward the kitchen.

Since she had no intention of being left alone with the palmetto bug, Chloe wasn’t far behind. “Okay, but what about the mice?” She was seriously questioning her recent and possibly foolhardy choice to start a new life in this place.

“I’ll take care of them, don’t worry.”

“Humanely, I hope.”

He glanced at her over his shoulder, the corners of his mouth twitching. “Oh, of course. I’ll invite them to leave in a pleasant voice, and I’ll reassure them it’s not them, it’s me. I’ll say that I hope we can still be friends, and even throw them a farewell party if you’d like.”

“Please,” she warned, “don’t make light of this.” She wasn’t in the mood for humor.

“I thought maybe kindness to rodents ran in your family. Tayloe used to trap live mice and release them in the thickets, which I warned her was silly, since they—and their loved ones—would only come back for a return engagement, but that was the way she wanted it.”

“You know where to find the mousetraps?”

“They’re in the hall leading to the caretakers’ annex.”

They went along turning on lights until they came to the kitchen, Chloe doing her best to unstick her wet blouse from her skin along the way. Someone had broken a window in the back door and had evidently camped out there, abandoning dirty dishes and silverware in the sink, which was dripping a steady stream of rusty water.

“Here we are,” Ben said, throwing back the bolt to the door of the annex, where a small apartment was built down close to the dunes. “Bug spray. And traps.”

“Could you deal with the palmetto bug first? He creeps me out big-time.”

While Ben was rummaging in the hallway, Chloe gave up on her wet blouse and resigned herself to its present see-through state until she could find a dry towel. She ventured a cautious peek into the pantry, which turned up nothing more than an unopened jar of pickles and several warm cans of cola. “I have food in the car, a bag of canned goods and a cooler,” she called to Ben. “I could offer you something to eat in exchange for your trouble.”

“It’s okay,” he said on his way back through the kitchen. “I’ll be satisfied with a glass of water.” He avoided looking at her—which, considering the transparency of her wet clothes, she appreciated.

She followed him. “The water softener isn’t hooked up, so we won’t want to drink the water yet. I brought a bottle of wine in my backpack. It’s a really good Estancia pinot grigio.”

“No, thanks. And if you don’t want to witness instant death, I suggest you leave the palmetto bug to me.”

Since bug killing held no interest as a spectator sport, Chloe decided to locate a dry towel. The staircase was dusty, the white paint on the banister chipped, and upstairs the bedrooms, like the parlor below, were swathed in white muslin.

The linen closet was located on the landing, and although the towels smelled musty, they suited her purpose. As she towel-dried her hair, she wandered around, reacquainting herself with the second floor.

Her aunt had assigned each bedroom a name. The master suite was Sea Oats and decorated in golden tones. The room that had always been Chloe’s was the turret room, Moonglow, and after she’d removed the dust covers and piled them in the hall, it appeared exactly as it had every year. She opened the windows an inch or so, enough to admit fresh air but not much rain.

Nostalgia swept over her as she took in the curved walls, the pretty blue-painted bureau, ornate wicker headboard and dotted-swiss curtains. She and Naomi had enjoyed many good times here with Gwynne—reading under the covers at night after Tayloe had told them to go to sleep, racing down the wide staircase in a flurry of anticipation when Zephyr the Turtle Lady tossed seashells against their windows early in the morning and invited them down the beach to inspect the newest turtle nest. Being in this room made her feel like a little girl again. Considering that she was over thirty and more worldly wise than she would have liked, that was a good thing.

“Chloe?”

Leaving the towel draped across her shoulders, she poked her head out the door, and saw Ben standing at the bottom of the stairs.

“The palmetto bug is history,” Ben reported.

“Good. Now maybe I should squirt some of that stuff around my room.”

“I’ll be glad to spray the rest of the house. Then I’ll set out the mousetraps.”

“We don’t have anything to bait them with,” she said, coming out to the landing. “Unless mice are into dill pickles.”

“I’m prepared to donate the cheese crackers in my pocket. That should work.” He pulled out a package and opened it.

Chloe descended the staircase. “Not so fast. We might have to eat those ourselves.”

“Are you hungry?”

“A little.” Self-consciously, she ran her fingers through her hair, hoping it wasn’t standing up in spikes.

Ben handed her a cracker. “That’s to tide you over until I can run out to your car and bring in the food.”

“You don’t have to—”

“Hey,” he said. “I can’t stand to watch a woman starve. No big deal.” He brushed past her up the stairs, carrying the can of insecticide, and she heard him humming tunelessly to himself as he went from room to room, anointing each one in turn.

Since there were eight bedrooms, each with its own bath, this took quite a while, during which Chloe inspected the dining room and removed the covers from the big mahogany dining-room table and chairs. The breakfront was devoid of its usual heirloom silver trays and goblets, which made the room seem bare, and Chloe recalled Gwynne’s telling her that she’d put them in storage. The elegant bone china was still there, and so was the antique crystal, all under the surveillance of numerous saturnine Timberlake ancestors glaring down from ornate gilt frames.

When she’d finishing in the dining room, Chloe retreated to the kitchen and munched gloomily on Ben’s cracker. The inn was a disappointment. True, her memories were based on idealized moments from past vacations. She hadn’t been prepared for the general disrepair of the place, but she definitely couldn’t go back to Texas. Her grandmother, with whom she’d lived for the past five years, had sold her house and moved to an assisted-living facility.

During the years with Grandma Nell, Chloe had saved her money in order to give herself a chance to do what she did best—design jewelry. Her cousin’s offer to let her live here had been a godsend. But Chloe’s work would suffer if she was forced to spend all her time cleaning and repairing the Frangipani Inn, not to mention that she didn’t have a clue how to go about it.

When Ben returned, she wordlessly handed a can of warm cola up to him. He popped the top, sat down on a chair beside hers and drank, his throat working as he swallowed. “You don’t remember me, do you?” she asked him suddenly.

He lifted a brow. “Cute. Red hair. Gwynne’s cousin.”

“Well, thanks for the cute, anyway,” she said wryly.

“It was a long time ago. You were how old? Fourteen? Fifteen?”

“Sixteen,” she told him, remembering the pain of longing for a guy who hadn’t recognized her existence. He’d called her Carrots because of her red hair, and she’d hated that nickname.

“I was twenty-one and in my first season of diving for Sea Search, Inc.”

“You seemed much older to me.”

He snorted. “Honey, that summer I was getting older by the minute.” His curt laughter didn’t convey humor.

She got up to plug in the refrigerator. “I’ve been thinking,” she said.

“Oh?” His eyebrows shot up.

“About your request to stay here. I wasn’t anticipating sharing the place with anyone else because I have work to do, but if you’d help with repairs in exchange for rent, you could live in the annex. You’d have your own entrance and everything, and—”

“Hold it,” he said. “You don’t have to talk me into it. I have nowhere else to go, and I’m a decent handyman.”

“That’s good, because I don’t know one screw from another.”

He blinked at her, and she realized what he must be thinking. She felt her neck coloring. “We could give it a trial,” she said quickly to cover her embarrassment. “Maybe a week or two?”

“That suits me, since I’m waiting for a job to come through and money is tight.”

“You don’t work with Sea Search anymore?”

“I haven’t been employed there for over a year.” Ben drained the can in one easy motion and stood up, crumpling it in his hand. “The rain has let up enough so that I can retrieve the food from your car,” he said before tossing the can into the trash bin beside the door.

Chloe, her cheeks still flushed from her gaffe, handed over her car keys and watched from the window as Ben loped through the curtain of rain. He soon returned carrying bags of groceries that she’d bought before leaving Texas, sprinkling wet droplets around the kitchen as he shook water from his eyes.

“I spotted your cat. He’s sitting under the porch steps.”

“Butch will be okay on his own. He loves it here.” She set a box of cat crunchies out on the counter for later and started to stash the rest of the food in the pantry.

“Would you like a sandwich?” she asked.

“No, I’d rather inspect my new digs.”

“You’ll have to plug in the refrigerator in there, and I’m not sure the hot-water heater works. Gwynne mentioned something about it.”

“I’ll check everything.” He rose, and she found herself staring point-blank at his bare damp torso, exposed when his shirt had come unbuttoned. His physique, even though he was older than when she saw him last, was close to spectacular. Wide shoulders tapered to a narrow waist, and his legs were muscular and nicely formed.

“I’d better call Butch one more time,” she said, mostly for something to do besides stare at the line of hair pointing toward his navel.

She stood and went to the door as Ben disappeared into the annex. Butch didn’t appear when she called. Since she wasn’t interested in flailing around beneath the porch in the hope of chasing him out, she went back inside and opened the can of tuna.

After her solitary meal, she climbed the stairs to her room and stripped off her wet clothes, noticing that the stream of water from her bathroom sink ran nonstop, a knob was missing from the vanity and the hook from the closet door lay on the floor. Thank goodness Ben Derrick had shown up. With him to help her, she might be able to make her ambitious plans for the summer work after all.

She was brushing her teeth when she heard a door open downstairs. “Chloe?”

“Uh-huh,” she said through a mouthful of toothpaste. She grabbed a glass of water, rinsed her mouth and spit; the water here had a foul sulfur taste, but the water softener would take care of that.

“You’re right. The hot-water heater isn’t working.”

She wrapped her robe tightly around her and went to the top of the stairs. Ben was standing in the foyer below.

“I’ll look at it tomorrow,” he said.

“Okay,” Chloe said, her heart sinking. She didn’t have extra money to pay for major repairs, and anyway, she wasn’t sure whose responsibility they would be, hers or Gwynne’s.

“I figured I’d better report it.”

“Thanks. I think. Hey, you’ll be needing a hot shower, won’t you?”

“That would be nice, but I don’t want to inconvenience you.”