nuts, but you have to keep in mind the place I grew up,” I pointed out.
“This is true,” Aubrey said. “Do they still change the name at Christmas to Christmas Tree?”
I grinned. “No one gets mail in December. Drives the post office crazy.”
“And is your ex-future-mother in law still sharing her house with a bunch of rodents in hats?” Archie asked.
I stiffened, a little protective of my Singletree family. “They’re chinchillas,” I told him. “And they’re very well behaved. It’s not their fault Lottie likes to dress them up.” The free-range chinchillas were harmless, really. Unless you wanted to display a gingerbread house or left a bowl of rolls on the counter.
“All right. You have some experience in nuts,” Archie agreed.
“Uncle Marv left us a treasure map,” Aubrey blurted out, grinning.
“Like a pirate map? With an X and everything?” I asked, intrigued.
“Not quite,” Archie said, leaning in and lowering his voice as if there might be someone else around to hear. “There’s a poem, first of all. That’s what he left us in the will. And the poem came with one piece of the map. It’s supposed to lead us to the others and ultimately the treasure, but we’ve been getting lucky so far and just kind of discovering pieces of the map.”
“Seriously?” I asked, marveling at what sounded like a really cool adventure. “That’s like a real-life escape room or something.”
“Yeah, but there are no hints,” Aubrey pointed out.
“What’s the treasure?” I asked, imagining a huge chest buried somewhere on the property.
Archie shrugged. “We don’t know for sure. But the guy had a fortune at one point, and he didn’t trust banks or accountants, so he had all kinds of weird ways of hiding his money.”
This whole conversation was fascinating. The idea of a treasure hunt had me excited in a way I didn’t think I had been since I was a little kid. “So you’re figuring it all out?”
Aubrey laughed. “Not really. We haven’t had a ton of time, trying to get this place back together so we can haul it out of debt.”
That didn’t sound good. “So you kind of need to find the treasure, and you’re hoping it’s cold hard cash.”
“Or something valuable at least,” Archie said. “But knowing our uncle, it’s probably something bizarre that had value to him alone.”
“Or it’s cash,” Aubrey suggested, looking hopeful.
“We do think the bulk of his fortune didn’t convey with the will,” Archie agreed. “That it’s here somewhere. If not hidden at the end of the map, then just stashed somewhere in the building. That’s why we’re only bringing in contractors who will sign some paperwork our lawyer drew up.”
“Paperwork?” I tried to picture your average plumber being presented with a complicated legal document and asked to sign before he could get the pipes working up here again.
“If they find anything in the course of their duties here, they get ten percent if they present it to us immediately. But we’ll prosecute to the fullest extent of the law if they keep it from us.”
We finished up our meal and took some of the Half Cat whiskey I’d brought out to the hot tub they’d gotten running on their deck. As I slipped into the hot bubbling water, I stared around myself, marveling at how much my life had changed in a short period of time. The dark green of the trees and the towering mountains off to one side gave me the sense of being very small, and of the world and my life stretching ahead of me being much bigger than it had felt in Maryland. I let my eyes search the scenery, partly because it was breathtaking, and partly to keep them from falling on the beautiful woman sitting across from me in the hot water with her hair piled up on top of her head.
Every time Aubrey reached for her glass, her top half popped out of the bubbling water and I had to fight not to stare. She wore a red bikini in a sporty design. Not the triangle top thing that Amber had liked, the one that was made mostly for sitting still. Aubrey’s suit made me think of beach volleyball players—it was made to move in. Practical, but still ridiculously sexy.
And the soft swell of her breasts was almost more than I could take.
When Archie announced he was going to turn in for the night and left the two of us alone beneath the warm water and the cool Colorado sky, I