“Hunter.” I touched his arm. “I don’t feel good about being here. I can’t breathe.”
“Let’s go back,” he said.
Holding my hand in his, Hunter walked me out, planted a kiss on my forehead, and then disappeared back into the cavern. I sat cross-legged under the tree, my back resting against it. The bat cave was the right place to search, but I had a feeling we were looking at it in the wrong way. The passages were too narrow.
Not much time passed before Hunter appeared out of the darkness, his hair a mess, his shirt covered in dirt beyond recognition, his eyes downcast.
He slumped next to me. “Nothing.”
“Do you think John and his friends have already found it?”
Hunter shrugged.
I propped my right shoulder against the tree and faced Hunter. “We found proof that it is here. We just need some time and maybe extra help. If we bring a professional in to help, can we still claim the finder’s fee for the total value?”
“I’m not sure. But I need us to find it all. I need to do it for Edward and my family.”
A feeling of dread came over me, tightening a knot in my stomach. It was important to me to finish my father’s sailing journey, and it was vital for Hunter to honor the man who raised him. And then Hunter and I would go our separate ways. A question burned inside of me. “Once this is over, will you really stay here?”
Full of sadness, his eyes searched mine, and he took a deep breath. “I’m sorry.”
I shouldn’t have been upset about it, but my emotions were overpowering me. Hunter made it clear earlier that he wanted to stay in the South Pacific. This was a fun time, and the sex was out of this world fantastic, but this wasn’t my life. And I’d promised myself I wouldn’t get attached to him—or worse, fall in love.
Maybe when I returned to spread my dad’s ashes, I could stay at Hunter’s resort and see him again. Make love to him again then if he wasn’t involved with someone else. I swallowed the lump in my throat. But right now, no boat waited to take me home, and I could pretend Hunter and I were meant to be together forever.
“This is the right place.” I rose and offered Hunter my hands. “The day is still young. Let’s go back inside and search some more. It’s hidden in there, and we just missed it.”
An hour later, I sat near the cave’s opening, taking a brief break. I placed the flashlight next to me and took a sip from my bottle, then offered it to Hunter.
He gladly accepted my offer. “I think someone found the loot before us.” He wiped his mouth with his hand and gave me back the bottle and leaned against the wall opposite me. “Or there is another death-looking place.”
Come hell or high water, I couldn’t consider quitting when we were this close. Shifting my butt on the rock, I nudged the flashlight, and it rolled off the stone and dropped, casting light on Hunter. There was something unnatural about the way the crack in the wall went up and around, making a large, jagged arch around him.
“Do you see how it has a lighter color than the rest of them?” I moved my finger up and down in the light, letting its shadow run the length of the split in a stone.
Hunter traced the line with his finger, then he pulled a knife from his back pocket and picked at the seam.
“I’m not a geologist,” he said, “but I think this is not original to this cave.”
“Is it possible they deposited the loot here and then constructed a wall?”
The unequivocal confidence of this idea steadied my heart race. If my hopeful imagination was right, then, holy shit, Captain William Thompson hired brilliant stonemasons as his sailors. And, no doubt, the two hundred years wait only helped to disguise the faux barrier.
“One way to find out.”
Grabbing the hammer, Hunter swung it wide and hit the flat rock hard. Every muscle in my body vibrated from the first blast. The sound bounced from wall to wall, and then the cave swallowed it and then breathed out a shrieking noise. Hunter and I flattened to the ground, covering our heads with our hands, waiting for hundreds of bats to rush above us. Once the screeching and swooshing air stopped, we got up.
“You okay?” Hunter asked. I nodded in response and returned my focus to the wall.
Zigzag lines ran from the center of the first blow. Hunter continued to hit the rock repeatedly until he made a hole. Chipping off more rock with his hands, Hunter enlarged the opening. I handed him the flashlight. Through the fog of dust and stone particles stored deep inside the cavity, trunks stacked on trunks came into view. A feeling of pins and needles coursed through my body as I stared at our discovery. My mind grasped that it wasn’t a hallucination from dehydration or exhaustion and that I wasn’t looking at a mirage that could vanish in the blink of an eye. It was real. And we finally found it.
“Finally,” Hunter whispered.
The rest of the wall crumbled with ease as our greedy hands pulled on the edges and enlarged the entrance. Dust suspended in the air reflected the light as we entered the damp chamber. My eyes widened, taking in what I hoped wasn’t a figment of my imagination formed through spending too much time dreaming of this moment.
“Please pinch me,” I said. “Wow. Just wow.”
Eight large wooden trunks crowded the space, lightly dusted with dirt. Some chests were filled to the brim with gold and silver candelabras, their lids not even closed.
