She huddled against him, aware of the tension that was tightening his whole body. Her fury evaporated. "You really are a beast, aren't you? Your first instinct is to bite that hand that's trying to feed you."
"I said I'm sorry," he said again. His fingers moved in her hair.
"I don't know if I can believe that."
"It's the truth. I shouldn't have pushed you like that." He drew his head back to look down into her glistening eyes. "But I can't guarantee you it won't happen again."
"You have a long way to go to catch up with me, don't you? A lot further than I thought at first."
"So? Are you going to give up on me?"
She shook her head slowly. "No."
"Sarah…"
She put her fingers over his lips. "And don't, I warn you, make any cracks about me not giving up on you until you've helped me find the Flowers. If you say anything even close to that, I swear I won't be responsible for my actions."
He shut his mouth and squeezed her so tightly she thought her ribs would crack.
THE NEXT MORNING Sarah awoke with more doubts. The gentling of Gideon Trace was proving to be a formidable task.
The man was like a wild animal that had once been wounded. The bleeding had stopped long ago and he had recovered physically, but the scars would forever make him cautious about trusting anyone.
The coffee was brewing and the biscuits were in the oven. In a few minutes she and Gideon would sit down to breakfast just like two people who were involved in a real relationship.
She was deliberately trying to give Gideon a taste of what living with her would be like but she couldn't tell yet if she was having any impact.
Perhaps the treasure hunt had been a bad idea. She considered that thought very seriously as she slipped outside to taste the morning air while she waited for Gideon to finish shaving.
It was beginning to dawn on her that she might have made a drastic mistake in using the treasure hunt as an opening for contacting Gideon Trace.
Perhaps the truth was, she had only herself to blame for some of his wariness.
How would she have felt if some stranger with whom she had conducted only a casual correspondence suddenly showed up on her doorstop and said he wanted to have a relationship while they searched for a fortune in jewels?
Sarah grimaced and dug her toe into the ground. Perhaps she should call a halt to the treasure hunt for now and go back to square one. She had been convinced somehow that the Fleetwood Flowers and Gideon were linked and it had seemed natural to pursue the two of them together. But she might have been wrong about that part of things.
Certainly her relationship with Gideon was the most important part of the equation. Perhaps she should give it her full attention for now.
Equation.
Sarah blinked in the morning light, inhaling the sweet scent of the evergreens. Equation.
She stood staring a moment longer at the stand of trees that edged the clearing. Then, moving slowly, she turned and went back into the cabin.
Gideon was just emerging from the bathroom, tucking his shirt into his jeans in an intimate, somehow very sexy gesture. But, then, Sarah reminded herself, everything about Gideon was sexy to her. He took one look at her face and his brows rose questioningly.
"What's wrong?"
"Nothing. I just thought of something."
"What?"
"Emelina Fleetwood was a schoolteacher."
"So?"
"So in those days a good schoolteacher emphasized the basics, reading, writing and arithmetic."
"And?" He went into the kitchen to help himself to a cup of coffee.
"Gideon, it just hit me that one very logical way for a retired schoolteacher to make the directions to her treasure was with a classic mathematical equation. One she was never likely to forget. The most likely sort of equation to choose for that kind of thing would be one from geometry. You know, triangles."
"Triangles?"
"You can make all sorts of measurements if you know just a little bit of information about a particular triangle. Heck, the Egyptians built whole pyramids based on stuff they knew about triangles."
Gideon regarded her for a moment as he sipped his coffee. His eyes were very green. "It wouldn't be the first time someone used that technique. It requires that whoever hid the treasure be familiar with geometry, but you're right, a schoolteacher would have been."
"We're sitting here with a map that's just loaded with info that could be elements of an equation." Excitement flowed through Sarah as she moved over to the kitchen table to look down at the map in the plastic envelope. "Look at these numbers. Sixty and Ninety and twenty-five. A ninety-degree triangle is a right triangle. Right?"
"Right."
Sarah frowned. "So maybe what we've got here is a right triangle. Maybe the sixty refers to the size of one of the other angles. Right triangles with sixty-degree angles in them are common in geometry."
"What about the number twenty-five? My geometry is rusty but I seem to recall that the angles of a triangle have to add up to 180 degrees. Sixty, ninety and twenty-five don't add up to that."
"Maybe twenty-five is the length of one of the sides of the triangle. The distance between the two small squares on the map, perhaps." Sarah was getting more excited by the minute as she examined the markings on the copy of the Fleetwood map. "Given a couple of angles and the length of one side, you could solve for the remaining two sides, right?"
"Sounds like we're talking your basic Pythagorean theorem here."
"Yes, of course. The square of the length of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the lengths of the other two sides."
"Congratulations to your memory."
"Don't congratulate me, congratulate Mrs. Simpson. Math was not my strong point in high school," Sarah said as she continued to study the map. "But Mrs. Simpson drilled some of the basics into me. Little did she know I was going to become a writer and never need the stuff. Until now, that is. I guess you never know. Now, if we assume twenty-five is the length of one side…Gideon, we're going to need a calculator. I'm not that good at the basics. Got one?"
"Not on me, but we can pick up a cheap one in town this afternoon. We're almost out of milk, anyway."
"Let's go now."
"Sarah, it's only seven o'clock. The stores won't be open until nine or ten."
She sat back, disgusted with the delay. "This is it, Gideon. I know it. I have a feeling."
"Uh-huh. I have a feeling there's something getting very close to being done in the oven."
Sarah's eyes widened. She leaped to her feet. "My biscuits."
"First things first," Gideon said. "The Flowers can wait. I'll get the honey."
LATER THAT MORNING, with the help of a five-dollar calculator, they ran the numbers. Sarah was beside herself with excitement. She practically danced around the table as they drew triangles and labeled the sides.
"We've got the length of all three sides and we know there's supposed to be a white rock at the point where B and C intersect," she said, delighted with the results.
"None of this does any good unless we can figure out what points Emelina used to measure her triangle," Gideon noted.
"Well, she gave us the length of one side of the triangle, twenty-five feet. She must have been using familiar points of reference. You said yourself, people tended to do that. Gideon, this is so thrilling. I've never done anything like this before." She looked up when there was no response from his side of the table. "But you have, haven't you?"
"Once or twice." He sat watching her with an unreadable expression in his eyes.
"Like once or twice a year when you go off on one or your mysterious vacations?" Sarah asked shrewdly.
He exhaled heavily. "Magazines are expensive to run. Cache needs an infusion of cash periodically."
"So you go out and dig some up. Wonderful."
"It's not quite that easy, Sarah. More often than not, you don't get lucky."
"Still, you know more about second-guessing someone like Emelina Fleetwood than I do. What do you think she used as points of her triangle?"
He hesitated for a long time. Then, as if he had reached a decision, he pulled the map closer. "We're assuming that all these figures apply to a right triangle. We could be totally off base with all this. The numbers might mean something else entirely."
Sarah shook her head. "No, I don't think so."
His mouth curved faintly at her air of certainty. "Yeah, I know. You've got a feeling. All right, we'll assume your intuition is valid and go from there." Gideon leaned over the map. "My first hunch is that she was using the distance between the outhouse door and the back door of her cabin. Twenty-five feet sounds about right for that. But she might also have used a clothesline or a tree as a marker."
"No, no, I think you're right. Brilliant idea. Lucky you've had experience with outhouses, isn't it?"
He gave her a warning glance. "One more outhouse joke and I'm through as a consultant."
She grinned, undaunted. "Let's go see if we can find enough left of that old outhouse to tell us where the door was."
"It probably faced the main house." Gideon glanced wistfully toward the kitchen counter. "What about lunch?"
Sarah started to protest any further delay and then thought better of it. There was something in Gideon's expression that made her think another picnic lunch was important today. "I'll make us some sandwiches."
Forty minutes later they paced off the distance between the toppled outhouse and the sagging back door of the cabin. Sarah held a tape measure in one hand and Gideon took the other end.
"Twenty-five feet," he called from the back door of the cabin.
"All right," Sarah sang out. "I'm sure this is it, Gideon. Now, if we assume that the right angle was at her back door, then the one at the outhouse door was the sixty-degree angle."
"She could have drawn the triangle to either the right or the left of her base line," Gideon remarked.
"We may have to measure it twice and see which point is near a white rock." Sarah glanced to the side. "Let's try it off to the right, first. The woods on that side of the house look promising. Got the measuring tape?"
"I've got it."
Five minutes later they came to a halt in a grove of pine and fir.
"I only hope we're walking a reasonably straight line," Sarah said as they started to pace off the remaining side of the imaginary triangle.
"I think we can gauge it fairly accurately this way. You getting hungry yet?" Gideon was carrying the picnic basket and seemed more interested in its contents than he did in locating the white rock.
"No. I'm too excited. Aren't you feeling any thrill at all? We're so close."
"Ninety-nine times out of a hundred you end up with nothing but a pile of dirt at the end of this kind of hunt."
"Don't be so pessimistic."
"Sarah, we walked all over this section of ground yesterday and found nothing."
"We'll get lucky today. Today we know what we're doing."
"I'm glad one of us does."
But when they finished, there was no white rock at the point where the B and C of the triangle supposedly intersected. Sarah looked around, utterly baffled.
"I don't understand it. I was so sure we'd find it using the triangle formula. Maybe we should try the other side of the clearing."
"Maybe." Gideon glanced up at the sky. "Lunch-time"
"Is it?"
"Yes, it is. I vote we take a break and eat right here." Gideon settled down on the ground right at the point where the intersecting lines of the triangle should have revealed a large white boulder. He spread the checkered cloth on the thick carpet of dried pine needles and started unwrapping sandwiches.
Reluctantly Sarah plopped down beside him. "Do you think maybe this really is a wild-goose chase, Gideon?"
"How should I know? You're the one with the map and the sense of intuition. Here. Have some carrot sticks."
She took a carrot and munched absently. "I wonder if I've blown this whole thing out of all proportion. This morning I was wondering if I'd been mistaken in thinking that you and the earrings are linked."
He slanted her a glance. "Which is more important? Me or finding the earrings?"
"You, naturally." She wrapped her arms around her knees and gazed straight ahead into the forest. "But I can't quite figure out why meeting you seemed so bound up with my finding the earrings. It's kind of weird when you think about it."
"It was Cache that put the idea into your head. The coincidence of the fact that I publish a treasure-hunting magazine is probably what made you connect me to the idea of hunting down the earrings. It's logical."
"Yes, but I don't usually operate on logic."
"I've noticed. Have some lemonade." He poured her a cupful from the Thermos.
"Things are getting confusing, Gideon."
"I can see your problem. It always gets confusing when you mix a fortune in gems with the great romance of the century."
She took that seriously. "Yes, it does. I'm worried that if we do find the jewels, you'll think I used you. How am I going to convince you that you're more important?"
Gideon leaned over her and brushed his mouth against hers. "You are one wacky female."
"Interesting. I'm an interesting female. Not wacky."
"If you say so." He kissed her again. "You taste like lemonade."
"So do you."
He rolled onto his back. "What do you say we take a nap?"
She shook her head automatically. "I never take naps."
"I do. When I'm lying out in the middle of the woods on a warm afternoon, that is."
She smiled. "Do you do that a lot?"
"No." Gideon folded his arms behind his head and closed his eyes. In a moment he was sound asleep.
Sarah watched him for a while, the sweet longing deep inside making her feel unaccountably sad. She wished he belonged to her so that she could touch him; make love to him.
A few minutes later she pillowed her head on his strong shoulder and fell asleep.
When she awoke a long while later, Gideon's fingers were on the buttons of her shirt and he was leaning over her with a compelling passion blazing in his gemlike eyes.
"You want to prove to me that I'm more important than finding the earrings?" he challenged softly. "Let me make love to you. Here. Now."
Dazed with sleep, sunlight and a sudden, searing sense of longing, Sarah reached up to put her arms around his neck.
6
« ^ »
AN ALMOST UNBEARABLE SENSE of excitement washed through Gideon as he watched Sarah awaken with a smile of sensual welcome in her eyes. It suddenly occurred to him that he had been waiting all of his life to see just that look in a woman's gaze. The feel of her arms stealing around him was more satisfying than finding hidden treasure. His hand trembled from anticipation and desire as he touched her.
"Gideon? What is it?"
"I want you. So bad I can taste it."
He winced inwardly at the sound of his own voice. It was harsh and raspy in his throat. He wanted to murmur in her ear; he wanted to charm her; coax her into making love with him; persuade her into sensual surrender. He longed to reassure her—to tell her he would be careful with her, infinitely careful. He would do everything he could to make it good for her.
But the only words he could get out were the ones that told her he was starving for her. He wondered if he'd frightened her.
"I'm glad you want me," Sarah said. "So glad."
She wasn't trying to pull away from him, he realized. She still wanted him as much as she had seemed to want him whenever he had kissed her during the past few days.
Gideon relaxed slightly. He touched her throat, inhaling the scent of her, and felt her fingers move in his hair. The gentle caress sent passionate chills down his spine.
When he finally got her shirt open he thought he would lose what remained of his self-control. He lifted his head to
stare down at the curves of her small, full breasts. His whole body was tight, hot and heavy now.
"So sweet." He bent his head to kiss the soft, inviting fullness of her. "Soft. Hot." He caught her nipple gently between his teeth. It grew taut and firm almost instantly and his whole body clenched in response.
"Oh, Gideon."
Her leg shifted, sliding alongside his, and Gideon was suddenly impatient with the clothing. He splayed his fingers over her warm belly and slid his hand down to the fastening of her jeans. He hesitated, waiting to see if she would resist this next step.
She didn't. She simply lifted her hips so that he could push the jeans off entirely. When he saw the scrap of red lace she wore as panties, he thought he would go out of his mind.
"I've never seen anything sexier in my life," he whispered as he slipped one finger beneath the elastic edge of the delightfully shameless undergarment.
She laughed softly and buried her flushed face in his shoulder. "Good. I wore them just for you."
"Does that mean you intended to let me make love to you today?"
"I've got six other pairs just like these with me. I bought them in Seattle before I came to meet you. I've worn one of the pairs every day since I found you. I never knew when this was going to happen, you see. I wanted to be prepared."
He was torn between laughter and a frustrated groan. "What about your famous intuition? Didn't that warn you when this would happen?"
"My intuition is always at war with my common sense when I'm around you," she complained softly. "You make it hard for me to think straight. Things aren't always clear for some reason."
"I'm glad. And I can't wait to see the other six pairs." He covered her mouth with his own, his tongue surging intimately between her lips. He knew he was seeking advance knowledge of what it would be like when he claimed her completely. The sample he got was enough to make his head whirl.
His fingers found the hot, flowing warmth of her and he almost came unraveled.
"I love the feel of you," Sarah said, her eyes narrowing with desire. "Your hands. Yes, please, touch me, Gideon. Such wonderful hands." She sucked in her breath. "That feels incredible."
Gideon watched her hair spill over his arm, the soft, thick strands turning to honeyed gold in the splintered light. He was enthralled with her response, mesmerized by it. He'd never had a woman come alive like this under his touch. She was literally melting for him. He could see the heat in her cheeks and feel her racing pulse.