The Tycoon's Seductive Revenge(14)
“I wouldn’t put this on my top ten list of fun times, sorry.” She sounded irritated, losing patience with him.
Carter took the hint. “What do you say we shine some light on these dust motes?”
He ducked under the eve, cleared a path and felt along the back wall until he found panes of glass. Swiping his hand down the small, circular window, he removed enough filth to let in a few glimmers of midmorning sunlight.
He dusted off his hands. “Look, no zombies.”
“What a relief,” she deadpanned.
“But, I think if you look near your left heel, you’ll find something much more interesting.”
Rays of the sun slanted through the panes, falling on Ellie’s black kitten-heels. She looked down where he pointed. “Carter, you were right!”
“Can I tape record that statement?”
She rolled her eyes, bent down and scooped up the plans. When she straightened, a glitter of awe shone in her eyes. Damn, she looked beautiful.
The center of his chest ached for a moment. “Let’s head downstairs and take a look.”
Pausing, she peered at him. “What is it you think you’ve found?”
He dipped his chin coyly. “You’ll have to stick around and find out.”
Lightheaded with excitement—and not because of Carter’s amazing kiss, she insisted to herself—Ellie flew down the iron rungs, glad to leave the musty attic filled with relics of the past and memories better off undisturbed.
They descended to the first floor Senate Room. In the corner stood a mammoth mahogany desk that remembered times when men signed life-altering documents with quills on parchment.
“Spread it out here,” she directed.
Enthusiastically Carter unfurled the crackling blueprints and spread them across the desk. They investigated the layers of prints together, his hands planted on either side of her, staring at them over her shoulder.
“So, where is it?” she asked
“Where’s what?”
“Stop being dense.”
He shrugged. “I’m a guy, not a mind-reader.”
“Point taken.”
“There,” he remarked almost breathlessly. His finger landed on a spot that, to her knowledge, didn’t exist.
“Where? What?”
“I’ll show you.” His whole demeanor changed from slick Miami multi-millionaire to reveal adorable boyish charm. Once, he’d been open with his emotions like this all the time. Excited about life and the next adventure waiting around the bend.
Carter swiped up the top layer of plans and veered toward the hallway.
Ellie followed at his heels. In the hall he checked the plans again, before his eyes scanned the hotel’s walls as if he could see right through them. Bricks, buttresses, plaster, support beams all seemed to coalesce for him. He always had a good eye for architecture, and was lightening-fast at geometry and physics. No wonder he’d gone into real estate.
“This way.” He breezed through the door of the library. He scanned the space again with his three-dimensional vision. His eyes stopped at a bookshelf.
“That’s it?” Her shoulders bowed. So much for excitement .
He peered at her. “Haven’t you realized by now that things usually aren’t what they seem?”
Ellie had never dealt with that kind of reality until her father had passed, when she was left to pick up the pieces of his shattered life. “I’m learning,” she admitted.
“Sometimes you need to look harder to figure it out. But there are moments when that insight comes right to you, as if you’ve known it all along.”
Feeling the weight of his stare, she sensed a deeper significance in his words. Still, she couldn’t puzzle out his meaning. “I trust you,” was all she could think to say.
A smile crept onto his face. “It’s about time.”
He dropped the plans and went straight for the bookshelf. Before they hit the floor, Ellie caught and cradled the precious documents, the entire history of every renovation of The Montgomery Hotel. “What’s the matter with you?” she hissed.
“The plans aren’t important. It’s what they aren’t telling us that matters.”
Ellie rolled the layer of blueprints and set them on a table beside an old globe of the earth mapping out Marco Polo’s routes, then went to his side. “Can you stop talking in Sherlock Holmes speak?”
“Watch.” With certainty, he felt along the bookshelves. “It should be obvious. Like there. See the empty space? In this entire shelf, there’s only one book missing.”
“Oh.” She’d never noticed that.
Carter reached into the space, felt around. But nothing happened.