Page 4 of Between a Rock and a Hard Cowboy

Poppy noticed and turned to her. “You all right with this?”

“Me? Of course.” Eva dismissed the concern with the wave of her hand. “It’s not like you’re really living at Rosie’s anymore anyway since you got that fancy suite at the hotel. Maybe now you’ll move your shit out of the apartment and I’ll have more room to spread out.”

Poppy watched her too closely—all those damned Psych classes the girl had taken at Cornell made her fancy herself a therapist sometimes.

“You sure?” she asked.

“I’m more than sure. I need the peace and quiet for work.”

Olivia raised a brow. “I’ve seen you work at the table during family dinner.”

“There’s work and then there’swork. And speaking of, I have some to do so I’ll say goodnight.” She turned toward the door.

“What about the secret compartment?” Olivia asked.

She’d forgotten about that. “Tell Linc to leave it alone and not break anything. I’ll bring my lock pick kit by tomorrow and get it open.”

Eva was out the door when she heard Poppy say, “Lock pick kit?”

And Olivia add, “I knew she’d be able to pick that lock.”

That comment cheered her a little bit as she made her way down the back staircase and out the kitchen door to avoid having to interact with any of the Wilders in the office near the front entrance.

But by the time she pulled up to the back staircase at Rosie’s and glanced up at what was now her apartment, and hers alone, an unpleasant empty lonely feeling had hit her hard.

Time to get to work. Computers had never let her down the way people in her life did and always had. But the internet—that was always there for her. Day or night. A comfort. A distraction. A challenge. A win.

Since the day she’d heard on the evening news that the first text message had been sent via computer back in 1991 at eight years old, she’d been fascinated by technology.

It was ten years before she’d gotten her own computer, a Gateway Performance 1500 that cost her a whopping three thousand dollars. It had taken her a decade of odd jobs and saving to buy it while she’d made do with using the computer lab at school.

That hadn’t been all that bad. Rather than go home to an empty house, she’d stay late and lose herself on the web at school while other kids ran home to sit mindlessly in front of the television.

And she was going to lose herself on the web now.

ChapterTwo

Linc narrowed his eyes at the key in his hand, turning it, studying it from different angles, hoping to see something he’d missed. Something they’d all missed.

“Why do you care about that old thing anyway?” Ethan asked.

Linc raised his gaze to his brother. “It meant a lot to Gramps. It must go to something important.”

“Maybe it was just a good luck charm. Or something his father gave him that doesn’t even go to anything anymore and he carried it for the memory,” Ethan suggested.

Wyatt, always skeptical, cocked up a brow. “As far as I’ve heard, our great-grandfather wasn’t exactly the sentimental type. And Grandfather was anything but superstitious or nostalgic.”

“That key was important to them for some reason.” His brothers could think and say what they wanted, but Linc wasn’t giving up.

Why had his grandfather carried this key everywhere for every day of his adult life?

Could it be just an old key? It didn’t seem likely. But what if it did go to a trunk that had long since fallen apart? A door whose lock had been changed. A piece of furniture that was no longer in this house or the hotel…

The hotel.

“Has anyone checked the locks and furniture in the hotel?” Linc asked.

It had been built in 1886 by his great-great-grandfather, John Thomas Wilder.

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