Page 93 of Tessa's Trust

“Well, that’s weird,” I murmured.

There were tons of different-colored sticky notes, all smashed together.

“Those are Sadie’s.” I reached for them. The first one I read held a grocery list. Disappointment washed through me. “What’s this?” I lifted a purple note with numbers scrawled across it.

“I don’t know. Longitude and latitude, maybe?”

There were so many, and we’d have to go through them all.

“This was her record-keeping system?” he asked.

“I heard she also had a ledger, but that was more for gambling debts,” I murmured, excited for the first time. “Nick, the truth of where she might be hiding could be on one of these sticky notes.”

“Maybe, but why in the world would Rudy Brando have these?”

Perhaps he planned to create false deeds for all her properties. But in that case, his plans for Sadie wouldn’t have been good. Had he planned to kill her? If so, I was glad someone had killed him first. Yet what if he had a partner? My mind flashed to Rudy’s widow. Had Marilyn hurt Sadie? The woman didn’t seem the type, but looks were often deceiving.

My stomach roiled. “We have to find Sadie.” Shoving the box to the side, I paused. It rattled oddly.

Nick cocked his head. “That’s weird.” He reached in and removed the rest of the sticky notes, placing them on the table. Then he tapped the bottom of the box. It really wasn’t big enough to hold much else. “There’s a false bottom.”

I snorted. “A false bottom in a hidden metal box? This guy was paranoid.”

“Yeah, Rudy obviously had a few skeletons.” Nick reached for the screwdriver he’d used earlier and pried up the bottom of the metal box. It flipped out easily, revealing several folded pieces of paper. He grasped them and pulled them out. “Aha.”

“What’s that?” I leaned closer to him, trying not to notice the warmth that cascaded off Basanelli.

“It’s a deed for another of Sadie’s properties.”

All in all, there were five deeds, and the last was a duplicate of my building. The one that held Silver Sadie’s.

I gasped. “There’s another one?”

Nick peered closer. “Yeah, but look, the signature isn’t the same. Obviously, he was practicing.”

Oh, this was good evidence. I clapped my hands together. Nick looked up, one eyebrow rising. “Don’t get too excited. You obtained this illegally.”

I gulped. “Well, yeah, but no. What does that mean? Does it mean it can’t be used in court?”

He sighed. “No. It can be used in court since you found it. If the police had found it illegally without a search warrant, then it couldn’t be used.”

“So it was good that I broke and entered?”

His hard gaze dried the spit in my mouth. It was both sexy and slightly unnerving. “No, it was not good. I’m sure Franco had a valid warrant, and if he had found this, it would’ve been good. Right now, there’s a question as to how you got it.”

I didn’t really care. The point was, I had it. “It’s proof that Rudy Brando had plans to steal from Sadie.”

Nick nodded grudgingly, looking beyond mouthwatering, but I had more important things to worry about than his sinewed body.

I pushed the box out of the way, put the probably fake deeds on the chair, and slowly began unsticking all the notes from each other to place in rows on Nick’s table.

He sighed and walked over to pick up his sandwich, taking a big bite. “Well, at least I know what we’re doing for the evening,” he drawled.

I grinned. “That all you got, Basanelli?” I was joking.

He dropped his sandwich onto the counter and was on me instantly, taking me to the floor. I chuckled and kissed him, letting him take over. He was hot and wild, and I loved every minute of it. It was quite a while before either of us was hungry for food.

After a couple of rounds with Nick, where I saw stars and might’ve whimpered his name, we returned to the kitchen to eat our sandwiches and figure out some sort of organizational system for Sadie’s sticky notes. There were at least four hundred of them, and they were all smooshed together.

---