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in the mountains near Cuernavaca.”
    â€œThat’s a far cry from the Yucatán.”
    Remy bristled beside Jeanne. “If you can harness your rude penchant for interruption long enough, Avery, perhaps the lady might enlighten you, make our offer, and then we can be away from this backside of Cancún.”
    Jeanne shot Remy an exasperated look. If this was a hint of what lay ahead, heaven help her.

CHAPTER TWO
    Gabe watched the lady pierce the professor’s self-inflated bubble of authority. Good. There was a backbone of steel inside that soft, curvaceous body. Otherwise, the conversation was over as far as Gabe was concerned. He’d not work under Primston’s haughty professorial eye.
    Many of Gabe’s parents’ associates fell into that category, not that that was the real reason he shunned academia and opted for a real life on the water. He’d courted them once and, but for a bizarre twist of fate, he might have become one of them. Gabe brandished a smile intended to charm more than apologize.
    â€œSorry, Dr. Madison. I have a tendency to think aloud. So how did this information come to be in the Sierra Madres?”
    He could almost hear her excitement pop as she explained. “Don Diego Ortiz, who built a hacienda over a labyrinth of mine shafts and caves at the turn of the nineteenth century, was descended from the captain of the Luna Azul —Captain Alfonso Ortiz . . . ”
    Female PhDs didn’t look like that when I was in school , Gabe thought, distracted by the shoulder-length golden brown hair that Jeanne Madison wore pulled from her tanned oval face with some kind of tortoiseshell clasp. This one had a compelling schoolgirl innocence and exuberance, with eyes that sparkled like polished amber. The moment he’d seen them in the lamplight by the cantina door, Gabe wondered if they were contacts.
    Regardless, Doctor—the word wedged like a square peg in the round hole of Gabe’s senses, because Lady Jeanne was more suitable for this classy package of brains and beauty. Better yet, Jeanne. They weren’t that familiar yet, but they were going to be. It was a shame she came paired with Dr. Prim .
    â€œSo Ortiz reported the minimum of the facts that led to the loss to the authorities in Spain,” she continued, all business and engagingly oblivious that his interest went beyond professional, “and sealed the rest in a small strongbox. My brother found the box with other Ortiz family heirlooms stored in a mine shaft that led through a hidden entrance into the haunted hacienda he was rebuilding after it burned down.”
    Gabe held up his hand. “Hang on—a haunted hacienda?”
    â€œNot really .”
    She grinned, scrunching her nose in such a way as to make something in Gabe’s belly scrunch as well.
    â€œThere were these guys who tried to scare my brother away so that they could buy the hacienda, because some valuable fossils were discovered in the mines.”
    Her hasty dismissal of what seemed to be a great story said more than her words. She had the fever all right, with all its first-time passion and naiveté. Gabe suppressed a smile. “So this box was hidden in the mine connected to the hacienda?”
    â€œRight.” Her hair bobbed with her affirmation.
    Gabe leaned forward, shoving Primston to the periphery of his vision in favor of their charming companion. “Where are the letters and log now?”
    â€œAt my advice, my brother turned them over to the Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City,” Jeanne told him.
    Gabe groaned inwardly. Why did she have to be one of those by-the-book types? A chance like this came along once in a blue moon. Having had his treasure pocket picked by Mexican authorities on another gig, he’d have seized a windfall like that and run with it, leaving the historians to pick up the leftovers.
    â€œBut, ” she explained, “they allowed us to get the last recorded