I blinked at him for a minute before clearing the cobwebs. “Yeah, sure. There are spare workout clothes in the cabinet on the left, and you can change in here.”
He nodded and turned into the locker room I indicated without sparing me a second glance. I quickly made my way to one of the supply cubbies in the gym to find us some gloves.
A few minutes later, Augie joined me and gloved up without speaking. We took turns punching and holding the heavy bag for each other until both of us were nice and warm.
When Augie stopped punching just long enough to use the hem of his shirt to wipe his face, I tore my eyes away from his flat stomach and sexy-as-hell happy trail to glance at his face.
“I get the feeling you’re not here for another self-defense lesson. You seem to be intent on teaching this bag a lesson.”
He dropped the tail of his shirt and looked up at me, sliding his glasses back up his nose with the back of his glove.
“Whatever. It’s fine.”
I cocked my head at his words. “Augie. What’s going on?”
He hesitated before looking away. I stepped closer so no one else in the gym could hear us. “Is this about what happened last night? Is this about us…”
“No,” he said firmly. “Not at all. I’m sorry if you thought that.”
I couldn’t deny the relief I felt in my gut, but he was still clearly upset about something. “Then what happened?”
“Work shit. Family shit.”
I waited, knowing that wasn’t all of it.
He walked over to where I’d dropped a couple of bottles of water by some towels. After peeling off the gloves, he grabbed a bottle of water and cracked it open. As he swallowed, I enjoyed the movement of the muscles in his neck and the drops of sweat trailing down to the dip in his collarbone. Shit, maybe I enjoyed it a little too much. I shook my head and grabbed the other water, biting the ends of my gloves to yank them off first.
“I think my family is involved in the burglaries,” he said.
Despite the information Rex and Skipper had given me, I was surprised at Augie’s words.
“What makes you say that?” I asked, gesturing for him to take a seat on a bench near the sparring mat.
“It’s going to sound ridiculous,” he began, forking his fingers through his damp hair before letting out a breath. “But my great-aunt left me an antique personal letter-writing box, called a slope, in her will. It’s something that’s been in our family for over two hundred years and holds a packet of love letters written to the woman who owned the box from the man who handcrafted it for her.”
“I don’t understand. Is it worth a lot of money?” I asked.
“No. I mean, it is, but not the kind of money that would get my family’s attention.”
“Do they want control of the history inside? Or…” I was trying to figure out what his family could possibly want with an old antique box enough to steal it from his possession. “Did they ask you for it and you refused to give it to them?”
He shook his head. “Not really. Just… just bear with me for a minute and let me talk it through, okay?”
I murmured an apology for interrupting him but forced myself not to take his hand into mine the way I wanted to. Instead, I concentrated on listening.
“First, the home invasion. Three of my slopes were missing from the collection in the large cabinet in the living room. The rest were smashed to pieces. Now that I think back on it, the ones that were taken all bore some resemblance to Melody’s slope. Same type of wood, same basic shape and size. They weren’t at all the same age, but someone looking based on only the description wouldn’t know that.”
I wondered how he could tell those three missing boxes weren’t part of the broken pile on the floor, but I didn’t interrupt to ask. The man knew his antiques, so I trusted he was sure of what he said.
“Another thing that was missing was a jar of old keys. Melody’s slope will not open without a key or without bashing the box to pieces. If someone in my family wanted the box, I have to assume they wouldn’t want to break it. But that jar of keys didn’t hold the key to any of those three slopes or Melody’s slope.”
Augie twisted the small hand towel with his fingers.
“Then, when my car was left open in Hobie, there was nothing missing because there was nothing of value in the vehicle except the gym clothes you’d given me. And when it was broken into in the parking garage at Grandfather’s building, one of the things missing was a box of old keys again.”