“You don’t want to keep anything?” he asked, gazing around the dusty room.
“No, not really. I didn’t know Jerry well. We spoke on the phone on holidays, but we weren’t close. I barely knew him. I hadn’t even seen him since I was five when my father brought me to visit.”
Nodding, he said, “I’ll help you when you’re ready to go through his things and box them up. Do you want to take the drawers while I take the closet?”
“Sounds like a plan,” she replied, moving toward one of the dressers.
He opened the closet door, finding a spacious walk-in. There were several pairs of boots and one pair of old, dusty loafers lined up on the floor, but there weren’t many clothes hanging up. Only one suit, a few dress shirts, and a pair of khakis. All nicer clothes than he ever saw Anderson wear when he was alive. But there were a couple boxes in the corner that looked promising, and he headed toward them.
A few minutes later, he was exhaling in defeat as he closed the last box and stood up. There were no hidden piles of money in the boxes. Mostly just old paperwork—old receipts and bills of sale from back when this was an operational ranch, things like that. Turning to help Amelia in the bedroom, he paused when his eyes fell on a small box shoved deep into the corner of the top shelf, excitement filling him.
Reaching up, he grabbed the old metal box and pulled it off the shelf. He pried the lid open and froze. It definitely wasn’t the money. The box was full of old pictures, and right on top was a woman who looked like she could be a slightly older version of Amelia. Gently removing it, he stared at it for a moment, registering the minute differences. Eyes just a touch narrower, nose a hair bigger, and lips not quite as full.
The differences were small enough that not many would notice, and it hit him then that this was Amelia’s mother. He flipped it over, reading the back. Charmaine Anderson 1992. Quickly doing the math, he realized this was taken the year Amelia was born. He put the picture down and quickly shuffled through the others, finding several more, ranging from her parents’ wedding to her birth, and Amelia’s two birthdays before her mother passed. Amelia thought she didn’t have any photos of her mother, would never know what she looked like, and there had been a handful of them here with her uncle all along.
Spotting paper yellowed with age, he dug a little deeper and pulled out an envelope with Amelia’s name. He didn’t open it to find out, but he wondered if it was from her mother. From what he understood, Jerry Anderson had never married, and there weren’t any other women in her life that he knew of.
He tucked the letter back in the box, and holding it tightly, he walked back into the room, smiling when she sneezed. It was the cutest sound, and he realized then just how far gone he already was if he was thinking her sneezes were cute.
“The dust in here is unreal,” she said with a smile that was part grimace. “I really need to clean it soon.”
“Hey,” he said, sitting on the bed and wincing at the lumpy mattress. “Come sit here by me.”
Glancing over, she stared at the box in his hands as she walked to sit beside him. “Did you find it?”
“I found something better,” he said, handing her the box.
“What could be better than unexpected cash?” she asked with a smile, glancing down into the box. She froze and then reached into it, picking up a picture with trembling fingers. “Is this who I think it is?”
“She looks just like you, so I think so.
Was your mother’s name Charmaine?”
“Yes,” she replied in a whisper so soft, he didn’t think he would have heard if it he wasn’t a shifter.
“She was beautiful. There are several more underneath that. It seems like your uncle hid a few away where your father couldn’t get to them.”
She looked at them in silence for a moment before turning to him with teary eyes. “Thank you for finding these for me, Seth. Thank you so much.”
Shaking his head, he put his hand over hers and gave it a squeeze. “You would have found them sooner or later.” Letting go of her hand, he reached into the box and pulled out the letter, handing it to her. “This is addressed to you.”
She took it with trembling fingers, and a few tears spilled down her cheeks. “It’s in a box with my mother’s pictures. Do you think… maybe it’s from her?”
“I’m not sure, but I think there’s probably a good possibility,” he said softly, the sight of her tears hitting him like a fist to the gut.
“You were right. This is so much better than finding money,” she said with a shaky laugh.
With a brief frown as he shifted on the lumpy mattress, he said, “I’ll get out of here so you can have privacy while you read that. We’ll look for the money some other time. It might not even be in here.”
“Thank you for coming over, Seth. And not just because you found this,” she said while holding the letter up. “I had a great time tonight.”
“So did I,” he murmured, leaning in to place a soft kiss on her lips. It was brief, but still enough to get his heart racing and his leopard perking up. He eased away and winced as the hard lump underneath him dug into his ass. “This is the most uncomfortable mattress on the planet. I don’t know how your uncle slept in it, with all these lumps.”
Shooting him a surprised look, she replied, “It’s not uncomfortable. It’s soft, and I don’t feel any lumps…” she trailed off as they shared a charged look. “Surely not. No one hides money under the mattress. It’s an obvious place for burglars to look.”
“Unless they live out in the country, in a small town where crime is basically nonexistent.”
They locked gazes for a moment, and then both of them stood at the same time. Amelia placed the box and letter on the nightstand while Seth grabbed the mattress, hefting it up and shoving so it slid off the other side of the bed. He glanced at her to see the surprise on her face, and he looked down, taking in the stacks of twenties lined up on the box springs.