Rarities Unlimited 02 - Running Scared

gold!”
    “C’mon, man,” Tim said. “We do it your way and we have a real catfight. We do it her way and the worst that happens is we get some money now and a lot more money later. What’s your problem with that?”
    Socks was still trying to explain his problem when the car doors slammed and the engine revved to life.

Chapter 13
    Las Vegas
    November 2
    Morning
    T he white-walled, Persian-carpeted room was quiet except for the occasional sound of paper when Shane turned a page in one of the catalogs Risa had given him to look through. There were no framed pictures from her past on the desk, no personal letters stuck in the belly drawer, no forgotten earrings tucked in among the pens, nothing to suggest her life outside of work hours. Her casino apartment was the same. There was nothing of the past she wanted to remember.
    She had learned at sixteen that the way to get what she wanted was to shut out all distractions and focus her intelligence on her goal. She didn’t begrudge a moment of her hard work. She had pulled herself out of the kind of southern poverty that made good jokes and lousy lives. Then she had discovered the world of ancient jewelry. It was her own personal paradise, a place where beauty lived and excitement was in every book she opened, every piece of new jewelry that came into her hands.
    And if sometimes, just sometimes, she felt the cool, unnerving breath of the past rushing around her when she handled a gold object, she could live with it just the same way she lived with some of her own past’s more brutal memories. None of it mattered in the here and now. Only her work did, her key to a far more beautiful world than she had been born into.
    Risa loved her job.
    And she was worried about losing it.
    Without moving her head, she checked the wall clock. Unlike most of the rooms in the Golden Fleece complex, her office actually had a built-in way to tell time. She knew that clock intimately; she had just spent the longest ninety minutes of her life waiting to be fired because she hadn’t found the kind of crowd magnet Shane needed for his Druid Gold show.
    Not that the beautifully made and fully alarmed glass display cases were empty. They held some very good—and even a few exceptional—artifacts from all across the area of Europe that had once supported the artistic style that the twenty-first century called Celtic. For the show Shane wanted to have, the emphasis was largely on objects found in Irish, Scots, Welsh, and English “hoards” through the centuries.
    Unfortunately most of the hoards that had ever been discovered had gone to the Crown and from there to the royal smelter to make more coin of the realm. Wars were expensive, the English were ambitious, and antiquities weren’t revered. Through the centuries the hoards that weren’t declared to the Crown had been secretly melted down into anonymous gold ingots.
    After the 1700s, when owning antiquities came into fashion, the owner of the land—nearly always an aristocrat—might keep whatever hoards were discovered in his family collection instead of melting the pieces down for their ore. Once collected, the objects might, just might, end up in a museum for people like Risa to study. More often they simply were passed from generation to generation in familial obscurity.
    Her stomach grumbled unhappily. She tried to ignore it. It just growled louder.
    Shane glanced away from the auction catalog he had been studying under the fluorescent lights. He would rather look at Risa anyway. Museum quality, but not ancient. Living, breathing, and . . .
    “Hungry?” he asked.
    “Gee, whatever makes you think that? The fact that I can’t remember the last meal I ate?”
    “Yesterday they threw peanuts at us on the flight from L.A.”
    “I know. You ate mine.”
    “You were asleep.”
    She didn’t want to pursue that line of conversation, because she had awakened with her head on his shoulder and him looking at her with hungry eyes. At least she thought it was hunger. Whatever it was had been replaced with his usual shuttered watchfulness before she could be certain.
    She really had to talk to Niall about another job. One with Rarities. Then she could get Shane Tannahill out of her system. An affair would be just what the doctor ordered. It had been a long drought for her in the male department. In some dark corner of her mind, each man who asked her out ended up being compared to Shane—and coming up short. Unfair to everyone