Rarities Unlimited 02 - Running Scared

involved, but there it was. Unchangeable.
    When she finally dined on his forbidden fruit, she would find it tasted just like the supermarket kind. Then she would shrug and get on with her life.
    “Is that glazed look a yes or a no to my suggestion of fruit?” he asked.
    For a horrifying moment she was afraid he had read her mind. Then she realized that he’d been offering her a snack. “Yes. Definitely.”
    “Good. A few more minutes and we wouldn’t have been able to hear each other over our growling stomachs.”
    While Shane phoned in an order to the chef du jour, Risa prowled around the long room where various gold artifacts lay gleaming within specially built display cases. Technically this room was her domain, but lately every time she turned around, Shane was taking up space in it. Since they had come back from L.A., he had all but slept in her office. He brooded over the display cases like a hen with too few chicks. Then he chewed on her for not coming up with anything better. In the last ninety minutes, particularly, he had made it clear that she had failed to supply him with a showstopper.
    The only good news from her point of view was that so far none of his other contacts, formal or otherwise, had done any better.
    Not that what she had found for him was inferior. The gorget she had purchased from a private estate sale was a lovely artifact. The decoration—perhaps a badge of high office—was fully eighteen inches wide and three deep. When worn across a man’s chest, it must have been splendid, especially if it had been fastened in place with a magnificent gold brooch on either side. Granted, she didn’t have said brooches, and the gorget itself wasn’t intact, but the pieces that did exist were striking.
    And the provenance had been of the highest.
    If only better gorgets didn’t exist in Ireland . . . But six or seven that did came immediately to mind. Shane just didn’t accept second best, much less seventh or eighth. Most of the time she admired and understood that hard-driving quality. And sometimes it made her nuts. The past three months qualified for the made-her-nuts category.
    Her stomach growled.
    She told herself that was good. Her figure was already too lush for anything but men’s magazines. She would much rather have had the willowy size-eight form that all the—male, of course—clothing designers had in mind when they drew their pencil-wide sketches or made slacks of fabrics and colors that fairly shouted, Whoa, d’ya ever see a butt quite that wide?
    Unconsciously she smoothed the dark, man-made miracle fiber of her slacks over her hips, wishing they were less round. But they were what they were, round, and that was that. The best she could do was try to disguise the matter by choosing businesslike clothes and making sure nothing was tight or sheer. Loose blouses concealed the breasts that other women envied and she would have given away in a hot second, but only if the hips went with them.
    Cherelle had always laughed at her for being self-conscious about a figure that a lot of women would have killed for, Cherelle included. If Risa had wanted a career stripping or dancing nude for hard-breathing men, then her figure would have been ideal. What she wanted was to be taken seriously by men and women alike, which meant toning down the physical and honing the mental. That was precisely what she had done. That was what she continued to do.
    She must have succeeded, because Shane hardly seemed to notice she was a woman at all. She suspected that he liked the swizzle-stick-thin model type.
    Without knowing it, she sighed.
    The small sound broke Shane’s concentration. Not that it was hard to do. When Risa was around, his attention was never far from her. It irritated the hell out of him. Maybe he should have taken Gail up on her offer of sweaty sex.
    He dismissed the thought almost before it formed. He didn’t want a bedroom marathon with Gail. He wanted it with Risa.
    And he wasn’t going to get it.
    “What about Jenkins?” Shane asked curtly.
    Risa blinked and brought her mind back from her growling stomach. “Mel hasn’t called.”
    “Call him.”
    “I did. He’s on a collecting trip in Ireland.”
    “Good. When is he due back?”
    “Doesn’t matter. He went on Silverado’s nickel. She’ll get first pick of whatever he finds.”
    Shane’s mouth thinned. Gail’s determination to beat him to every Celtic gold artifact worth having was becoming a real nuisance.