Rarities Unlimited 02 - Running Scared

profiles, Risa’s and Cherelle’s.”
    Then he waited for the explosion when Risa put two and two together and discovered he had put in a recent request for a complete Rarities background on Cherelle.
    And on Risa.
    The narrowing of her eyes and the flattening of her lush mouth told him that she’d made the connection very quickly. If she’d only been mad, he could have accepted it. But there had been a flash of raw hurt in her brilliant blue eyes before she lowered her head and resumed emptying out the bottom drawer of her office files.
    He went and sat on his heels in front of her. “In my place what would you have done?” he asked quietly. “Someone from your childhood appears, someone who isn’t anything like you, someone you don’t want me to know about. Someone, in fact, that you hide from me.”
    Risa tilted back her head, furious with him but most of all furious with herself for the tears burning her eyes, her throat. “So you sicced Rarities on her. On me.”
    “Yes.”
    “You don’t trust me.”
    “Risa—”
    She made a sharp gesture with her hand to stop his words. “Never mind. Why should you trust me? I didn’t trust you enough to tell you who Cherelle was because she was where I came from, where I could have stayed, where she . . .” Risa swallowed and fought against the tears that wanted to fall.
    The back of Shane’s fingers caressed her cheek once, lightly. “I was wrong. Your past isn’t any of my business. All that matters to me is where you are now. Unless I had badly misjudged you because I wanted you so much, Cherelle didn’t belong in your ‘now.’ That’s why I called in Rarities. I didn’t trust myself. And that’s a first.”
    He stood and met Ian’s dark, wryly sympathetic glance. “Unless research has something new, the data is in my office,” Shane said.
    “Anything since you sent the files to Tannahill?” Ian said into the cell phone. “Right. If and when you do, we want it yesterday. Yeah, same to you, sweetheart.”
    He switched off and put the communicator back on his belt. The supple leather straps of a shoulder holster gleamed briefly, then vanished beneath the denim jacket again.
    “So Rarities flew you in,” Shane said, seeing the harness.
    “The longer Dana looked at your Druid gold, the more she wanted to find the rest of it. She said there was something both otherworldly and all too real about the art.”
    “Did you bring my four pieces with you?” Shane asked.
    “You requested them, the lab wept and screamed, and I brought them. It would have been easier if you’d stuck with pictures for show-and-tell and questioning strangers.”
    Shane didn’t accept the opening to explain why he had insisted the gold be returned.
    Risa did. “Pictures don’t have the same . . . feeling.”
    If Ian noticed that her voice was unusually husky, he didn’t comment. “That’s exactly what Shane said to Dana.”
    She glanced quickly at Shane, then away. Being reminded of how much they thought alike wasn’t what she needed right now. “Where are they?” she asked Ian.
    “With security downstairs. I refused to open the locks on the box, and they refused to let me upstairs until I did.”
    “How far did the Rarities lab get with them?” Shane asked.
    “Dana put everything in your Rarities computer file. Said you could bloody well hack your way into it.”
    “My pleasure.”
    Ian shook his head. “One of these days you’re going to push Niall too far.”
    “Not if I can help it,” Shane said. “He’s got more than a decade on me, and he hasn’t slowed down a bit.”
    “You still work out with him?”
    Shane smiled ruefully. “Every chance he gets. He just loves thumping on me.”
    “And here I thought he liked coming to Vegas to gamble.” Ian laughed. “Getting thrashed on a semiregular basis will do you good.”
    “That’s what Niall says.”
    Beneath black, lowered eyelashes, Ian glanced at Risa. Her eyes no longer looked on the brink of overflowing. Her hands were steady as they shuffled journals into the suitcase. But then her hands had been steady when she was fighting tears.
    “According to Dana,” Ian said to Risa, “our first priority is finding Cherelle Faulkner, because we’re assuming she has the rest of the gold.”
    Risa nodded.
    Shane didn’t. “Our first priority is Risa’s safety.”
    Ian’s smile was all teeth. “Look, you don’t like my orders, yell at Dana. In the meantime get the hell out of my