Priceless

I stood there for a moment and hoped for a miracle. The rain kept falling and my boss kept glaring. I swallowed and gestured toward my car. “My things. My equipment. To do the work, I must have—”

“Tomorrow.” He said it quietly, and in a way that brooked no argument. Christ, he was intimidating, and tall, but that was about all I could make out of him in his bulky rain jacket and ball cap. The dark, the rain, and my sucky night vision made it pretty difficult to see much of anything. I mostly just wanted to get under a dry roof.

He shifted and folded his arms across a wide chest. “Miss Hargreave, do you enjoy standing in the cold night rain? Slithering around in the mud to piss behind a tree? Driving around aimlessly in the dark with no idea where you are headed? Because I can assure you that I do not care for any of those things. It’s nearly eleven o’clock and I would like to greet my bed. Can we get you into my Rover so I may make this a possibility before it is indeed tomorrow?”

Ouch.

I was convinced I had no luck at all. Not one speck of it. This man was an asshole and I had somehow landed smack dab in the middle of my own personal hell, with him in the role of the devil. With horns. And cracking a whip.

I turned and wrenched my suitcase from the trunk of the rental car, hoping my equipment would be safe for the night, but really, it would be on him if anything happened to my stuff. He could deal with it.

Pompous jackass!

I marched alongside his Rover with the precious leather seats, tossed my bag in the back atop same said leather seats, and seated myself in front.

Mud? Meet expensive leather!

I was determined not to speak another word to Lord Condemnation if I didn’t have to.

Jerk wad, massive pain in my ass!

MISS Hargreave was nothing like the grad student I had anticipated. She was a “she” for one thing, a great deal younger than I’d figured on, and from her body language, was quite enraged at the moment. I looked over at her sitting stoically in my front seat. Oh yes, she was hopping mad. Her arms were folded and the earthy scent of wet mud was all over her. She rather reminded me of a cat being given a bath, all claws and hissing. She had an interesting accent too.

“You’re not native are you?”

She started to turn her head toward me but then she caught herself and kept herself facing out the window. She was punishing me for making her wait in the rain for three hours probably. There was something about her that seemed vaguely familiar but I couldn’t place whatever it was.

“My accent blows my cover every single time. Damn.”

Okay, she was more than a little wound up.

“American?”

“Yep.”

The windscreen wipers sweeping back and forth pretty much filled the cold silence between us. I supposed my comment about pissing behind a tree had not been well thought out, and I wondered what she really thought of me. Probably something along the

lines of, “Go fuck yourself, you sodding arsehole.” Yeah, Miss Hargreave had some pluck in her it seemed, despite her harrowing evening.

“Look, I’m sorry about not getting your call when it first came through. I didn’t have my mobile on me.”

She kept herself turned away and facing out toward the dark wet night. “Doesn’t matter. I’ll be out of your hair in the morning.” She gestured with an elegant hand. “This whole thing…is obviously not going to work.” She snorted a laugh. “American art student cataloging nineteenth century Romanticist masterpieces for a British earl. What a joke! I’m in way over my head—”

“That’s not true. I’m only a lowly baron, not even close to being an earl,” I interrupted in hopes of distracting her from what was certain to be an emotional tirade, as well as her notice.

“My bad,” she sneered, mimicking me from earlier. “I’ve got to work on my Debrett’s Peerage as well as my navigation skills. I’ve got quite a list of improvements to tackle, don’t I?” The sarcasm dripping off her was pretty harsh and she still spoke to the window.

Nope. Not distracted in the least.

I tried again. “So how does an American girl end up at University of London taking a graduate degree, and more to the point, how in the hell do you know Debrett’s Peerage? Surely that’s knowledge fit only for the natives.” If distracting her didn’t work, maybe teasing would.

She laughed. Just a short breath of air and a shake of her head, but it made me feel better. What I really wanted was to get a good look at her. I wanted to check Miss Hargreave out, and see what she was made of in a lighted room—sans wet mud preferably. If going by the rest of my impression of her, and the sound of her voice being any indication at all, I could be in for a lovely treat.

“You’re not going to quit before you’ve even seen all the paintings I’ve got in my house, are you? Because, that would be a travesty. Well at least I think it would. I don’t know shit about art.”

She didn’t move her position of staring out at the rain and I felt the sudden need to convince her to stay. Nothing about this night was going to plan. She wasn’t going to be an easy sell, but I really needed someone for this job. It’d been left for about five decades too long. I required a professional, and there was one sitting in the seat next to me right now. A spitfire American with lousy directional sense, but an expert all the same.

I softened my voice. “I take that back. I know enough about art to know I need a professional’s help.”