Priceless

  A tremulous voice answered on the third ring. “Hello?”

  “Is this Gabriel Hargreave?” I asked. “Where are you? I can come down in the Rover and collect you or at least lead you up the proper road.” I tried to keep the harshness from my voice. I didn’t want him to quit, before I could fire him at any rate.

  “Not Gabriel, I’m Gabrielle. Gabrielle Hargreave. And how the hell should I know where I am? I told you I’m lost. And it’s dark out here.”

  “Oh, my bad, Gabrielle, you’ve been driving around with no idea where you’re going for three hours?” I was pretty shocked by what she’d just told me. “Why on earth would anyone continue driving while they’re lost in the dark? You’re supposed to stay put and wait for help. Didn’t you ever watch a survival show?”

  “Nobody came and I thought I could find my way,” she wailed into my ear. “It’s raining and I just drove through a stream across the road.” She sounded hysterical now, and I couldn’t help wincing as I moved my mobile away from my ear.

  I tried to adopt a patient tone. “But I cannot come and collect you if you keep driving around.” Dead silence greeted me, and I wondered if I’d had lost connectivity for a moment, until I heard her breathing. “What landmarks can you see?”

  A muffled sob came through loud and clear, and I felt a moment’s guilt for not catching her calls, when she actually rang for help. I really needed to stop setting my mobile down in random places—

  “I already told you before, I can’t see a bloody thing!” she blasted back at me.

  “Well, you need to calm down, Miss Har—”

  “Wait! I can make out the profile of some low hills to my right. And there’s nothing but fields to my left. I swear I can hear waves crashing below me. Please say you know where I am!”

  Was she crying? Unease started to settle in my gut. Maybe this person was not cut out for the job after all. “Are you outside of your car? I think I can find you but you need to hang on and get back in your car. Turn on your headlamps and whatever the hell else you do, for the love of Christ, stop driving and wait for me.”

  I headed out in the Rover, glad for the four wheel drive over country roads that had turned to slopping mud. She’d sounded frantic. The part about hearing waves crashing below her did not sit well either. There were sections of the cliff side where a person could simply slip over if they were not aware of their bearings. And Miss Hargreave was certainly not going to be the poster girl for Outdoor Magazine anytime soon, I could safely wager.

  The drive was slow going due to the rain and mud until I got to the main road. I traversed that for a good two kilometers before turning off again, for where I thought she might be. When headlamps came into view I breathed out a heavy sigh in relief and pulled up alongside what I assumed was her Volkswagen.

  The economy did not look promising for making it up the muddy road tonight. I came up to the driver’s window and looked in. Where was she?

  “Miss Hargreave?” I called out.

  Only the sound of rain and the rumble the windscreen wipers from the Rover filled the darkness.

  OH dear God, he was here.

  I’d seen the lights of the Range Rover as soon as it pulled up alongside my rental but I couldn’t just pop out to greet my new boss with my jeans around my ankles, now could I? I’d needed the loo hours ago and my bladder was past the point of negotiation.

  Far, far past.

  The tree I’d chosen to shield my privacy was an ancient thing, and as soon as I was restored to my former self, I called out to the tall form bent over, peering into the window of my car. “I’m over here. Mr. Everley? That is you, right?”

  His head whipped around so fast it gave me a moment’s pause and I stumbled.

  “Of course it’s me. Who else would it be? What in the hell are you doing hiding under a tree? Why aren’t you waiting for me in your car where it’s dry?” Mr. Everley sounded very annoyed. Like an asshole, too.

  “I had—I needed to—I was desperate for a loo if you must know.” Seriously, did he talk to everyone this way? It wasn’t like I’d tried to get lost or that I was actually responsible for the torrential summer rain.

  The stiffness of my legs combined with the mud, the cold, and the general awkwardness of this whole situation did not help me with my balance one bit.

  I slipped again and went down on my ass in the sticky mud, right at Mr. Everley’s feet.

  A large hand reached down to help me up. “You’ll get mud all over my leather seats now,” he said blandly.

  I took his offered hand and let him haul me up. “No, I won’t. I’ll follow you in my car.” I was so mortified at this point, walking in the mud and the rain sounded like a damn good idea. Closed inside a vehicle with my new boss scowling and growling at me, with mud all up my backside? So out of the question.

  Mr. Everley took one sneering look at my car and shook his head at me. “That little thing will die a muddy death if you try it. You don’t have a choice. Get in.” He certainly had no trouble ordering me around. Must be the duke or earl in him.

  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.”

  She moved in her seat and sighed, just as I pulled up to the garage and parked the Rover. She held out her hand and turned her body toward me.

  “Shall we begin again? Gabrielle Hargreave, University of London. I’m the professional here to have a look at your art collection.” She faced me now, but I still couldn’t see her very well. I liked the sound of her voice though. It sounded…sexy.

  The garage light had brightened the interior by a fraction where we sat together, and I finally got a glimpse, but could still barely make out her features. I felt surprise for the second time tonight as I closed my hand around hers for a firm shake. Gabrielle Hargreave was, again, so not what I was expecting.

  Her hair was soaking wet and pulled back in a tie, but the overall impression was one of beauty. I may be a waste at social pleasantries but I do know when a woman is beautiful, and Miss Hargreave was certainly that.

  I was changing my opinion about my new grad student rather quickly.

  “Ahh, Gabrielle Hargreave, pleasure to meet you. Ivan Everley, inheritor of all this…and of course, shuttle driver for lost American art students.” I smiled at her.

  She dropped my hand and looked down at her lap.

  “That bad?” I tilted my head down to try to get her to look at me again. She seemed miserable.

  “You forgot to add ‘wet and caked in mud’ to your description.”

  “Not really. I remembered the ‘wet and muddy’ but figured I was pushing my luck with the ‘lost American’ part already. I’m not a complete idiot, Miss Hargreave.”

  She arched a very pointed brow at me and I felt the hit right in the groin.

  I reached for the door handle and got out of the Rover as fast as I could. This whole situation was getting a little awkward. We were bantering back and forth like we’d known each other for years rather than mere minutes.

  But before I could make my way over to her side to open the door for her, she’d already exited and was bent over my leather seats earnestly attempting to remove the smudges of mud left on them from the backside of her jeans.

  I got a very nice look at her from behind though and I wasn’t complaining. Nope. Miss Hargreave had a fine looking arse attached to those mile long legs of hers. Covered in mud or not, it was a beauty.

  I cleared my throat. “Shall we?”

  “Sorry about your leather seats. I can come back and clean them tomorrow.”

  “No worries. Finnegan will take care of it,” I said as I pulled her bag from the backseat. “He’s the man to see around here if you want anything done. I’ll introduce you as soon as we get up to the house. On second thought, it’s late now.” I checked my watch. “He’s probably gone to bed.” I nodded. “Of which, you’re no doubt in desperate need of yourself.”

  “I am exhausted,” she mumbled, while stifling a yawn with her delicate hand.

  I led her forward, my hand pressed against her back as we made our way out of the darkened garage. Again, I was struck with the overwhelming feeling of something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Odd, but I kept thinking that we’d met before in some capacity.

  “This doesn’t look nice at all,” I said. The rain, which had been doing steady work up to this point, decided to unleash in biblical proportions. The sound of the drops hitting every surface as they poured down in sheets to rival Noah’s flood, roared in front of us.

  “Well I don’t think I can get much wetter,” she shouted over the noise.

  “That’s probably a good thing, because we’re both about to find out. We’ve got to make a run for it!” I yelled, grabbing her hand and pulling her with me as I made for the safety of the house.

  FIVE

  BEING dragged through a deluge along a dark path in unfamiliar territory was not my favorite, but having a guide who knew where he was going was so much better than none at all. At least I wasn’t spending the night in a rental car at the bottom of a ditch.

  We dashed toward a looming stone manor, Neo-Gothic design from what I could tell in the dark and streaming rain. I held onto Mr. Everley’s hand and went forward. He pulled us through puddles and small lakes until we headed up some stone steps, and finally to a door that got my attention. It was a behemoth made of oak and carved with heavy designs of flora and fauna. Fascinating. I’d get a better look tomorrow in the light of day.

  We entered through the door and into a mudroom of sorts. Perfect place for me. I was covered in the stuff, and could think only about getting it off me via a hot bath. A soft bed would be welcome, too. In the morning I could figure out what kind of art Mr. Everley had stashed away in his gloomy corner of Ireland and decide if his collection merited the work or not.

  “Here, allow me,” he said, taking my coat off my back and hanging it dripping on a peg.

  “Thanks.”

  I tried to shake the water off my hands, attempting to sort out my appearance, which must be truly horrifying by now, but it was beyond hopeless. “I don’t think I’ve ever been so soaking wet before.” I brushed at my emerald-green shirt, realizing because my poor jacket had lost to the rain, I was soaked through to the skin.

  “Yeah, it’s downright evil tonight. I’m so glad you’re not out there any longer because I fear you would’ve floated away by now, Miss Hargreave.” He was busy hanging up his own coat and pulling off the ball cap he’d been wearing, when we both turned to face one another.

  “I’m so grateful you finally checked your pho—”

  In the light.

  Where he could
really see me.

  And where I could really see him…for the first time.

  But it wasn’t the first time we’d seen each other.

  Straight dark hair spilled down his neck. Lips that I remembered knowing how to kiss me, opened in total surprise. Captivating green eyes that had held onto mine in a crushingly intimate moment, widened in shock. Mr. Ivanhoe appeared to register the same horrible conclusion I was experiencing.

  Those dark green eyes of his narrowed and glared down at me accusingly, looking fearsome and terrifying in what was, without a doubt, anger at finding me in his house.

  Oh no, please, God, no! It just couldn’t be him of all people.

  I think it was safe to say we were both in shock.

  He pointed a finger at me. “You!”

  I stared up into his fuming eyes, frozen and horrified with only one thought racing through my mind.

  Run away.

  I tried to. I moved to turn my body away from him and flee, but he was too quick. Within a millisecond he had me gripped by the shoulders and facing him. I was going nowhere. Not that I had anywhere to go when I was lost and muddy somewhere in the wilds of Northern Ireland, in some old stone mansion with what was certainly a crazed madman.

  “What in the fuck are you doing here? Maria, wasn’t it?” he spat, shaking me with a hard jerk.

  I shook my head and tried to flinch out from his iron grip on me. “W-who is M-maria?” I sputtered dumbly. “Paul Langley just sent me here to have a look at your p-p-paintings.” I could feel my body quivering in complete terror and fear for my safety. What would he do to me? “Please…don’t…hurt me,” I begged on a whisper.

  He blinked and released me instantly, as if he needed distance to keep his anger in check, and surprised at how hard he’d been holding onto my arms.

  “The evidence from last time wasn’t enough, was it? Even Langley’s gotten in on things now?” He scoffed and looked disgusted with me, a sneer curling one side of his lip. “Were you planning on videotaping again or just photos this time?”