“Hire me?”
“Your services, I mean.”
“I see. And exactly which of my services are you interested in hiring me to perform?” she enquired, her tone chilly and mocking.
“Not that,” he blurted, aghast. Could the woman possibly believe he had to pay women for their company? And that if he did, he’d go about it in such a clumsy fashion?
“That,” she repeated, her lips drawing into a soft rosy bow that did not help his concentration at all. “That being?”
Her brows arched and her lips twitched.
She was laughing, Griff realized. At him. The sheer humiliation of it bounced around like a pinball inside him, slamming his pride hard enough to trigger some abandoned, deeply buried response system. A sort of Freudian kick in the ass.
As their gazes locked, he felt his grip on the cane relax and his lips settle into a comfortable smile. “That being any service requiring negotiations of a personal nature,” he said in a soft, deep voice that was only the slightest bit rusty. “The specific service I have need for at the moment is of a less intriguing, more professional nature.”
There was no mistaking the look of heightened awareness in her pretty eyes. It was laced with wariness, and with excitement. It was a look Griff hadn’t seen on a woman in quite a while. A look he’d thought he didn’t care if he ever saw again. He’d thought wrong, he realized. Suddenly, to his surprise, he felt more at home in his skin than he had in a long time.
“To be specific, I want to hire you to help me complete Devora’s collection,” he told her. “The birds,” he prodded gently, when she continued to stare at him in silence.
“Of course.” She ran her fingers through her hair, dislodging an amber-jeweled butterfly clip so that it seemed to be dancing across the sun-kissed waves near her ear. He liked it.
“I’m sorry. I was…thinking of something else for a moment,” Rose explained, then wanted to kick herself when Griff’s indulgent smile assured her that he knew exactly what that something else had been.
She didn’t like this, not one bit, and there was no way in heaven that she was going to agree to work for the man. Hire her, indeed.
“I’d really like to help you,” she told him, “but as I explained the other day, this really is not my field of expertise.”
“Maybe not, but there’s no denying you know a hell of a lot more about antiques in general than I do.”
She conceded that with a small shrug. “You could learn.”
“You could teach me.”
“Out of the question. I’m in business to sell stuff, not train potential competitors.”
“Understood. You have my word of honor that I will never go into the antiques business for myself. What do you say?”
“I say I really have to get back to work now.”
“Does that mean you accept my offer?”
“No, it means I have a business of my own to run.”
She began rearranging a display of Limoges boxes, while he looked on.
“I get it,” he said, leaning against a mahogany armoire filled with linen. “You want me to beg.”
“No, really, I don’t—”
“I’m begging you, Rose. I’m a desperate man. A victim of my own ignorance. Take pity on me.”
“All right, I’ll do this much—I’ll make a suggestion.” She turned to him holding one of the prized miniature boxes in each hand, one a ripe strawberry, the other a tiny carousel. “If I were you, I would try the Internet.”
“I did. Unfortunately my computer skills are limited to flight simulation and engine design.”
“You didn’t turn up anything?”
He shrugged. “Only that one of the three birds I need is a Piping Plover, name derived from the Latin pluvius, or rain. The feminine form of rain, to be precise.”
“Rain has gender?”
“Evidently the Romans thought so. At any rate, this particular Plover is practically extinct. What does that tell you?”
“That you’re in trouble.”
“That’s what I’ve been saying.” He shifted so he could see her face. “Would it have any influence on your answer if I told you that you have the most amazing eyes?”
“No,” she retorted, wishing that were the truth. Just hearing him talk about her eyes in that voice—the sort of deep, dark caress of a voice that every woman hears in her most secret fantasies—had an eroding effect on her resolve. And her concentration.
“Because it’s true,” he continued. “Just when I’m convinced they couldn’t be any greener, you blink, or I do, and they’re suddenly full of silver lights.”
Rose placed the strawberry Limoges box on the shelf, picked it up and put it back down in the precisely same spot. Maryann was right. God did work in mysterious ways. Right now, he was punishing her for saying that Griff was not charming by making him disarmingly so.
“And you,” she said, putting aside both boxes and turning to face him, “are full of baloney.”
“You want me to say your eyes aren’t green? I will. It goes against my code as an officer and a gentleman, but I’ll do it. I’ll do whatever it takes to get you to say yes.”
“Does this really mean that much to you?”
“Yes. It does.”
“Why?”
Griff hesitated. Damn. He’d wanted to play this straight. He didn’t consider a little flirting, especially when it came so naturally and she did have incredible eyes, to be dishonest. But now she was digging into his actual motives and intentions, and he was going to have to make a choice. Lie, or tell the truth and make her so angry she’d never agree to help him.
“Bottom line,” he said, “it means a lot to me, for no other reason than that it meant so much to Devora. Hell, I’d never be standing here pressing you this way otherwise. She made it clear she wanted the collection completed, and I feel strangely compelled to oblige.”
All true, after a fashion, he assured himself. If he was lucky, he might be able to continue to pick his way along a fine line of omissions and insinuations.
“I guess I can understand that,” said Rose.
“Good. Because I really need your help. And I’m prepared to be generous,” he added, hoping to sway her with the more honest incentive of cold, hard cash.
At first she appeared uninterested in the offer. Then she glanced over her shoulder at the counter behind her and did that distracting, sort of pouty thing with her lips that he’d noticed she did when she was pondering something.
“How generous?” she asked.
Griff considered the price she’d charged for the string of dead flowers and named an hourly rate in keeping with it. He was desperate, he reminded himself as he saw her eyes flash with real interest, and something else—something he couldn’t quite name.
“I’ll do it,” she said. Then, before he could feel triumphant, she added, “But with a few stipulations.”
“Name them.”
“I’ll work for you, but not instead of you. I already have my hands full. I do a lot of business online,” she explained, pointing to the computer sitting on a small desk behind the counter, “so I’ll handle that part of the search. But you’ll have to be available to come along if I decide we should chase down a lead.”