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flight.”
    “Miranda, you’re going to bed.”
    “Oh yeah.” She smiled again. “Very soon now.”
    “I’ll call her.” He sucked in his breath as a man might when faced with an ugly chore. “I’ll explain.”
    “My hero.” Loving him, she kissed his cheek. “No, I’ll go. A hot bath, some aspirin, and I’ll be fine. And after this little adventure, I could use a distraction. It seems she has a bronze she wants me to test.” Because it had gone cold, she set the tea down again. “She wouldn’t summon me to Standjo if it wasn’t important. She wants an archeometrist, and she wants one quickly.”
    “She’s got archeometrists on staff at Standjo.”
    “Exactly.” This time Miranda’s smile was thin and bright. “Standjo” stood for Standford-Jones. Elizabeth had made certain that not only her name but everything else on her agenda came first in the Florence operation. “So if she’s sending for me, it’s big. She wants to keep it in the family. Elizabeth Standford-Jones, director of Standjo, Florence, is sending for an expert on Italian Renaissance bronzes, and she wants one with the Jones name. I don’t intend to disappoint her.”
     
    She didn’t have any luck booking a flight for the following morning and had to settle for a seat on the evening flight to Rome with a transfer to Florence.
    Nearly a full day’s delay.
    There would be hell to pay.
    As she tried to soak out the aches in a hot tub, Miranda calculated the time difference and decided there was no point in calling her mother. Elizabeth would be at home, very likely in bed by now.
    Nothing to be done about it tonight, she told herself. In the morning, she’d call Standjo. One day couldn’t make that much difference, even to Elizabeth.
    She’d hire a car to take her to the airport, because the way her knee was throbbing, driving could be a problem even if she could replace her tires quickly. All she had to do was . . .
    She sat straight up in the tub, sloshing water to the rim.
    Her passport. Her passport, her driver’s license, her company IDs. He’d taken her briefcase and her purse—he’d taken all her identification documents.
    “Oh hell,” was the best she could do as she rubbed her hands over her face. That just made it all perfect.
    She yanked the old-fashioned chain plug out of the drain of the claw-foot tub. She was steaming now, and the burst of angry energy had her getting to her feet, reaching for a towel, before her wrenched knee buckled under her. Biting back a yelp, she braced a hand against the wall and sat on the lip of the tub, the towel dropping in to slop in the water.
    The tears wanted to come, from frustration, from the pain, from the sudden sharp fear that came stabbing back. She sat naked and shivering, her breath trembling out on little hitching gasps until she’d controlled them.
    Tears wouldn’t help her get back her papers, or soothe her bruises or get her to Florence. She sniffled them back and wrung out the towel. Carefully now, she used her hands to lift her legs out of the tub, one at a time. She gained her feet as clammy sweat popped out on her skin, causing the tears to swim close again. But she stood, clutching the sink for support, and took stock of herself in the full-length mirror on the back of the door.
    There were bruises on her arms. She didn’t remember him grabbing her there, but the marks were dark gray, so logically he had. Her hip was black-and-blue and stunningly painful. That, she remembered, was a result of being rammed back against the car.

    Her knees were scraped and raw, the left one unattractively red and swollen. She must have taken the worst of the fall on it, twisted it. The heels of her hands burned from their rude meeting with the gravel of the drive.
    But it was the long, shallow slice on her throat that had her head going light, her stomach rolling with fresh nausea. Fascinated and appalled, she lifted her fingers to it. Just a breath from the jugular, she thought. Just a breath from death.
    If he’d wanted her to die, she would have died.
    And that was worse than the bruising, the sick throbbing aches. A stranger had held her life in his hands.
    “Never again.” She turned away from the mirror, hobbled over to take her robe from the brass hook by the door. “I’m never going to let it happen again.”
    She was freezing, and wrapped herself as quickly as she could in the robe. As she was struggling to belt it, a movement outside the window had