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mocking her quite so often.
    “Yes, the ninety-nine percent who never travel by limo don’t know how hard they have it,” he said.
    “I don’t travel everywhere by limo, you know,” she defended, her cheeks growing hot. “I do know how to drive.”
    “Ah, Daddy bought you your very own Beamer, did he?”
    Actually, he’d bought her a Mercedes, but that did nothing to alleviate her annoyance. “I won’t make excuses for my father’s money,” she told him. “Some people happen to be born into wealthy families, and some aren’t. I can’t control who my father is, or how much money he has.”
    “True, but you could have, say, gotten a job when you became an adult.”
    “I’m pursuing my education. That will prepare me for my career.”
    “Still? You must be what, thirty? When are you going to graduate already?”
    “I’m twenty-eight,” she corrected, stung by his implication that she had lingered in school too long. She had attained a master’s degree before pursuing her PhD. “I’ve finished my PhD coursework, and I’m researching my dissertation now.” Let him find a way to cast her as an idle-rich spoiled brat now.
    His mouth curved down, as if he was impressed in spite of himself. “I see. What is your dissertation about?”
    Too late, she regretted her boast. Her obscure topic of study meant a lot to her, but she knew how it would sound to somebody like Joe Dunham. Somebody who lived in the so-called real world. “Art history,” she murmured, her bravado gone. “My dissertation is on women in the work of Albrecht Dürer.”
    “Who?”
    “Albrecht Dürer, a German engraver and artist in medieval times. Very influential.” She could only imagine how ludicrous she sounded to him. He made his living doing dangerous and difficult things. Her studies must seem ridiculous to him.
    “Uh-huh. An engraver. He did, like, what, bracelets and stuff?”
    She fought a smile but wasn’t completely successful. “No, engraving was a style of printmaking at the time, used for making printed pictures. He would engrave a design into a copper plate and then ink it and use the plate to print the design on paper. The diversity of his talent amazes me. He illustrated many books and painted, as well.” Her love for the subject took over, and she forgot her embarrassment.
    She pulled up an image of Dürer’s work and turned her laptop to face him. “This is ‘St. Jerome in his Study,’” she explained. “It’s one of his most famous works.” The image had always intrigued her. St. Jerome, engrossed in scholarship, sat at a table flooded with light from a nearby stained-glass window. In the foreground, incongruously, an enormous lion lay asleep next to a sleeping dog.
    She expected him to shrug off her explanation, out of boredom, but instead he came to sit next to her to take a closer look at the image. He studied the picture intently, intelligence alive in his green eyes.
    She found herself observing him rather than looking at the image. What was his ancestry? Irish, maybe? His dark hair, in need of a trim, seemed to be in perpetual disarray, yet it suited him. His face combined intelligent eyes the color of woodland moss, a sensual mouth, and lean cheekbones with a hawkish nose that looked as if it had been broken at least once. His face spoke of smarts and toughness at the same time. His teeth flashed white every time he grinned, which was often. He particularly seemed to laugh at her a lot.
    He gestured to the screen. “Uh, why does St. Jerome keep a lion in his study?”
    The prosaic question startled a laugh out of her. “It’s part of the iconography of St. Jerome,” she explained. “All of the saints had stories and legends about them, and medieval painters or engravers often pictured them with symbols from those stories as a way of identifying them. St. Jerome supposedly removed a thorn from a lion’s paw, so he’s always depicted with a lion.” She pointed to a large hat hanging on the