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time.
    She snatched up the phone. “What’s up, Charlie?”
    “Did you change your mind about today’s meeting?”
    “Of course not.”
    “Where are you?”
    How did he know she hadn’t arrived at the meet point yet? “Are you at the restaurant?”
    “No, but I made the reservation, not Smith. I just called to confirm that everything was set and to give them my credit card for anything you ordered. They said no one had shown yet. You’ve got eight minutes to make this meeting. If I’ve figured out one thing about you it’s that you’re the kind of Type-A who thinks if you arrive on time you’re ten minutes late. So...where are you?”
    Actually, she was down to seven minutes according to her phone, but correcting Charlie would not improve the tension in his voice.
    “I’m close.” She wheeled off the interstate and forced her blood pressure to come down from the ceiling as she maneuvered through a traffic light onto surface streets. “I’m five minutes away, tops.”
    “What happened?”
    “I had car trouble.”  It was as good a lie as any. She’d strangle Dingo if he cost her this contract.
    “This Smith guy came very highly recommended from my oldest UK contact. Uber-platinum. You told me you needed a big score. I found it. You can’t let car trouble or anything else interfere.”
    Heat crawled up her neck at being chided.
    She was never in this position. Everything she did was above reproach. Dingo had just undermined her reputation by using up the extra time she’d built in so that she’d only miss this meeting if she were abducted by aliens.
    Even then, she’d make an alien wish he’d chosen more carefully.
    That thought gave her an idea for shifting the topic off her time frame. “Just who is this guy, Charlie?”
    “All I know is he’s from Italy, he’s here for a very short time and he’s willing to pay big bucks to have whatever it is he’s looking for brought to him. My guess is he represents some eccentric billionaire. I tried to find out more on him today just to have an idea of what our dollar parameters might be, but no one knows anything beyond what I’ve told you. I set the meeting in a public venue, but if you get a hinky feeling, just walk.”
    And lose the best lead she’d had in forever?
    Not going to happen unless this guy acted like an axe murderer on holiday. “I’m good, Charlie. You know I can handle myself. If he’s for real, I’ll close this deal.”
    “Good, because if you can’t, this Smith will move on and my contact in the UK won’t be happy since he’s getting half of my finder’s fee.”
    “I hear you. I’m not going to drop the ball and I appreciate all you’ve done over the past month. This will be my chance to thank you.”
    “No worries, Val. I like working with you. Aram gets on my nerves. But my contact knows who Aram is so if we let this one off the hook, Aram will be standing by to scoop him.”
    “That is not going to happen.” She hated being compared to Aram Pavlovsky, a five-foot-eight PITA who considered himself a Bulgarian Don Juan–she paused for an eye roll–and was her closest competition on the West Coast. Not that he was her equal when it came to Renaissance artifacts, but he was a shark at closing deals.
    She’d been lucky to negotiate this arrangement with Charlie Rothschild–a new buyer in town–before Aram had gotten wind of the new arrival. Charlie brokered high-end, rare antiques, artifacts and antiquities to clients in Europe, and he was the best resource she’d had in a very long time.
    He had a rep for big deals, but she hadn’t seen anything significant until now.
    “Are you there yet?” Charlie asked.
    Another eye roll, then she said, “Hold on.”
    “Why?”
    “I want to look in the back seat to see if you’re sitting behind me. Chill, Charlie. I’m close.”
    “Very funny,” Charlie groused. “I’m serious about Aram. I heard he’s asking around for leads on seventeenth-century collectors.