Stolen Vengeance: Slye Temp book 6 Read Free Page B

it quickly.
    No more.
    “Valene, don’t. This is why I was trying to tell you what your dad wanted if we got to this point. He’s seventy-eight–”
    “Not for another week.”
    “Still. He’s lived a good life.”
    She didn’t deal well with desperation, but anger? Oh, she had plenty of practice at handling rage. “He’s old and has had a good life so what? It’s time to put him down? Is that it?” 
    “I’m not saying that, Valene.”
    “You are saying it’s a bad investment.”  Just like when Mom decided she couldn’t invest any more of her youth in a man with one arm, once he was no longer a gorgeous bauble she could dangle in front of two sisters who had married rich, but dumpy, men. It hadn’t been enough that her dad had loved her mother, or that he’d been a highly respected associate professor of history at the time of the accident.
    Against her mother’s wishes, her dad had gone off on an archeological excavation in Europe where a former associate had arranged for her dad to have an active role. He’d spent months setting it up, but Valene’s mother had criticized him the whole time, claiming his dream was nothing more than grunt work or manual labor. Yes, he’d lost his arm on that trip, but her dad had never uttered a word of regret.
    He’d still been a very attractive man when her mother bailed on their marriage, but he’d lost a lot of his athletic physique over the eighteen months of healing from the accident.
    A few months before getting injured, he’d taken a new teaching position, and since he wasn’t tenured the new university had replaced him. Life went downhill for a while, but her dad had planted two feet and stood up, determined to raise Valene.
    Dr. Bowen pulled out a hard-eyed gaze he probably held in reserve for difficult cases like her. “Do you have that kind of money?”
    “I can get it.”  She had a new client who wanted a specific seventeenth- century artifact located. A small one. That’s all the message had said besides asking her to meet the guy at a restaurant two hours from now.
    Seventeenth century could be big money, especially if it was an extremely rare book. Ancient inscriptions were her first love, but the written word up through the Renaissance was her area of specialty.
    On the other hand, anything that rare would not just appear out of thin air in one week.
    Her expertise had grown out of a natural gift for uncovering obscure details from history, a bulldog attitude when it came to digging up information, and a tenacious drive for tracking something down when others quit. Or rather, that had been her reputation before she’d allowed so many contracts to slide. She’d been tough competition when she was at the top of her game and she could do it again.
    She knew of only two other people who specialized in the same areas and who could be considered her equals. Artifact hunters were all over the place, but she was more of a bounty hunter when dealing with the Renaissance and mapping the journey of a specific item from person to person.
    It was one thing to know the value of an object, but much more valuable to uncover the hands that had touched it. The other two comparable experts were on the US Eastern Seaboard.
    Luck had fallen her way to have this client on the West Coast.
    “What if your father doesn’t want to do the experimental treatment, Valene?”
    Her dad once told her he never would have survived the early cancer treatments without her being his advocate when all he'd wanted to do most days was curl up and sleep.  Cancer could suck the drive out of a strong person.  Her dad was a fighter and a survivor who trusted her to have his back.  Even so, she’d never push him to do anything against his will.
    Pushing back up to her feet, she felt the first wave of confidence roll through her, something she hadn’t experienced in a while.
    “I told you, the final decision is his. You mean well, and for that I thank you, but you don’t