She’d blinked, startled; she’d never heard such a tone in the professor’s voice before. Words sharply clipped, he’d sounded defensive, almost . . . well, paranoid.
I understand. I’ll take care of it. You just rest, Professor. Don’t you worry about a thing, she’d soothed hastily, deciding that whatever pain meds he was getting were making him funny, the poor dear. She’d once had Tylenol with codeine that had made her feel itchy all over, short-tempered and irritable. With multiple fractures, it was a sure bet he’d been given something stronger than Tylenol 3.
Now, standing beneath the faintly buzzing fluorescent lights in the university hallway, she rubbed her eyes and yawned hugely. She was exhausted. She’d gotten up at six-fifteen for a seven-twenty class and by the time she got home tonight—er, this morning—and managed to fall back into bed, she would have put in another twenty-hour day. Again.
Turning the key in the lock, she pushed open the office door, fumbled for the light switch, and flipped it on. She inhaled as she stepped into the professor’s office, savoring the scholarly blend of books and leather, fine wood polish, and the pungent aroma of his favorite pipe tobacco. She planned to one day have an office of her own very much like it.
The spacious room had built-in floor-to-ceiling bookcases and tall windows that, during the day, spilled sun across an intricately woven antique rug of wine, russet, and amber. The teak-and-mahogany furniture was formally masculine: a stately claw-foot desk; a sumptuous leather Chesterfield sofa in a deep, burnished coffee-bean hue; companion wing chairs. There were numerous glass-paned curio cabinets and occasional tables displaying his most prized replica pieces. A reproduction Tiffany lamp graced his desk. Only his computer, with its twenty-one-inch flat screen, belied the century. Remove it, and she might have been standing in the library of a nineteenth-century English manor house.
“In here,” she called over her shoulder to the deliverymen.
The package hadn’t turned out to be quite what she’d expected. From the way the professor had spoken of it, she’d imagined a bulky envelope, perhaps a small parcel.
But the “package” was actually a crate, and a huge one at that. It was tall, wide, about the size of a . . . well, a sarcophagus or something, and proving no easy matter to navigate through the university corridors.
“Careful, man. Tilt it! Tilt it! Ow! You’re smashing my finger. Back it up and angle it!”
A muttered “Sorry.” More grunting. “Damn thing’s awkward. Hall’s too frigging narrow.”
“You’re almost here,” Jessi offered helpfully. “Just a bit farther.”
Indeed, moments later, they were carefully lowering the oblong box from their shoulders, depositing it on the rug.
“The professor said I needed to sign something.” She encouraged them to hurry. She had a full day of working and studying tomorrow . . . er, today.
“Lady, we need more than that. This here package don’t get left ’til it’s verified.”
“‘Verified’?” she echoed. “What does that mean?”
“Means it’s worth boo-koo bucks, and the shipper’s insurer’s got to have visual verification and release. See? Says so right here.” The beefier of the two thrust a clipboard at her. “Don’t care who does it, lady, so long as somebody’s John Hancock’s on my paperwork.”
Sure enough, Visual Verification and Release Required was stamped in red across the bill of lading, followed by two pages of terms and definitions detailing shipper’s and buyer’s rights in pedantic, inflated legal jargon.
She pushed a hand through her short dark curls, sighing. The professor wasn’t going to like this. He’d said it was personal.
“And if I don’t let you open it up and inspect it?”
“Goes back, lady. And let me tell you, the shipper’s gonna be plenty pissed.”
“Yeah,” said the other man. “Thing cost an arm and a leg to insure. Goes back, your professor’s gonna have to pay the second time around. I bet he’s gonna be plenty pissed too.”
They stared at her with flat, challenging gazes, clearly disinclined to wrestle the awkward crate back up on their shoulders, squeeze it back down the hall, reload it and return it, only to end up delivering it again. They weren’t even talking to her breasts, a thing men often did, especially the first time they met her, which told her how deadly earnest they were about dumping their load and getting on with their lives.
She glanced at the phone.