Black Hills

her to him, saying nothing at all.
    “He’s up there somewhere, laughing. It makes it worse. I don’t care how petty it is, it makes it worse. So I’m going to be pissed off.”
    “That’s fine, be pissed off. Or look at it this way: He thinks we’re stupid, that you’re stupid. He thinks we bought his little game, and we didn’t. He underestimated you, and that’s a mistake. It took a lot of time and effort for him to make that trail, plant that wallet. He wasted it on you.”
    She relaxed a little. “When you put it that way.”
    He lifted her face to his, kissed her. “Hi.”
    “Hi.”
    He ran his hand down the length of her braid, wishing he could ask, demand, even beg. And let her go. “Any hail damage?”
    “Nothing major. How about at your grandparents’?”
    “To my grandfather’s secret pleasure, they lost most of the kale.”
    “I like kale.”
    “Why?”
    She laughed. “No good reason. There’s a ball game on tonight. Toronto at Houston. Wanna watch?”
    “Absolutely.”
    “Good. You can set the table.”
    He got out plates, laid them with the scent of cooking, of her, filling the air. He decided it wasn’t pushing just to ask. “Is that sexy underwear still in your dresser?”
    “It is.”
    “Okay.” He glanced at her while he opened a drawer for flatware. “You need to pick a date this summer. I’ll give you the Yankee schedule, and you can pick whichever game works for you. I can get Brad to send the plane. We could take a couple of days, stay at the Palace or the Waldorf.”
    She checked the potatoes she had roasting with rosemary in the oven. “Private planes, fancy hotels.”
    “I’ve still got my box-seat season tickets.”
    “Box seats, too. Just how rich are you, Cooper?”
    “Really.”
    “Maybe I should hit you up for another donation.”
    “I’ll give you five thousand to throw away the red number in the drawer upstairs.”
    “Bribery. I’ll consider it.”
    “New York and the Yankees were the first bribe. You missed it.”
    She’d missed this, too, she realized. Just poking at each other. “How much to toss them all?”
    “Name your price.”
    “Hmm. Could be steep. I want to build a dorm for the interns.”
    He turned back, head angled. “That’s a good idea. Keep them on the property. They have more time here, probably more interaction with one another and the staff. And you’d have a number of people on-site at all times.”
    “The last part wasn’t a consideration until recently. Which I just don’t want to talk about right now. Housing and transportation aren’t huge problems, but they always take some work. I want to build a six-room dorm, with kitchen facilities and a community room. We’d have room for a dozen interns. Fork over enough and I’ll name it after you.”
    “Bribery. I’ll consider it.”
    She grinned at him. “How does it feel? To be loaded?”
    “Better than it did to be broke. I grew up with money, so I never thought about it. Part of my mistake when I hit college. I never had to worry where a meal was coming from or how I’d pay for shoes, that kind of thing. I blew through my savings and then some.”
    “You were just a boy.”
    “You were just a girl and you made a budget, and lived by it. I remember.”
    “I didn’t grow up rich. You spent plenty on me, too, back then. I let you.”
    “In any case it was a come-to-Jesus when I got in a hole, which I compounded by going against my father and dropping out of college, wanting to be a cop. Still, I figured I could do it.”
    He shrugged and sipped as if it didn’t matter. But she knew it did.
    “I’d have the first chunk from the trust coming along so I could live thin for a while. I didn’t know what thin was. But I found out.”
    “You must’ve been scared.”
    “Sometimes. I felt defeated and pissed off. But I was doing what I needed to do, and I was pretty good at it. Getting good at it. When he blocked the trust payment and froze my accounts, what there was of them, it turned desperate. I had the job, so it wasn’t like I’d be on the street, but thin got thinner. I needed a lawyer, a good one, and a good one wants a good retainer. I had to borrow the money for that. Brad lent it to me.”
    “I knew I liked him.”
    “It took months, close to a year, before I could pay him back. It wasn’t just the money, Lil, breaking my father’s hold on the trust payment. It was, finally, breaking his hold on me.”
    “His loss. And I don’t mean the