Black Hills

over a chunk of ham, some sort of potatoes, and I think it might be artichokes.”
    “I can make my own food, you know. I just haven’t had a chance to get to the store for supplies in the last few days.”
    “Uh-huh. I brought over a six-pack if you want a beer.”
    “Coop, this can’t . . . This is wrong in so many ways.” She pulled off her coat, tossed it aside. “You can’t just live here.”
    “I’m not. I’ve got my own place. I’m just sleeping here for a while.”
    “And how long is a while? How long do you plan to sleep on my sofa?”
    He sent her a lazy glance as he took a pull of his beer. “Until you loosen up and let me into your bed.”
    “Oh, well, if that’s all, let’s go. Come on, let’s hit the sheets. Then we can both get back to our regularly scheduled lives.”
    “Okay. Just give me a minute to finish this up.”
    She clamped her hands on her head, paced a circle. “Fuck,” she said. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
    “I might’ve put it more delicately than that.”
    She stopped, then squatted on the other side of the coffee table. “Cooper.”
    He took another sip of his beer. “Lillian.”
    She shut her eyes a moment because there had to be some sense, some shade of sanity in the chaos murking up her brain. “This arrangement is awkward and unnecessary, and just weird.”
    “Why?”
    “Why? Why? Because we have a history, because we had a . . . thing. You do realize that everyone in the damn county figures we’re sleeping together again.”
    “I don’t think everyone in the county knows either one of us, or cares. And so what?”
    She had to scramble for an answer to that. “Maybe I want to sleep with somebody else, and you’re in the way.”
    Coop took a long, slow pull from the beer this time. “Then where is he?”
    “Okay, forget that one. Just forget that one.”
    “Happy to. It’s got to be your turn to put the meal on.”
    “See?” She jabbed a finger in the air. “ There. What is this ‘turn’ crap? This is my house. Mine, mine, mine. And I come in to find you on my sofa, with your feet on my coffee table, drinking my beer—”
    “I bought the beer.”
    “You’re deliberately missing the point.”
    “I got the point. You don’t like me being here. The point you’re missing is I don’t care. You’re not staying here alone until this trouble is resolved. I told Joe I’d look out for you. That’s it, Lil.”
    “If it makes you feel any better I can arrange for an intern to stay in the next cabin.”
    The faintest trace of impatience flickered over his face. “Would the average age of your interns be maybe twenty? I wonder why the idea of some skinny college kid as your backup doesn’t ease my mind. You’d save yourself from aggravation if you just accept that I’m going to be around until this is settled. Did you make that list?”
    “Until” was the sticking point, wasn’t it? she thought. He’d be around until . . . he was finished, he decided to move on again, he found something or someone else.
    “Lil?”
    “What?”
    “Did you make that list?”
    “What list?” When he smirked, it came back to her. “No, I didn’t make any damn list. I had a few other minor things on my mind today.” Though she knew it was a kind of surrender, she dropped down to sit on the floor. “We took two thirty-two slugs out of the gray wolf.”
    “I heard.”
    “They have to run ballistics, but we all know it was the same gun, used by the same man.”
    “That’s your good news. You’d have more to worry about if you had two shooters.”
    “I hadn’t thought of it that way. Well, whoopee.”
    “You need better security.”
    “I’m working on it. More cameras, lights, alarms. The health and safety of my animals is priority, but I can’t just reach in my pocket and pull out the money to pay for all that.”
    He hitched up, reached in his pocket, and took out a check. “Donation.”
    She smiled a little. Damn it, he was being considerate and kind—and she was being nothing but bitchy. “And all are gratefully accepted, but I priced some of the equipment and systems today so . . .”
    She glanced at the check. Her brain simply froze. She blinked, blinked again, but the number of zeros remained the same. “What the hell is this?”
    “I thought we’d established it’s a donation. Are you going to heat up that food your mother sent?”
    “Where the hell did you get this kind of money? And you can’t just give it away like this. Is