Northern Lights

we're going to be a while, I want to have someone go out and check on my dogs."
    "I called the State cops. A Sergeant Coben's in charge of the case, for now anyway. He'll probably want to talk to you—and your mother at some point. There's not likely to be much movement on this until they can get a team up there and bring him back down. I called the hospital. All three boys are in satisfactory condition."
    "You've been busy. Tell me, chief, do you take care of everybody?"
    "No. I just handle details."
    She'd heard bigger bullshit in her life, but then she lived in Lunacy. "She do a number on you? The ex-wife?"
    He shifted. "Probably."
    "Want to spew? Trash her over breakfast?"
    "Not so much."
    She waited while Wanda served the meal, topped off the coffee. Meg cut into the eggs, letting the yolk run where it liked. "So I slept with this guy in college," she began. "Great looker. Kind of stupid, but he had tremendous staying power. He started playing this head game on me. How I should think about wearing more makeup, dressing better, maybe I shouldn't argue with people so much. Blah blah. Not," she said with a wag of her fork, "that I wasn't gorgeous and sexy and smart, oh no, but if I just fixed up a little more, went along a little more."
    "You're not gorgeous."
    She laughed, her eyes dancing, and bit into her toast. "Shut up. This is my story."
    "You're better than gorgeous. Gorgeous is just lucky DNA. You're . . . vivid," he decided. "Compelling. That's the sort of thing that comes from inside spaces, so it's better than gorgeous. If you want my opinion."
    "Wow." She sat back, surprised enough to forget her breakfast. "If I was anybody else, I'd be speechless after a comment like that. As it is, I've lost my trend. What the hell was I talking about?"
    This time when he smiled, it reached his eyes, warmed up the gray. "Asshole college boy you slept with."
    "Right. Right." She dived into the hash browns. "There was more than one, but anyway, I was twenty and this dude's passive-aggressive insults were starting to get under my skin—especially when I found out he was boffing this brain-dead bimbo with pots of money and breast implants."
    She fell silent, concentrating on her breakfast.
    "So, what did you do?"
    "What did I do?" She drank some coffee. "Next time we went to bed, I screwed his brains out, then slipped him a couple of sleeping pills."
    "You drugged him?"
    "Yeah, so?"
    "Nothing. Nothing."
    "I paid a couple of guys to carry him down to one of the lecture halls. And I dressed his sorry ass in sexy women's underwear—bra, garter belt, black hose. That was challenging. I made up his face, curled his hair. Took some pictures to put up on the Internet. He was still sleeping when the first class started piling in at eight." She ate some eggs. "It was a hell of a show—especially when he woke up, got a clue and started screaming like a girl."
    Enjoying her, appreciating the single-mindedness as much as the creativity of her revenge, Nate toasted her with his coffee. "You can bet I won't be commenting on your wardrobe."
    "Point of the story. I believe in payback. For the little things, for the big ones. For everything in between. Letting people screw you over is just lazy and uncreative."
    "You didn't love him."
    "Hell, no. If I had, I wouldn't have just embarrassed him. I'd have caused him intense physical pain in addition."
    He toyed with the rest of his omelette. "Let me ask you something. Are we exclusive?"
    "I consider myself very exclusive, in every way."
    "What we have going on together," he said patiently. "Is this an exclusive arrangement?"
    "Is that what you're looking for?"
    "I wasn't looking for anything. Then there you were."
    "Uh-oh." She let out a long breath. "Good one. Seems like you've got a whole big pot of good ones. I don't have a problem limiting myself to swinging from the chandelier with just you, for as long as we're both enjoying it."
    "Fair enough."
    "She cheat on you, Burke?"
    "Yeah. Yeah, she did."
    Meg nodded, continued to eat. "I don't cheat. Okay, sometimes I
    cheat at cards, but just for the hell of it. And sometimes I lie when it's expedient. Or when the lie's just more fun than the truth. I can be mean if it suits me, which is a lot."
    She paused, reaching across to touch his hand for a moment so there was a connection between them. "But I don't kick a man when he's down, unless I'm the one who put him down in the first place. I don't put him down unless he deserves it. And I