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“Well, aren’t you touchy,” she exclaimed.
He averted his eyes. He shrugged. “Banes has been at it again.”
“You should assign him to school crossings. He hates that,” she advised.
“No, he doesn’t. His new girlfriend is a widow. She’s got a little boy, and Banes has suddenly become his hero. He’d love to work the school crossing.”
“Still, you could find some unpleasant duty to assign him. Didn’t he say once that he hates being on traffic detail at ball games?”
He brightened. “You know, he did say that.”
“See? An opportunity presents itself.” She frowned. “Why are we looking for ways to punish him this time?”
“He brought in a new book on the Little Bighorn Battle and showed me where it said Crazy Horse wasn’t in the fighting.”
She gave him a droll look. “Oh, sure.”
He grimaced. “Every so often, some writer who never saw a real Native American gets a bunch of hearsay evidence together and writes a book about how he’s the only one who knows the true story of some famous battle. This guy also said that Custer was nuts and had a hand in the post trader scandal where traders were cheating the Sioux and Cheyenne.”
“Nobody who reads extensively about Custer would believe he had a hand in something so dishonest,” she scoffed. “He went to court and testified against President Ulysses S. Grant’s own brother in that corruption trial, as I recall. Why would he take such a risk if he was personally involved in it?”
“My thoughts exactly,” he said, “and I told Banes so.”
“What did Banes say to that?”
“He quoted the author’s extensive background in military history.”
She gave him a suspicious look. “Yes? What sort of background?”
“He’s an expert in the Napoleonic Wars.”
“Great! What does that have to do with the campaign on the Greasy Grass?” she asked, which referred to the Lakota name for the battle.
“Not a damned thing,” he muttered. “You can be brilliant in your own field of study, but it’s another thing to do your research from a standing start and come to all the wrong conclusions. Banes said the guy used period newspapers and magazines for part of his research.”
“The Lakota and Cheyenne, as I recall, didn’t write about current events,” she mused.
He chuckled. “No, they didn’t have newspaper reporters back then. So it was all from the cavalry’s point of view, or that of politicians. History is the story of mankind written by the victors.”
“Truly.”
He smiled. “You’re pretty good on local history.”
“That’s because I’m related to people who helped make it.”
“Me, too.” He cocked his head. “I ought to take you down to Hardin and walk the battlefield with you sometime,” he said.
Her eyes lit up. “I’d love that.”
“So would I.”
“There’s a trading post,” she recalled.
“They have some beautiful things there.”
“Made by local talent,” she agreed. She sighed. “I get so tired of so-called Native American art made in China. Nothing against the Chinese. I mean, they have aboriginal peoples, too. But if you’re going to sell things that are supposed to be made by tribes in this country, why import them? ”
“Beats me. Ask somebody better informed.”
“You’re a police chief,” she pointed out. “There isn’t supposed to be anybody better informed.”
He grinned. “Thanks.”
She curtsied.
He frowned. “Don’t you own a dress?”
“Sure. It’s in my closet.” She pursed her lips. “I wore it to graduation.”
“Spare me!”
“I guess I could buy a new one.”
“I guess you could. I mean, if we’re courting, it will look funny if you don’t wear a dress.”
“Why?”
He blinked. “You going to get married in blue jeans?”
“For the last time, I am not going to marry you.”
He took off his wide-brimmed hat and laid it on the hall table. “We can argue about that later. Right now, we need to eat some of that nice, warm, fresh bread before it gets cold and butter won’t melt on it. Shouldn’t we?” he added with a grin.
She laughed. “I guess we should.”
Two
The bread was as delicious as he’d imagined it would be. He closed his eyes, savoring the taste.
“You could cook, if you’d just try,” she said.
“Not really. I can’t measure stuff properly.”
“I could teach you.”
“Why do I need to learn how, when you do it so well already?” he asked reasonably.
“You live alone,” she began.
He raised an eyebrow. “Not for long.”
“For the tenth time today …”
“The California guy was in town today,” he said grimly. “He came by the office to see me.”
“He did?” She felt apprehensive.
He nodded as he bit into another slice of buttered bread with perfect white teeth. “He’s already approached contractors for bids to build his housing project.” He bit the words off as he was biting the bread.
“Oh.”
Jet-black eyes pierced hers. “I told him about the clause in the will.”
“What did he say?”
“That he’d heard you wouldn’t marry me.”
She grimaced.
“He was strutting around town like a tom turkey,” he added. He finished the bread and sipped coffee. His eyes closed as he savored it. “You make great coffee, Jake!” he exclaimed. “Most people wave the coffee over water. You could stand up a spoon in this.”
“I like it strong, too,” she agreed. She studied his hard, lean face. “I guess you live on it when you have cases that keep you out all night tracking. There have been two or three of those this month alone.”
He nodded. “Our winter festival brings in people from all over the country. Some of them see the mining company’s bankroll as a prime target.”
“Not to mention the skeet-and-trap-shooting regional championships,” she said. “I’ve heard that thieves actually follow the shooters around and get license plate numbers of cars whose owners have the expensive guns.”
“They’re targets, all right.”
“Why would somebody pay five figures for a gun?” she wondered out loud.
He laughed. “You don’t shoot in competition, so it’s no use trying to explain it to you.”
“You compete,” she pointed out. “You don’t have a gun that expensive and you’re a triple-A shooter.”
He shrugged. “It isn’t that I wouldn’t like to have one. But unless I take up bank robbing, I’m not likely to be able to afford one, either. The best I can do is borrow one for the big competitions.”
Her eyes popped. “You know somebody who’ll loan you a fifty-thousand-dollar shotgun?”
He laughed. “Well, actually, yes, I do. He’s police chief of a small town down in Texas. He used to do shotgun competitions when he was younger, and he still has the hardware.”
“And he loans you the gun.”
“He isn’t attached to it, like some owners are. Although, you’d never get him to loan his sniper kit,” he chuckled.
“Excuse me?”
He leaned toward her. “He was a covert assassin in his shady past.”
“Really?” She was excited by the news.
He frowned. “What do women find so fascinating about men who shoot people?”
She blinked. “It’s not that.”
“Then what is it?”
She hesitated, trying to put it into words. “Men who have been in battles have tested themselves in a way most people never have to,” she began slowly. “They learn their own natures. They … I can’t exactly express it… .”
“They learn what they’re made of, right where they live and breathe,” he commented. “Under fire, you’re always afraid. But you harness the fear and use it, attack when you’d rather run. You learn the meaning of courage. It isn’t the absence of fear. It’s fear management, at its best. You do your duty.”
“Nicely said, Chief Graves,” she said admiringly, and grinned.
“Well, I know a thing or two about being shot at,” he reminded her. “I was in the first wave in the second incursion in the Middle East. Then I became a police officer and then a police chief.”
“You met the other police chief at one of those conventions, I’ll bet,” she commented.
“Actually I met him at the FBI academy during a training session on hostage negotiation,” he corrected. “He was teaching it.”
“My goodness. He can negotiate?”
“He did most of his negotiations with a gun before he was a Texas Ranger,” he laughed.
“He was a Ranger, too?”
“Yes. And a cyber-crime expert for a Texas D.A., and a merc, and half a dozen other interesting things. He can also dance. He won a tango contest in Argentina, and that’s saying something. Tango and Argentina go together like coffee and cream.”
She propped her chin in her hands. “A man who can do the tango. It boggles the mind. I’ve only ever seen a couple of men do it in movies.” She smiled. “Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman was my favorite.”
He grinned. “Not the ‘governator’ in True Lies?“
She glared at him. “I’m sure he was doing his best.”
He shook his head. “I watched Rudolph Valentino do it in an old silent film,” he sighed. “Real style.”
“It’s a beautiful dance.”
He gave her a long look. “There’s a new Latin dance club in Billings.”
“What?” she exclaimed with pure surprise.
“No kidding. A guy from New York moved out here to retire. He’d been in ballroom competition most of his life and he got bored. So he organized a dance band and opened up a dance club. People come up from Wyoming and across from the Dakotas just to hear the band and do the dances.” He toyed with his coffee cup. “Suppose you and I go up there and try it out? I can teach you the tango.”
Her heart skipped. It was the first time, despite all the banter, that he’d ever suggested taking her on a date.
He scowled when she hesitated.
“I’d love to,” she blurted out.
