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Rosebud. Nope. He couldn’t bring Mom in on this yet. He needed her focused on the meetings and deals he’d lined up before he left.
    Dan thought hard, trying to review the interview as his mother would. Rosebud Donnelly’s voice had cracked and Emily Mankiller had touched her, like a mother comforting her child. His first instinct—she’d lost someone, maybe a husband—had been true. Maybe Rosebud had taken a shot at him to make up for a different shot, a better shot. That had to be it.
    Did that even the score? Was she satisfied? No, he decided. A woman like that was never satisfied with just once. He smiled at the thought. But he didn’t think she was going to take another shot at him. He’d looked her in the eyes. Her mouth may have been lying, but he didn’t think her eyes were telling the same tale.
    No, they’d been saying something…different. He adjusted his jeans. Damn it all. He shouldn’t have gotten so close to her, so close to the way she smelled, to those beautiful eyes the shade of a doe’s fur in the early spring. He never should have touched her hair, one long swath of silk. He never should have shaken her hand.
    For that matter, he never should have come here.
    And now, he thought in resignation, he had to go in there.
    Time to get this over with. Dan grabbed his dead hat off the dash. He needed a new one, pronto. A man didn’t go without a hat where he was from.
    â€œWell?” Dan hadn’t even made it to the door of the dining room. He sighed. There was no avoiding his uncle. The whole house stunk of him.
    Dan was so busy mulling over the best way to handle telling Cecil about the situation that he didn’t see the man in the black leather jacket sitting in front of Cecil until he stood up. Another Lakota Indian? What was Cecil doing with someone who sure as hell looked like one of the very people suing Armstrong Holdings?
    â€œDan Armstrong,” he said, making the first move. A fellow could tell a lot about a person by his handshake.
    â€œShane Thrasher,” the stranger said. His grip started out rock-hard, but quickly went limp, like he was trying to hide something. Dan decided he didn’t like the man, an opinion reinforced by his uncle’s warm smile for Thrasher. Nope. Didn’t like him at all.
    â€œThrasher is—what are you, again?” Cecil opened a lockbox Dan hadn’t seen before and pulled out a thick file. The box looked old—like the house. Definitely not something Cecil normally had in his office.
    â€œHalf Crow,” Thrasher replied as he sat back down. He acted like he’d sat in that chair a lot.
    Hadn’t Emily Mankiller said something about the Crow tribe? Something about Custer and Little Bighorn and Greasy Grass? What Dan needed was an eighth-grade history book, but if he was remembering correctly, according to Ms. Mankiller, the Crow were the ones who worked with the whites against the Lakota.
    â€œThat’s right. I can’t keep you all straight.” Dan winced at Cecil’s words, even though Thrasher didn’t blink. “Thrasher is my head of security. An inside man, if you will.”
    Head of security? Dan looked him over. More like gun for hire. The bulge at his side wasn’t hard to see. Maybe Rosebud Donnelly had taken a shot at Dan, maybe she hadn’t. Dan had a hunch that he needed to be more worried about Shane Thrasher than a beautiful, conflicted lawyer. “Pleasure to make your acquaintance.”
    A muscle above Thrasher’s left eye twitched in response. It appeared the insincere feeling was mutual.
    Cecil was studying a thick file. “What did you think of that Donnelly woman?”
    â€œShe’s trouble.” An honest assessment—but he couldn’t figure out if she was the good kind or the bad kind of trouble. More than likely, she was both.
    Thrasher snorted in a way that struck Dan as too familiar. Wielding a red