Her father picked up a napkin and wiped his eyes. “That’s my daughter. If you hadn’t, and I’d found out about it, I’d have disowned you myself.”

She picked up her sandwich again, and stared at it, before taking a pensive bite. “You know, Dad,” she said after swallowing it, “it isn’t easy being a flint-hearted bitch. It takes a lot of work.”

To her surprise, he reached across the table and patted her free hand. “You mean,” he said, quietly but firmly, “that it isn’t easy being a warrior. That is what you are, and only a foolish young man with no experience and unable to get past his own ego would fail to see it.”

She looked up at him in complete shock.

He nodded, and gave her a smile warm and bright with approval. “Just promise me this. Watch your back very closely. Not because you need to, but to please your old man, who probably worries too much about the girl he remembers as a baby in his arms.”

She blinked, and agreed.

“Good,” he said with satisfaction. “That is all I have any right to ask you. Now—can I force some strawberry cobbler on you?” He arched his eyebrows at the refrigerator. “There’s fresh homemade ice cream to go with it,” he continued temptingly.

All she could do was laugh, and agree.

She was thinking about the conversation as she made notes in her office after she got back. It had been a very enlightening and surprising little talk, on a lot of levels—

“Sometimes it would be easier not to be such a rebel,” Grandfather said from behind her, making her jump. “Easier on you, as well as your parents. But sometimes it is something that you must be.”

She swiveled her chair around. There he was, standing in the door to her office, looking inscrutable. “Are you eavesdropping on my brain again?” she asked, shaking a fist at his ear. “Dirty old men shouldn’t eavesdrop on ladies’ thoughts!”

He ducked, and chuckled at her, waggling an admonitory finger at her. “No respect,” he chided. “You kids have no respect for the elderly and wise—”

It was hard to stay even annoyed with him for more than a minute when he was in this mood. “If you were either, I might,” she retorted. “You’re an oversexed sixteen-year-old contrary, an Osage heyoka and there isn’t any such thing, and you’re just disguised as a wise old medicine man! You’ve got my real Grandfather tied up in a closet somewhere. You’re Coyote, that’s what you are, and not Mooncrow at all!”