Читать книгу The Virgin Beauty - Claire King - Страница 11

Grace’s office had been a zoo all week, populated by a large assortment of domesticated animals, some of which, like Daniel’s cat, did not have a thing wrong with them. Which was more than Grace could have honestly said about some of their owners.

The kid with the bike was back today, with a perfectly healthy white rat who rode happily in a plastic milk crate he’d strapped to the handlebars with a bungee cord. She’d looked over the rat while the kid looked over her. The rat was quiet and polite, the boy was not, giving her a little headache with questions about how tall she was, and had she ever played basketball for the Utah Jazz, and could she change a lightbulb without getting on a chair?

Why Mrs. Handleman had sent the child and a perfectly healthy animal back into the examining room was a question Grace posed the first chance she got.

“Because his mother has an account with this clinic,” Mrs. Handleman explained, gravely affronted at having her authority questioned, Grace gathered from her tone. “And I didn’t want that filthy vermin in the front office. You’re the vet. You deal with the filthy vermin.”

Grace was the vet, and everyone in town seemed to know it. The company she’d had moving in was nothing compared to the rush during her first official week. Several times she sent up a quick prayer to thank Dr. Niebaur for lending her Mrs. Handleman until she found an assistant. A prayer that was almost always followed by a curse. Under her breath, of course.

She’d had just one applicant for Mrs. Handleman’s job. A woman who’d shown up at the clinic before Grace’s ad had even appeared in the newspaper. Lisa Cash, a relative of the hunk, she presumed. Grace secretly decided “Lisa” was a rather plain name for a rather flashy young woman. She’d come into the office in tight jeans and a pearl-buttoned cowboy shirt pressed to within an inch of its life. Her hair was bleached until it was more dead straw than live follicle, with what looked like intentionally dark roots. She wore a good quarter pound of eye makeup, as well, which only added to the barmaid aspect of her. Grace was thrilled with her, and envious. As much as it would have galled her to look in the mirror and have a yellow head and Bride of Frankenstein eyes staring back at her, she’d always secretly wished she could work up the courage to look like a hooker every once in a while. For novelty. As a change from looking like someone an eleven-year-old rat owner might mistake for a member of the starting lineup of the Utah Jazz.

Lisa didn’t have any experience in a vet’s office, but she was good on a computer, she said, and could file and take appointments. Grace hired her on the spot. Anyone who looked like Lisa Cash would be unlikely to sniff at something so inconsequential as a rat, and besides, Grace couldn’t wait to get rid of Mrs. Handleman.

The woman was bossy, tyrannical and territorial. And if she mentioned how Dr. Niebaur did things one more time, Grace was going to put her fingers in her ears and start screaming. But she knew everyone who came through the door, whatever their species, and filed them back to the examining room in a reasonably orderly manner, so Grace fought off the urge to fire her before Lisa was trained.

“You have the dairy call at two,” Mrs. Handleman reminded Grace again, at a quarter to the hour. “It’s a good ten miles out of town. Dr. Niebaur would have left by now.”

“Uh-huh. Right. Thanks.”

Grace was tempted to make a face at the old woman’s wide, retreating back. She only just managed to pull in her imaginary tongue when the woman looked back, suspicious.

“Anything else?” Grace asked innocently, peeling off her lab coat and reaching for the hook behind her door for her coveralls.

Mrs. Handleman gave her a cross, distrustful look, then stomped officiously down the hall. Grace almost giggled.

Even Mrs. Handleman couldn’t puncture Grace’s good mood, apparently. Her first dairy call, and she could hardly contain her excitement. Nobel County had several large dairies, mostly transplants from California, where dairymen had been all but zoned out of the crowded suburban landscape. Grace was happy they had been. She loved working with the big, gentle dairy cattle, but wanted, too, the kind of rural lifestyle only a sparsely populated place such as Idaho could offer. The best of both worlds, she thought, smiling.

“You look pretty when you do that.”

Him. She stopped short, halfway wiggled into her insulated coveralls. Oh, the gorgeous, giant Daniel Cash. The man who had kissed her until she was a wide, giggling ooze of pudding on her living-room floor, then hadn’t called her for a week. Weren’t men who kissed you that way supposed to call you right after? Or at least the next day? Or the day after that? She didn’t know, but she thought so. She turned down the corners of her mouth. Wouldn’t do to have him think the smile was for him.

“Mr. Cash.”

“Dr. McKenna.” He gestured to the coveralls. “Don’t let me keep you.”

She finished worming her way into the coveralls with as much dignity as ten pounds of stiff canvas and padding would allow.

Daniel watched her worming, and fought back the little thrill it gave him. She toed off her sneakers and stepped into her boots. He hid an unexpected smile at the picture she made. The bulky coveralls, with the right sleeve cut off as befits a large animal vet, fit her fine in the torso, but the legs were a good five inches short, and her heeled boots gave her another inch, making her look a little like a stork wearing a winter coat. He doubted she’d have appreciated the analogy.

Grace knew exactly how she looked, and she would have given a lot at that moment to have been dressed in anything else. She furrowed her brows, shook off the wave of self-consciousness. She was a vet, she had a call to make. The last thing she needed was to be worrying about the fashion opinion of some man.

“How’s Tiger?”

“Who?”

“Tiger,” she offered blandly. “Your cat?”

“Oh.” He looked a little sheepish. “Tiger’s good. Where are you headed?”

“I have a dairy call. Spandell’s.”

“Dairy call?” Daniel’s brain kicked automatically into a familiar, low-level hum of excitement. It had been the same for him since he was a kid, when he’d splinted the broken leg of a pup his dad had run over. Doc Niebaur had told he’d make a hell of a vet someday. Had used the word “hell” even, which at ten was forbidden to Daniel, and had made him feel like a man. He’d hoped, after all this time, the buzz would fade. No damn luck, evidently. “What’ve you got?”

“Mild fever, probably.”

He nearly rubbed his hands together. Milk fever. He could have cured that in his sleep. Then again, so, probably, could have most dairymen. “Spandell call you in?”

She nodded. “About twenty minutes ago. He sounded pretty worried about it. He seems to have a very close attachment to his cows. Plus, I think he wants a look at me.”

Daniel narrowed his eyes fractionally. “I bet.”

Grace didn’t know whether to be flattered or annoyed by the glower that had come over his face. “I’ve got to go. I’m going to be late as it is.”

“I’ll ride along with you.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s my first call on this place. I want to make a good impression.”

“Then you should have gotten some longer coveralls.”

Grace’s face dropped, then flamed.

Daniel watched the transformation of her face and felt an uncomfortable little bite of regret gnaw through him. He’d been teasing, of course, didn’t realize she’d be so sensitive. She seemed so confident. A woman the likes of Grace McKenna, embarrassed by a silly thing like her coveralls?

“I was just kidding you,” he said roughly. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt like such a heel.

She smiled gamely. “I know. They are funny, aren’t they?”

“Look, Doc—”

“I got them as long as I could, but the only ones they had in my length were so big in the torso I couldn’t swing my arms when I walked. I looked like Frankenstein.”

“I’m sorry I said anything.”

“It’s okay. Seriously. I’m used to teasing.” But not from him. Since he’d kissed her, she’d been working up to wondering if maybe this man saw her as someone desirable, feminine maybe, and possibly even, when she was sitting down and her big feet were tucked under, a little bit delicate. She’d always wanted one man, someday, to consider her a little bit delicate. “I really do have to go.”

He’d hurt her feelings, Daniel knew. Being…well, a man, he wasn’t quite sure why, but he felt like a jackass.

“Let me ride along. I went to high school with Larry Spandell. He won’t mind.”

She considered him a minute, looked down at his boots. “Well, since you already have manure on your boots, I guess you can come. But don’t get in my way.”

Get in her way? She was in his way, and had been ever since she’d stepped down from her truck with his vet box in the back. Get in her way. He jammed his cowboy hat onto his head, vexed with both of them. “I won’t.”

Larry Spandell had a small operation, milked just seventy-eight Holsteins on a place his mother had inherited from her mother. Every cow was his baby, and the one with milk fever was his favorite. When Grace and Daniel walked into his milk barn, Larry was worrying over the sick cow like a nanny over a fevered child.

“Mr. Spandell? I’m Grace McKenna.”

He shook her hand, didn’t give her more than a glance. Daniel saw how she’d braced herself for the introduction, how relieved she was when Larry didn’t gape up at her from his five feet, eight inches. Daniel filed that observation away. He’d kick it around later, when the nearness of the woman and the excitement of the job wasn’t clouding his judgment.

“Doc. This is her.”

Grace could see that. She could tell it was milk fever from the position of the cow; lying on her sternum with her head displaced to the right, turned into the flank.

She sterilized her hands and knelt to the cow, already reaching for her bag. Daniel placed it in her hands.

“Parturient paresis,” he murmured absently, using the diagnostic name for the affliction. Grace glanced at him in surprise. He was taking the cow’s pulse at the carotid artery. “Muzzle’s dry, extremities cool, temperature below normal.”

Grace decided she’d be curious about Daniel Cash later. She turned to the dairyman. “When’d she calve?”

“Yesterday.”

“Pulse is seventy-five, pupils dilated,” Daniel mumbled, talking to himself.

“Thank you,” Grace said tightly. She took a brown bottle from her vet bag. “When’d she go down?”

“’Bout an hour ago. I called your office as soon as I saw.”

“Good.” She filled a syringe, injected it smoothly into the thick vein on the cow’s neck. “She’s an old cow, Mr. Spandell. I’m giving her some calcium borogluconate. She should be up soon, but next calf I want you to give her a single dose of ten million units of crystalline Vitamin D eight days before calving. That should prevent this happening again.”

Daniel rose. “Your older cows should be on high-phosphorus, low-calcium feed, Larry. I told you that last time you had a cow go down with milk fever.”

“I know, Dan, but I’m on a budget here, you know.”

“Be harder on your budget to lose a cow.”

Grace shot Daniel a glare, then turned to the dairyman. “Call my office in a couple hours. If she’s not up by then, I’ll come back on my way home and treat her again.”

“You may have to inflate the udder,” Daniel said.

Grace whipped around, said in a low voice, “I know my job, thanks.”

Daniel nodded, sucked in his cheeks. Geez, he’d made her mad, and no wonder. But he didn’t care. It had felt so right, so incredibly good, kneeling beside this old cow in this milk-smelling barn. He’d wanted it to go on all day, treat every one of Larry Spandell’s seventy-eight Holsteins for problems they didn’t even have.

“Okay, Mr. Spandell?” she was worried he hadn’t heard her, mooning over his downed cow the way he was. “You’ll call me?” She pressed one of her new business cards against his shoulder. He reached up and absently pushed it into his shirt pocket. “That card has my home number and my pager number on it.”

“I will. Thanks a million, Doc. Doc Niebaur said you was a good vet.”

“Thanks. I think she’ll be fine. You take care now.”

Daniel, had anyone asked, would have had to say Dr. Grace McKenna practically stomped out of that milking barn. And a woman like her made a powerful physical statement, stomping around in a full-on snit, he decided.

“Doc!”

But she had already tossed her bag back into her vet box and was gunning the truck. He loped over and scooted inside just as she roared off.

“Listen, McKenna—”

“You better not talk to me right now, Cash.”

“I can explain.”

“You don’t have to explain. I know exactly what was going on back there.”

“You do.” Well, of course, she would. Nobel was a small town, and she’d been here a week. Surely she’d heard from a dozen people already how he’d been drummed out of vet school just months shy of graduation, for cheating. For cheating! Something that never would have occurred to him.

“I do,” she said through gritted teeth.

He put a booted foot on the dash and glared out the window. “Well, I’m interested to hear what you have to say about it.” The old, helpless sense of anger nearly overwhelmed him. The injustice of it had almost killed him at the time, and now this woman was going to tell him all about how she’d managed to get through vet school without stealing any test results.

“I think you don’t trust me and you came with me today to make sure I didn’t kill any of your high school buddy’s precious cows!”

His foot hit the floorboard with a thump. “What?”

She yanked the wheel of the truck, screamed onto the shoulder, spitting gravel twenty feet behind her, and came to a sliding halt. She shoved the stick into neutral and turned on him. “I’ve seen you driving by, don’t think I haven’t.”

“You’re on Main Street, McKenna. I can’t come to town without passing your office.”

“And Mrs. Handleman told me you’d gone out into the clinic’s corral Monday to look at that mule Katie Reed brought in while I was on a call.”

Handleman! What a snitch. She’d been ratting him out since he was ten. “Katie asked me to,” Daniel argued stubbornly. And he’d been flattered, thrilled.

“I think you’ve been checking up on me since the very minute I got into this town because you don’t think I can do this job. Well, you’re wrong! I can, and I will. And for your information, pal—” She reached out a long finger and poked him in the chest as he turned to stare, dumbfounded, at her. “The day I need anyone’s help diagnosing parturient paresis is the day I sell my vet box and start a bakery!”

He couldn’t help it. He was angry and she was angry, and now wasn’t the time, but a bakery? He could just picture her wearing an apron. He laughed.

She was going to punch him. He may have had the most beautiful eyes and a glorious body and he may have been tall enough to kiss her without craning his neck toward the heavens, but she was going to punch him anyway. It was a matter of principle. She balled up her fist.

“Wait, wait,” he said. “Wait a minute. I’m not laughing at you.”

She glared at him.

“Okay, I am, but just at the thought of you in a bakery. Do you even know how to bake?”

“You think just because I look like this I can’t bake,” she shouted at him. Hideous tears burned at the back of her throat. Silly, girlish tears. She could have screamed in frustration. “I am still a woman.”

“What’s that got to do with it?” he yelled back at her. “My mother can’t bake worth a damn. And look like what?” He knew what she meant, couldn’t let it pass no matter how much he wanted to. No matter how angry he was, or how desperately he did not want to be attracted to this woman, he couldn’t let her think he meant she wasn’t desirable as hell. “Tall and willowy as a wheat stalk? Beautiful? Sexy? Mouthwatering? No, I think because you’re a young vet with a busy new practice you might not have had the time to learn to bake cookies.”

“Well, I haven’t!” she yelled.

“That’s all I was saying,” he bellowed.

“Look, I don’t need you or anyone else looking over my shoulder, Cash. I’m a hell of a vet. Born to it, I’ve had people say.”

People had said the same thing to him. “Fine. Fabulous. You’re the best vet around, McKenna.”

“Stop yelling at me!”

“You’re yelling at me.”

“Because you laughed about the baking thing.” She turned back in her seat, folded her arms across her chest and stared out the front window. “If you’re not checking up on me, Cash, then why hang around in some stinking barn with a sick cow?”

He pulled at his jaw, stalling. When he couldn’t think of anything better to tell her than the truth, he said, “Because it’s what I was trained to do.”

She turned her head. “I beg your pardon?”

Daniel dropped his head back, and when that gave him no comfort, scrubbed his face with his hands. “Never mind.”

“What do you mean, it’s what you were trained to do?”

“It’s none of your business.”

“You’re a vet?”

“No, dammit, I’m not a vet.”

“You’re shouting again.”

“You bring it out in me.”

She barked out a laugh. “I doubt it’s my fault. You’ve acted like a jackass since the instant I met you, and except for one rather bizarre moment last week which we won’t mention despite the fact that you didn’t even call me afterward, when that would have been the polite thing to do, and I should give you hell for that—” she took a deep breath, struggling to keep on the matter at hand “—you’ve been a jackass ever since. This just tops it.”

He scowled at her. She was right about the jackass part, damn her, and that just made her all the more insufferable. But call her? After that mind-slaughtering kiss? Did she think he was a masochist, too?

Okay. Good enough. He reached for the door handle and jerked open the truck door. He was over it now. Over whatever weird, obsessive sexual witchcraft she wielded that had made him kiss her in the first place, that had drawn him back to her office to see her this afternoon despite the fact that it was the last place he wanted to be. He was cleansed, free. Her witchy power was helpless against his stronger will. Ha!

“I’ll walk back to town.”

“Great!”

“I don’t need this kind of aggravation from a woman I hardly know,” he muttered.

“I imagine most women would have to get in their aggravation where they could with you,” she muttered back. “They wouldn’t want to have to wait until you did get to know them before they started aggravating you!”

“What?”

“You know what I mean.” She always got flustered when she was nervous. And this huge man breathing fire was making her very nervous. “You’re very hard to be around!”

“Fine.”

“Fine!”

“See you around.”

“What did you mean you were trained to hang around barns treating sick animals?”

He’d reared back in preparation for giving Grace McKenna’s passenger door a slam she’d not soon forget, but he froze halfway into it. He scowled at her, a bluff as much as anything. He didn’t particularly want this gorgeous woman with her snotty attitude and his vet practice to know what a failure he’d been.

“I’m not going to stand here on the side of the road and discuss this with you.”

“Are you really going to walk back to town?”

“You betcha.”

She’d been ready to soften, but he’d snapped at her. Again. She wasn’t such a wimp that she’d let Daniel Cash bully her around.

She raised her patrician eyebrows. “Have a nice walk, then.”

“I will.”

“Do,” she retorted primly.

“Thank you,” he yelled back incensed.

“You’re welcome!”

He did slam the door then, and was gratified when she sat there awhile longer, truck idling, as he started off down the long road to town.

When she finally roared past him, her truck tires sprayed a fine coating of sand and gravel over him, head to toe.

He glared at the retreating vehicle and shook dust out of his hair. He sucked a clod of dirt off his bottom lip.

Witch.

He was glad he was no longer under her spell.

He walked for almost an hour before he saw the truck coming toward him. Five miles, he figured he’d walked in his cowboy boots on this damn country road. If he ever saw Grace McKenna again, and he fervently hoped he wouldn’t, he was going to give her a pretty big, pretty loud, piece of his mind. And then he was going to tell her he could check his own damn heifers, and the law be damned. And then he might just tell her the reason he didn’t call her after he kissed her was because he kissed a lot of women. A lot. And that one kiss in her living room didn’t mean anything to him.

That’s what he’d tell her. And at least most of it was true.

The truck slowed as the driver caught sight of him. Daniel sighed as he recognized both the rig and its driver. Hell, he would rather have just kept on walking.

“Hey, Danny,” his brother called as the truck stopped.

Daniel walked across the road, leaned in the open window.

“Frank.”

Frank looked around idly. “You’re a ways from home.”

“Very observant,” he snapped. “I need a lift back to town.”

“Hop in.”

Daniel rounded the hood and got in on the passenger side. Frank flipped a U-turn on the empty road and headed back the way he’d come.

“Your rig broke down?”

“No,” was the terse reply.

There was a long silence. “Just out for some exercise?”

“Shut up.”

Frank scratched idly at his jaw. “I saw the new lady vet come tearing into her parking space ’bout forty-five minutes ago while I was having lunch at the café. She looked mad. And sorta scary. I’d hate for her to be mad at me.”

Daniel stared out his window.

“That have anything to do with you walking this road in the middle of the afternoon?”

“Frank, I’m warning you—”

“Okay, okay. I wanted to talk to you, anyway, Danny. That’s why I came into town.”

Daniel sighed again, knowing what was coming. “What do you want, Frank?”

“You know what I want. I want out.”

“I know.”

“But you’re not going to do it.”

“No.”

Another silence.

“I’ve been thinking about it,” Frank said.

“If you spent half as much time thinking about getting on with your life as you do thinking about how to sell this ranch, you’d be better off.”

“Thanks for the advice, Danny. You can shove it.”

Daniel eyed his little brother. “Nice talk.”

“Better yet, take a little of that advice yourself. I was with you when it all came down up at W.A.S.U., Danny, and I was right there when you put Julie on that plane back to her parents. You haven’t been the same since. Maybe you should get on with your own life.”

Daniel pulled his bottom lip through his teeth, a habit when he was mad. “What do you want, Frank?” he asked, though he already knew.

“Borrow on your shares of Cash Cattle. Buy me out.”

“We’ve gone over this a million times. I owe more on the property in town than I own. I’m stretched. The bank will never loan me enough to buy your shares in the corporation. I don’t want them, anyway.”

“You’d be majority shareholder.”

“So what? I could boss Mom and Dad around then?”

“What about Lisa?”

“What about her?”

“She could buy my shares.”

Daniel stared at his brother. “She doesn’t have that kind of money.”

Frank thrust out his chin. “I think she does.”

Daniel’s cousin Lisa worked for them, putting up hay in the summer, helping with calving in the spring, feeding the cattle during the long winter. Daniel knew exactly what she made.

Daniel shook his head. “It doesn’t matter if she has it or not. You’re not selling.” He looked at his brother. “What about all we’ve talked about? What about keeping the ranch between the two of us, for our children? It was what Grandad wanted, what Mom and Dad want. How many ways do you want to parcel it out? You want the rest of the cousins in? How about the neighbors?”

“Children?” Frank’s handsome, weathered face drained of color. He’d taken hold of that single word like a man on a lifeline. “Our children?”

“Oh, hell, Frank. I’m sorry.”

“We’re not going to have children, Danny. I’m sure as hell not going to, and you’re not moving in that direction as far as I can tell, either. You’ve had—what?—a dozen dates since Julie left you. Two dozen? How many of those women you considered having kids with? What children are we going to give this place to?”

Daniel turned his head, watched the farmland and dairies go by. Frank was right. He wouldn’t have children, would never marry again, would never fall in love. The first go-around had taught him more about loss and betrayal than he’d ever wanted to know. A second such lesson would probably kill him.

And Frank was less likely to have children than even he was. Frank’s wife, the silly, laughing Sara he’d married two weeks after they’d graduated from high school, had died three years ago on an icy highway between Nobel and Boise. Daniel thought Frank could have gotten over that, eventually. Could have outgrown his grief, go on to be the man he was meant to be.

But the accident had taken a baby, as well. Frank and Sara’s firstborn. Frank was only twenty-five years old. And already three years gone to his grave.

“Do you really love the place so much?” Frank asked finally. “Is it really that important to you?”

“It’s important to me.” Daniel moved his shoulders restlessly. He hated putting emotions into words. It was a sorry, unmanly habit to get into. “As much as anything, though, it’s the folks. They poured their lives into Cash Cattle so they could give it over to us.”

Frank eyed him. “You liar,” he said flatly, and snorted when Daniel’s fists clenched. “That isn’t why you won’t sell out, Danny. You think because of the thing at W.A.S.U., you have to hold on to the ranch with both hands. You don’t want to fail again, and you don’t care who gets in the way in the meantime. This isn’t about the folks and their ‘dream’ for us. And even if it were, I don’t want that dream. And until you got booted out of vet school, you didn’t want it, either.”

“You know I was always going to keep a hand in.”

“While I was stuck running the place on my own.”

“You wanted it, Frank. Remember? And you had Lisa there. She loves the ranch as much as we do. Did.” Daniel shook his head. “Why the hell are we discussing this now? It didn’t work out that way, it worked out this way. We both have to live with it.”

“That’s what I’m saying. We don’t. We could sell the outfit, lock, stock and barrel. Get a fresh start somewhere else.”

“And how would Mom and Dad live? We don’t have enough equity in the land to give them a big chunk of money all at once, and the capital gains taxes would take what we did make off it. Would we just leave here and let them fend for themselves after everything they’ve sacrificed for us?”

Frank slumped over the wheel of the truck, studying the road ahead of him. “We could work around that.”

“No, we couldn’t.” After a long silence Daniel said, “I need you there, Frank. I need you, and I’m not about to pay you to leave.” He ran his hands down his face, pulled reflexively at his bottom lip. “Look, I know you’re frustrated. I know you’re overworked. Maybe we can see our way clear to hire on a summer rider. That’d leave me free to help you and Lisa with the farming.”

“She’s getting a job in town.”

“Lisa? Where?”

“With the new vet. Heard about it down at the Rowdy Cowboy, I guess. She doesn’t know much about vetting, but she took those secretary courses in high school, and those computer classes a couple years back.”

“Huh. I didn’t know she wanted a job in town.”

“Guess she does.”

“We’re about to start farming.”

Frank shrugged. “We’ll have to hire someone else.”

“Is she moving to town?”

“No. She said she’ll stay out in her house. Cost her too much to rent in town.”

“Huh,” he said again, though the longer he considered, the more sense it made. Lisa had been complaining, albeit gently, subtly, for months about Frank’s erratic behavior. It was no wonder she wanted out. “I guess I’ll have to hire a rider, after all. You’ll need help with the farming until we find someone.”

“Whatever.”

“Frank—”

Frank turned pleading eyes to his brother. “I can’t take much more, Danny. I swear to God.”

“You’ll be okay, Frank. You’re just feeling blue right now.”

“I’m not just feeling blue. It’s more than that.”

“I can see that it is.” He could, quite clearly. “Have you thought about seeing someone about it?”

“You were an animal doctor, Danny, not a human doctor.”

“I wasn’t either. But it’s been three years, Frankie. You need some help.”

“Yep.” His brother pulled up to the curb, behind Daniel’s pickup. “And I keep hoping you’ll give me some.”