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Something blazed in her eyes, but she didn’t ask him to elaborate on what he’d said. “I guess I’m driving tonight?” she asked.
“If you could,” he said with a swallow following the words. “I can pay you for the gas.”
She gave him a kind smile. “I can pay for gas, Mike.” She leaned into his chest, and he adjusted his hand on her waist, keeping her tight and close against him.
He wanted to stand here with her in peace and silence for a good, long while, the scent of the peach in her shampoo just underneath the dirt that also came from her. “I went to work with Hunt yesterday,” he said.
“Yeah? How was it?”
“It wasn’t terrible.”
“That doesn’t mean it was good.”
“It was all right,” he said. “I think I’d like it, once I know what’s going on.”
“That’s good, then.”
Mike watched Tenney make room at the fence for another horse, this one gray. “What’s this one’s name?”
“Stella.” Gerty spoke with a smile in her voice. “Gloria thinks we can train her up to use with the kids.”
“Is that right?” Mike asked. That sounded like Gerty would be here for longer than a summer, but he didn’t vocalize that.
“Yeah.” Gerty stroked her neck too, and the horse leaned into her touch like it was made of magic.
“Gerty,” he said quietly.
“Hmm?”
“I’m probably gonna be the next CEO of HMC.”
She turned to face him and stepped back. Surprise danced across her face. “You are? Is that what you want?”
He didn’t say it didn’t matter what he wanted. “Yeah,” he said. “Like I said, it wasn’t bad, and the more I learn, the more comfortable I’ll be.”
“Wow.”
“Why does that surprise you?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Just, when we were kids, you said you weren’t sure that was for you.”
“I got to go do what I wanted,” he said. “Hunter’s ready to retire and do what he wants to do, and I think I’d be a decent CEO.”
She kept stroking the horse, almost absently now. “Of course you will be.”
He cleared his throat. “I’ve got to figure out what to do with my money too.”
Her eyes came back to him, another round of shock in them. “Your money?”
“Yeah.” He ground his voice again. “Uh, when I turned twenty-one, I got a bunch of money from my parents. I got this huge lecture too—apparently everyone gets it. But I’m supposed to use the money for something good. Hunt’s started two charitable organizations. My Uncle Colt did a ton of research on the Human Genome Project. Uncle Cy still builds a couple of really expensive bikes and donates them every year.”
Gerty simply stared at him, like she didn’t comprehend. Maybe she didn’t. Even Mike couldn’t conceptualize what two billion dollars looked like, and it had been sitting in his bank account for almost a decade.
Surprisingly, it hadn’t been his father to remind him of his duty to do something good with it, but Hunter. He’d asked Mike yesterday what he’d done or planned to do, and Mike hadn’t had anything to tell him.
Hunt was such a good friend and a good person that he’d said, “You’ll figure it out,” and then he’d just moved onto the next thing.
“How much money are we talking?” Gerty asked.
