Page 25 of I Hate You More

“Mayonnaise, Wheezy,” Caleb said from the opposite end of the yard. He was doing his best Spencer impersonation, which meant he’d screwed up his face into a grimace and kept all inflection out of his voice.

The whole thing was starting to seriously irk Spencer. He inflected. He inflected all the time.

“Sandwich spread.” Caleb tried again. “Condiment. Aioli.”

“I don’t think pulling out a thesaurus is going to make a difference.” Ruby pursed her lips thoughtfully. “Try to go a little deeper and sterner next time. You need to sound more like the kind of guy who’ll whip your knuckles if you don’t follow the rules.”

“You guys know I can hear every word you’re saying, right?” Spencer asked.

They ignored him as Caleb made another attempt at Spencer’s voice. As kids, they’d been so good at imitating each other that they could even fool their parents, but those days were long gone. Somewhere along the way, Spencer had apparently developed the voice of an old-timey schoolteacher.

“No, that’s not it,” Eva said. Like the other two, she was seated in a lounge chair—Spencer’s—that had been dragged over and set up on Caleb’s side of the yard around Wheezy. The golden retriever, exhausted with the labors of stealing not one, not two, but three of Eva’s kids’ hot dogs, was sleeping off his extra calories. “It needs to be sexier. Like maybe you wouldn’t mind the whipping every now and then.”

“You guys know I can also hear every word you’re saying, right?” Maury, Eva’s husband and the only person Spencer currently considered his ally, cast Spencer a supportive grimace.

Maury was a short man, balding and with a slight paunch to his gut, his disposition as cheerful and easygoing as Eva’s. The fact that all three of his kids—Julio, Xavier, and toddling little Max—were currently holding an unsupervised pirate sword fight on the stage was proof of that.

“You’re the sexiest man I know and the only person I want to spank me,” Eva obediently replied. She ruined it by adding, “But I’m not wrong, am I, Ruby?”

“No, you’re not. In fact, I think you might be onto something. Okay, Caleb. Picture yourself decked out from head to toe in skintight black leather and try again.”

Spencer refused to look at her, but he didn’t need his eyes to tell him what she looked like right now. She’d be wearing that same expression as when she’d discussed danger words at the meet and greet, with a laugh on her lips and that challenging gleam in her eye. He hadn’t been able to track down the book about porcupines yet, but he’d done enough internet research to realize that the world of erotic literature ran deep.

And, he was forced to admit,girthy. If that was the sort of thing Ruby enjoyed, then it was a good thing he’d decided to have nothing to do with her. Some of the things he’d read about seemed downright painful.

“Mayonnaise,” Caleb said in a voice that sounded less like Spencer and more like Tom Jones in the middle of murder spree. Wheezy must have agreed because he didn’t stir. “Goddammit, Spencer! What’s the trick? You must have been doing something else at the time.”

At a shout from the three small boys—and a look of reproach from Eva—Caleb coughed.

“I mean, poppycock,” he amended. “Balderdash. Fiddlesticks.”

Spencer held back a snort. Which one of them was the old-timey schoolteacher now?

“I’m not going to do your job for you,” he said. “If you can’t train that dog, then it’ll be better for all of us if you admit it and issue Ruby a refund.”

From the shouts of protest on the other side of the backyard, it was obvious that wasn’t going to happen.

Maury confirmed it with a sigh. “You might as well tell them your secret and save us both a lot of trouble,” he said to Spencer. “Eva won’t stop until that dog is transformed. She’s emotionally invested now.”

“I don’t have a secret,” Spencer protested. “Just like I don’t have anything but an ordinary voice. Ruby is only saying all that to wind me up.”

“Oh, so youareaware that I’m doing it?”

Spencer glanced up to find Ruby standing above him, her head tilted to block the setting sun. She was a vision against the streaks of pink and yellow. If he hadn’t known it to be impossible, he’d have said that she’d convinced the sky to be her own personal lighting crew.

He scowled. “It doesn’t matter because it won’t work. That dog will never be anything but a waste of space. Acutewaste of space, but still.”

A retort formed on Ruby’s lips, but Maury hoisted himself out of his seat before she had a chance to utter it. “As much as I’d love to sit here all night, eating smoked meats and watching that dog fail at everything, it’s getting late and the boys need baths before bed.”

“Late?” Spencer echoed with a glance at his watch. It wasn’t late—not by any standards but those belonging to parents of young children—but itwasten minutes past the hour. “Oh shit.”

“Balderdash,” Ruby reminded him.

He ignored her and released a short whistle. For once, it wasn’t to call Caesar or Wheezy to attention. “Hey, Caleb? I don’t suppose you noticed the time, did you?”

Caleb, who was regaling Eva with a story that was making her laugh so hard she was crying, glanced up. “What? No, why?”

Spencer didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to—nor did he particularly want to. He’d sworn time and time again that he wasn’t his brother’s keeper and that Caleb needed to be responsible for his own life, but it always came down to this.