Page 44 of I Hate You More

Spencer shook his head as he turned Eva and Maury’s minivan down a dirt lane that rumbled and kicked up a wake of debris behind them. “I could tell you, but then I’d have to conveniently dispose of you.”

Even though his eyes were trained on the road, he could feel Ruby’s soft laughter shaking in the passenger seat. If he was being honest, he could feel every single movement she’d made for the past hour. Each soft breath that escaped her lips, each twist of her body, each strand of hair she tucked behind her ear… After the challenge she’d uttered back at Eva and Maury’s house, he defied any man to sit within ten feet of her and not feel the strain.

“You wouldn’t get away with it,” she said. “The second I didn’t show up for a shift, the residents at the retirement community would call the CIA, FBI,andHomeland Security. They’re kind of obsessed with me.”

He didn’t find anything odd about this statement. As someone who was becoming rather obsessed with her himself, he could understand the motivation.

“You must take really good care of them,” he said and held out his hand. To his delight, Ruby accepted his hand and squeezed it. She didn’t let go, either, content to slip her fingers through his and hold them there.

It was one of the first real touches they’d shared, this holding of hands while zipping down a highway with three kids fighting in the back seat. In the grand scheme of romantic gestures, it was barely a blip, but Spencer’s chest started to contract all the same. Like Eva handing out hugs as though they were lollipops, Ruby made this feel so normal, sogood.

“Itryto be good to them.” She squeezed again. “Although it rarely ends up well for me. No matter how hard I fight it, I fall in love with each and every one of them. Some of the independent residents like Mrs. Orson live there for years and years, but the ones I physically take care of—the nursing-home patients—come in with a clock ticking over their heads. Even though I know it’s going to hurt and that I could do my work so much better if I didn’t get attached, it happens anyway.”

“I keep forgetting how similar our jobs are. I feel the same way about every animal I take care of.”

She laughed but there was a brittle quality to it. “That’s right. You and I are just two highly trained medical professionals making our way in the world. Nothing special to see here.”

“What made you choose geriatric medicine as your specialty, if you don’t mind me asking?” Spencer felt himself to be on dangerous ground, but he didn’t know where it had come from. “It can’t be easy, only seeing your patients in the end stages of their lives. I couldn’t be a vet if it only included late-stage care.”

Her hand slipped out of his as easily as it had slipped in.

“What is it?” he asked, risking a sideways glance. “What did I say?”

Her only answer was a shake of her head. Her curls, which refused to stay contained in a ponytail at the nape of her neck, covered her face and masked her expression, but he didn’t need to see her to know that he’d struck a nerve.

“I have to pee,” Julio called suddenly from the back seat. “And so does Xavier.”

Ruby twisted in her seat to look at the kids. Spencer couldn’t say for sure, but she seemed relieved at the interruption. “I’m sure we’ll be there any minute now. How about you, Max? Can you hold it until we get there?”

Max giggled. “Too late!”

She groaned, but it was a good-natured groan rather than an exasperated one. “I knew I shouldn’t have given you guys all that apple juice. What’s our ETA, Captain?”

Spencer caught sight of the familiar sign off the highway and clicked the blinker. “Five minutes, tops. And I’m sorry I didn’t plan for a pit stop. I’ll take care of Max.”

“Oh, it’s not a problem. Believe me, cleaning up a two-year-old’s mess is nothing compared to a ninety-year-old’s.”

This confession took Spencer by surprise. Although he wiped away his fair share of animal accidents, they usually had vet techs to help with the more grueling day-to-day details. It was on the tip of his tongue to ask how much she had to do with the routine care of her patients, but he wasn’t about to risk another misstep.

“Well, it’s a pretty place to die, I’ll give you that,” Ruby said as they pulled up to a sprawling ranch house set against the emerald green of western Washington. In the spring, the fields behind them were covered in a blanket of colorful tulips, but they boasted nothing but leafy greens and shorn heads right now. “Whatisthis place?”

“You’ll see,” he said as he hopped out and began extracting the boys from the back seat. True to her word, Ruby reached for both Max and the bag containing his change of clothes. From the way she took it all in stride, it was clear she hadn’t been making an idle boast. She was as casually unconcerned with bodily fluids as she was with everything else he’d seen thrown her way.

It was the strangest sensation. He’d witnessed this woman, so flawlessly beautiful that heads literally turned when she walked into a room, spend hours trying to train an untrainable animal, single-handedly build a pageant stage in his backyard, and roll around on the grass with three rambunctious children. She refused to let anything he said or did deter her from her goals, and she tackled every challenge that came her way with a smile. She had terrible taste in show dogs, it was true, but even that fit the intoxicating mixture of beauty and tenacity that characterized her.

She was magnificent in every meaning of the word, and for reasons he couldn’t even begin to understand, she seemed to want to share that magnificence with him.

“You’re going to have to get Wheezy out of the back for me,” Ruby called over her shoulder. “I don’t think you included a ‘Get your stubborn behind out of this car’ in the recording.”

“I’ll put it in the next batch,” he promised, but there was no need for Spencer to say anything to the animal. As soon as he lifted the hatchback, Wheezy lumbered to his feet, sighed, and jumped out.

“I know how you feel, buddy,” he said, running his fingers over the silken curls of the dog’s ears. “But there’s not much else you can do, is there? The moment she walked into your life, you didn’t stand a chance.”

And neither did I.

* * *

By the time Spencer encouraged Wheezy up the walkway, Eva’s boys had recognized their surroundings. There were shouts of joy and laughter, followed almost immediately by the slamming of a screen door. His father appeared on the front porch of the sprawling farmhouse with a puppy in one hand and a bottle in another. It was such a familiar sight—that tall, stately man cradling the runt of the litter—that Spencer could feel the last of his tension ebbing away.