Page 7 of I Hate You More

Holding her place in the book with one gel-tipped fingernail, Mrs. Orson glanced up. “Ruby, honey, if doing all this extra work for Wheezy is too much, I won’t hold you to your promise—and I won’t ask Harry to take your place either, so there’s no need to look at me like I just ran over your favorite bicycle. It’s only a dog show.”

“Only a dog show,” she echoed. She’d spent her morning literally dragging Wheezy across the city, facing down a grumpy dog-show judge, and promising to reform an unreformable animal, and Mrs. Orson wanted to quit? Already?

“I thought it would be a fun project for you, that’s all. It doesn’t seem like you spend much time with people your own age. You’re always hanging around here after work when you should be off enjoying your youth.” She nodded once. “I’ll tell you what… Forget I ever mentioned wanting Wheezy to enter the dog show. You can go to a movie or something instead.”

“Oh no, you don’t,” Ruby said. “You’re not doing this to me.”

“Doing what, dear?”

“Ending things before I even have a chance to get started.Youalready paid the fee, andIalready negotiated the terms of Wheezy’s admission. There’s no way we can back out now.”

“One can always back out of an unpleasant duty.”

That wasn’t even a little bit true. Ninety percent of Ruby’s life was an unpleasant duty. She worked and she took care of her mother and she ran errands for a pack of residents who obviously didn’t appreciate the lengths to which she went for them.

“Besides, you said yourself that the dog-show judge insulted you and Wheezy,” Mrs. Orson added. “I understand if you’d rather not face him again.”

Ruby got the impression that she was once again being played. This felt like reverse psychology or Stockholm syndrome or some weird combination of the two where she was trapped into doing Mrs. Orson’s bidding and not-bidding depending on the hour of day. Unfortunately, even equipped with that knowledge—aware that Mrs. Orson was manipulating her—Ruby couldn’t stop what came next.

“I’mnotafraid of the dog-show judge,” she said.

“If you say so.”

“He has no idea what I’m capable of.”

“I’m sure he doesn’t.”

“I’ll follow his stupid rules. I’ll get his stupid deportment lessons. And then I’ll win.”

“You mean Wheezy will win,” Mrs. Orson pointed out.

“Of course that’s what I mean,” Ruby said quickly, but she wasn’t fooling either of them. She’d no more back out of this plan now than she’d rummage underneath the sink and steal Mrs. Orson’srealmedication. All she had to do was conjure up an image of Spencer Wilson, his eyelashes fluttering as he tried to bar her from his precious dog show, and she felt the kind of burning passion she thought she’d buried when she left the pageant circuit. It was a more dangerous sensation than Mrs. Orson could know.

The day Ruby had stood in front of her mother and announced that she would never again set foot on a pageant stage had been the best—and worst—of her life. It had been like stepping out of prison after a decade behind bars, crawling out from a hole in the ground and feeling the sunlight on her skin for the first time. She’d beenfree—to make her own choices, to carve her own path, to go through life without a panel of judges commenting on everything she ate and wore and said.

She’d also quickly realized that without the pressure of competition to sustain her—without the drive to win, to succeed—she was about as useful a creature as Wheezy. It had been almost a decade since she hung up her tiara, and what had she done with her life since then?

The answer was easy: nothing.

But that didn’t mean she wascompletelyuseless. Especially when it came to pageantry. If this Spencer Wilson thought a condescending glare was all it took to stop her, he was about to learn the lesson of a lifetime.

Mrs. Orson must have picked up on some of Ruby’s thoughts because she let out a laugh. “I knew I chose the right woman for the job.” She turned her attention back to her book. “Now get to work before Harry comes back to look for you. I’ve had just about enough of his face for one day.”

So had Ruby, but there were eight more hours of it to get through. And then eight hours after that. And eight hours after that…

She suppressed a sigh and leaned down to drop a kiss on Mrs. Orson’s papery cheek. If nothing else, at least this dog show would give her something—and someone—else to focus her energies on. She might not be able to beat Harry Gunderson at his own game, but she could give Spencer a run for his money. Of that she was sure.

“I’ll do this for you, Mrs. Orson, but I should warn you ahead of time that pageantry isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. It can be awfully cruel sometimes.”

“So can life, dear.” Mrs. Orson didn’t bother looking up from her book. “Yet here we both are, living it anyway.”

Chapter 3

Spencer pulled his truck around the back of his house, the vehicle jostling up and down over a path that was growing increasingly rutted as time went by. There was a perfectly good driveway a few feet away, leading up to a perfectly good garage, but Spencer hadn’t touched either of them in months.

He came to a stop and hopped out of the cab, careful to ensure his emergency veterinary bag was secure in the back. House visits weren’t as common nowadays as they used to be, thanks in large part to the offices that had started cropping up to offer twenty-four-hour vet services, but his practice still got the occasional late-night call. A dog-show judge might be able to get away with regular hours, but he’d always be a veterinarian first and foremost.

As Spencer walked up the dirt path toward the back door, he caught a flash of movement out of the corner of his eye. The white-and-brown blur drew closer until it stopped a few feet away. There it transformed into a bulldog—ancient, patient, and with his oversized tongue dripping so far out of the side of his mouth that it almost touched the ground.