Page 14 of I Hate You More

“Help her with what, Ruby?”

“You still have all my pageant stuff in storage, don’t you?” She couldn’t quite meet her mother’s eyes. “There are a few things I’d like to pull out, if you don’t mind.”

A strong hand drove into her shoulder and pushed her to the nearest chair. Ruby fell with a plop, spilling tea on herself in the process. She’d known it would be a risk, coming over here and saying “pageant” out loud to her mother, but she needed all the help she could get. So far, she and Caleb hadn’t done much except introduce Wheezy to the agility course equipment—the rings and tunnels and posts that would prove him to be a dog in peak physical condition—but that had been enough. Mostly because all Wheezy had done was chew off one end of the tunnel.

“You stay right there,” her mother commanded. “I’ll get the key to the pod.”

“No, Mom. I don’t need you to dig out the entire museum. I only meant—”

It didn’t matter what she’d meant because Laurel Taylor was a woman on a mission.

“What do you want? The gowns? The shoes?” Her mom sucked in a sharp breath, her joy almost palpable as she swung a glittering pink key ring around her finger. “The harp?”

Ruby groaned, but it was no use. It had been too long since her mom had a project—or a hope. There was no easy way out of this.

“No, Mom. The harp isn’t going to do the dog a bit of good.” She paused and reconsidered. “Well, he can’t be any worse at it than I was, but since I can’t even get him to sit on command, I’m not ready to tackle musical scales.”

“The dog?” her mom echoed, the key ring coming to a sudden halt. “Why would you want the dog to play the harp?”

“The only thing I want him to play is fetch. I thought I’d start with that old baton-twirling kit of mine. The spangled hula hoops might come in handy, and I was also thinking maybe I could take that stage platform you had Stepfather Deux build for me. You remember the one with the rigging and the lights?”

Not unsurprisingly, her mother didn’t take well to this request. Of all her stepfathers—and there had been three of them—the second had been Ruby’s favorite. Laurel’s, too, though nothing could prevail upon her to own it. The day he’d left—on foot, because Laurel had sold his truck to finance a pageant down in Texas—had been a blow to them both.

She tossed her head. “I’m not sure I still have all that nonsense.”

Ruby snorted. “You’re a terrible liar. You kept every bead and scrap of lace from my pageant days. I know you’ve been hoarding it all in hopes I’ll return to that world someday, but I have something even more important in mind.”

Despite herself, her mom’s interest was caught.

“Dog pageantry,” Ruby announced with a nod toward the living room. “Wheezy over there is going to win the West Coast Canine Classic.”

Of all her mother’s qualities, one of the best ones—and the one that had caught her so many husbands—was her laugh. She was frustratingly driven, competitive to the point of obsession, and as vain as a fairy-tale villain, but when that sound escaped her lips, it was impossible not to fall in love with her.

“I know,” Ruby said, unable to help herself from chuckling along. “It looks hopeless. And if you’d seen him when we tried to get him to jump through a hoop, you’d feel even worse. But I’m determined to help him win.”

“Oh, Ruby. Whatever for?”

It was a more difficult question than her mother realized. The quick answer—that Mrs. Orson had conned her into it—was no longer accurate. Mrs. Orson may have sparked this whole thing, but sometime in the past week, the older woman’s happiness had taken a back seat to a much stronger and much more attractive motivation.

“Because a man told me I couldn’t,” she said.

Her mom nodded as though that made perfect sense. “They usually do.”

“He’s also really good-looking,” Ruby felt compelled to add.

“They usually are.”

“And he thinks I’m an idiot.”

Not even this confession—probably the strongest motivator of the lot—had the power to move her mother. Without so much as a flutter of her eyelashes, Laurel sighed and said, “Then let’s go get you the platform. Though I don’t see what good it’s going to do that dog. Unless you plan on hiding him underneath it?”

Ruby threw her arms around her mother’s neck. Say what she might about a vain, fanatically competitive woman who treated marriage like a newly leased Lexus, there was no denying that her mother had always been there for her. Granted, she’d usually been holding a jeweled scepter like a cattle prod at the time, but it still counted.

“The platform is just a theory I have,” Ruby said as the pair of them headed out the back door toward the temporary storage pod that had been sitting in the backyard for more years than Ruby could remember. “Wheezy is the laziest dog in the world, and he refuses to do anything I tell him, but he has a flair for drama. I’m hoping a stage will motivate him, give him a little oomph.”

Her mom stopped the key in the middle of the lock. “Where on earth are you going to put it? Not here, I hope. Ruby, I don’t have room and—”

Ruby shook her head before her mother went down a rabbit hole of unnecessary excuses. “It’ll go up at the dog trainer’s house. Caleb said I could bring anything I wanted.”