“Hush up, varmint. You can’t be mean to your guide.”
“My guide?”
“To sin, Ruby. Your guide to sin. Well. And trailheads. I’ll meet you out at the main barn.”
“You’re saying that like we don’t live together right now.”
Well, hell. So he was.
“All right. But I guess I will keep seeing you all evening, and I’ll see you tomorrow at coffee time.”
She laughed. “Must be a trial.”
“When there’s lasagna, of course it’s not. So I guess I did lie to you. You do have to do something to pay me back. You need to keep making me lasagna.”
She rolled her eyes. “Only because I am not doing anything else all day.”
“I thought the binders were work.”
“Oh, they were,” she said. “So was listening to Taylor Swift and singing at the top of my lungs while I cried.”
He didn’t say anything. But he was glad he had to work today.
“All right. I’ll clean the kitchen. You scamper off and finish up any last-minute details you need to put in your notebook. But remember, I’m your guide. So I reserve the right to upend your plans at any moment and substitute them with better plans.”
“I didn’t agree to that.”
He looked at her and lifted a brow. “I didn’t ask.”
The air seemed to get heavy between them then. It was like when he touched her thigh at the bachelorette party. Which officially felt like it had been ten years ago, instead of just a few days earlier. Another life, another Rue.
And he tried not to sit in the discomfort of the change of it all.
“Right. Well, I’m going to go have a shower.”
“Good,” he said, the word coming out more clipped than he had intended it to.
He spent the rest of the evening getting their picnic planned, figuring out which horses to take, exactly what trail. Looking at all the weather conditions. He would have to bring blankets. One for them to sit on, with a tarp underneath it, and a blanket for her to wrap in so she wouldn’t get cold.
When he was going to sleep, he had the vague idea that it had been a lot like what planning a date must be like.
But it wasn’t one. Because Justice King had never been on a date, and he sure as hell wasn’t going on one with his best friend.
Chapter Nine
Rue met Justice at the barn, as bundled up as she thought she could be while still managing to maneuver herself onto a horse.
“You look a bit...”
She frowned. “What?”
“Like a blueberry.”
She was indeed in blue snow gear that made her look a bit spherical.
“That’s rude.”
“It is a little bit rude, I admit it. But also it’s funny. And true.”
