“And yet you managed to get your dog inside without falling into any.” Spencer grinned at her. It was a good grin, the kind that started in his eyes and crinkled into laugh lines around his mouth, but something about it felt off. Probably because the man was mocking poor Wheezy before they’d even managed to get a foot in the door. That didn’t seem like very professional dog-show-judge behavior to her. “I’m sure I don’t have to tell you how many of these we get every year.”

“How many whats you get?” Ruby asked, suspicious.

He heaved a mock sigh. “Everyone with a beloved family pet seems to think they can just roll up here and enter the show. No training, no grooming, no pedigree… I mean, come on. Would you bring an animal like that to the most prestigious dog show on this side of the country? To compete against a gorgeous girl like this one?”

Spencer placed a reverential hand on the poodle’s head, but his gaze wasn’t focused on the dog. Instead, his wide, obvious smile took Ruby in from top to bottom.

She pretended not to understand him.

“He’s not that bad,” she said with a nod at Wheezy, who’d given up howling to scratch at an itch on his neck. Enthusiastic flecks of mud splattered all over the white linoleum. “A little rough around the edges, maybe, but he has something this poodle doesn’t.”

“Fleas?” Spencer suggested with a laugh.

Ruby wasn’t impressed. “I was thinking more along the lines of personality.”

To be fair, the man wasn’t entirely wrong. Wheezy—a golden retriever of questionable parentage, zero formal training, and the personality of a slug—was the last animal on earth who should be entering any dog show, let alone the West Coast Canine Classic.

Yet here they were, doing it anyway.

“Why, dear—don’t you think you can help Wheezy win?” Wheezy’s owner had asked. Mrs. Orson, who weighed all of a hundred pounds soaking wet, had been in bed at the time, which was Ruby’s excuse for giving in so easily. Mrs. Orson always looked her frailest while she was lying down. And she knew it, too, the old sneak. Of all the residents at the retirement community where Ruby worked as a nursing assistant, Mrs. Orson was the wiliest. “I was so sure you could manage, with all your experience in pageants… No matter. It’s only a dying woman’s last wish. I’ll ask Harry if he can do this one small thing for me instead.”