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.