Since the alternative—to take Wheezy back to Mrs. Orson, still untrained and now boasting a lopsided haircut—wasn’t very appealing, Ruby decided to take him up on the offer. Besides, the ease with which Spencer got Wheezy to comply with his orders was giving her an idea. There was more than one Wilson man in this world capable of issuing orders.

“I’d love that, thanks,” she said. Eva jumped and clapped her hands, which sealed the deal. “But someone had better grab a hammer and help me finish this stage. I know just how we’re going to get Wheezy to start acting like a show dog.”

“Unless the answer is hard work, years of training, and carefully curated breeding, there’s no point,” Spencer warned.

Her only reply was to hoist the hammer and return her attention to the stage. She’d been curated since the day she was born, and hard work and training were in her blood.

Along with a spark that delighted her as much as it burned.

* * *

“Mayonnaise, Wheezy,” Caleb said from the opposite end of the yard. He was doing his best Spencer impersonation, which meant he’d screwed up his face into a grimace and kept all inflection out of his voice.

The whole thing was starting to seriously irk Spencer. He inflected. He inflected all the time.

“Sandwich spread.” Caleb tried again. “Condiment. Aioli.”

“I don’t think pulling out a thesaurus is going to make a difference.” Ruby pursed her lips thoughtfully. “Try to go a little deeper and sterner next time. You need to sound more like the kind of guy who’ll whip your knuckles if you don’t follow the rules.”

“You guys know I can hear every word you’re saying, right?” Spencer asked.

They ignored him as Caleb made another attempt at Spencer’s voice. As kids, they’d been so good at imitating each other that they could even fool their parents, but those days were long gone. Somewhere along the way, Spencer had apparently developed the voice of an old-timey schoolteacher.

“No, that’s not it,” Eva said. Like the other two, she was seated in a lounge chair—Spencer’s—that had been dragged over and set up on Caleb’s side of the yard around Wheezy. The golden retriever, exhausted with the labors of stealing not one, not two, but three of Eva’s kids’ hot dogs, was sleeping off his extra calories. “It needs to be sexier. Like maybe you wouldn’t mind the whipping every now and then.”

“You guys know I can also hear every word you’re saying, right?” Maury, Eva’s husband and the only person Spencer currently considered his ally, cast Spencer a supportive grimace.