“Ready.” Joy giggles with utter delight. He’s hovering for show, and it absolutely tickles her. Right there on the spot, Joy decides to meet him halfway. She grabs his arm, pulling it tighter around her. “And we’re off.”

They walk away together, neither of them looking back. The dirt trail leading away from the stables begins to incline upward. Once they reach the crest of the hill Joy says, “I think we’re in the clear.”

Fox nods, dropping his arm. The promised structure is still a small rectangle in the distance. “Did something happen?”

Joy nods. She tells him about her conversation with Malcolm, the way her reverse confession backfired, and the aftermath.

“Hmm.” Fox considers her for several heartbeats—and her imagination jumps the gun per usual.

“You’re thinking I’m right, aren’t you?”

“Sixty-five percent.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? I’m not prying. We’re having a conversation!”

“Reading my face is cheating.”

“I didn’t—”

“You did,” he says with another smile, slightly mocking, mostly a challenge. His smile last night had notes of sunshine after a rainstorm—warm and welcome but all too fleeting. “You have this way of looking at people. It’s pretty intense, like you’re searching for something important.”

“People,” she repeats, skeptically. “I look at people like that?”

Fox is trying so hard not to stretch that smile into a grin. Joy can’t help but see that as a challenge on her life and namesake.

Any time she can assert her comedic prowess, Joy takes the chance. She likes to live up to her name because she thinks it’s funny in a her parents subjected her to a lifetime of irony kind of way. Trying to make Fox smile is quickly becoming her new favorite hobby. Getting that sentient grump to laugh satisfies her in a way she hadn’t really thought about before.

“No,” he admits.

“It’s like I said, I want to know you. You have my full attention. For better or for worse.”

“In sickness and in health.”

Joy’s comedic heart stammered in her chest. That’s exactly where she was going with that. Yesterday, she made a quip about a proposal. This morning, she said rules of engagement and what comes after that? Marriage.

“You have no idea how refreshing it is to be around someone who gets my terrible jokes. Malcolm just sighs at me like he’s dying.”

“That’s why I like them,” he says. “Because you know they’re terrible and you say them anyway.”

“Because—”

“Because they bring you joy. Yes, I know.”

Joy laughs. “You better stop that before you give me a heart attack.”

The Barn Hall is a massive one-level structure. It’s painted dark green and has professionally shot portraits of the blue-ribbon animals mounted out front. There are two entrances, one on each side, and they enter from the right.