Page 57 of The Right Kind of Wrong

“Still on to leave at six?” Monroe asked, her hands in her jean pockets as she rocked back on her heels.

Blake pushed whatever the hell was threatening to burst out of her back down. “Sounds like a plan,” she said with a smile.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

“What are your plans for tonight?” Monroe asked as Denny followed her into the house.

He stopped at the door, his big boots positioned so that he stayed on the entry way rug. “Hanging out with a friend to watch the fireworks.”

Monroe yelled down the hall toward Maisie. “You can play for fifteen minutes, Mais. Then you need to wash up so we can have dinner.” Monroe had been working on setting time expectations so that Maisie could learn how long things lasted. It was a futile endeavor most days, which was apparently pretty normal. She turned back toward Denny, raising her eyebrows. “A friend or a friend?”

Denny blushed. “It ain’t like that, Roe. He’s just a friend.”

Maisie had been with them all day today, so there hadn’t been much time to get into more adult conversation topics.

Namely, how the hell Denny was keeping himself busy in this one-horse town.

Monroe didn’t begrudge him for staying. Denny had been raised by his aunt—his parents had both died when he’d been twelve—and she still lived in town.

There was no way he was ever going to leave her, unless she left this earth first.

Monroe softened, remembering meeting a young Denny a year after he lost his parents, when they’d started high school. He’d been tall and awkward and sad as all get out.

What Monroe had told Blake hadn’t been a lie. He’d sat behind her in homeroom, and he’d taken an interest in her art.

Slowly, he’d opened up to her, and in response, she’d done the same.

After she’d been allowed to live with her mom again, Monroe wasn’t especially trustful of outsiders. She didn’t want the same thing to happen again, and the less people knew about her—whether it was good or bad—the safer she’d felt.

But Denny had been lost, too.

They’d found something in one another. His friendship had made high school bearable. She was poor, with a formerly opiate-addicted mother and a troublemaker brother, but Denny had never cared about any of that.

Besides one experimental kiss when they’d been fourteen, where they’d both cringed afterward and promised that it should never, ever happen again, they’d always just been . . . them.

A safe place to both be themselves.

Monroe frowned, guilt washing through her. She really should have done a better job of keeping in touch. “Take your boots off, but come with me to the kitchen. I need to hear more about this friend.”

Plus, it was easier than thinking about whatever the hell had just happened with Blake outside.

Because seriously . . . what was that?

The only consolation was that she didn’t think that Denny heard. He and Maisie had been on the far side of the yard.

She listened for the sound of his boots being removed, and he came into sight a few seconds later. “Don’t know that you should be throwing stones in glass houses,” he said, leaning against the wall.

Monroe placed a skillet on the stove and then grabbed a pack of beef from the fridge. “What are you talking about?”

“Look, for as much as I know that you like me, I’m not the reason that you’re coming into the shop every single day.” He smirked, like he’d just laid out some sort of gotcha.

Blushing was a reasonable response to his words mostly because, annoyingly, they were true.

Blake had literally just called attention to the fact that Monroe had—in her defense, accidentally!—checked her out, and she didn’t need to hear Denny’s opinion on the matter, too.

And it wasn’t like Monroe was some kind of letch. Blake had been in a bra, sudsy bubbles dripping down her arms as she’d scrubbed the truck, her body jostling with the movement.

Monroe just hadn’t been expecting it.