Page 58 of The Right Kind of Wrong

That was all.

She also hadn’t been expecting to see Blake’s surprisingly toned arms on full display. Or to see Blake on her knees.

Or . . . oh, hell.

She was doing it again.

She let out an indignant sound as she busied herself by filling a pot with water and then placing it on the stove, too.

She added spices to the browning meat. On a normal night, she’d have chopped up onions for the spaghetti base, too, but they didn’t have time.

And with how skittish Blake was acting, she didn’t want to take the chance at pushing back their departure.

Blake had been . . . off, outside.

Had been for the last few days, in fact, now that Monroe was thinking about it.

And maybe it was weird that Monroe was so confident in that assumption, but she just was.

Not just because of the comment about checking her out. Though that was weird, too.

It was definitely not something Monroe could safely pick apart, not if she wanted to maintain the shreds of her sanity.

Denny walked across the kitchen and stared out the back door, into the yard. “A lie by omission is still a lie,” he said in his deep twang.

Monroe leveled him with a look. “Says the closeted man in small-town Texas.”

He held his hand up to his chest and reeled back like he’d been shot. “You wound me.”

She pointed the spatula she’d been using to break up the meat at him. “You wound yourself, butthead.”

He grinned like an idiot. “Did you just call me a butthead?”

Monroe rolled her eyes but smiled. “I had to find more appropriate bad words to use around Maisie. Little kids are like sponges, apparently. She heard me say ‘asshole’ one night, and I thought I was going to melt into the floor when she kept repeating it the next day.” She laughed, thinking about the low, hushed tone of the daycare worker, Clara, when she’d picked Maisie up. Clara had only repeated the word in a whisper, like god himself could hear. Then, she’d fidgeted with a cross around her neck, which did nothing to disabuse Monroe’s notion that Clara was actually genuinely worried that they’d be struck down for their transgression. “That was not an especially fun conversation.”

As far as Monroe was concerned, swearing was the least of their worries when it came to keeping the ship that was their lives on course.

“Who were you calling an asshole?”

Monroe moved over to the pantry to grab a box of spaghetti. She spared another glance toward the hallway, just to make sure Maisie wasn’t lurking before she told him, “Sylvia called to see how my progress was going since getting my incomplete pieces delivered.” Back at the counter, she added more salt to the pot, which was starting to bubble. “In my defense, I said it after I hung up, and I didn’t know that Maisie could hear. I didn’t say that to her face.”

Monroe had briefly explained to Denny the Sylvia of it all earlier today, when Maisie had been picking out snacks for them to bring along to the fireworks show tonight.

If you’d told her fifteen years ago that she’d be living in this town at twenty-eight, standing under the fluorescent Walmart lighting with Denny and her niece, well . . . actually, that wouldn’t have been too hard to believe.

The part that would have seemed made up was that the snacks were for them to take on their date (platonic) with Blake to see the fireworks.

And that she’d made it to New York City and had been in a weird situationship with a woman twenty years older than herself who was also her agent-slash-art-dealer, depending on the day.

“Can’t bite the sugar mommy hand that feeds you,” Denny commented, taking the smallest step backward in anticipation of Monroe’s spatula.

She took a menacing step toward him. “Do you wear those overalls and dirty baseball hats so that no one blinks twice when you say things like ‘sugar mommy?’”

Denny looked down at his outfit before meeting her stare with a grin. “I like dressing like this, thank you very much.”

“Does your friend like it?” Monroe antagonized.

“If you must know, yes. We’re both real ‘salt of the earth’ types.” She didn’t miss the way Denny stood up a little taller, daring her to come back at him.