Page 52 of Lost and Lassoed

“What’s with that?” I asked Emmy, gesturing toward Teddy and Jake.

“Hmmm?” she asked, then looked where I was looking. Why the fuck was Teddy touching that asshole’s arm again? “Oh. Nothing currently, I don’t think.”

“Currently?” I hoped my voice was level.

“They had a friends-with-benefits thing going on for a while.” I felt my nostrils flare.Rein it in, August.

I shook my head. “She can do better.”

Emmy looked shocked when I said that. “Was that a”—she paused for a second—“compliment?”

I grunted.

“Oh my god—it’s working, isn’t it?” Emmy asked excitedly.

“What are you on about?” I asked. Did she know something? She couldn’t know—could she? And what if she did—what then? Would she react the way I did when I found out about her and Brooks? Get angry and throw a fit? Or would she be happy? Was there even anything for hertoknow?

“You and Teddy. It’s working.” I hoped the way my spine stiffened wasn’t noticeable. “You’re actually getting along, aren’t you?”

“No, Clementine,” I said. “We’re not.”

“Liar.” She smirked. I looked at Teddy and the vet again.

Yeah, I was a fucking liar.

Chapter 24

Teddy

Gus didn’t say goodbye to me after Riley and I went to see the horses this morning, and when he got home last night, he had reverted to his first language—grunts—when talking to me. He spoke in complete sentences to Riley, but not to me.

He didn’t even directly speak to me this morning when he told me that Riley was going to hang out with Emmy while she trained horses today so I wouldn’t be needed. He just told Riley that’s what she was doing and then glared at me.

What the hell?

I tried not to let it sting, but it did. I’d told him not to walk away again, and he said okay. So why the hell was he acting like it never happened? Again!

Stupid stubborn asshole and temper-tantrum-having man.

After he and Riley left this morning, I was free to do as I pleased, which wasn’t as much of a relief as I thought it would be. But it did mean I could go help Ada at the Devil’s Boot. Ada and I had met in college. We hit it off and kept in touch even though she transferred the next year.

—

Ada and I were on the second floor of the Devil’s Boot. A lot had been done since the last time I was here—there was a smaller bar up here, and seating and a few neon signs had been installed. It felt less stuffy, but it still had that old-school dive bar charm that made us all keep coming back.

Well, that, and the fact that it was the only bar in town.

Ada and I were working together to display the newspapers that were found during the cleanout. We’d been brainstorming for a couple of weeks and had decided on a vision. For the cover stories, Ada had thrifted a bunch of vintage frames that we would hang throughout the space. For all the others, we were going to basically modpodge them to the wall behind the bar and create wallpaper out of them.

Then, the reclaimed wood shelves that Aggie made would have the newspapers as a backdrop.

We’d already washed the wall and primed it. Now we were determining our layout—we wanted it to be planned but not look planned. Let me tell you, making things look effortless takes a lot of effort.

“I don’t know,” Ada was saying. “I think we have to angle some.”

“But do we angle them on the bottom layer, or do we create a bottom layer that’s more uniform and then layer them differently on top of it?”

“Teddy Andersen asking the hard-hitting questions,” Ada said, but she wasn’t looking at me—she was looking at the wall—the same place she’d been looking for the past twenty minutes.

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