Free The BFF Bride by Allison Leigh Page A

night’ll work for what?”
    She turned to set aside her brushes on her worktable, and her T-shirt slipped off one shoulder. “Dinner. Did you read the note or not?”
    He tossed the note next to her brushes. “It’s harder to figure out than your paintings.”
    “My mom expects me to bring you around for dinner this week. I couldn’t come up with a good reason to tell her no.” She folded her arms across her chest. She was wearing narrow blue jeans with stains and rips on them that he knew came from years of use rather than some deliberate fashion style. She had one knee bent to prop her foot on the base of the revolving stool and one leg stretched out in front of her, and her toes were painted as brilliantly red as the smear he’d wiped off her cheek.
    Over the years, he’d noticed lots of things about her, but he couldn’t remember ever really noticing her toes. They were decidedly...cute.
    Shaking off the thought, he started looking through another stack of paintings. “I don’t care what night. Just pick and get it over with.” He lifted the canvas closest to the wall to look more closely at it. “Reminds me of a blizzard. Remember that time we got stuck at the high school during that February blizzard?” Twenty kids and one adult, sleeping on gym mats in the auditorium with no lights or electricity.
    The corners of her lips barely lifted in acknowledgment. “How about Wednesday? Six o’clock. If you can manage an hour, I’m sure they’ll be satisfied. We probably won’t have to play this charade again until Christmas Eve.”
    When his family had always gone to her folks’ place after church. When they’d been kids, they’d all bedded down together in the basement, whispering about what Santa might bring, while upstairs, they could hear their parents laughing.
    “Wednesday’s fine.” He lowered the painting back in place and carefully leaned the canvases once more against the wall. “Do you sell them all?”
    “Most of them.” She clasped the round seat beneath her. “Bolieux sells them, anyway.”
    “That the gallery Sydney got you hooked up with?”
    “Mmm-hmm.” She spread her fingers and looked at her fingernails. Picked at some dried paint. “Once I ship all of these to them, they’ll display and catalog them. List them online, too. I’ve sold a lot more since they started doing that.”
    “You getting good money for them?”
    “Not enough to buy Ruby’s yet, but I’m getting there.”
    He stopped in his tracks.
    She raised her eyebrows. “What? You find that surprising?”
    “I don’t know. I never thought about it. Does Erik know about this?”
    “I’ve mentioned it a time or two in passing.” She shrugged, and the shirt slipped down her shoulder another inch. It was clear that she wasn’t wearing a bra. At least not one with straps.
    He shook himself again. Why the hell was he noticing stuff like that? He’d worked damn hard over the years, training himself to overlook such things where she was concerned.
    “Until I started making some money with my art,” she continued, “it’s just been a nice thought.”
    “Tabby’s Café,” he mused. He wasn’t sure whether he liked the idea or not. It was as unsettling as thinking she had cute toes.
    But she shook her head. “I wouldn’t change the name. The place is Ruby’s. Always has been. Always will be. At least as long as I have any input on the matter.” She pushed off the stool and slipped past him through the doorway. “Wednesday at six. You s’pose they’ll think it’s odd when we don’t drive out there together?”
    Her parents lived outside town on a small spread where her dad still trained cutting horses. He found his gaze dragging over the stack of paintings containing the one with the blizzard-like blue, gray and white swirls. “Uh, yeah.” He went after her. “They’d think it was odd.”
    She’d gone into her kitchen and pulled open the refrigerator door. Unlike the plain white model in his