She studied the shelf in front of her. Bubba’s Honey-Sweet BBQ or Mesquite…She’d been standing there for five minutes, trying to decide, and finally with a sigh, threw them both into her cart. When in doubt, buy them both? Sure, why not.
She’d gone home after her shift ended and had changed into civvies, when she realized that she had no food for dinner. Of course.
She was tired beyond words, but out to the Shop ’N Go she’d gone. She could pick up a few items, cook dinner, and then take that bubble bath she’d been promising herself.
She pushed her little cart around the corner. Just one more—
Crash!
Her cart went skittering sideways and she fell over, right into…
“Uh…hi Wyatt,” she croaked, staring up at him. He looked sweaty and tired and smelled a little bit like…garbage?
She jerked away, upright, onto her own two feet. Even tired, sweaty, and smelling like garbage, her skin sizzled where his hands had touched her arms. She needed to keep her distance. She was his parole officer, dammit. “Out shopping for groceries?” she asked, and immediately wished she could shove her police-issued boots down her own throat. That was just about the most dumbass thing to ask ever. What, exactly, does a person do in a grocery store if it wasn’t grocery shopping?
He grinned at her, his face suddenly a lot happier than it’d been when they’d first crashed together. She smiled back. Wyatt smiling was a sight to behold, and it surely didn’t do anything for the twerking butterflies in her stomach. “Yeah, I didn’t think about it and apparently no one else did either, but my groceries at my house didn’t exactly keep for the last two months.”
Her mouth made a perfectly round “O.” “Of course,” she breathed. “Oh man, I bet your house smelled something fierce when you got home.” Which explained the garbage smell.
“I can’t say it’s the most pleasant smell I’ve ever come across in my life,” he said with a small grin. “Maggie came inside, took one whiff, and turned right back around and wanted out. If I thought that running away would make the situation better, I would’ve followed right behind her.”
“You got it all cleaned out, then?”
“Best I could.” He shrugged. “All I had left to eat was beans – baked beans and green beans. Even I knew better than to throw those two into a pot together.”
She shuddered. “Yeah, probably not. You want to come to my house for dinner?”
She didn’t know where the words had come from. Her jaw was moving and words were coming out and she felt like a total jackass because she couldn’t invite him to dinner. She was his probation officer. She absolutely, positively could not invite him to dinner.
And yet? She had.
And she desperately wanted him to say yes, stinky garbage smell and all.
“Yes,” he said, his eyes lighting up like she’d just offered him the best present a person could receive. “I’d love that! Let me buy dinner – I was going to go old school and just buy steak and potatoes and some salad. Are you okay with that?”
She grinned at him. Such an Idahoan dinner. The only thing that could make it more Idahoan was to add on a dessert like peach cobbler or apple pie. “I’d love it,” she said. And she would. And she knew she shouldn’t, but somehow, she couldn’t seem to make herself care right at that exact moment. She would later.
Just not right then.
They went wandering up and down the aisles, arguing over the best salad dressing – blue cheese was just downright nasty, obviously – and what to include in the salad. Not surprisingly, he didn’t want tomatoes, not even little cherry tomatoes.
“Sometime, you’re going to have to tell me what your major malfunction is about tomatoes,” she said, dropping a small container into the cart for her own salad. He could leave them off his if he wanted. Far be it from her to force him to eat all the good stuff.
“Tomatoes are God’s little joke on the world,” he said as they browsed through the meat section, finally settling on a couple of marbled New York Strips. “They’re food…with some assembly required.” They’d moved over to the produce section, where he swung a 25-pound bag of russets into the cart. She didn’t normally buy potatoes in those kinds of quantities, but considering how far south his potatoes would’ve gotten in the last two months, she figured he must be planning on taking the extras home with him when he left.
She cocked an eyebrow at him. “Some assembly required?”
“Yeah. Salsa, ketchup, spaghetti sauce – they’re all great and wonderful. But you have to cook ‘em up before you can eat them.”
They moved towards the front checkout counters. “I guess that’s one way of looking at it,” she said. “But don’t you at least love the smell of tomato plants during the summer? I always figured I’d throw in a few stems from a tomato plant into my bridal bouquet when I got married. I love that smell more than roses.” She snapped her mouth shut. What on earth had possessed her to bring up marriage? She was such an idiot.
The cashier, a few years younger than her – was he Matthew Blank’s younger brother? She wasn’t quite sure – looked back and forth between them with interest. She sent him a pained smile. “How are you this evening?” she asked politely as Wyatt ran his debit card through the machine.
“Just fine, Officer Connelly,” he said as he bagged their groceries up. She stifled a groan. Any chance that he had no idea who she was, was obviously out the window.
And the way he was looking between her and Wyatt? The chances of this little foray not getting back to her father were growing vanishingly smaller by the moment.
Whoops.
And yet, she couldn’t seem to make herself care. She should. A tiny voice in the back of her mind was jumping up and down and screaming in panic right now but that part of her brain just seemed so far away. And unimportant.
Wyatt scooped up the grocery bags and a bag of dog food and asked, “Ready?”
“Yup.” She turned away from the cash register, and the kid called out after her, “Have a good evening, Officer!”
She nodded, still heading for the door, trying to escape as quickly as possible.
What were the chances of her father not hearing about this? About zero percent or so.
Which, strangely, meant that she had nothing left to fear. If she was going to get into trouble for hobnobbing with Wyatt at the grocery store, well then, why not actually do something to get into trouble about? So far, she’d gone grocery shopping with a drop-dead sexy man…who smelled like garbage. Not exactly something to get arrested over.
Might as well make the crime worth the punishment.