With a shrug to indicate it was her loss, he went into the store to see how fast he could conquer his two-page list. He not only needed staples, but he needed stuff for the barbecue the day after tomorrow. His mother and sisters would bring side dishes and probably at least one dessert, but he needed meat to throw on the grill.
After work, he’d been using bungee cords to secure empty coolers in the bed of his truck when Hailey pulled in her driveway, so he’d asked her if she needed anything at the grocery store. When she grimaced and admitted she’d been putting it off for so long she needed a lot of things, he’d suggested they go together and save gas. He’d also thought it would make the shopping more fun, but since she didn’t want to make it interesting with a race, that remained to be seen.
She paused when they were inside. “Which end do you start on?”
“The first thing on my list is mustard.”
“Really?” She leaned over to look at his list. “What kind of order is that?”
“It’s the order that things popped into my head.”
“You’re going to do a big shopping and the first thing you think of is mustard?”
He pulled his list away so she couldn’t see it anymore. “Mustard is important. Let me guess, your grocery list magically comes to you in alphabetical order?”
“I have an app on my phone for groceries. I took the time to arrange the aisles the way they are in the store, so now as I add things, they’re in the order I’ll find them on the shelves. I still print it out, though, because I hate when I have to keep unlocking my phone over and over while I shop. But it’s all in order.”
“You sound very smug about that.”
She grinned. “Maybe I should agree to that race, after all.”
“Ready, set, go.”
“I’m not really racing,” she called after him, but he didn’t look back.
Only three aisles in, he made a mental note to ask her which app she was using for her grocery list. He spent more time scanning his list to see if any of the items matched the aisle he was in than he did putting things in his cart. And he’d already backtracked twice in three aisles, so it was probably a good thing they weren’t racing.
He ran into her in the pasta and rice aisle. She was looking at boxes of flavored rice, and he leaned over her shoulder. “I like the chicken flavored.”
After tossing two boxes of pilaf into her cart, she gave him a sweet smile and looked at his cart. “If we were racing, which we’re not, you’d be losing.”
He snorted and kept going. By the time he’d loaded up on boxes of macaroni and cheese, because a guy couldn’t have too many of those, she was gone again. He grabbed spaghetti fixings, then what looked like a lifetime supply of egg noodles. It was easy to throw meat in the Crock-Pot, then dump it over noodles at the end of a long day.
When Matt turned the corner into the canned vegetables and baked beans aisle, he saw Hailey again. She was talking to a guy who was seriously overdressed for a trip to the grocery store. Looking at his suit and tie, with the leather shoes and perfectly styled hair, Matt knew this was the kind of guy Hailey had been waiting for.
She laughed at something the man said, and Matt’s fingers clenched around the cart. Then he turned and went back the way he’d come. He could get baked beans once Hailey was finished trying to pick up Mr. Perfect in the grocery store.
His mood soured, he went about checking off everything on his list as fast as he could. He ran into Hailey a few more times and managed to give her a wave and a smart-ass comment each time, but he couldn’t shake the image of how she’d been smiling at the guy in the suit.
A guy in the woods with a beard and flannel shirt must be a serial killer, but put on a suit and hit the grocery store and you were Mr. Wonderful.
Hailey must have gotten held up thumping melons or whatever in the produce aisle, because he had three-quarters of his bags in the back of the truck before she wheeled her cart out of the store.
“I guess you would have won if we’d been racing,” she said.
“Yup. Since I’m already up here, just hand your bags up to me. And there’s room in this cooler for your milk and the meats.”
She handed the bags up to him a few at a time. Since he was standing in the bed of the truck, he had a perfect view when she paused to wave goodbye to the man in the suit, who was pushing his cart a few aisles over.
“Did you get his number?”
She handed him the last few bags, frowning. “What?”
He hopped down off the tailgate and slammed it closed. “I saw you laughing with him in the canned goods aisle, and he looks like your type. With a suit like that, he must be a great guy.”
“He is a great guy. He’s been married to one of my best friends from school since the summer after we graduated and I was laughing because she has a cold and sent him to get some groceries after work, but he doesn’t know where anything is.”
“Oh.”