Read Online Hale Maree by Misty Provencher - Free Book Online Page B

couldn’t resist. You
are the girl that I met by chance, because our fathers were doing
business together, and I fell in love with you at first sight. I
was the one that pursued you, even though I had a girlfriend at the
time. I couldn’t help myself. I’ll tell her you were never
the other woman,
Hale, because you are the
one .”
    When he stops talking, I realize I’m leaning
a little off my seat with my mouth open. The way he looks at me is
so intense, even just the fleeting glance he takes from the road to
give to me, throws me off-guard and it takes me a moment to
remember that this whole thing is just a cover up. But, if he can
say it again the way he just did, making me forget that he’s not
really in love with me, than I’m sure his friends won’t have any
trouble believing the lie either.
    “ Yeah, stick with that,” I
say, settling back against the seat. “It sounds real.”
    “ It should,” he says, but he
keeps his eyes on the road and his jaw seems to harden a little.
“We need to be on the same page.”
    “ Your page has a wedding
certificate on it though.”
    “ So should
yours.”
    “ No,” I wiggle in the seat.
“Mine has more of a note on it.”
    That gets me a glance with a cocked eyebrow
attached to it.
    “ A note?” he
asks.
    “ Like a would you like to date me note.”
    “ Oh,” he says and closes his
mouth with a thoughtful hmm . It takes a second before he
continues, “I’ll tell you what. Let’s consider this a date. We’re
going to be at the beach house for a while, so let’s think of this
as one long, uninterrupted date.”
    “ But dating doesn’t mean
we’ll end up together.”
    “ I think we both realize
that this date has to end exactly like that,” he says solidly. “But
we don’t have to make anything official overnight either. I don’t
have any problem with you taking some time to get comfortable with
me.”
    It’s as much breathing space as I’m going to
get out of him, I think.
    “ And you can get comfortable
with me too,” I say.
    “ No need,” he says. “I was
comfortable with you from the first moment I met you.” His glance
jumps from the road, and washes over me in static waves that make
my heart blink a beat before he looks away.
     
    #
     
    “ What do you like to eat?”
he asks as we pull up in front of a grocery store. ‘Town’ is a
strip of individual buildings that house all the necessary stores:
a grocery, a gas station, a hardware and a rickety brown building
with a hand-painted sign that says:
    COME IN ITALIANS FOOD
    “ Not Italians. I don’t eat
them,” I say pointing to the sign, and he laughs.
    While we walk through the aisles of the
grocery store, I try to decipher things about Oscar by what he puts
in the cart. He likes pickles- two jars of kosher spears- and he
buys expensive coffee. He gets eggs, milk and bread (snore) and
fruit, chicken, steak, hamburger with buns and lunchmeat (snore
more). He throws in peanut butter and a few bagged salads, bottled
water, champagne, beer, dressing and carrots...the list keeps going
and the cart is piled like we’ll never see civilization again.
    I’m not a detective after all. The only
thing that the grocery cart says about Oscar is that he doesn’t
know what he’s doing, because he’s buying way too much of
everything. It would probably cost him less to have the entire
store relocated onto the front lawn of the cabin.
    He pays the bill, while I hold a teetering
cake in place, so it doesn’t plop out onto the floor.
    “ You really think we’re
going to eat all of this?” I ask, as he grabs the cart handle and
pushes our mammoth pile slowly enough that I can still hold onto
the cake and manage the three bags of chips that want to slide off
the top of Mt. Grocery.
    “ I was waiting for you to
say what you liked,” he says. “You didn’t, so I got a little of
everything. I’m starving...you like bagels?”
    I nod. We heave everything into the truck,
stacking and smashing it