She turns to me, a devilish grin on her gorgeous face. “Iheard you like free food, so I thought what better place than the home of all the samples you could possibly want?”
I’m speechless for a minute. Speechless because that’s kind of an amazing thing to do—to figure me out.
* * *
I’m carrying a reusable grocery bag that I keep in the car and staring at something irresistible up ahead. “You’re telling me I can get a sample of cereal, the world’s greatest food, here?”
She guides me to the mouth of a cavernous aisle where a woman with curly hair and a blue apron smiles broadly at anyone passing by her table. She waggles a cup of some kind of granola at potential customers. Couples and families and solo shoppers stream past her, though some stop.
“Have you never been to Costco before?” Remy asks.
“I don’t really do the shopping in the family.” I don’t know a lot of pro hockey players who do, but I don’t say that since I’ll sound like a privileged dick. Truth is, I haven’t been to a big warehouse store like this in ages. Decades probably.
“We’ll talk about that another time, but for now, would you like a sample of cereal, Lake?”
“I want nothing more,” I say, locking eyes with her, even though that’s not entirely true.
I do want something more. But that’s something I can’t have, so for now, we stride past the hordes to the table.
“Would you like to try some granola that’s been elevated by a dusting of chocolate?” the curly-haired woman asks.
“You just named two of my favorite things,” I say.
“We even have milk.”
I turn to Remy, bringing a hand to my head, the sign for mind blown. “You didn’t tell me they had milk with their cereal samples.”
“I didn’t think I needed to.”
I turn to the woman. “Is this place heaven?”
She smiles. “No, it’s Costco.”
The woman picks up the milk and waggles it, as if asking permission to pour the oat milk on the cereal, and I say yes. She does, then hands me a small cup of chocolate-dusted granola along with a wooden spoon.
I take a bite, and my taste buds sing. “It’s crunchy, just a little bit sweet, and the perfect amount of wetness,” I say, meeting Remy’s eyes. A blush spreads across her cheeks. And, damn, it looks good. I offer it to her. “Want some too?”
“I’d never let my date eat cereal solo,” she says with a twinkle in her eye.
The certainty in her statement knocks the breath from my lungs.
Date.
She’s getting into this fake date plan. After bringing the spoon to her mouth, she takes a bite. And I don’t even attempt to look away as she drags the spoon past those ruby red lips. I don’t attempt it because I can’t do it. She has the prettiest lips I’ve ever seen.
She closes her eyes briefly. “Mmm. That’s delicious, and I clearly need to get some.”
The sample woman pumps a fist. “Mission accomplished.”
But the real mission apparently is the rules of dating, because as we head down the cereal aisle in hot pursuit, Remy says, “Column D in my spreadsheet. How we began.”
“What’s in columns A, B, and C?”
“A is for the date, as in the day of the week. B is blank for ease of reading. And C is for the timeline, as in the number of days since we theoretically started seeing each other.”
I laugh. “That’s…adorable.”
“It’s not adorable. It’s organized.”
