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“That would be nice,” I agreed.
“Alright,” he said, grabbing both his bags. “We can borrow the SUV for the shopping trips, but we will have to drop it back off and pick up my bike later. Scared?” he asked, reading my face.
“Of a motorcycle? Yeah, kind of,” I admitted.
“It’s not a long ride,” he assured me.
I appreciated that. Not undermining my feelings, or telling me I was going to love it. Just giving me the facts to wrap my head around. If it wasn’t a long ride, no matter how miserable it made me, I could get through it.
“Okay,” I agreed, nodding.
“Okay,” he repeated. “Let’s get this shit going.”
So then we did.
I opted to wait in the car while Cary tossed his bags in the hotel room. Because, quite frankly, I didn’t want to waste any time checking out the room. I was more than a little excited to be going shopping.
Did I feel more than a little bit of guilt at the idea of spending the money of a man who most definitely did not owe me, someone who was already going above and beyond for me? Yes, absolutely. But I comforted myself with the fact that I could and would pay him back someday.
Oh, and it didn’t hurt that Dezi had sort of let it slip that the members of the club had a lot of disposable cash. So it wasn’t like getting me a couple of things was going to hurt Cary’s bottom line.
I’d always liked shopping when I was younger. Before Raúl kept me locked in his mansion.
True, when I was a kid, and later when I’d been married, it had been hammered into me never to spend money on myself for anything other than essentials. And to those people in my old community, that meant I didn’t get to buy new clothes until my old ones were threadbare or ripped.
Still, I got a certain amount of joy walking up and down the aisles in the big box stores, window shopping, looking at all the pretty things.
It had been so long since I’d been able to have something as simple as that.
I was eager to get a chance again. Even if I was going to be very careful to only choose the bare minimum of items. And even then, get them as cheaply as possible.
It wasn’t long, though, until Cary seemed to pick up on what I was doing. In fact, he turned the big red shopping cart away from where I was flipping through the clearance section of clothing, and came back a moment later with the back of the cart loaded down with every item I’d looked at or reached out to touch.
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “Absolutely not. That’s too much.”
“You need clothes,” he said, shrugging like it was no big deal.
“Not that many clothes,” I insisted.
He went ahead and ignored that. “Do you like them?” he asked, waving down. “Or you want to trade anything out?”
“Yes, for things off of this rack,” I said, waving toward the clearance section.
“Honey, what the hell are you doing?” a lady half a row over asked, looking over at me with drawn-together brows. “If the man wants to buy them for you, let him,” she told me.
“See?” Cary asked, smirking.
“I think she might want some shoes and pajamas while you’re at it,” the lady went on, clearly a bit taken with Cary. And, really, who could blame her.
“You know what? I think you might be right,” Cary agreed. “Shall we, love?” he asked, shooting dancing eyes over at me.
“Oh, ‘love,’” the woman swooned, pressing a hand to her heart. “Honey, grab on tight to this one, and don’t you let him go,” she said before pushing her cart away.
“Don’t gloat,” I said, shooting him mock-angry eyes as I followed him across the little aisle toward the pajamas. I was going to go ahead and sneak a quick look at the underwear while he was hopefully distracted. I didn’t have time to try on any bras. But, honestly, with the weight loss, I didn’t have a whole hell of a lot in the breast department that needed the support anyway.
“Hey, not my fault strangers in the clothing department clearly see how right I am,” Cary said as I went to move away from a cute pajama set I’d been looking at. “Nuh-uh. Pick it up, and put it in the cart,” he demanded.
“There are other—“ I started.
“And by other, you mean cheaper?” he asked, brow raising because he knew he had me there. “Listen, Abs,” he said, moving to stand in front of me, leaning down a bit so he could keep his voice low. “There’s no way for me to say this without sounding like a dick, so I’m just going to say it. I have quite a bit of money. So stop nickel and diming everything. Pick out what you like and put it in the cart. This,” he said, waving at the pile of clothes already in there, “is probably less than I spend on vegetables every week.”
