Love You Truly (Buttercup Hill #3)

Chapter 1

Dash

One Month Ago

The parking lot at Sunshine Foods market is jam-packed at seven in the evening. Typical.

After taking what seems like the last available parking spot, I weave through the sea of vehicles—pickup trucks and Teslas in equal numbers—and grab a shopping cart.

I know exactly what I need, so it shouldn’t take too long.

Tortilla chips, avocado, chicken breasts, white rice, black beans. And a bag of powdered sugar mini donuts.

The donuts have nothing to do with cooking tacos for my family tomorrow night. They have everything to do with an after-work craving when I haven’t had dinner and probably won’t. Splitting a plate of wings at the bar hardly counts as dinner, but Lucas is as predictable as he is insistent that we keep our weekly guys’ night ritual going.

In three years, neither Lucas nor I have missed a single Wednesday night, and I don’t plan to be the one to break our streak. Let him be the one to fall for a girl and come crawling, telling me he just has to spend Wednesday night with her.

I’m stubborn enough to win any kind of showdown he throws my way, especially if it involves a woman.

Rounding the endcap of the cereal aisle, I try to recall whether I have anything left in my pantry that might qualify as breakfast tomorrow morning. If not, I’ll double up on the donuts. For the past few days, I’ve slept in and skipped breakfast in order to make it to work on time. Bad habit.

The vast wall of cereal puts me in a temporary trance. Colors dance in front of my eyes as Cap’n Crunch’s blue hat merges with the beak of Toucan Sam and morphs into the yellow of a Cheerios box. Organic cornflakes, regular ones… I wonder if they taste any different.

It should be a thoughtless selection. Any kind of cereal will do, especially if I end up shoveling it down from a coffee mug on the go, but the choice suddenly seems daunting.

Three days of worrying about vineyards and my fucking reputation have left me unable to make a basic decision. I should grab a box—any box—and move on, but my feet feel glued to the floor. I stare down the cereal as though it’s Mt. Everest.

It’s why I barely move out of the way when a frustrated “excuse me” sounds beside my shoulder. I feel it more than I hear the words—a lilt against my ear, a subtle hint of jasmine perfume, a warm sweep of air as a woman moves past me. My senses light up before I even get a look at her, as she nearly sideswipes me with her shopping cart.

The close call has my senses on alert. Same feeling I used to get when I played high school football, and I’d feel someone on my heels before I could see him running to tackle me. It allowed me to dart out of the way more than once and score a touchdown.

I’m interested enough to follow as she careens down the aisle like a drunk linebacker with a case of vertigo.

Her shopping cart is loaded to the top with box upon box of canned sparkling water and cases of bottled water, and the cart itself seems to have a wonky wheel. The bright flash of her red sweater calls to me like a toreador waving a flag. I’m the bull, unable to tear my eyes away as she weaves down the aisle.

The rogue wheel seems to be turning the cart in circles as the woman fights to keep it moving straight ahead, hanging on for dear life. The problem is that with a hundred pounds of beverages in the cart, she’s fighting a losing battle against the laws of physics.

Instead of moving to help her, I stand frozen, watching the impending disaster unfold like a movie. I know it’s terrible, but my feet won’t budge.

I watch her long, dark hair swish against her red sweater, which highlights a tapered waist above tight black jeans, her legs long and lean. She works hard to control the cart, which nicks a box of Lucky Charms, sending it to the floor.

Swearing under her breath, she’s loud enough for me to be amused by her choice of words. When she bends to pick up the box, she briefly lets go of the cart, which sweeps in a circle and dead ends into fourteen kinds of Special K. The weight of the cart keeps them in place, but freeing the cart isn’t an easy job.

I can’t help but wonder why she has so many drinks in her cart, but that’s beside the point. Then I notice a jumbo bag of dog food on the lower rack. Probably weighs fifty pounds. I feel compelled to tell her there are delivery services for these things.

“Hey, can I help you with that?” I call after her.

She doesn’t answer, instead yanking on the shopping cart, which hurls her backward into the center of the aisle. Digging in with her three-inch heels, she doesn’t get much traction, but I admire the effort.

This is why I tell people like my uptight eldest brother that getting out of the office is important. Seeing people in their natural environments often tells me more about them than a résumé packed with qualities they think I think are important.

Hitting the gym and watching which guys are all about their own workouts—wearing headphones, refusing to spot someone who’s lifting—tells me how they’d fare in a workplace. Selfish assholes. Seeing someone like this woman, determined to complete her mission, fighting a shopping cart goliath like David in a red sweater, tells me she has grit.

All of these things matter, and since I’m the one in charge of hiring new people to keep our winery afloat, I notice.

Finally unmoored from the linoleum tiles on the floor, I push my own cart after hers, determined to help if she needs it. I’m not being chivalrous; this now feels like a public safety issue.

I catch up with her in a few strides, but not before she tries to whip the cart around the end of the aisle. Big mistake.

The rogue wheel cuts too close to the end of the aisle, where an unfortunate pyramid of glass jars is stacked five feet high. Well, it was…

I abandon my cart as hers craters into the jars, and she goes with it. Her heels have no chance of digging in and stopping the cart on the slick supermarket floor, so she slides along like a kite surfer in a tornado.

The cart hits the display so hard that it forces a rebound effect, throwing her backward just as I reach her and put my hands out like it’s fourth down and I’m alone in the end zone.

If it were a football game, I’d be the hero. In this case, I’m more like a punching bag, losing my own footing in a sea of pale green pickle juice seeping from dozens of broken jars.

“Whoa…!” she yells, punctuating my string of curses.

The air reeks of vinegar as both of us slip backward, me holding her against my chest and throwing one hand down in an attempt to break our fall. More pickle juice greets my hand, which slips, dropping me to my back. My arm encircles the waist of the woman as her full weight lands with me on the floor.

Then, an eerie, still silence.

It takes a couple of moments before other shoppers appear, observing us down their noses like we’re odd specimens who don’t know how to grocery shop properly. “You guys okay?” A woman in a gray puffer coat down to her knees looks over her small round glasses and tilts her head to the side.

Since I’m pretty certain I took the brunt of our fall, I feel confident that the woman on top of me is probably okay.

“Yup. Fine. Clean up on aisle seven,” I say, forcing levity into my tone when I’m halfway certain I’ve broken a rib. The other shoppers move around our two-cart pileup and go on with their days, and I do my best to push up from the floor with one hand.

However, the pickle juice has its way, and I slide sideways before righting myself. Meanwhile, the woman splayed on top of me wriggles out of my grip, but her heels slide in the pickle juice, and she has no luck separating her body from mine.

I have enough wherewithal to appreciate the warm feeling of her form against mine, the softness of her sweater under my hand, and the scent of jasmine, which I now realize is coming from her hair. Long tendrils dance across my face as she fails to push away.

Finally, I muscle my way to standing, holding tight to her body so she rises from the floor along with me. She’s stiff against my rib cage, and her feet pedal against the floor as she struggles to stand on her own.

“I have it,” she bites out right before slipping and almost taking both of us back down again. I hold on tight, bracing an elbow against a display of paper towels, which stays in place under my weight.

“Not quite, you don’t.” I push away from the towels and test my footing on the slippery floor. I feel steady, but I quickly realize I’m bracing this woman across the swell of her breasts. A part of me knows I need to move my hand—and quickly—lest she think I’m trying to grope her.

When she finally stops fidgeting in my grasp, she looks down at where my hand still grips her securely. I move it away gingerly, testing her steadiness before I take a step backward. I feel a whoosh of refrigerated air between us and fight the urge to pull her back against my chest.

“Sorry. You okay?”

She nods. “Yeah. Thanks.”

I’m not a caveman, and I’ve never had a problem finding women to date. I’m not bragging. If anything, I wish my reputation as a ladies’ man wasn’t tattooed quite so insistently across my face.

“Once a man-slut, always a man-slut,” Lucas says as women sidle up to me. I nod and fist-bump him like we’re in on the same joke, an old habit. My friends seem to expect nothing less from me.

I’d like to be about as far from a man-slut as a guy can get, but old reputations die hard, and people see what they want to see.

Just to punctuate the moment, a jar of sweet baby dills teeters on what’s left of the display, rolls off the top of the jar below it, and smashes on the ground a few feet away. Glass shards explode in all directions.

The woman sighs and turns around and surveys the damage around us—a dozen or so smashed pickle jars, tiny gherkins, and dill slices as far as the eye can see, and the pervasive smell of dill and vinegar. “Bet you didn’t expect to become a human pickle when you came here tonight,” she bites out.

But all I can think is that I know this woman. In fact, I’ve sort of known Mallory Rutherford half my life.

The fact that we’ve barely ever spoken is merely incidental. She was in the same grade as my older sister Beatrix, and I quietly worshipped her beauty like the testosterone-charged younger brother I was. Then, a few years ago, she had a brief fling with my brother. If I ever had any thoughts about asking her out, they died with the eye-rolling tales of what a nightmare she was.

It takes another few seconds for her eyes to sweep from the mess to my face, and I see the jolt of recognition halfway through her next sentence. “You landed hard—are you hurt?”

Her eyes go wide. “Dash.”

“Mallory.”

It didn’t occur to me that the woman careening down the aisle a few minutes earlier was Mallory Rutherford because why would Mallory Rutherford be commandeering a stuffed shopping cart in high heels on a Wednesday night? Doesn’t she have some expensive wine industry gala to attend where she can tease some poor vineyard owner into thinking she’ll sell him a few acres from her family’s sprawling lots?

Mallory Rutherford is a social butterfly, the daughter of land owners on the other end of Napa Valley, and arm candy to any man with a big enough pocketbook. As I said, I barely know her, so her reputation is all I have to go on, whether it’s accurate or not.

The irony of that isn’t lost on me, but sometimes reputations are correct.

Her face is a confluence of expressions and shades of pink. Lips colored with a rosy lipstick, cheeks drowning in scarlet, brow furrowed, eyes squinting. Then wide. Then squinting again.

She opens her mouth and closes it again as her cheeks notch a brighter pink hue.

“Are-are you okay?” she asks.

Her concern for my well-being strikes me as almost antithetical to everything I know about Mallory Rutherford—out for herself, only interested in a man if she can flirt her way into a business advantage, and ultimately, a woman with expensive taste who cares only about herself.

Again, the irony is real.

She looks me over from head to feet, and I feel the warmth of her gaze like the morning sun. Immediately, I shake myself back to reality because this is Mallory Rutherford, and I don’t know whether she’s sizing me up out of concern or because I might make a nice next meal.

My hand goes to my lower back, which took the brunt of my fall, but near as I can tell, I haven’t broken anything.

“I’m fine. You?”

The embarrassment on her face is taken over by an icy stare. “Fine. Again, sorry.”

She looks at her shopping cart, which has a few jars of pickles sitting on top of the cases of drinks, and begins removing them one by one. Her eyes dart around the floor for any jars that haven’t broken—and there are a few—and she picks those up as well.

I stand there agog, watching Mallory totter around in her heels amid a green layer of pickle juice on the floor. She could easily walk off and flag down a supermarket employee to clean up the mess and be out of the store before the cleanup is finished. Yet she’s trying to put the display back into its pyramid shape herself.

It makes me want to help her, so I chase the few jars that have rolled the furthest away and stack them back on the display.

“Thanks.” Her voice is barely audible, and I can’t decide whether it’s because she doesn’t like to ask for help or she doesn’t like me, which is ridiculous because she doesn’t know me.

But people have their opinions. I guess she’s just another one who doesn’t mind getting it wrong, and I don’t care enough about her to bother correcting the misperception.