Second Chance With the Rebel: Her Royal Wedding Wish by Cara Colter Page A

all that old crowd looking at her as if she was the one who had most surprised them all, and not in a good way.
    Fun. His diversionary tactic when anything got too serious, when anything threatened the fortress that was him.
    “Well, showing up where I’m not wanted is not exactly my idea of a good time.”
    “I have a lot to teach you,” he said, then, “And here we are at the grocery store. Which is open at—” he glanced at his watch “—half past seven. Good grief.” He widened his eyes at her in pretended horror and whispered, “Lucy! Are they open Sunday?”
    “Since I’ve moved back, yes.”
    “I’ll bet there was a petition trying to make it close at five, claiming it would be a detriment to the town to have late-night and Sunday shopping. Ruin the other businesses, shut down the churches, corrupt the children.”
    She sighed. “Of course there was a petition.”
    The tense moment between them evaporated as he got out of the car and waited for her. “Come on, Lucy Lin, let’s go find the cumin. And just for fun, we have to buy one thing that neither of us has ever heard of before.”
    “Would you quit saying the word fun over and over as if you don’t think I know what it is? Besides, this is Lindstrom Beach, I don’t think you’ll find anything in this whole store that you’ve never heard of before.”
    “You’re already wrong, because I’d never heard of cumin. Would you like to make a bet?”
    Don’t let him suck you into his world of irreverence, she ordered herself sternly.
    “If I find something neither of us has ever heard of, you have to eat it, whatever it is,” he challenged her.
    “And if you don’t?”
    “You can pick something I have to eat.”
    It was utterly childish, of course. But, reluctantly she thought, it did seem like it might be fun. “Oh, goody. Pickled eggs for you.”
    “You remember that? That I hate those?”
    Unfortunately, she remembered everything.
    And suddenly it was there between them again, a history. An afternoon of canoeing, a picnic on an undeveloped beach on the far shore. Her laying out the picnic lunch she had packed with a kind of shy pride: basket, blanket, plates, cold chicken, drinks. And then the jar of eggs. Quail eggs, snitched from her mother’s always well-stocked party pantry.
    She had made him try one. He had made a big deal out of how awful it was. In fact, he had done a pantomime of gagging that surpassed the one she had done of Claudia yesterday. But, at that moment that he had started gagging on the egg, they had probably been going deeper, talking about something that mattered.
    “I’m not worried about having to eat pickled eggs,” he said. “I’m far too competitive to worry. I’ll find something you’ve never heard of before. Unlike you, who are somewhat vertically challenged, I am tall enough to see what they tuck away on the top shelves.”
    As he grabbed a grocery cart, Lucy desperately wanted to snatch the list from him and just do it the way she had always done it. Inserting playfulness into everyday chores seemed like the type of thing that could make one look at one’s life afterwards and find it very mundane.
    And with Mac? There was going to be an afterward, because he was restless and he would never be content in a place like this.
    “Here’s something now,” he said, at the very first aisle. “Sasquatch Bread. I mean, really?”
    “It’s from a local bakery. It’s Mama’s favorite.”
    “We’ll get some, then. How about this?” He picked up a container. “Chapelure de blé?”
    “What?”
    “I knew it. Here less than thirty seconds, and I’ve already won.”
    She looked at what he was holding. “You’re reading the French side. It’s bread crumbs.”
    “Trust the French to make bread crumbs sound romantic. We’ll take some of these, too. You never know when you might need romantic bread crumbs.”
    She was not sure she wanted to be discussing romance with Mac, not even lightly, but the