“I can’t decide,” Landry murmured to Zane. “Sauteed mushrooms or not? What do you think?”
Zane made a face. “I don’t like mushrooms. And I never get anything less than three patties on mine.”
“Good gracious!” She turned to stare up at him. Her eyes were gleaming with humor. “You know I keep saying how you could probably get a modeling job doing underwear ads for billboards along the highway, but if you keep up this diet you’ll totally eliminate that from your job prospects.”
“Underwear salesman, huh?” Zane could not help but laugh at that one. “I think I’ll pass. I like to keep my clothes on. Besides, I don’t wear underwear.”
“Yes, you do,” she murmured. She wasn’t looking at him anymore. She was smiling at the young woman behind the counter as they approached to order their meals. “I just picked a ton of underpants up off your mother’s lawn and put them in my guest bedroom. You wear underpants. Either that or you collect them. Either one makes you a candidate to sell the suckers.”
“Right.” Zane did not appreciate the way the young woman behind the counter let her eyes drift to the area of his body currently under discussion. Well, hypothetically, since it wasn’t like he wore his underpants on the outside of his jeans. “Are you ready to order, Landry?”
“Absolutely.” There was no hesitation in Landry’s manner. “I’ll have a double cheeseburger with everything, hold the mushrooms and onions, and then I need a large order of spicy fries and a large drink.”
It struck Zane very suddenly that this whole situation was very surreal for him. It was so absolutely normal. That was true. People came into a restaurant, a diner, a burger joint, something to order their food, sit, and eat. It was a daily occurrence for most people. Or perhaps weekly if they were the types to eat at home. All of that was normal. Except that wasn’t the way that Zane King’s life worked.
Zane was the sort of guy who walked into a five-star restaurant, bellied up to the bar, and ordered two hundred dollars worth of food to go so he could eat it off the tailgate of his truck before or after a nice run through Dallas in his wolf body. He didn’t usually date. Not unless it was some kind of Dallas social function where he could not be without a date. Those were determined by his mother and they were few and far between the older he got. And now? It wasn’t like anyone was going to want the King brother who didn’t get a piece of the company pie. Sure. His salary was comfortable. But it wasn’t nearly comfortable enough for the average Dallas society dame to want anything to do with him.
“Zane? It’s your turn,” Landry prompted. She elbowed him lightly in the ribs.
He ordered his triple cheeseburger and left off the mushrooms. Then he ordered a double of fries and a huge drink because he was dying of thirst all of a sudden. The young woman was still staring at him. She fumbled the keys on the register. Then she stumbled over the total. Did he have something on his face? Did he look silly or something? Why was she staring?
“Um, are you Zane King?” the girl finally asked as Zane handed her the cash to pay for their meal.
What? Had she been hoping he’d hand her a credit card to pay so that she could answer what was obviously a burning question on her mind. Zane chuffed out a little sigh. “Yes. Why?” He glanced at her nametag. “Are you Chloe?”
“Yes!” She put her hand on her chest like she was about to die of the excitement of his knowing her name. “Oh my God, you know me? How?”
“Your nametag?” Zane frowned. What in the hell was going on?
Chloe’s excitement died all of a sudden. She gave him a mulish expression. “That wasn’t nice.”
“Really? Because I feel like it was perfectly reasonable considering I have no idea why you would care who I am.” Zane began to warm to his topic. He felt put-upon without even knowing why. Beside him Landry was struggling not to laugh. He could see the bright humor on display behind her blue eyes.
The young woman named Chloe pointed to the newspaper stand just beside the counter. Zane never paid much attention to newspapers in general, let alone the newspaper stands that seemed to dot the landscape all over Dallas like a holdover of the old days before the internet. Right now though? He was suddenly paying attention.
“Holy crap!” Landry reached out and snatched up a copy of the Dallas Star. “How the hell did this wind up on page one?”
“Oh, I can answer that,” Zane said grimly. “Let’s just say that my mother has a special relationship with the society editor. No doubt she put a bit of pressure on the entire paper.”
“But why?” Landry whispered. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
Of course, Chloe the burger joint employee was all over that almost immediately. “It’s because he’s the hottest bachelor in Dallas and he’s looking for a home!”
Landry now glared at the young woman as Landry snatched up their empty drink cups. “Don’t you have customers to help? There’s a line behind us you know? Maybe I should talk to your manager.”
“If you need a place to stay, my parents have an extra room!” Chloe called after them. “We’d love to have you!”
“Oh God,” Zane moaned.
He could not even manage to take his empty cup from Landry’s fingers. She had to carry it for him. His hands felt numb. His brain was spinning. And right now he was ready to go back to the house in University Park and strangle his mother so they could put that on the front page!
“It’s going to be okay.” Landry kept repeating that as they went to the soda machine. “What do you want to drink, Zane? Just focus on that for a minute.”
Drink. Right. “Something with caffeine.”
She chuckled softly and then pushed his cup up against the ice dispenser. Zane realized that everyone inside the restaurant was still staring at him. He had that feeling. And then he began to realize that it wasn’t just paranoia or some kind of thought that they were all staring at Landry because she was just so damn cute. They were staring at him because his idiot mother had placed a story in the Dallas Star advertising him as the hottest bachelor in Dallas searching for true love and a place to call home. She had turned him into a laughingstock and probably the most stalked man in Texas right now.
“There.” Landry grabbed his arm and steered him to an empty table in a corner. Somewhere on the loudspeaker above they had called the number to tell Landry and Zane that their food was up in the window. “You sit,” Landry told him. “I’ll go get the food. Don’t move. Don’t look at anyone. Just read your phone or something.”
Phone. Right. He had a phone. Zane immediately pulled it out and started whipping off a text to Devon. Surely Devon had not known that Tisha was playing this dirty. Right? Would he have known about this and decided not to tell Zane? It was like Zane was getting the ultimate payback for all of the obnoxious things he had done in his life up until this point.
Moments later Landry set down a tray with burgers and fries. Despite the insanity going on around them and the not-so-secretive looks being thrown his way, Landry managed to act normal as she doled on the burgers and fries and started eating.
“Man, I’m hungry,” she told him. “The school lunch isn’t bad, but I get pretty tired of peanut butter and jelly every single day.”
“You don’t bring lunch from home?” Zane asked absently.
“Nah. If I do lunchroom duty I get free lunch and a little extra boost in pay.” She did not seem to realize that this was a pretty obvious signal to anyone listening to her that she was experiencing some serious financial problems.
Zane was distracted. He picked up his burger and took an enormous bite. Then he began to think to himself what would cause him to ever volunteer for lunch duty. Nothing. He didn’t really like kids. He didn’t want any. He had been a horrible child himself.
“Do you want kids?” he asked her suddenly. And then all at once he realized how that might have sounded. “I’m sorry. I’m not trying to pry. My brain is just going in too many directions at once to even begin to be not rude.”
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“Oh.” Her elegant pale red brows arched high over her blue eyes. “No. Never. I don’t want kids. I like them okay as long as they belong to other people. I was an only child. And I watched families like yours with all of those kids and all I could think was that I was glad that it was just me at home.”
Zane laughed. For just a moment he had forgotten that his mother had just tried to sell him off in a Dallas newspaper. He was thinking about his childhood and all of the times that Landry had come over to play with him and his brothers. There were always about a thousand people running about their house. The pool had constantly been full of kids in the summer. With five boys all one year apart there had been a very huge overlap in friends. And, of course, back then Tisha Olivares-King had been into pretending she liked motherhood. That generally meant she hired people to watch all of the kids while she entertained their socialite mothers inside with expensive sangria and imported candies and cakes, but as far as childhoods went, it hadn’t been all that bad.
“What about you?” Landry prompted. “Do you want kids? I never would have thought of you as being daddy material. You seem too footloose for that. In fact, I can’t even see you being the marrying kind.”
“I’m not.” Except as he said the words he felt like they were wrong. “I guess I’ve always just said that I’m not. I won’t get married. I’m not interested in the women that my mother has thrown my way. And no newspaper ad is going to induce me to start suddenly dating around trying to find someone to take care of me.”
“You might be a hot bachelor,” Landry mused. She swiped a fry through the large pile of ketchup she had dispensed on the corner of her burger wrapper. “But I really don’t see these women being willing to take care of you. They all see the name King and assume that you’d be the one taking care of them.”
“That is a bit of a problem.” He glanced around.
Damn. They were all staring. At least the people inside the burger joint were trying to be less than obvious about it. They kept stealing glances his way and then whispering to each other. It did not help that there was a huge color photo of him on the front page of the Star just a few feet away.
Zane winked at Landry. “Should I get a T-shirt that says I’m broke and hope that it deters some of the interest?”
“I don’t know.” She gave him a very serious look and bobbed her head up and down as though she were honestly considering this. “I think it would have to say that you’re bankrupt and impotent. Then maybe people would be turned off. There are always a few people out there who would be happy enough to pay your bills just so they could be seen with Zane King.”
“And you?”
“I apparently have Zane King living in my house,” she quipped. “So far it’s not that great. He has left a huge pile of clothing all over his room. I’m almost certain he’s going to eat his way through the contents in my pantry without paying a bit of attention to who they belong to. And I would bet my next paycheck that he has never grocery shopped for himself before.”
“You would be correct,” Zane admitted wryly. “So the grocery and pantry thing is a big deal in the roommate world?”
“Oh, huge!” she gushed. “Roommates have killed each other over a box of granola bars.”
Zane snorted and shoved a few more fries in his mouth. “I had no idea.”
“Well, now you do.” She pointed at him with a fry dripping ketchup. “You’d better go and get your groceries. I’m not kidding.”
“What if I just give you my credit card and you go buy whatever you want and I’ll pay for it.”
“As nice as that sounds,” she began slowly. “I don’t know what you like to eat.”
“Oh.” He felt like an idiot that all of this stuff was absolute news to him. It was like he hadn’t ever grown up. He’d just gotten larger and richer and stupider all at the same time. “So what if we go together and you can show me how this grocery store thing works.”
She was gaping at him.
“What?”
“You’ve honestly never shopped for groceries?”
“I’ve been in a grocery store,” he told her quickly. “I’ve purchased things in there too. I’ve just never done it with the idea that what I was buying was supposed to last more than the next few hours.”
Landry shook her head and rolled her eyes. The length of her long red ponytail slithered over one shoulder and lay against the curve of her breast. It was just about the prettiest picture he had ever seen. “Oh, Zane,” she said in a singsong voice filled with gentle humor. “I think it’s time I helped you to grow up a little bit. Prepare yourself. It’s a pretty damn painful process.”
Zane had absolutely no doubt. Especially since they sold newspapers at the grocery store.
Chapter Thirteen
It did not take much to jog Landry Fisher’s memory about the first time she had gone into a grocery store. It had been not long after her parents had lost their house there in Dallas and the family had been reduced to moving back in with Grandmama. Landry’s mother had come shopping because Yolanda Fisher—Landry’s father’s mother whom they had always referred to as Grandmama—had decided that if the young family was going to live with her, she was going to treat them like servants. It hadn’t gone over well, but Landry’s mother hadn’t grown up rich. Landry’s mother’s family had been comfortable but not rich. So it wasn’t like Talia Fisher hadn’t known how to grocery shop. But for Landry it had been a whole new experience.
“I think what I remember the most,” Landry said as they walked through the enormous sliding doors into the huge airy atrium of the grocery store. “Is how long it took to grocery shop.”
“What do you mean?” Zane looked utterly confused. “I’ve been in here before. You grab stuff off the shelf and you put it in your basket. How long could that take?”
“How soon do you want to come back here?” Landry began steering the basket through a second set of huge sliding doors. The entrance immediately put them in the produce section of the massive grocery store. “If you don’t mind coming every day or every other day then that’s fine. Just choose a few things, put them in your basket, and be done.”
“Ew. A few days?” He looked absolutely horrified and Landry struggled not to laugh out loud. “This place is kind of horrible. What are double coupons?”
How funny that he had picked out that huge sign to comment upon. It was one of the things that had caught Landry’s eye in the beginning too. There were always so many different prices listed on items in the store. The club price, the sale price, the original price, and the price you got if you had two heads or something utterly ridiculous like that.
“Coupons are those little things people clip out of newspapers and magazines,” Landry reminded Zane.
“Right.” He gave her a dirty look. “I know what a freaking coupon is. Remember the extreme coupon reality shows a few years back?”
“Ha!” Landry pushed her shoulder into his side and nearly shoved him into oncoming traffic. “You think you know. But those ladies were nuts about this stuff. I don’t do that. I just find coupons for stuff I buy anyway. And if you come in on a Tuesday or a Thursday the store will double your coupon.”
“Just that simple?” He winked at her and made a face. “You know, a dollar becomes two and that kind of thing?”
“You are so obnoxious.” She grabbed his arm and dragged him out of the way of a grocery basket shaped like a truck with an enormous bed filled with groceries and four kids of various ages hanging out on all sides. “And you need to be careful. Traffic in here is about as serious as the stuff on the highway.”
“I noticed,” he muttered. Then he gave everyone a mulish look of dislike. “If I had my truck they’d all be running the other way.”
“Because you drive so badly.” Landry had never had this much fun in a grocery store. Zane was really something else. His sense of humor was wonderful and he seemed perfectly willing to laugh at himself. It was almost like he hadn’t really changed
from the good-natured boy who had been more worried about fun than school. “And really a basket can be a weapon of mass destruction if you use it properly.”
“Ouch!” Zane spun around as someone rammed into him from behind. “I can see that!”
The woman who had rammed him was in her mid to late twenties and wearing yoga pants and a workout tank that hugged what were most obvious a fake set of breasts. Her hair was up in a ponytail and she still managed to have enough makeup on that she’d probably had to apply it with a paint roller.
“Oh my God!” the woman gasped.
Landry expected the woman just to say that she was sorry for hitting Zane or something of that nature. It didn’t work out that way though. Instead, the woman grabbed for Zane’s arm. Then she reached into her basket and drew out a copy of the Dallas Star.
“Oh shit,” Landry muttered. “Zane, I don’t know if this was a good idea or not.”
“You’re Zane King!” The yoga-pants-wearing, pancake-makeup-face woman gasped and began bouncing up and down on the balls of her feet. “You’re Zane King! Oh my God! I saw your story in the paper. It’s just so precious!”
“Precious?” Zane looked confused.
Landry was done with the guesswork. Precious did not exactly apply to what Landry had assumed was in the paper about Zane and his situation. What on earth had Tisha Olivares-King said about him?
So with that in mind Landry snatched the paper right out of the woman’s basket and began skimming the story on the front page. What she read made her both angry and more than a little afraid for Zane’s safety. Or maybe the word was more along the lines of Zane’s virtue. This paper article was going to end up getting him assaulted!
“Your mother is claiming that you’re homeless because your brothers threw you out after you inherited too much of your father’s estate.” Landry was utterly scandalized. “She paints it like you’re desperately searching for a woman to love you for who you are and not the millions of dollars you’ve inherited.”
Billion Dollar Wolves: Boxset Bks 1-5 Page 57