Free Heaven Beside You by Christa Maurice Page B

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    The guests would love the out-and-out Mayberry-ness of it. Then they would go home and tell all their friends about this little gem of a town. She’d be booked solid by March, and the Wegmans, too. And the townspeople would have a blast.
    Crap. Today was Wednesday and she’d sent Jason to the grocery store unescorted.
    She jammed the folder in her box with the mail and sprinted down the sidewalk. She tossed her box in the back of the truck before running inside.
    Jason was under siege in the canned vegetable and soup aisle in front of the cream soups. Nobody at the register, in the office or in the deli. All three employees surrounded him. Mr. Henderson hadn’t noticed yet, but he might be sleeping in the warehouse. There was no telling how long Jason had been stuck like this.
    His eyes lit up when she rounded the chip display. “Cassandra, bella ,” he called.
    She almost stopped and looked behind her. He couldn’t be talking to her. Beautiful Cassandra? “How’s it going?” she asked, hoping to pass off the heat on her cheeks as windburn.
    “Well—”
    “Mr. Callisto said you made him dinner last night, but you’re leaving him on his own for the rest of his stay.” Cori Gwynn pouted her too-pink-to-be-natural lips. She’d been Homecoming Queen last year and now rang register. A pretty far drop. “I said I’d come cook for him.” Her voice had dropped to a sultry tone that left nothing to the imagination. The clingy fuchsia sweater she wore didn’t either.
    “And I told her she’d have him poisoned before the weekend.” Kady Stern smirked. The Prom Queen. Both of them seemed to think it still mattered. Kady worked in the office by virtue of a letter grade difference in high school business math. She held that over Cori, too. Her sweater wasn’t skin tight, but her skirt was about an inch from obscene. And they hadn’t even known Jason would be coming.
    “Oh, Mr. Callisto, you don’t want that kind.” Sweet round face clouding with worry, Angela Costi picked up one of the cans in Jason’s basket and put it back on the shelf. “It takes milk. You want this kind. This you just put in the pan and heat up. You do have a pan, don’t you?” Angela had the imagination of a block of wood, but she was passionately in love with Finn Runningwater, who didn’t seem to notice she was alive, and the only one concerned about what Jason would eat for the next two weeks.
    Jason looked at Cass. He seemed terrified by the attention. She couldn’t imagine why. Most of his life looked like this. “Do I have a pan?” he asked.
    Cass sighed. She should have known better than to let any eligible man walk into Henderson’s Grocery unescorted on a Wednesday, let alone one as wildly eligible as Jason. “I can loan you one. Listen, Kady, Cori, if Duke catches you out here there’s going to be trouble.” Using Mr. Henderson’s first name felt awkward, but did the trick. They both paled. “Angela, why don’t you go back to the deli and slice up a pound of ham, a pound of turkey and a loaf of Italian bread for Mr. Callisto?”
    “Oh, that’s a good idea, Cass,” Angela said. “I’ll get some potato salad and broccoli salad, too. Would you like that, Mr. Callisto? It’ll keep to the end of the week at least.”
    “Great.” Jason managed a smile. He hadn’t moved from his defensive position against the cream soups.
    “Oh, and some cheese. We have some really nice cheese.” Angela hurried away, signaling the other girls to leave, too. Under the guise of discussing Jason’s grocery basket, they sniped at each other as they disappeared around the Grandma Shears chips.
    “It was like a scene from The Birds . All the sudden they were everywhere,” he whispered. He moved out to the middle of the aisle and peered around the corner.
    “Sorry, I forgot about them. Do you really plan to eat canned soup for two weeks?” In his basket were twelve cans. She couldn’t possibly let him sit alone and eat canned