She dropped everything onto her desk and pressed her palms against the cool wood, letting out a slow breath.
“Get it together, Beryl,” she muttered. “You have a business to run.”
The Supernova Supermarket didn’t care that her heart had done something inconvenient over a picnic lunch with a human.
She pushed out another long sigh, placing her purse in her lower right office drawer and the leftovers in the picnic sack next to her desk. She would deal with them later.
Once seated in her comfy executive chair, she texted Jake her address for tomorrow night’s spontaneous dinner. As she typed, she took a moment to worry about him and who might be after him…and why.
To that end, she decided to contact law enforcement regarding what she’d heard. Well, she’d only be able to tell Sheriff Campbell, since he was the only Alpha law enforcement she knew besides Sam Brody. She certainly didn’t want to contact Sam about this. Besides, Jake had mentioned a break-in at his house and that Wyatt was handling that.
She started to write a text to Wyatt to tell him what had happened, but paused, replaying the event in her mind one more time.
Maybe she’d been wrong.
Maybe she hadn’t heard what she thought she had from the muscle-bound man with the blue bandana covering his face. Mind-reading humans had never been her forte.
Then she remembered that as she heard the words from his mind, she saw the man lift the blue bandana up over his face. His lips had not been moving. She’d read his thoughts. Sigh.
Beryl put her phone down. No matter what had been intended, nothing had happened to either her or Jake. She was only guessing the man was thinking about Jake. She glanced down at her phone and swiped out of the text program.
No, she wasn’t ready to report something she wasn’t certain was true.
She made a mental note to review the incident with Jake tomorrow night and ensure they were on the same page. She didn’t want to get ahead of herself, but she wanted to be a good citizen and report what she witnessed if it was warranted.
She inhaled, held her breath and exhaled. She was falling for this man, no two ways about it. After a first date, she didn’t see how she could ever part with him.
A sharp knock on her door startled her back into her day. “Come in,” she called out.
The door opened and Francine leaned in, her expression clearly concerned. “Sorry to bother you, but I think you should come up to the front of the store.”
Never a good sign if the manager was needed and Francine wouldn’t bother her on a whim.
Great. Now what?
Beryl straightened up. “Is it a spill, a fight or a lawsuit?”
“Not yet,” Francine said. “But give it a minute.”
Beryl got up from her desk and grabbed her manager apron, placing the loop over her head and tying it into place and tucking her store’s electronic hand-held device in her front pocket as she made her way to the checkouts.
The problem seemed to be with all the self-checkouts.
The moment she and Francine stepped into the checkout area, Beryl knew something was really wrong.
The commotion wasn’t loud—not yet. She guessed the repair to the ice machine was still working, so she had that one good thing going for her.
But the air around her head, that…tightfeeling. Like a storm about to break. She almost expected the smell of ozone, like right before rain here. But there hadn’t been a cloud in the sky when she’d been out for lunch with Jake.
Instead, a line of customers had formed at the checkout lanes, and a chorus of exasperated voices rose just enough to carry.
“I scanned it three times.” The customer, clearly irate, was standing by the first self-checkout lane. “It keeps saying the same thing! My kid just wants his candy—”
Beryl slipped into manager mode like a second skin. “All right,” she said, clapping her hands once. “What’s going on?”
A woman waved a candy bar in the air. “Your self-checkout machine won’t let me buy this!”
Beryl stepped up to the terminal where the woman stood and said, “Let’s take a look.”
