Love Finds You in Hershey, Pennsylvania (5 page)

Jasper’s eyes softened in response to hers. “Maybe,” he said softly. “But I guess only time will tell.”

Sadie groaned and stretched her neck muscles to relieve some of the tension she felt. “You can be
so
irritating sometimes.”

“Only sometimes? I have to try harder, then.”

“Great,” she muttered sarcastically.

Just then their pizza arrived. Like a hound on the scent, Kylie came bounding over. Sadie grimaced as she doled out a slice of pepperoni to her daughter. She had attempted to convince Kylie that green peppers gave
color
to pizza, but it hadn’t worked. Noting her expression, Jasper grinned all the broader as he slid a piece of pepperoni pizza her way.

Swallowing hard, she took a bite and chewed it down.

“Huh,” she mumbled. “Not bad.”

With Kylie’s birthday party taking place in just two days, Sadie was in desperate need of essential party items. Because Jasper owned the only car between them (willed to him by Sadie’s mother, Amelia, upon Amelia’s death), he offered to drive her to the supermarket following their time at the Pizza Playhouse. He had even been chivalrous enough to pay for their meal, and by the end of dinner, Sadie felt quite bad for her poor attitude.

She accepted his offer for the trip to the grocer’s and laughed loudly as he and Kylie serenaded her the entire way with the song “Be Our Guest” from Kylie’s favorite Disney movie. Upon arriving at the supermarket, Kylie begged to be “lifted up” as Sadie pushed the cart through the aisles. Jasper, as usual, succumbed to her pleas and carried her in his arms for their first half-hour through the store.

At last, Kylie grew bored with this and demanded to be put down. He did so with firm instructions that she was not to go wandering off. She skipped a few feet ahead of the cart, humming snatches of “Be Our Guest” as she went.

The waiter at the Pizza Playhouse had presented Kylie with a cherry lollipop for dessert, which the little girl had accepted with glee. Having thoroughly smeared her own mouth with sticky sweetness, she had pushed the diminished bright red orb into Jasper’s mouth. He held its remains firmly in the pouch of his cheek as he and Sadie strolled through the supermarket.

Sadie’s eyes narrowed to slits as they passed a display of ethnic foods with Russian caviar at its center.

She muttered something about global conspiracies, and Jasper raised an eyebrow. Removing the lollipop from his mouth, he commented, “What makes you so sure this Russian dude has got your number?”

Sadie pursed her lips before answering. “It’s obvious, isn’t it? He’s been coming into my restaurant for the past three weeks in order to stake out the competition. That gives him a three-week advantage over me, the dirty rat.”

“Dirty rat?” Jasper coughed and reinserted the lollipop. “I’m just saying…maybe you’re jumping to conclusions.”

“There you go again, defending the other team!” She dropped a box of whole-grain crackers into the cart.

Kylie came running back to them from farther up the aisle, waving a box of fruit roll-ups in the air. “Kylie wants
this
!”

Sadie gave her one of the “I’m-the-mother-and-that-means-no-is-no” expressions, and Kylie turned around with a frown and marched back to return the fruit roll-ups on the shelf.

“I’m not defending the other team,” Jasper inserted. “I’m just making sure
our
team doesn’t make any premature moves.”

“As team captain, my decision supersedes yours,” she teased.

“But as team strategist,
my
rulings are final.”

“Then I quit,” she responded.

“You’re under contract,” he shot back.

She frowned. “True. You’ve got me there.”

He grinned smugly. Kylie dashed in between them.

“This one, this one!” She held up some sort of sugary gelatin in plastic tubing. The color of the liquefied candy was neon green.

Jasper took it from her. “Kylie, even
I
wouldn’t eat this stuff.”

She ran off again. Jasper removed the lollipop, which was considerably smaller by now, and waved it in the air. Before he could comment, Sadie cut him off.

“Listen, Jas, I’ve worked long and hard to get that restaurant running. It’s been a dream of mine for years—even before Ned died. I’m not about to take any chances on it. Let’s just say the Russian’s motives are innocent—and I’m not saying that they are, mind you…but it’s very hard to make a go at that kind of business. What are the odds that two restaurants like ours could exist side by side, even in a tourist-traffic town like this?”

“But if there’s even a
slim
chance,” Jasper argued, “don’t you think he deserves the right to try?”

Sadie paused to read the ingredients label on a spice container. “In a perfect world, yes. In my world, unfortunately not.”

Jasper crunched the final knob off his lollipop stick and ground the ruby shards between his teeth.

“So what are you planning to do, then?”

Sadie wheeled the cart around a corner and into the next aisle. “I don’t know. But I’ll figure something out, don’t you worry.”

“Me? Worry?” He stuck the white lollipop stick between his lips. “That’s your department, sweetheart, not mine.”

She rolled her eyes at him as Kylie came running up once more.

“Can Kylie have this, Mom,
puh-lease
?”

The soon-to-be five-year-old held what appeared to be a can of edible silly string. Jasper and Sadie exchanged a worried glance.

“Uh…” Jasper took it from her outstretched fingers. “Why don’t we see what’s in the organic foods section, huh, Kylie?”

Kylie pouted. “But Kylie wants
this
!”

Jasper crossed his arms and stood toe-to-toe with her. Sadie thought they looked adorable like that.

“Kylie.” He used the “grown-up” tone. “We got pizza, didn’t we?”

Her head dropped a little. “Yes,” she mumbled.

“You got a lollipop, didn’t you?”

Her head went lower.

“Yes.”

“So how about if we go look at the birthday cakes, and you can pick the design you want your mom to put on
your
cake this Saturday?”

Her head lifted a little.

“And then maybe we can stop by the ice cream case and pick a tasty, sweet,
natural-ingredient
”—he glanced at Sadie here— “dessert.”

“That would make Mommy very,
very
happy,” Sadie declared.

Kylie’s head bobbed back up like the bobble-headed dog on her teacher’s desk at school. Jasper winked at her.

“And if Mommy’s happy…,” he began.

“Then Kylie and Jasper is happy!” she finished with glee.

“Kylie and Jasper
are
happy,” Jasper corrected.

She frowned at him. “That’s what Kylie said, silly.”

Jasper looked at Sadie as Kylie dragged him toward the bakery. “You know, she took
two
for the team with that one.”

Sadie shrugged helplessly as Jasper and Kylie exited the aisle. Glancing back at her list, she frowned as she noticed she had forgotten to pick up a jar of nutmeg in the previous aisle. With a sigh, she swung the cart in an arc and propelled it around the corner. She felt the crash even before she heard it, a rattling connection with a shopper just beyond her line of vision.

She gasped as a groan hit her ears, and she flew around the side of the cart and out of the aisle to see what mayhem she had caused now.

Please don’t let it be Smith or Jones…please don’t let it be Smith or Jones!

Her heart sank when she saw whom she had leveled with her cart. He leaned against an end display of cookies, holding on for dear life to a cardboard cutout of one of the Keebler elves and rapidly rubbing his shin.

Dmitri Velichko. The Russian.

Great.

“It’s you.” Sadie realized her tone lacked something in the way of apology, not to mention the simple fact that she
hadn’t
apologized.

Dmitri rubbed his shin a few more times before releasing the cardboard Keebler elf, albeit with some obvious reluctance.

“Are you always this reckless?” he asked with a hint of irritation.

Sadie failed to smother a grin. “Yeah. It’s just part of my natural charm, I’m afraid.”

Apparently he found her brazen lack of remorse rather engaging, because he smiled. Straight, dazzling white teeth too, she noted.

“I suspected as much,” he admitted.

“So…you come here often?”

She mentally slapped her palm to her forehead as soon as the words left her mouth.

Way to go, Sadie. Score one for the other team.

He arched an eyebrow. “Whenever I need groceries. And yourself?” His accent was endearing, and she knew her blush was alarming.

“I–It’s just that, well…you know…my daughter’s birthday is on Saturday, and uh…we could’ve gone to Wal-Mart instead of coming here, but…and um…some people, they uh, well…prefer to go there.”

What am I doing—a Forrest Gump impersonation?

She made a second attempt at coherence. “So…you know.”

Oh yes, much better, Sadie.

He looked concerned. “Are you all right?” he questioned.

Why did he look so concerned? “Sure. Why?”

“You’re turning
very
red.”

“Oh, it’s—it’s allergies.”

“Allergies?”

“Mmm…yeah.”

No, it’s stupidity syndrome.

“I just get in grocery stores, and I—I—”
I—what?
“I tend to break out.”

Sadie could have sworn his eyes were literally going to pop out of his head.

“You what?”

“I just… Okay, you know what? Never mind.” She covered her face with her hand. She couldn’t believe how poorly this was going. Where was Jasper when she needed him?

She turned on her heel and prayed that her face would start cooling any second. She grasped the handle of her cart and grimaced as Dmitri took a step back.

“I’m only lethal when I drive,” she tried to reassure him. “And I don’t have a car, so I hardly ever drive.”

“That’s…comforting.”

She thought he was probably lying but was beyond caring at that point.

At long last, Kylie came bouncing over and tugged on her shirt hem. Thank goodness for five-year-olds and their constant interruptions.

“Mommy! Kylie found the cake she wants! It’s gots yellow icinining”—Kylie had yet to learn the correct pronunciation of “icing” —“with blue curly edges and guess who’s in the middle of it! Guess, Mommy, guess!”

“I can’t possibly, sweetheart.”

“BELLE!”

Sadie frowned in confusion. “There’s a bell on the cake? You want a yellow cake with a bell?”

She looked at Jasper as he approached, begging for some sort of assistance. He made a face at her as though she were a bit simple.

Well, of course she was. She had Forrest Gump–syndrome and a tendency to break out in grocery stores after running over “innocent” Russian immigrants.

“
No
, Mommy.” Clearly, Kylie had inherited the brains in this gene pool. “Belle from
Beauty and the Beast
.”

“
O–Oh! Belle!
” She glared at Jasper. Like it would have killed him to throw her a bone on that one. “Well…that sounds wonderful.”

She made a mental note to return to aisle 12 and procure two more packs of yellow food dye. She didn’t even want to begin to consider the effects of that much artificial product on a five-year-old’s internal system.

Jasper read her mind and said, “It’ll wash right out with the fruit punch, so don’t worry about it.”

As Sadie considered this, the group fell silent. After a moment, she took notice of the quiet. Glancing up from her grocery list, she saw that Jasper and Kylie were staring at Dmitri and vice versa.

“Oh! Sorry! Uh, guys, this is Dmitri Velichko.” She turned her back on Dmitri and made a face at Jasper, gesturing stiffly with her hand and mouthing,
“He’s the one!”

She turned back around. “And Dmitri, this is Kylie and Jasper.”

Jasper and Dmitri shook hands, and the Russian smiled warmly at Kylie. “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Kylie.”

“You talk funny,” she bluntly announced.

“Kylie!”
Why me, Lord?