Page 1 of Tiger Betrayal

Chapter One

Laramie Tucker couldn’t stop shaking.

New jobs were hard, but performing new jobs with absolutely no training? This was a nightmare for an anxiety riddled little overthinker like her.

Five minutes ago, she’d hit her help button to have the manager on the floor come help her, but she could see Rita from here, and she was not in a rush to come dig Laramie out of this hole. Rita was leaning against the customer service counter chatting with the girl working at the cash register there. Meanwhile, Laramie had a growing line of eight people at her register, and she had no idea how to scan the rest of this guy’s groceries.

She’d saved all of the fruit for last, but she was there. He was complaining about the way she’d bagged his lettuce and bread together and was explaining bread should only ever go in its own bag.

“Right. I’m so sorry,” she murmured. “It’s my first day.” Laramie hit the help button again, but Rita, her manager, just looked at her pager on her belt and then went back to talking. She didn’t even look her way.

“Hey, Rita?” she asked.

Rita ignored her.

Shoot. Laramie took a steady breath and looked around to see if there were any other cashiers who could help, but they’d all taken a break, and hers was the only register open. There were now at least ten people in line. She could see the line building down the entire frozen vegetable aisle straight back.

“I just want to pay and leave,” the older gentleman said softly.

“I would love that too,” she said with a nervous laugh. “Um, they didn’t show me how to weigh fruit. I’m so sorry. I was supposed to be learning how to stock the shelves. This is not what I was hired for. Hey, Rita?” she asked louder.

Rita slid her an annoyed look and disappeared into the break room door by customer service.

All she’d told Laramie was that she could never leave her cash register, or it could get robbed because it was unlocked.

A wave of panic consumed her. “Um, has anyone here ever done this before? Does anyone know how to scan and weigh fruit?” She locked eyes on a man with bright, strange colored eyes who was waiting with a cart two people back. She couldn’t read the expression on his face, but she froze under his stare. She couldn’t tell if he was handsome or not, because she was stuck in those strange eyes, but she could tell he was striking as a man.

“Are you serious right now?” a woman asked in front of the man. Her groceries were up next on the conveyor belt.

“Let’s go. We have places to be!” Someone yelled from the back of the line.

“I just want to pay,” the gentleman said, trying to hand her his credit card.

She hit the help button three times fast as the panic flared bigger inside of her.

“I would like to get out of here sometime today. How fucking hard can this be?” the woman up next demanded.

“Can’t you read?” the bright-eyed man barked. Something in his stern tone quieted everyone.

Laramie looked at him in horror, thinking he was talking to her, but he was looking at the woman in front of him with the most terrifying expression she’d ever witnessed on a man’s face. “It’s her first day,” he said, jamming a finger at Laramie’s boob. No, not her boob. Her nametag, where it did, in fact, say it was her first day under where her name had been printed.

He turned around and addressed the line. “Everyone with twenty items or less, go to self-check-out. Now!”

And to Laramie’s absolute shock, the line obeyed. Five shoppers motored their carts and baskets directly to the empty self-check-out lane, and the beeps of them scanning their groceries disrupted the heavy silence.

Laramie started fidgeting with the screen, trying to figure out where the fruit buttons were, and the scary giant man told the woman who had cussed at Laramie, “Move!” And then sidled past her while the grouchy lady half-heartedly told him how rude she thought he was.

“Give me fifteen seconds,” he ground out to Laramie as he passed.

And that man walked right into the break room and returned gripping the back of Rita’s neck. He dragged her directly to the register, explaining that he had watched her ignore the help calls, and to, and-I-quote, “Train your fucking employees so you can keep a fucking customer.” Whoo, he had a potty mouth.

The man released her and then sidled back to his cart again, taking the opportunity to once again tell the woman who had cussed at Laramie to, “Get the fuck out of my way.”

Laramie felt secondhand in trouble, so she averted her gaze and mumbled to Rita, “No one ever showed me how to do the fruit. Or anything really. I’ve just been making it up as I go.”

“The job isn’t that hard,” Rita griped. “It’s self-explanatory.”

“I’ve never even worked a register. I don’t even know if I’m signed onto this one. You barely showed me anything.”