AllFreeNovel
Share Us
As he got closer to the house, the porch light hit him and . . . huh. Something about his profile tugged at a memory.
Guess he felt my gaze, because he turned toward my place. And whoa. His lips were a thin line, his jaw set to cranky, but none of it mattered—the man was beautiful. His high forehead and sharp cheekbones were nothing less than stunning. Though he really was strangely familiar.
Meanwhile, with only a lamp on behind me, I couldn’t have been more than an outline. A shadowy person lurking in the dark. Great. Nothing like being spied on to make you feel welcome in your new neighborhood. So much better than a casserole or cookies.
Hold on. I knew where I recognized him from. Only it couldn’t be, because that would be ridiculous. Absolutely fucking wild. Yet there he stood.
“Holy shit,” I whispered.
My new neighbor was a goddamn rock star.
The Wildwood General Store opened at seven a.m. I was not a morning person, but installing the coffee machine had been my bright idea. And locals who rose early for work needed their caffeine fix. So I donned my uniform: a long-sleeve striped Henley, blue jeans, and black Chucks. Because comfort matters. Tied my brown hair up in a ponytail and got my butt into gear. Working in a small-town general store was never my dream. Which isn’t to say I don’t enjoy my work, but it’s funny where life takes you. For instance, it took me all the way to Los Angeles and back again. And I learned my lesson: here is where I’d stay.
When I arrived at work, the first thing I did was remove the copy of Rolling Stone from the magazine rack. My neighbor might not be on the cover, but he’d probably be mentioned inside. There’d been plenty of articles about him over the last two years. Often about his band breaking up and his personal life going to hell in a handbasket. Imagine having strangers all over the world dissecting and discussing your life like it was nothing. And I now lived next to someone who was regularly in the gossip magazines. Weird.
As per my usual, I overthought the situation with my new neighbor. The conclusion I had reached was . . . if I were a world-famous rock star who’d bought a house in a small town in the middle of nowhere and moved in at midnight, it could only be for one reason: I wanted to be left the fuck alone.
Though I highly doubted that would happen. Hadn’t I already been caught spying on the poor man? And I wouldn’t be the last. Any new person in town became the center of attention, let alone someone famous.
The owner of the small general store, Linda, usually wandered in around nine. Her family had been around since the land the town stood on was taken from the local Native Americans. In fact, her great-great-grandfather had built the original wooden construction that housed the store. When it burned down about a century back in a forest fire (along with the brothel and a barber shop), it was replaced with this two-story stone building. Most of the wooden display cases and shelving dated back to those days. Of course, the line of silver fridges and freezers along the back wall did not.
We stocked a little bit of everything, from boxed mac and cheese to truffle oil (which, incidentally, went together to great effect). The shop aesthetic I was aiming for was a mix of new and old, with a dash of boho thrown in for good measure. Because while we were convenient, we were still in competition with the large supermarket and weekly farmers’ market in the next town over. And the tourists who visited expected a certain ambience.
Linda liked to sit at the corner table with her pack of tarot cards and a pot of tea. She’d done a lot of living in the ’60s. These days she just wanted to hang out in her family business and have everything be mellow and groovy. Her words, not mine. Which left me to manage things. Given my ever so carefully hidden control-freak tendencies, this was for the best. Her mishandling of the produce display one time still blew my mind. Gourds deserved more respect. And her efforts at tidying the book swap section I’d introduced were downright horrifying. Women’s Fiction was not Romance. Everyone knows that.
Before Linda came Claude. He dropped off freshly baked goods several times a week. He’d been a pastry chef at a big hotel in Chicago. On the first day of his retirement, he realized he hated fishing, wasn’t into hunting or hiking, and didn’t know what to do with himself. Unlike my boss, relaxing was not Claude’s thing. When he offered to keep the coffee shop section of the store’s bakery case stocked, I said yes. Best decision ever, though my hips might disagree.
