Candy Store (5 page)

Sliding the screen door shut, Callie sighed. “At least somebody loves me,” she said, then went to the garage to get her car. Downtown Saratoga, home to the famous horse 31

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races, was only ten minutes from her cottage. It had snowed the night before, but by 8

a.m. the streets were nicely plowed and the sidewalk slush had melted.

Callie had spent her whole life in Saratoga, but the Saratoga of today was very different from the town she knew so well as a child. Now that she might have to close her store in the near future, she took in the Main Street with renewed interest.

When Callie was a little girl, she used to ride her bike into town with her friends, fifty cents in her pocket, straight to the candy store. They’d fill up their bags with jujubes and Necco wafers and jawbreakers and then head to the park and stuff themselves full of sugar under an elm tree. As a teenager, when Callie realized she had been blessed with the gift of candy making, she knew that, as soon as she could, she would open up her own candy store on Main Street.

Her dream became a reality when she was twenty-five years old. She had saved every penny from her various cooking and catering jobs over the years, only spending the bare minimum on her cottage, and all of the sweat and grease was worth it when she signed the lease for her very own candy store.

The first time she walked by the vacant storefront that was now Callie’s Candies, the old rundown ice cream shop didn’t look like much good for anything other than for breeding spiders and mice. Narrow but deceptively long, with a large kitchen in back, it was covered in dust and neglect.

But for Callie it was her first brush with true love. She immediately envisioned the space a buttery yellow, glass display cases full of truffles and fudge, old wine barrels on the floor with fresh, homemade saltwater taffy.

The past five years had been the most rewarding time of her life. She made candy in the evening and sold it by day. She loved watching the glee on the children’s faces as they flew in off of their bikes, strewn haphazardly on the wide sidewalk, anticipation glowing in their eyes.

They knew that Miss Callie would always give them free samples of whatever she had just made that day, whether it was vanilla swirl fudge or chocolate turtle pie. And 32

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even when they pulled the dollar out of the dirty shorts and handed it to her for a bag of taffy, they couldn’t wait to get outside and see what little “extra” Callie had thrown in for them, maybe a lollipop or a wax-paper-covered slice of fudge.

Sometimes, if they were really lucky, and they had been given money from their mothers for a box of truffles to take home, Callie never let them get out of the store without a handful of lollipops and gummy worms.

But now that popular chain stores ruled the street along with swanky restaurants and wine bars that seemed to multiply by the week, Callie’s rent had doubled, then tripled in the past five years. With every year, she found it harder and harder to put something away in the bank after she had paid her bills. People were always telling her to put up a website and advertise, but she didn’t know the first thing about that kind of stuff.

And she didn’t want to. She just wanted to make candy and watch the joy on her customers’ faces as they ate it.

Callie pulled into the plowed parking lot behind her building, then walked through the narrow alley between buildings to the sidewalk. She always made it a point to enter her store by the front door in the morning. Her first sight of the pretty yellow, blue, and white striped awning over the window and the fanciful cartoonish painted letters of Callie’s Candies on the flag beside the door made her incredibly happy.

She unlocked the front door and walked in, pulling up the shade on the door, scanning the glass for smudges or smears. Satisfied that it was clear and clean, she headed for the back room, breathing in the scent of sugar and cocoa powder, feeling settled for the first time since the wedding the day before.

Her store didn’t open until 11 a.m., Monday through Friday, but Callie always had plenty to do in the morning. The best was making fudge or coating truffles in coconut and peanuts. The worst was going through her inventory and doing her orders for the week.

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Today was inventory day, of course. Callie sighed with dismay. Today of all days, she could have used a long, therapeutic session with some caramel and nougat.

“It figures,” she muttered, as she walked into her small office at the back of the store and put her purse down. She took off her suit jacket and laid it across the back of her desk chair. Unbound by the jacket, her breasts felt free and immodest in the white lace camisole, reminding her yet again of her wanton behavior at the wedding.

“Forget about it. You’ve got work to do,” she lectured herself and got straight to work, intent on ignoring the new sensual sensations her body was sending her.

Picking up her clipboard and supply spreadsheet, she went to her dry storeroom first and noted what was low. Moving to her tiny walk-in refrigerator, she checked materials off her list from the top shelf first. The bottom shelves were deep and she had to get on her knees to count cocoa bars. The position was awkward, with her rear end pointing straight up, her hands and knees sprawled unladylike on the floor. For the past five years, Callie had planned on putting in sliding shelves on the bottom of her refrigerator. Unfortunately, the project never made it to the top of her ever-growing to-do list so she hadn’t gotten to it quite yet.

Squirming around, trying to get comfortable in her clumsy position, she said, “One, two, three, four,” aloud as she counted stacks of the finest imported cocoa bars.

Immersed in her counting and in the painful crick that was building up in her neck, she was surprised by a familiar scent that suddenly overwhelmed her senses. Her inventory forgotten, she stopped counting cocoa and heard footsteps coming up the short hallway and then stopping at the doorway to her storeroom.

One thing was absolutely certain, she thought with a thudding heartbeat, she was no longer the only person in Callie’s Candies.

“We’ve got to stop meeting in refrigerators like this.”

Callie’s heart stopped beating altogether. She would have recognized that smooth, deep voice anywhere. Her breasts had grown full and tight after just that one sentence.

And now that she heard his voice, she knew the scent that had tipped her off was one 34

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she would never forget again. Tobey smelled like the perfect mixture of passion and heat and masculinity all rolled up in one.

Callie froze in place, unable to get her limbs to work. She couldn’t believe that Tobey’s first image of her outside of the wedding refrigerator was like this—could she be any less feminine, she wondered dejectedly—in her own damn commercial refrigerator. Her face, she was sure, was going to be flushed a deep shade of red when she finally stood back up, considering that the man she had been lusting after for the past twenty-four hours had just walked into her store unannounced, just in time to witness her pawing through her shelves on her hands and knees with her ass sticking straight up in the air.

“On second thought,” he said, his voice washing over her like hot caramel, “I think I like it.”

For a millisecond, Callie considered trying to crawl onto the shelf, hoping that Tobey would just go away. Then again, she thought, she hadn’t invited him to her store.

In fact, she hadn’t even told him she had a store, so how could it possibly be her fault that he had found her looking less than ideal.

Trying desperately to rouse up some anger—otherwise she was stuck with embarrassed and horny, and that was a terrible combination—Callie crawled backwards and stood up, brushing invisible specks of dust off her knees and skirt.

Her arms folded across her chest, she said, “What are you doing here?”

Tobey was leaning against the door, looking more gorgeous than any man had a right to in his pin-striped shirt and well-tailored coat and slacks. He grinned widely and Callie wanted to smack the smile from his lips. And kiss him senseless, of course, but she was going to have some control over herself if it killed her.

“This is Callie’s Candies isn’t it?”

Callie nodded, keeping her lips firmly pressed together, forcing herself to back up into the refrigerator shelves, rather than jump Tobey’s bones like the slut that she was turning out to be.

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Tobey smiled. “I’m here for our appointment.”

Callie’s mouth dropped open. She quickly shut it, but no question about it, her brain wasn’t firing correctly anymore. She couldn’t manage anything better than, “For our appointment?” She was utterly mortified, sure that her skin was turning pinker and pinker by the second. If things got any worse, she would definitely fade away completely into the fabric of her pink suit.

“10 a.m., Monday morning. My assistant set it up with your accountant.”

“You can’t be. I mean, you couldn’t be. Oh god,” she said, leaning her weight into the cool air of the refrigerator as the full ramifications of her actions came crashing down upon her.

Thoughts rushed around her brain, knocking into each other as the magnitude of her mistake sunk in.
I slept with the Candy King. I had a one-night stand with the one person
who could save my business. Oh god, what am I going to do? What if he thinks I knew who he
was all along and did it on purpose?

Trying to think quick, she said, “Oh yes, of course. I was so wrapped up in doing my weekly inventory that I forgot all about our appointment.” Her voice was as crisp as she could make it, but to her ears her words still sounded far too much like soggy pie crust. Struggling to sound impersonal, she said, “Please forgive me. You’re with Sweet…”

Callie let her voice drop and looked up towards the ceiling as if she obviously knew the name of his company but had momentarily forgotten it. She hoped against hope that he would fall for her act.

The truth was, she was such a bad business owner she didn’t even know the name of the company that had been sent in to save her from ruin.

“Sweet Returns,” he said smoothly, his eyes running past her flushed face to her chest and getting stuck there. “And of course,” he added, never taking his eyes from her breasts, his voice husky and full of the very need she herself was trying to fight off, “I forgive you.”

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Too late Callie realized that she was flashing Tobey through the translucent white silk of her flimsy camisole. She crossed her arms across her chest, wanting to hide her telltale arousal from Tobey, but it was no use. With her arms crossed beneath her breasts, the soft flesh rose indecently up out of the v-neck top of her skimpy shell. She didn’t know which was worse: her hard, pink nipples shooting through the fabric like darts, or the bounteous mounds of her breasts spilling from her top.

Wishing she weren’t always doing the wrong thing at the wrong time, Callie bit her lip and said, “Should we get down to business?”

No matter how hard she tried to act professional, her voice was tentative and breathy. Callie knew she sounded like she’d rather get kissed by Tobey than look at the bottom line with him. But she couldn’t help it. Tobey was so damn gorgeous. And sexy.

And…

Oh my god, he was standing right in front of her. The next thing she knew, he had crossed the small space between them in the storeroom. With the intimacy that comes from knowing just how a woman needs to be touched, he brushed back a curl from her cheek. Callie shivered.

Just like the visions that had kept her awake all night long, Tobey was right there within stroking distance. She needed him desperately. Against any good sense she had ever possessed, her arms uncrossed and moved across his shoulders to entwine around his neck and she pressed her breasts up against his hard chest. “Callie,” he said. The word wrapped around her like a deep fog and then his mouth was on hers and her lips were open and greedy and she was moaning. He felt so good, so damn good, she was nearly sobbing with need.

Tobey sucked at her lower lip, letting his teeth graze her skin, still sensitive from their lovemaking at the wedding, before moving his mouth down past her chin and then the side of her neck.

“I was awake all night dreaming about doing this again.” He sank his lips into the crook of her neck and sucked at it. Callie groaned.

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“Me too,” she admitted, unable to stop the confession from rolling off of her tongue.

“And this,” he said. He hooked his thumb under the strap of her sheer camisole and slid it off one shoulder, baring the top of her breast to him. Gently he rubbed the soft flesh of her breasts and then bent his head further and sucked at the soft tissue. Callie felt her nipples jut out even further, she heard herself crying out his name as she let her neck fall back and pressed her tits into his eager mouth.

She had forgotten everything—where she was, that she hardly knew Tobey, that she was a good girl, the kind of girl who had a good time in bed, but at least the good time had always been in a bed. All Callie cared about was the feel of Tobey’s lips and tongue and teeth on her breasts, the way his light stubble felt sandy against her soft skin, the way his hands were cupping her ass, molding her hips into his hardness, just the way she wanted.

Her hands reached for his coat and she roughly pulled it off of his shoulders and threw it on the floor, her mouth taking his, her tongue plunging in and out of his mouth, mating frantically with his. Needing to touch his naked skin more than she needed to breathe, Callie pulled his shirt out from his pants, finally sighing with pleasure when her fingers found the warm, rippling muscles on his back.

With his foot, Tobey closed the door to the storeroom and spun them around, pressing Callie up against it. She felt Tobey’s hardness, still covered by his wool slacks, press into her panties, which were already wet with her need. The wool felt rough and scratchy through the thin silk of her panties and she ground her hips into his. Callie felt desperate for release, on the verge of coming apart against Tobey’s hard, hot thighs.