Smashwords version Sweet Surrender

Chapter
One

“Oh my
GOD, I have never seen a cock that big,” Viola gasped, her frosted pink lips an
O of shock and admiration.
“That’s because it’s not real,” Poppy Donovan looked askance at
the enormous chocolate phallus in her best friend’s hand.
Viola held the plastic wrapped concoction up and admired it. “A
girl can dream, can’t she?” She turned it around, examining it from all angles.
“So realistic. It even has veins. And look at the size of those
chocolate cojones. I wonder if they made it from a mold of someone, you know,
like they do with celebrities for wax museums? Oooh, I wonder if we could find
out who they made the mold from! Oh, my God, what I’d do to-“
“Put it down before it melts!”
“Well, someone put on her grumpy pants today,” Viola smirked,
setting her chocolate prize down on the glass counter.  Clearly Viola
wasn’t the one wearing the grumpy pants. Viola was the one who was wearing the
happy cheerful look on the bright side of everything pants, like she always
did.
Then again, Viola wasn’t the one whose half-sister had tricked her
into managing an erotic bakery for the next eight weeks.
“How could she not have told me about this?” Poppy wailed, waving
her hand at the room around them. The boob cakes tipped with red cherry
nipples.  The cock popsicle molds. The paint-on chocolate. The many
flavors of edible underwear. The display case of lickable lubricant.  
“Umm, because it’s Penelope, duh?” Viola knelt in front of the
glass-fronted display cases of bakery, examining the contents with fascination.
“True, true. I should have seen this coming. Well, no, I should
not have specifically seen THIS coming, because no one ever knows what kind of
shenanigans Penelope is going to pull until she actually pulls them, but I
should have known that there was disaster in the making when she begged me for
a favor, because this is Penelope, after all, and whenever you do a favor for
Penelope, it always ends up in disaster, doesn’t it?” Poppy’s voice was rising
higher and higher, and she was babbling.
She looked around. She was talking to herself.
Viola had vanished.
Oh, there she was by the front door
– talking to a couple of
customers
.
How had they sneaked in here? Oh, God. Customers.    There
were actual members of the public in here now, witnessing her shame.  She
felt a blush staining her cheeks, but she forced a smile on her face and walked
over to them.
She needn’t have bothered, because Viola had them eating out of
the palm of her hand.
“I’m so glad you’re open again!” a little brunette with a pixie
haircut was gushing to Viola. “We tried to come here yesterday and when we saw
you were closed we were afraid you were shut down for good.  Now, where’s
the Amaretto passion potion? My boyfriend LOVES the taste of it.” She winked,
and her boyfriend, a hipster with flatironed hair, nodded enthusiastically.
“Oh, I know what you mean,” Viola beamed. “The Amaretto is one of
my favorites too. My boyfriend can’t get enough of it.”
Poppy rolled her eyes. Viola was the consummate b.s. artist. The
girl could sell snowballs to an Eskimo. The truth was, until Poppy and Viola
had walked in to the bakery this morning, they’d never even heard of amaretto
passion potion.
“I think it’s on that shelf over there, babe –“ the hipster guy
pointed, and the brunette dashed over to grab several bottles.
“You have to try it on your boyfriend, too! I could just eat him
up when I put this stuff on him,” the pixie girl burbled enthusiastically, and
began describing in explicit detail where exactly she liked to apply the
potion.
Poppy felt her cheeks flaming with embarrassment, and sneaked a
glance at herself in one of the mirrored walls.  Yep, her face was red as
a stop sign. It was impossible for her to miss, because all the freaking walls
in the bakery were made of mirrors.  

It was
yet another reason that being inside the store made her cringe.  She
wasn’t a huge fan of mirrors, especially full length ones.  She was a
full-figured girl, generally a size 16 or 18, and while she’d come to terms
with the fact that she was never going to have the body of a Victoria’s Secret
model, she was still self-conscious about her looks.
She’d dressed in a two piece navy pinstripe suit this morning, not
sure what to wear to help manage a bakery, but now she felt ridiculously
out of place in this lushly decorated den of iniquity.

The bakery was painted pink, with black filigree swirls everywhere
and black filigree display shelves. On the right side of the store were the
glass display cases of fresh pastry, baked every morning by bakers right on the
premises.  There were racks of frothy high end lingerie as well, and
plastic mannequins throughout the store doing obscene things to plastic molds
of pastries, and shelves full of every variety of edible erotic concoction that
could be dreamed up by the human imagination.

The door to the office, on the left side of the shop, was
sandwiched in between a narrow bookcase full of vibrating lollipops and a
mannequin wearing a fishnet bodysuit who was deep-throating a baguette.
Viola, with her purple tipped black hair, lacy black corset top,
black jeans and studded black boots, fit right in. Her former college room-mate
looked as if she were born for sin. Poppy looked as if she were born to be an
accountant.
And now Viola was leading the couple over to a rack of edible
underpants, which were pink and tied on the sides with licorice bows.
“Now, before I ring you up, I just want you to get a look at our
new line of edible panties. The thongs are especially deelish…or so my
boyfriend tells me,” Viola said with a huge grin.

Poppy struggled to quell her rising panic.  Part of her
wanted to shout “What are you doing?” at Viola, because Viola was making these
people stay in the store even longer, but Viola was doing exactly what she was
supposed to be doing. Upselling. Helping Penelope make the store a success.
That’s why Viola was dropping three different flavors of underwear
at $19.99 each into a glossy pink bag with a black lace pattern, along with the
passion potion.
Damn, she was good. The boutique owner who’d fired her was an
idiot; she’d been his best salesperson. Well, granted, he’d grabbed Viola’s ass
and Viola had punched him in the nose, which ended up with a frantic call to
Poppy at the law school where she worked as a secretary, and a hastily arranged
agreement that he wouldn’t press charges and she wouldn’t sue.

But Poppy and Viola had heard through the grapevine that his sales
dropped by 25 percent after she left.
Poppy watched Viola expertly swipe the customer’s card through the
credit card processor on the cash register, and then the couple left, grinning
from ear to ear and in a big hurry.

“I know what they’re going to do when they get home!” Violet
trilled.  “Gee, this is fun.”
“For you. You’re all uninhibited and loosey goosey and free
spirited. I’m a little more…conservative.”
“Maybe working here will be good for you. You need to loosey
goosey up a little. When was the last time you got laid?”
Poppy spluttered for a minute before she managed to choke out “I’m
sorry, I…what?”
“You heard me. When was the last time you got bonked by something
that didn’t plug in?”
“I do not plug things in,” Poppy said virtuously.  When
Violet gave her the skeptical eyebrow raise– it was always the left eyebrow –
she felt compelled to add, “I use things with batteries. Things that plug in
scare me – I’m afraid they might electrocute me, in the hoo hoo area.”
Violet nodded in agreement. “That would hurt. The hoo hoo area is
very sensitive. But you are avoiding the question, which tells me all I need to
know, although I would know anyway, because you would tell me if you’d gotten
some. Or I’d see it in your face.” And, smiling smugly, she sailed off down the
hallway in the back of the store to the kitchen, to flirt with the bakers some
more.
Poppy growled, low in her throat.  It was really annoying how
often Viola was right.
But she had bigger fish to fry – namely, Penelope. Laid up in her
hospital bed, suffering from multiple broken bones after she’d been mowed down
by a hit and run driver, she had blinked back tears as she begged Poppy to save
Sweet Surrender.

“Just
till I get back on my feet…I sank all my money into this place…I’m finally
settling down and being responsible and this business means everything to me…my
clerks quit and left me and I’m going to lose everything…”

She’d
gone on, and on, and on, until she’d convinced Poppy to ditch her legal
secretary job for the summer, move five hours from Portland to Port Rollins,
and manage the bakery until Penelope got out of the hospital.

She’d
just apparently forgotten to mention what type of store Poppy would be
managing.

And
Penelope knew that the law school which had given Poppy a full scholarship and
a job was extremely conservative, and not likely to look favorably on Poppy’s
new place of employment.

Which was absolutely typical of Penelope.  Poppy had lost count of
the times that she’d had to bail her half sister out of one mess after another,
and come out the worse for out.

She’d almost gone to jail for her.  
She’d
been on nightmarish double dates with her – dates where Penelope had
conveniently forgotten to mention that she and Poppy were only half sisters and
they looked nothing alike, so Poppy’s date inevitably looked crestfallen when
he saw Penelope’s full-figured sister.  

She’d spent thousands of dollars that she could ill afford to buy
Penelope’s way out of trouble, paying off store owners for boosted merchandise,
paying off traffic tickets, paying her bail, paying for lawyers.
Then Penelope had inherited this bakery from a distant aunt on her
side of the family, along with some cash, and she spent all the cash fixing the
bakery up…and apparently gave the bakery a unique new twist. Unless Penelope’s
80-something-year-old great-aunt Edna had owned an erotic bakery, but Poppy
sincerely doubted that.

Poppy yanked her cell phone from her purse’s outer pocket and
dialed Penelope’s number. When she called, as she expected, the phone went
straight to voicemail. Next she called the number to the hospital and punched
in the extension to her sister’s room, and the phone rang and rang and rang.
Of course. Typical Penelope.  First, plunge head first into
disaster. Second, call up Poppy, wailing and crying for help and swearing this
was the last time ever. Third, once Poppy had bailed her out, drop off the grid
for a while until things cooled off.
Except this time she was laid up in a hospital room and couldn’t
escape Poppy’s wrath, which Poppy would most definitely be unleashing on her as
soon as the bakery closed at 6 p.m.
6 p.m. Oh, God, she was going to handling pornographic pastry for
the next ten hours straight.  If anyone at Western Christian Law School
found out about this, she was toast.  Plain toast, not penis shaped toast.
 
Glumly she surveyed a display of Lickorish,  a line of edible
flavored body butters, which were set out on a countertop along with an
assortment of product sample jars and a little wicker basket of tiny plastic
spoons for sampling.
She picked up one of the full sized jars, with its printed label
of a man licking the product off a woman’s nipple, and examined it critically.
And she heard the front door open.