Candy Store Read Online Free PDF

tremors to end, not wanting the fantasy of Derek being with her to be erased when she opened her eyes.
    When she'd shampooed her hair and dried off, working to push all erotic thoughts away, Callie dressed in the most severe outfit she owned, a light pink suit. And yet, underneath the jacket, she wore a silk camisole.
    She didn’t intend to take her jacket off for the meeting—the suit was more like armor than clothes in her mind—and the white silk looked the best of anything she owned peeking out from underneath her jacket. Callie usually wore jeans and a t-shirt that said Callie’s Candies on it, so today she felt business-like and stern in her suit.
    Wolf followed her out of the bedroom and she let him into her little fenced backyard to take care of his business.
    “I’ll come back at lunch,” she called to him and he turned his furry face to hers, wagging his tail as if he understood.
    Downtown Saratoga, home to the famous horse 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. 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 even when they pulled a dollar out of their 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.
    If they were really lucky, and they had been given money from their mothers for a box of truffles to take home, Callie gifted them with a handful of lollipops and gummy worms.
    But now that popular chain stores ruled the street along with swanky restaurants and wine bars, 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