Candy Store Read Online Free PDF Page B

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.
    This 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.
    “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 it, 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 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 footsteps coming up the short hallway and then stopping at the doorway to her storeroom.
    “We’ve got to stop meeting in refrigerators like this.”

Chapter Six

    Callie’s heart almost stopped beating. She would have recognized that smooth, deep voice anywhere.
    She froze in place, unable to get her limbs to work. She couldn’t believe that Derek’s first image of her outside of the wedding refrigerator was like this—could she be any less sexy, 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 up, considering that the man she had been lusting after for the past twenty-four hours had walked into her store unannounced, just in time to witness her pawing through her shelves on her hands and knees with her butt 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 Derek 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