Sweets to the Sweet Read Online Free PDF Page A

second glass, filled both, wandered to the window with the baby, and stared out at his bashed-in car.
    Laura sighed mentally. “Would you like to stay for dinner?”
    “Thank you, yes.”
    Whether he knew it or not, she thought darkly, she wasn’t letting him manipulate her, bashed-in car or no. For keeping Mari happy, she would have given him fortunes. Dinner was cheaper.
     
    An hour later, Laura peeked nervously under the kitchen table. Mari was settled in the triangle of Owen’s crossed knee.
    “Laura. She’s fine. ”
    “I don’t understand it. She’s not crying. She always cries when I try to eat dinner.” Laura’s face peeked over the edge of the table. “Did I tell you that dinner was delicious?”
    “Four times.”
    “How did a bachelor from a large family learn to cook like that?”
    He chuckled. “Learning to cook was a matter of survival, not choice. I still haven’t mastered the art of following a recipe.”
    He’d mastered a few other things, though, she thought idly. A stranger shouldn’t be sitting at her kitchen table, and yet he was. She’d never meant to drink the glass of wine, and yet she had. Owen had the gift of making odd things seem natural. He’d kept her laughing through dinner with stories of his large, unruly family. He also had wonderful dancing eyes, the most seductive tenor she’d ever heard, and an easy way of making himself at home. Laura, what is this man doing in your house?
    “Owen, what are you doing here?” she asked determinedly.
    He raised a dark eyebrow quizzically.
    “Saving a stranded woman. Chauffeuring her around. Cooking her dinner. You make a habit of this?”
    “I’ve been exiled from my own family,” he said gravely.
    “Exiled?”
    “It’s difficult to explain. You see, chocolates are the family business—did I tell you Reesling is my last name? And for the last seven—”
    “ Reesling? Reesling Chocolates?”
    For an instant, he couldn’t stop looking at her. Sheer lust filled her eyes, vivid and uninhibited. She had let her guard down for those few seconds. Mischief sparkled from her. And if he’d had the least idea that chocolates were her nemesis, he’d have brought up the subject an hour before.
    “My dad used to buy them for special occasions,” Laura confessed. “Thirty dollars a pound, all wrapped in satin boxes, those beautiful little shapes…” Abruptly, she came back to earth. “Wait a minute. Let’s get back to why you’re ‘exiled’ from your family.”
    He would have preferred to talk chocolates. In her bedroom.
    He settled for answering a gentle stream of questions and watching her eyes change from the blue-green of the sea to the turquoise of the gem. She had a most disturbing habit of…listening.
    And he had a long-standing policy of not talking about himself, but she coaxed the family history from him. For the past seven years, he’d run the business single-handed, while his dad retired and his younger siblings were busy getting educated—and married. The Reeslings owned cacao plantations in Brazil, transported the beans to New York and manufactured chocolates from their own secret recipes. Like most of the good chocolate firms worldwide, Reesling’s wasn’t a massive corporation, but it was a complex international business. Running it, Owen had discovered, was both satisfying and challenging, particularly since he had been determined to double production.
    “Which you’ve done.” Laura had no doubts.
    “Which I’ve done,” he agreed. And he’d turned into a workaholic in the process. Of his six brothers and sisters, only Gary and Susan were interested in the business. Both were well educated and skilled in managing the business, and they had been indispensable to him. “Only, according to them, I’ve turned into a domineering, autocratic tyrant,” he explained to Laura glumly.
    “Have you?”
    “Hell, yes.”
    She chuckled, but her smile was compassionate. “There’s more to it than that,