by Bella Andre
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.
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.”
Callie’s heart almost stopped beating. She would have recognized that smooth, deep male 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 her client's wedding 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.”
...Excerpt from CANDY STORE by Bella Andre ©2010.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bestselling author, Bella Andre, has always been a writer. Songs came first, and then non-fiction books, but as soon as she started her first romance novel, she knew she'd found her perfect career. Since selling her first book in 2003, she's written twenty-one "sensual, empowered stories enveloped in heady romance" (Publisher's Weekly) about sizzling alpha heroes and the strong women they'll love forever for Simon & Schuster, Random House, and Grand Central Publishing. Her books have been Cosmopolitan Magazine Red Hot Reads twice (Game For Anything and Wild Heat) and have been translated into German, Thai, Japanese and Ukrainian. If not behind her computer, you can find her reading her favorite authors, hiking, knitting, or laughing. Please visit her at:
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