“This place certainly is…colorful,” Marty Gotschall, real estate agent said, looking around the store. He looked like a formal high school football player gone to fat, stuffed into a suit that just barely fit him. He flashed white teeth at them in a used car salesman smile, and shoved a glossy business card into Poppy’s hand before she could jerk it away. “So you’re the new owner?”
“My sister is the owner. I’m helping her out for the summer.”
“Well, let me know if she’s interested in selling. Good location, good location. This neighborhood’s got potential. I’ve got a few properties for sale down here, if she’s looking to expand. What about you? Are you interested in securing your future with a guaranteed-“
A slim Asian woman with stylishly razor cut hair walked up behind him, carrying a bowl of freshly sliced fruit. “Marty! Goodbye, it was great seeing you again,” she said, sliding easily in between him and Poppy.
“Uh…thanks, I mean…” With a slightly bewildered look, he waved at Poppy and Viola and turned and headed for the door. When he walked he leaned forward as if he were a quarterback muscling through a 4-3 formation. Definitely ex high school football.
“Hi, I’m Amelia. I own the fruit stand. That guy will talk your ear off,” Amelia said, setting the bowl of fruit down on the counter. “So, you’re helping Penelope run the store?”
“Yes, I’m her sister Poppy. I’m just helping her out for the next eight weeks while she recuperates.”
“Wow, eight weeks?” Amelia looked surprised. “I didn’t know she was that badly injured.”
Viola rolled her eyes. “If Poppy hadn’t visited her in the hospital right after the accident I would have thought she was faking the whole thing so she wouldn’t have to come to work. Cock popsicle?”
“Viola!” Poppy protested.
“What, my foul language or the fact that I pointed out that your half sister is a full liar?”
“Both.” Poppy speared her with her best disapproving schoolmarm look, but Viola ignored her and held up a cardboard display box with various flavors of chocolate phallus pops.
“Thanks, don’t mind if I do,” Amelia said, grabbing a popsicle that was a swirly mixture of milk and dark chocolate, and peeling the plastic wrapper off it.
“Mmmm, biracial. My flavorite,” Viola sniggered.
Poppy felt her cheeks heating up with embarrassment. Viola was right; she really needed to loosen up.
Viola grabbed an orange slice and dipped it in a sample jar of chocolate body butter. “This is excellent! Try it, guys. Amelia, we will buy one bowl of fruit slices from you every day, and put them out here for the customers to sample. You can leave a stack of business cards by the fruit bowl if you like.”
“Cool beans!” Amelia beamed at her, dunking an apple slice in the chocolate.
Poppy felt a twinge of conscience. She’d promised her sister she’d do everything she could to make the bakery a success while Penelope was in the hospital. She should be networking and coming up with promotional ideas too. She was just still so shocked by her surroundings that she was struggling to get her bearings.
“Oh, great, it’s my breast friend,” Amelia groaned, rolling her eyes at the door. A tall man with thick graying blond hair, wearing a houndstooth suit one size too big for him, was enthusiastically making his way towards them.
“Henry Chenowith,” Amelia said in a low voice. “President of the Warehouse District Chamber of Commerce. He only talks to your boobs.”
Sure enough, he thrust his hand out, pumped Poppy’s hand in a vigorous handshake, and said “Henry Chenowith, pleased to meet you,” to her cleavage.
Poppy almost said “40 double D, pleased to meet you too,” but she reminded herself that she was here to help Penelope, not antagonize her neighbors. So instead she introduced herself politely and pasted a fake smile on her face and prayed he wouldn’t comment on the surroundings.
“We’re so pleased the store is open,” Chenowith told her breasts. “I hope you come to all of our meetings. Penelope already joined, so there’s no charge to you. We’re having a business mixer tonight, at O’Malley’s Tavern, if you’d like to come. 7 p.m. Two blocks east of here.”
Poppy found herself pondering the suggestion. She wasn’t really looking forward to confronting her sister that evening; hadn’t discovering the true nature of Sweet Surrender, and the run-in with Rafe McDaniel, been enough trauma for one day?
She saw Viola looking at her with narrowed eyes. Viola knew her all too well.
“Coward,” Viola mouthed at her.
“What? It’s business promotion,” Poppy said indignantly. “I’ll visit Penelope tomorrow night.” Viola gave her a knowing look and sucked on her orange slice.
“Excellent, excellent! We’ll see you there, then.” And Chenowith bustled off. Amelia stuck her tongue out at Chenowith’s back as he walked out the door, and Viola giggled.
“You could come with me,” Poppy suggested to Viola once he was gone.
“I have to babysit the rugrats, remember?” Viola was staying at her aunt’s house for the summer, and babysitting her children while her aunt took night classes. Penelope’s studio apartment only had one fold-out sofa and there was no room for Viola there.
“Fine. I’m going to have at least one drink. I might even have two. And I’m going to flirt with men. You’ll be sorry you missed it.”
“You’re going to have half a drink, hide in the corner and go home early,” Viola predicted. Poppy shot her a dirty look and flounced back to the office.
The most annoying thing about Viola was how often she was right.
At the end of the day, Poppy’s skin felt greasy and she smelled like flour and butter, so she headed up to her sister’s tiny studio apartment for a quick shower.
She stripped out of her business suit and thought about Rafe’s comments this morning on her clothing. Ha! She could dress sexy when she wanted to. Not that she cared what he thought.
But just in case she saw him on the street as she walked to O’Malley’s, she pulled on a silky black skirt with a tulip flare at the bottom, a black lacy camisole, and a black silk jacket, with low heeled black pumps, and let her hair flow freely over her shoulders.
As she emerged onto the street, the sun was sinking in the horizon, a chill settled in the air, and she had the oddest feeling that she was being watched. She glanced around, but the street was empty now, and across from her was a row of silent buildings with windows like dark eyes which stared down at her, unblinking.
She dug her hand into her purse and fished out her keychain with the canister of mace on it. Glancing behind her, she walked quickly to O’Malley’s, with her hand on the mace and unease rippling through her stomach.
Chapter Five
Rafe had spent the day at his uncle’s office, writing reports and itching to get out of there and back to the bakery. He needed to explain to Poppy; he wanted her to know that he wasn’t the kind of man who would flirt with a woman if he was dating someone else. His father had raised him better than that.
Of course, he barely knew Poppy, and it wasn’t as if he owed her an explanation, but for some reason, her opinion of him mattered.
The bakery was closed up tight, but when he glanced at the window of the apartment over the bakery, it was dark, which meant either that she’d gone to bed at 7:30 at night, or she wasn’t home.
A whisper of unease nagged at him at how visible the apartment was to the street. How vulnerable Poppy was. If he could see when she was home at night, so could anyone else. He needed to talk to her about that too.
He had a good idea of where she might be tonight, at least. He’d made an effort to get to know the business owners in the neighborhood, and he knew about the Monday night business mixers at O’Malley’s. He was confident that Chenowitch would have invited her to the mixer, given that she was female and in possession of a magnificent set of mammaries.
He knew he shouldn’t get involved with her, at least not at t
his point. And yet, as he neared O’Malley’s, he found himself checking his reflection in the mirrored window of a barber shop and running his fingers through his rumpled hair.
Recon, he told himself.
Then he walked through the door into the crowded bar. This neighborhood was most definitely getting more popular, he thought.
He walked in the door and scanned the room looking for her, and then smiled when he spotted her in a corner, clutching a drink and backed up against a wall by Henry Chenowith, who was talking to her cleavage.
He grinned. Good, he thought. I can be the knight in shining armor rescuing her.
She’d changed out of her repressed-librarian costume and now she was wearing a slinky black ensemble that flowed over her like liquid silk. Her blond curls sprung out and flowed over her shoulders like a pre-Raphaelite goddess, and when his eyes lighted on her red rosebud of a mouth, all the blood left his head and rushed to his groin and he felt dizzy.
He started to shoulder his way through the crowd towards her, when a slim brunette in a red cocktail dress walked over and pressed against him in an overly familiar fashion. “I’m Karen,” she purred, looking him up and down and clearly liking what she saw. “And you are?”
“I am busy right now,” he said, not looking at her as he slid past her and continued pushing his way towards Poppy.
He lost sight of her for a minute, and when he broke through the crowd, Poppy was gone and Henry was wandering away looking for new cleavage to talk to.
Rafe scanned the room looking for her, but after several minutes of slowly working his way through the crowd, he had to admit she was gone. Where had she escaped to so quickly? There were several exits; had she slipped out a side door? And why?
He wondered if she’d seen him talking to the brunette, and his stomach twisted with unease. If she’d seen that, she was probably forming an opinion of him that was far from flattering.
A busty blonde wiggled up to him, and leaned forward, giving him a generous view of her impressive cleavage.
“I’m Stacy,” she told him. “And you are?”
“I am leaving,” he sighed, and turned away gloomily, making his way towards the door.
Chapter Six
“Will this never ending flow of customers ever stop?” Poppy shook her head in amazement. It was 11 a.m. and there were half a dozen people drifting around the store.
“Jeez, I hope not,” Viola said. “We’re supposed to be helping make this place a success, if I remember correctly.”
“Oh, you do not want to help my sister. You just like handling smutty pastry.”
“You got that right,” Viola said, heading over to a group of giggling women who were pawing through the lingerie rack.
Poppy forced herself to smile and box up pastry, but she was tired and irritable and couldn’t wait for the day to end.
Seeing Rafe at the bar last night with the skinny brunette draped over him had stung, and it shouldn’t have. She barely knew the man. Thank God she’d been right next to an exit door and managed to make her escape before he spotted her.
For a minute when he first came in, she could have sworn he was looking through the crowd for someone…and she let herself hope that he was looking for her.
And when she looked again and saw the brunette hanging on his shoulder, she thought for a moment that he’d looked annoyed. And she thought about waiting to see if he’d shake off the brunette, and come over and talk to her.
But then her mother’s whisky-soaked voice had rung through her head, an ugly echo from long ago. “Men jusht don’t love fat women like ush, Poppy. They jusht don’t. But thatsh okay, becaush we have eash other, don’t we, baby?” That usually came right before her mother ran into the bathroom and turned the water on full blast, which meant she was making herself throw up her dinner. The water didn’t cover the retching sounds as well as she thought.
Poppy shook her head, bringing herself back to the present. She might not be able to make herself as pretty as a fashion model, but there was plenty she could do. She could help her sister. She could make order out of chaos.
Sighing, she went back into the office and shut the door behind her, looking forward to a peaceful day of hiding out and organizing her sister’s files.
Annoyingly, her mind kept drifting back to yesterday’s brief interlude with Rafe. His handsome face smiling down at her, the glint in his eyes when he looked at her, the curve of his lips…it was almost as if she could hear his voice outside the office, saying her name.
Oh wait – he actually was outside her office. That was really his voice.
She clutched the arms of her chair, suddenly feeling too wobbly to stand.
“Listen, I need to talk to Poppy. I think there was a misunderstanding yesterday.”
Poppy forced herself to her feet and peered between the slats of the venetian blind covering the office window.
Rafe was standing there, handsome as a Greek god, towering over Viola.
Viola glared up at him, a tiny terrier challenging a pit bull. “You upset my friend, so you are not welcome here.”
“She’s a grown woman. I’d like to have this conversation with her, not you.”
“Well, she’s gone for the day, and she’s not coming back tomorrow, so you’re out of luck.” Oh, bless Viola and her forked little tongue.
“Can you please tell her that the woman who came in here is my future sister-in-law? I’m sorry about how Serafina behaved. She’s a little…” Rafe grimaced, as if struggling to find a polite word. “Feisty.”
“Is feisty a synonym for total bitch?” Viola folded her arms across her chest and glared at him.
“I apologize for Serafina. She’s just getting a little stressed out with the wedding coming up, and a few of her bridesmaids have dropped out so she’s having to do a lot of the wedding planning herself, and-“
“I’m not surprised. I wouldn’t be a bridesmaid for that harpy either,” Viola snapped. “Now you can leave before your shins are black and blue, or you can limp out of here with broken toes. Your choice.” She tapped her heavy boot meaningfully on the travertine floor.
Poppy choked back a laugh, clapping her hand over her mouth. Viola was small, but fierce. More than one would-be bully who’d try to elbow her out of the way at a night club had found that out the hard way.
Still, as she heard his footsteps clunking away towards the front door, she had to fight the urge to run after him. Was it possible that he was telling the truth about Serafina? Or was she just desperate to believe that?
She was horribly tempted to fling open the office door and run out after him, but just yesterday she’d lectured Viola on being strong and independent and not taking any grief from a man. What kind of example would she be setting?
Reluctantly, she sank back down behind her desk, ignoring the dull ache in her chest, and resumed her filing. She found cleaning and organizing to be hypnotically soothing. It was something that she could control.
Finally six o’clock rolled around, and they locked the front door, and she dropped the last of the store’s cash into the floor safe.
The store did a surprisingly brisk business; apparently they were in an excellent location with a lot of foot traffic. Who knows, maybe Penelope had finally picked a winner.
The thought made her feel guilty about confronting Penelope. Then again, she let Penelope run roughshod over her far too many times without saying a word, and it was never going to stop if she didn’t stand up for herself. And being set up to work here was without warning was simply not cool.
“Penis pop for your thoughts,” Viola said, as Poppy walked her to her car.
“I’m trying to decide what to say to Penelope when I go to the hospital tonight.”
“I wish I could come with you. You always fold when she turns on the waterworks.”
“I do not! Not always.”
Viola rolled her eyes at her and climbed into the car. “Call me and let me know how it goes.”
“Say hi to your aunt and the rug rats for me,” Poppy smiled.
“Will do.”
“And don’t be a bad influence and let them watch Tim Burton movies and give them goth makeovers.”
“Will don’t. I will be breaking out Nightmare Before Christmas and my best black lipstick as soon as Aunt May heads out the door.”
Poppy shot Viola’s back a disapproving look as she climbed into her car, but she didn’t have the energy to work herself into a good snit-fit. She had other things on her mind.
Sighing, she walked upstairs to shower off the bakery smells that clung to her skin and hair. She was tired and her feet hurt from running around the bakery all day and she still had to make the drive to the hospital.
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