“She’s on vacation,” Perrin’s voice was polite and distant. “How may I help you?”
“Between Friday night and Sunday morning? She can’t be in Milan already.” Tony closed his eyes, struggling not to imagine Raquel in the arms of some hot Italian designer. His stomach twisted.
“No, she’s staying overnight with some friends in New York.” The voice shifted as if he suddenly had the woman’s full attention. “Is this the One?”
“The one what?”
The woman on the phone sounded even merrier at his confusion. “Well, you better do something quick, Mister One. Raquel doesn’t slow down for any man.”
Where had he heard that before.
“When are you expecting her back?”
“Wrong question. Lose one turn. Ehhh!” She made a harsh penalty-buzzer noise.
He pulled the phone away from his ear and stared at it for a moment. “Then what’s the right question?”
“Ehhhhhhhh!” Perrin made a longer buzzer sound.
“Oh.” His only excuse was that he’d slept under six of the last forty-eight hours. He knew the right question now.
“She’s only staying in New York one night?”
“Give the man a kewpie doll!” It sounded oddly as if the woman on the other end of the phone was now dancing.
Chapter 11
It was Monday afternoon by the time Raquel came off the New York-Milan flight. She felt ragged. All of the expectation she’d thought to be feeling hadn’t made the flight with her. Not even in her checked luggage. She’d slept poorly in New York and not at all on either flight. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
She must look awful. Marco was going to take one look at her after she came through customs and tell her to turn back around. Even her lack of enthusiasm had a lack of enthusiasm.
When Marco had said how excited he would be to see her any time, and Perrin had teased her about backlogged vacation time, she booked a flight and took a chance. She could keep up with the business on her tablet computer and enjoy Italy and Marco in between. Multi-tasking was her lifestyle.
Except it didn’t feel that way.
At the head of the jetway she stumbled to a halt. A beautiful man in a white dress shirt, dark slacks, and mirrored sunglasses stood just inside the terminal. The sign said, “Wells.”
Marco had said he’d meet her at the hotel. But he’d sent someone? No one should be waiting for her on this side of customs and security anyway.
Then she focused her tired eyes on the rest of the card, “Fur bikinis for sale—cheap.”
She laughed. Someone had—
Finally she looked up at his face.
“Tony?”
“Antonio Alberico Bosco at your service. That’s my full name, which oddly means ‘invaluable elf ruler of the woods’ if you can believe that.”
He had her laughing despite her confusion and exhaustion. She couldn’t make sense of it; of any of it.
“My flight made it in fourteen hours ahead of yours. I slept over there,” he pointed at a row of seats close to the gate. With an easy confidence, he took her arm and led her to a quiet corner of the terminal’s seating. The vast windows revealed the paved expanse of the airport and the city skyscrapers rising beyond.
“I’m…” she took a deep breath to steady her whirling mind, “…meeting someone.”
“Yes, me.”
“But—”
“Open wide.”
“What?”
“Open wide or you won’t get your treat.”
She looked down. He held a small box marked with The Chocolaterie Bosco logo, gold on black. It had always looked abstract…but she now saw that it was an elf playing a trumpet beneath a tree.
“You flew all this way to feed me a piece of chocolate?”
His engaging smile had her opening her mouth against her better judgment. How ludicrous was it? She was here for a tryst with a highly successful Italian designer and now she was sitting and tasting—
Her brain switched off as she bit down on the chocolate that Tony had slipped into her mouth. The chocolate was, oh, magnificent. Impossibly smooth and luscious. There was a hint of…it took her a moment to pin it down, fresh apricot.
Then her teeth broke into the center releasing a flood of apricot liqueur, thickened into a syrup that lit up her sense of taste and smell too, and then she finally sunk her teeth into perfect texture of the candied apricot core. Triple apricot!
Somehow, impossibly, Tony had captured their summer’s worth of Fridays in a single bite: from the first change of the chocolate, to the lush mastery of the liquid coconut but transformed from tropical to summer, and the candied core texture that she so loved in the ginger caramel.
“It’s like a perfect kiss,” she barely managed to breath it out. She opened her eyes. Tony’s handsome face so close that she’d barely have to move to touch noses.
Then Tony’s lips brushed hers. It was a question, no more.
When she answered, he opened to her and slid his hand to cradle her cheek.
The kiss coursed through her. Men mostly just wanted to sleep with her, but against all odds, Tony had first become her friend. She knew how impressed he was by what she’d done, how deeply he understood the drive that had pushed them both every day, even if it had been down different paths.
And his kiss, oh heaven she was lost. His power overwhelmed her senses until she had to push him away so that she could breathe and think and hear something other than the pounding of her heart.
“How?” How had he known to be here? The passing crowd from her flight had thinned.
“Up ‘til now I have always made Granddad’s chocolates. Enhanced them. Built on them.”
He disoriented her; he was answering a different question. He did that to her a lot. Tony Bosco the European playboy had also been the chocolate maestro. She’d watched through the summer as Chocolaterie Bosco had bloomed with him as the new chocolatier.
“I never understood how Granddad made such chocolate until I really looked at the recipe he’d used to court Grandma. He put his heart on the plate. You’ve done something to me, Raquel, and this is the best way I know how to show it.”
She made herself focus on his words and resist her desire to kiss him again. His kiss was even better than his chocolate which should be impossible, but it was true.
“Since the first moment you swooped into the shop, there has only been one woman in my thought—” Then he burst out laughing. Not at something amusing, but at something impossibly funny.
For once she couldn’t follow the joke, “What?” By the time he recovered enough to speak, she was ready to offer him a sharp jab.
“Your boss is a very smart woman.”
Perrin was, but what did she have to do with apricot chocolate and the best kiss of her life?
“She said I was ‘The One.’ I had no idea what she was talking about, but I get it now.”
Rachel tried to come up with an answer, but couldn’t find it anywhere. “Okay, I give. You need to let me in on the joke.”
His face sobered, then he brushed his fingers along her cheek. “I’m, uh, glad you liked the chocolate.”
“It was magnificent, but that was also a subject change.”
“It was,” he nodded. “For perhaps the first time, I wasn’t copying Granddad.”
“You put your heart on the plate.”
He managed a nod, but his lips were clamped tight as if he was unwilling to speak the next words.
He really had put his heart into it. No one else could have made that, could have captured their story in a confection. What had it cost him to do it? And he’d done it for her. He’d—
“You just told me how you made that incredible bite.”
“I did,” his voice was rough.
“So, having revealed your secret, now you have to kill me?”
He shook his head.
“Well, I’m certainly not going to marry your cousin in exchange for that secret.�
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All of his suppressed tension exploded outward in a laugh that had heads turning in their direction.
“I’m ever-grateful for that.” Then he slipped out of the chair beside her and knelt on the floor of the airport terminal without releasing her hands. “Will you marry me for it, Raquel? For I can’t imagine ever designing a chocolate for anyone else but you.”
In Raquel’s neatly ordered life, it made absolutely no sense. Yet it made perfect sense. They shared passion and determination and he had a heart that she knew would never stop giving. He’d opened up a place in her that she didn’t even know existed and filled it with light and smiles and flavors. It was so easy to picture a life with him, children with him, growing old with him.
“I guess that depends.”
He blinked at her in surprise.
“It depends on whether you were smart enough to bring more of that apricot chocolate.”
“I did. And I’ll make you as much as you ever want once we’re home.”
She leaned down to seal the deal with a kiss.
“Then let’s go home.”
Where Dreams Are Sewn
Chapter 1
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“The woman is a demon,” Clem agreed with her. Anna, Kristin, and Mitchell leaned in to look over their shoulders.
Kari Jones flipped up the hem of the dress to inspect the lie of the fabric. “Look at this seam work.”
“Beyond demon,” Anna agreed over Mitchell’s low groan.
“Am not a demon!” Perrin stood at the entry to the sewing room. Her designs were always immaculate and technically a challenge, but this one took it to a whole new level.
“Then what are you?” Kari wanted to grow up to be like Perrin. Too bad it was never going to happen. That Kari was three days older than her boss was the least of the problems. She had learned the skills and could pattern and sew as well as her boss, perhaps even better, but the talent and vision that had struck down like a lightning bolt and launched Perrin into the fashion design firmament had somehow bypassed Kari.
Her own designs looked…serviceable.
Perrin’s designs had walked runways and were splashed across major magazines.
When she took the job almost a year ago, Kari had hoped that some “designer magic” might rub off Perrin and onto her, but it hadn’t happened so far. However, the amount she’d learned about construction was huge.
“How did you even do this?” Clem was still inspecting the dress. Kari could see the secrets and looked to be the only one of the four sewers who had.
“I’m a demoness!” Perrin did a football end-zone style dance around the dress form.
Kari snorted, “That’s for sure. A very pregnant one.”
Perrin rubbed her belly and smiled. She wasn’t due for another couple months, but the blond was already spectacularly round-bellied rather than her normal waif-slender self. Another reason Kari would never grow up to be Perrin; Kari was already six inches taller and far more curved—well, than Perrin’s normal shape. Her non-descript dark hair curled to her shoulders instead of being a golden bob.
Still, she wished she could grow up to be Perrin someday.
Perrin continued a cha-cha toward the doorway of the room where the five sewers worked to reproduce Perrin’s designs in necessary sizes for the shop and custom orders. The others continued deconstructing the new dress, learning from Perrin’s prototype. Anna was a wizard with pattern-making and Clem was almost as good a seamstress as Kari was. They’d figure it out. Kristin and Mitchell were so fast that, once a design was understood, they could reproduce it as many times as necessary.
Perrin tipped her head for Kari to join her in the main design studio.
Kari loved this space. Folded fabrics shimmered along three walls, peeking out of floor-to-ceiling cubby holes abundant with color and texture. To the right a doorway into the storefront cut through the shelving and to the left a bank of high windows let in the Seattle sunshine, which today was of the typically autumn gray-and-wet variety. Down the center was a sprawling cutting table and another pair of sewing machines below the windows. Design heaven.
Tamara, Perrin’s step-daughter, sat at the cutting table amidst a sea of fabrics. Even though they weren’t related by blood, it was easy to see that the bolt of brilliance had landed on the fifteen-year-old’s head as well. Tammy was piecing together a teen clothing line and it was some of the coolest work Kari had ever seen. With Tammy’s work, she didn’t feel envy; she felt awe.
Perrin perched carefully on a stool and Kari sat down facing her. Tammy looked up at her for a moment from across the table, but then returned her attention to the fabrics as if embarrassed; not even looking up long enough to offer a hello. Tammy Cullen was usually as effusive as her adoptive mother. And Kari had thought she was really close with the girl…but not at the moment.
Kari’s nerves suddenly roared awake.
She turned her attention to Perrin and saw the worry there.
Kari couldn’t imagine that she was about to be fired. Perrin’s Glorious Garb needed to be adding more people, not cutting them. And she’d finally come to terms with not being Perrin…mostly.
But Perrin’s worried look didn’t go away. Not a good thing; she and Perrin tended to buoy each other up. The CEO could always calm them down, but Melanie was in Paris on her honeymoon.
“I—” they both started on the same breath.
Kari nodded for Perrin to speak first, and then had to wait her out.
“I,” Perrin finally began again, “need you to do me a favor.”
“Sure,” Kari said in her most even voice. It didn’t sound like she was being fired.
“Tammy’s getting overwhelmed. Would you be willing to take over as the head fabricator for her line?” Perrin spoke in a mad rush. “I know she’s just fifteen and you’d rather be a designer but I want her to have the best and she’s good on a machine but you’re way better and you can do fitting even better than I can and I can’t think of anyone that would be more fantastic or that we’d both trust more and—”
“Of course, yes!” Kari managed to cut in on the runaway freight train of Perrin’s words. Fifty percent relief and a hundred percent excitement.
“—because it’s my daughter’s line and I want it to be perfect and you could do that and…really?”
Kari nodded. Head seamstress on a new line? Oh yeah. And if it came out of Perrin’s Glorious Garb, there was no question any line would be major; especially when it was as good as Tammy’s. She’d been dying to get her hands on those designs.
“I was afraid you were about to fire me.”
Perrin’s shock shifted quickly to mock anger, “You try to leave here and you and I are going to have some harsh words. You belong here.”
Kari could only smile back at her. She did. It was hard to believe, but Kari knew that she’d found exactly where she was supposed to be. It gave her a bit of a thrill that a woman of Perrin’s amazing skills agreed.
“Really?” Tamara whispered from across the table, looking up shyly beneath the dark brows and hair she’d inherited from her mother who had passed on several years ago.
Kari rose and circled the table to sit beside Tamara. They were the ones who looked like mother and daughter. Everyone remarked on it who saw them together. It had become a running joke between them by the second time they’d met. They’d rapidly settled on Auntie and Little Girl.
“Are you kidding me? Your clothes rock. I’d love to help with them.” Instead of offering the hug they normally shared, she held out a hand. “Thanks for asking for me.”
They shook on it like two serious adults.
Then Tammy gave out a very fifteen-year-old squeal and threw herself into Kari’s arms. “Love you, Auntie Kari.”
Kari hugged her tight. This is what she wanted. Not just the challenge of helping shape a whole line. She buried her face in Tamara’s hair for just a moment and wished she had a girl of her own.
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br /> “Love you…Big Girl.”
Tammy squeezed her even tighter and squealed again.
Chapter 2
The moment he walked in the shop, Richard Nyberg knew he’d made a mistake. Always have an emergency book with you. His wife had told him that any number of times before she’d left him—left them—two years ago. It was the one piece of her unending streams of advice he should have listened to, but he was always forgetting.
In seconds, his Lana and Tammy Cullen had hugged and were giggling together like he supposed a pair of fifteen-year-old girls were supposed to. Tammy dragged his daughter off for a whirlwind tour of the shop.
He slowed down a minute to check out the place. The dress shop felt welcoming and successful. Part of it was the thoughtful designer who had staged the store as carefully as the colorful designs. The other part was the surprising number of customers in a relatively small shop. Women swirled in and out of changing rooms, sipped tea while inspecting skirts and blouses. There was a happy buzz of voices from people glad to be there.
The stage manager at Emerald City Opera, Bill Cullen, had married the owner of the shop a year ago. Lana had hung out with their kids a lot during long rehearsals and shows, but he’d never thought to bring his daughter here. He could see that he should have. He supposed that a high-end women’s clothing store was one of those “girly rights” that no one told single dads about.
Tammy was towing Lana from one display to the next. It was set up like a 1950s diner. Chrome and red leather booths were populated by mannequins in clothes hot enough to remind his libido that it had been an extremely long dry spell. Single dads with young kids didn’t date. There was never enough time and it got way too complicated the few times he’d tried it.
The girls slowed down at the wedding dresses and he heard their oohs and aahs despite the general noise level of customers chatting around the busy shop. Girls who were fifteen should not be admiring wedding dresses. Daughters who were twenty-five shouldn’t be doing that. Maybe at thirty-five he’d let Lana out on her first date…like he’d have any say in the matter.
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