SWEET SURRENDER
Copyright 2013 by Georgette St. Clair
This book is intended for readers 18 and older only. It is a work of fiction. All characters and locations in this book are products of the feverish imagination of the author, a tarnished Southern belle with a very dirty mind.
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Poppy Donovan has been roped in to helping her half-sister Penelope run her new bakery for the summer while she recovers from a car accident - but as usual, Penelope’s been keeping secrets.
Like the fact that Sweet Surrender is actually an erotic bakery that sells desserts so naughty they make Poppy blush. And the fact that there’s an overly-muscled, macho hunk living next door who has suddenly developed an intense interest in everything about Sweet Surrender – including Poppy. Or the fact that Penelope’s accident may not have been an accident.
With Poppy’s life suddenly in danger and the future of the bakery at risk, Poppy may be forced to seek safety in the form of dreamboat-next-door Rafe McGovern – but Rafe’s been keeping secrets of his own.
Chapter One
“Oh my GOD, I have never seen a cock that big,” Viola gasped, her frosted pink lips an O of shock and admiration.
“That’s because it’s not real,” Poppy Donovan looked askance at the enormous chocolate phallus in her best friend’s hand.
Viola held the plastic wrapped concoction up and admired it. “A girl can dream, can’t she?” She turned it around, examining it from all angles.
“So realistic. It even has veins. And look at the size of those chocolate cojones. I wonder if they made it from a mold of someone, you know, like they do with celebrities for wax museums? Oooh, I wonder if we could find out who they made the mold from! Oh, my God, what I’d do to-“
“Put it down before it melts!”
“Well, someone put on her grumpy pants today,” Viola smirked, setting her chocolate prize down on the glass counter. Clearly Viola wasn’t the one wearing the grumpy pants. Viola was the one who was wearing the happy cheerful look on the bright side of everything pants, like she always did.
Then again, Viola wasn’t the one whose half-sister had tricked her into managing an erotic bakery for the next eight weeks.
“How could she not have told me about this?” Poppy wailed, waving her hand at the room around them. The boob cakes tipped with red cherry nipples. The cock popsicle molds. The paint-on chocolate. The many flavors of edible underwear. The display case of lickable lubricant.
“Umm, because it’s Penelope, duh?” Viola knelt in front of the glass-fronted display cases of bakery, examining the contents with fascination.
“True, true. I should have seen this coming. Well, no, I should not have specifically seen THIS coming, because no one ever knows what kind of shenanigans Penelope is going to pull until she actually pulls them, but I should have known that there was disaster in the making when she begged me for a favor, because this is Penelope, after all, and whenever you do a favor for Penelope, it always ends up in disaster, doesn’t it?” Poppy’s voice was rising higher and higher, and she was babbling.
She looked around. She was talking to herself.
Viola had vanished.
Oh, there she was by the front door – talking to a couple of customers.
How had they sneaked in here? Oh, God. Customers. There were actual members of the public in here now, witnessing her shame. She felt a blush staining her cheeks, but she forced a smile on her face and walked over to them.
She needn’t have bothered, because Viola had them eating out of the palm of her hand.
“I’m so glad you’re open again!” a little brunette with a pixie haircut was gushing to Viola. “We tried to come here yesterday and when we saw you were closed we were afraid you were shut down for good. Now, where’s the Amaretto passion potion? My boyfriend LOVES the taste of it.” She winked, and her boyfriend, a hipster with flatironed hair, nodded enthusiastically.
“Oh, I know what you mean,” Viola beamed. “The Amaretto is one of my favorites too. My boyfriend can’t get enough of it.”
Poppy rolled her eyes. Viola was the consummate b.s. artist. The girl could sell snowballs to an Eskimo. The truth was, until Poppy and Viola had walked in to the bakery this morning, they’d never even heard of amaretto passion potion.
“I think it’s on that shelf over there, babe –“ the hipster guy pointed, and the brunette dashed over to grab several bottles.
“You have to try it on your boyfriend, too! I could just eat him up when I put this stuff on him,” the pixie girl burbled enthusiastically, and began describing in explicit detail where exactly she liked to apply the potion.
Poppy felt her cheeks flaming with embarrassment, and sneaked a glance at herself in one of the mirrored walls. Yep, her face was red as a stop sign. It was impossible for her to miss, because all the freaking walls in the bakery were made of mirrors.
It was yet another reason that being inside the store made her cringe. She wasn’t a huge fan of mirrors, especially full length ones. She was a full-figured girl, generally a size 16 or 18, and while she’d come to terms with the fact that she was never going to have the body of a Victoria’s Secret model, she was still self-conscious about her looks.
She’d dressed in a two piece navy pinstripe suit this morning, not sure what to wear to help manage a bakery, but now she felt ridiculously out of place in this lushly decorated den of iniquity.
The bakery was painted pink, with black filigree swirls everywhere and black filigree display shelves. On the right side of the store were the glass display cases of fresh pastry, baked every morning by bakers right on the premises. There were racks of frothy high end lingerie as well, and plastic mannequins throughout the store doing obscene things to plastic molds of pastries, and shelves full of every variety of edible erotic concoction that could be dreamed up by the human imagination.
The door to the office, on the left side of the shop, was sandwiched in between a narrow bookcase full of vibrating lollipops and a mannequin wearing a fishnet bodysuit who was deep-throating a baguette.
Viola, with her purple tipped black hair, lacy black corset top, black jeans and studded black boots, fit right in. Her former college room-mate looked as if she were born for sin. Poppy looked as if she were born to be an accountant.
And now Viola was leading the couple over to a rack of edible underpants, which were pink and tied on the sides with licorice bows.
“Now, before I ring you up, I just want you to get a look at our new line of edible panties. The thongs are especially deelish…or so my boyfriend tells me,” Viola said with a huge grin.
Poppy struggled to quell her rising panic. Part of her wanted to shout “What are you doing?” at Viola, because Viola was making these people stay in the store even longer, but Viola was doing exactly what she was supposed to be doing. Upselling. Helping Penelope make the store a success.
That’s why Viola was dropping three different flavors of underwear at $19.99 each into a glossy pink bag with a black lace pattern, along with the passion potion.
Damn, she was good. The boutique owner who’d fired her was
an idiot; she’d been his best salesperson. Well, granted, he’d grabbed Viola’s ass and Viola had punched him in the nose, which ended up with a frantic call to Poppy at the law school where she worked as a secretary, and a hastily arranged agreement that he wouldn’t press charges and she wouldn’t sue.
But Poppy and Viola had heard through the grapevine that his sales dropped by 25 percent after she left.
Poppy watched Viola expertly swipe the customer’s card through the credit card processor on the cash register, and then the couple left, grinning from ear to ear and in a big hurry.
“I know what they’re going to do when they get home!” Violet trilled. “Gee, this is fun.”
“For you. You’re all uninhibited and loosey goosey and free spirited. I’m a little more…conservative.”
“Maybe working here will be good for you. You need to loosey goosey up a little. When was the last time you got laid?”
Poppy spluttered for a minute before she managed to choke out “I’m sorry, I…what?”
“You heard me. When was the last time you got bonked by something that didn’t plug in?”
“I do not plug things in,” Poppy said virtuously. When Violet gave her the skeptical eyebrow raise– it was always the left eyebrow – she felt compelled to add, “I use things with batteries. Things that plug in scare me – I’m afraid they might electrocute me, in the hoo hoo area.”
Violet nodded in agreement. “That would hurt. The hoo hoo area is very sensitive. But you are avoiding the question, which tells me all I need to know, although I would know anyway, because you would tell me if you’d gotten some. Or I’d see it in your face.” And, smiling smugly, she sailed off down the hallway in the back of the store to the kitchen, to flirt with the bakers some more.
Poppy growled, low in her throat. It was really annoying how often Viola was right.
But she had bigger fish to fry – namely, Penelope. Laid up in her hospital bed, suffering from multiple broken bones after she’d been mowed down by a hit and run driver, she had blinked back tears as she begged Poppy to save Sweet Surrender.
“Just till I get back on my feet…I sank all my money into this place…I’m finally settling down and being responsible and this business means everything to me…my clerks quit and left me and I’m going to lose everything…”
She’d gone on, and on, and on, until she’d convinced Poppy to ditch her legal secretary job for the summer, move five hours from Portland to Port Rollins, and manage the bakery until Penelope got out of the hospital.
She’d just apparently forgotten to mention what type of store Poppy would be managing.
And Penelope knew that the law school which had given Poppy a full scholarship and a job was extremely conservative, and not likely to look favorably on Poppy’s new place of employment.
Which was absolutely typical of Penelope. Poppy had lost count of the times that she’d had to bail her half sister out of one mess after another, and come out the worse for out.
She’d almost gone to jail for her. She’d been on nightmarish double dates with her – dates where Penelope had conveniently forgotten to mention that she and Poppy were only half sisters and they looked nothing alike, so Poppy’s date inevitably looked crestfallen when he saw Penelope’s full-figured sister.
She’d spent thousands of dollars that she could ill afford to buy Penelope’s way out of trouble, paying off store owners for boosted merchandise, paying off traffic tickets, paying her bail, paying for lawyers.
Then Penelope had inherited this bakery from a distant aunt on her side of the family, along with some cash, and she spent all the cash fixing the bakery up…and apparently gave the bakery a unique new twist. Unless Penelope’s 80-something-year-old great-aunt Edna had owned an erotic bakery, but Poppy sincerely doubted that.
Poppy yanked her cell phone from her purse’s outer pocket and dialed Penelope’s number. When she called, as she expected, the phone went straight to voicemail. Next she called the number to the hospital and punched in the extension to her sister’s room, and the phone rang and rang and rang.
Of course. Typical Penelope. First, plunge head first into disaster. Second, call up Poppy, wailing and crying for help and swearing this was the last time ever. Third, once Poppy had bailed her out, drop off the grid for a while until things cooled off.
Except this time she was laid up in a hospital room and couldn’t escape Poppy’s wrath, which Poppy would most definitely be unleashing on her as soon as the bakery closed at 6 p.m.
6 p.m. Oh, God, she was going to handling pornographic pastry for the next ten hours straight. If anyone at Western Christian Law School found out about this, she was toast. Plain toast, not penis shaped toast.
Glumly she surveyed a display of Lickorish, a line of edible flavored body butters, which were set out on a countertop along with an assortment of product sample jars and a little wicker basket of tiny plastic spoons for sampling.
She picked up one of the full sized jars, with its printed label of a man licking the product off a woman’s nipple, and examined it critically.
And she heard the front door open.
Chapter Two
Rafe McDaniel couldn’t help grinning as he walked in the door of Sweet Surrender. The first thing he spotted by the front door was a life size display of a lingerie-clad female mannequin tilting her head back, lips parted, dangling a chocolate penis-shaped lollipop over her mouth as if she were about to deep throat it.
The second thing he spotted was…her.
The voluptuous blonde with golden curls like an angel and a body built for sin, with padding in all the right places, was standing in front of a counter across the room from him, gingerly holding up a glass jar and staring at it like it might turn into a snake and bite her.
She wore a pin striped navy blue business suit which made her look like an accountant who’d wandered into the store by mistake, but he wasn’t fooled. She was a woman built for passion. If anything, the conservative attire made her even more – she looked like a sexy librarian who was waiting to be thoroughly ravished.
He felt an unnerving thrill of attraction running through him, and a rush of blood to the groin.
Down, boy, he scolded himself. I’m here on a recon mission. Not to get lucky.
Although he sure would consider himself lucky if he found himself between the sheets with that blonde.
He didn’t see anyone working behind the counter, and he found himself wandering over to her, as if drawn by a magnetic force.
Poppy stood in the corner, trying to turn invisible in the hope that whoever had just come through the front door would think the store was empty and leave.
No such luck.
“Hello?” A deep voice from behind her said, and she sighed in defeat and spun around to face him.
And couldn’t form words.
The new customer was a man, and he was ridiculously good-looking, with broad shoulders and curly brown hair and caramel brown eyes. He wore a blue polo shirt which revealed the curves and defined lines of his biceps and his tapered waist, and comfortable, worn denim jeans which accentuated his muscled thighs.
And there was something more – the smile that curled his sensual lips and the glint of humor in his eyes. She felt her heart skip a beat, and her nipples hardened and there was a rush of moisture between her legs.
The glass jar slipped from her fingers.
“Hey!” He caught it just in time, then held it up and read the label. “Raspberry Ecstasy body butter. What does Raspberry Ecstasy taste like?”
“Why, I…I don’t know. I’ve never experienced Raspberry ecstasy.” Wow, she was actually forming words. Her lips were forming words and stringing them together in a sentence, and her voicebox was saying them. Very good, Poppy! She gave herself a quick mental pat on the back.
Her usual reaction to stunningly handsome men was to flee, before she had a chance to start stammering and blushing and making an utter fool of herself. Fortunately, she didn�
�t encounter godlike Adonises that often – only when she was hanging out with her sister. Viola’s string of boyfriends were always weird looking, quirky performance artists or musicians.
But here she was, trapped in a corner by a giant slab of man-hunk, and obligated to be nice to all the customers who came in because she’d made a promise to Penelope and she always kept her word. So fleeing was not an option.
“I’ve never experienced Raspberry ecstasy either. Other kinds of ecstasy, yes, but not Raspberry. Shall we try it out?” He was smiling down at her, and the warm glint of humor in his eyes said that he was laughing with her, not at her.
He gently set the glass jar down on the counter and picked up a small sample spoon. “I actually need a woman’s opinion,” he said. “I’m researching options for a bachelorette party. Would you be willing to try a bite?”
Poppy swallowed hard. Try a bite? An image of herself gently biting his inner thigh, then running her tongue over it, flashed through her mind. She flushed. That was not an option that a man who looked like him would offer a girl like her.
Smashwords version Sweet Surrender Page 1
