Total pages in book: 70
Estimated words: 68515 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 343(@200wpm)___ 274(@250wpm)___ 228(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 68515 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 343(@200wpm)___ 274(@250wpm)___ 228(@300wpm)
The lady, who’d obviously been recording the entire thing with her phone for the ‘experience,’ swiveled her phone toward me.
But I didn’t stop long enough to wait for her reaction.
I walked inside, pulled the door closed off of her foot, and kept walking around the counter and into the back.
“Make sure the door stays closed, y’all don’t need to be in here freezing,” I said as I passed Noel and Peter.
Peter gave a chin jerk to acknowledge that he’d heard me, but Noel tossed me a saucy kissy face, making me roll my eyes.
Noel was a weird girl.
Sometimes, I wasn’t sure if she was interested in fucking me or fucking with me.
Not that I’d ever touch her. She was seventeen.
But still.
“Whoa,” Gracelynn said as she all but ran into me as I prowled through the door that led to the kitchen. “Slow down, tiger.”
Tiger.
I liked that she called me that.
“Sorry.” I thrust the coffee in her direction. “Usually, these are piping hot and would practically melt your tongue on the first sip. But it’s so fuckin’ cold, now inside, too, that it should be fine. It’s plenty cool.”
She took the cup with a grateful smile and said, “What kind did you get me?”
I grinned at her. “The night that you were sitting next to me on that log, you muttered something under your breath about coffee. How coffee was meant to be tasted, not flavored and drowned. So, I took a leaping guess and got you black coffee.”
Her eyes went huge. “You heard that?”
I nodded once. “I heard everything.”
Then I told her about my plan for tomorrow.
Her eyes went soft at the mention of what I’d do with the food if we didn’t open, and together we got started on everything for tomorrow, too.
In all, we finished eight hours’ worth of work in six. Which was what we’d intended, because by the time we were done, and leaving for the day, shit had gone from bad to worse.
The rain we’d gotten that morning was now freezing.
And there was no doubt in my mind that we would be closing the shop tomorrow.
Because where ice was, downed power lines came, unable to hold the weight of the ice on the lines.
“All right,” I announced as I walked into the front room. “The limit on cookies is now up. You can get as many as you want in the next two minutes. I’m closing for the day so my employees can get home safely.”
There was a gasp, and then the eight customers, which had thankfully slowed down from this morning’s crowd, cheered.
A couple of months ago, I’d put a limit on how many things a single person could get in a visit. Three bakery items.
Which had pissed a lot of locals off.
But it was the only thing that kept the crowds happy.
And honestly, I loved pissing people off. It was my favorite pastime.
But today, shit was about to go down. As in, I was about to close six hours early.
I was tired. Cold. And horny.
Three very bad combinations.
One, I could handle. All three? That was a recipe for disaster.
“Oh, holy shit,” one particularly excited woman with the skin the color of the deepest ebony exclaimed. “I’m about to buy this whole fuckin’ store out. Wait until I show up at home with all this. They’re gonna declare me queen.”
Gracelynn, who’d followed me out to see the weather out in front of the store, looked back behind herself with a grin.
“Make sure you get some cookies. The chocolate chip are my personal favorite. They, by far, are the best cookie you’ll ever put in your mouth.” Gracelynn snickered. “Warm them up for eight seconds in the microwave, and they get even better.”
The woman clapped her hands like she was about to go to town, and then proceeded to wait until all the other customers had left to declare that she wanted every cookie left in the shop.
In the end, the only items we had left in the display cases were a few slices of quiche, some bread, and a couple of stray cookies that’d been broken throughout the day.
“All right,” I said to Peter and Noel. “Get home. Text me when you get there so I don’t worry about you. Take whatever you want with you. And plan on having the day off tomorrow.”
They left without another word, and I gathered up everything that was left and shoved it into a large box to take with me.
“We should clean up and have your other chick notified not to come in. This is getting worse by the second,” Gracelynn muttered, watching Noel and Peter leave with a small smile on her face.
I did just that.
She was right.
By the time we got everything cleaned up, not only were the roads covered in ice, but they were also covered in a fine layer of snow, hiding the ice.