Once Upon A Chocolate Kiss

He fit her perfectly, she thought, as she tried to help him limp through the public area and into the back communal living room.

“What happened!” Angela McCade, sitting on the sofa, book in her lap, jumped up from her seat.

“Meet Angela, one of my boarders,” Samantha said. “This is Richard Moore,” Samantha said to Angela, who came forward to help.

“Nice to meet you,” Richard said, and Samantha thought again what a wonderful voice he had.

She helped him get seated on her sofa. “Well,” she breathed out, tired from trying to help the huge man. “Welcome to my home.” It was nearly a question.

Richard put her instantly at ease. “It’s beautiful.”

Samantha felt herself blushing. He looked right at home in her living room, she thought. She couldn’t believe her reaction to him. He was too handsome and too charming.

She was in so much trouble.

She had better keep her mind on other things.

“What happened to your ankle?” Angela asked.

“I’ll be right back,” Samantha murmured to Mr. Moore, sitting on the overstuffed sofa, his shoe and sock lying next to him. “Angie, why don’t you help me?”

She turned and headed toward the back room, past the old elevator that led up to her grandmother’s extra rooms, where Samantha had lived for several years. She crossed the cement floor to the freezer located in a small storeroom near the back door. Angela was right on her heels, her long golden-brown hair flopping in a ponytail.

When they were out of earshot, Angela asked, “Where’d you get the knight in shining armor?” Her light blue eyes flashed with curiosity as she waited for Samantha to explain.

Samantha shook her head at her young friend. “I didn’t ‘get’ him anywhere. And though I will agree he certainly has knight qualities—” like being the most gorgeous man she’d ever met…she allowed her smile to fade “—I’m afraid he didn’t rescue me. Exactly.”

At the last word Angela groaned. “What did you do this time?”

“Hey, it’s not always my fault,” Samantha protested, hunting through the dim supply room’s shelves until she found the ice pack. Going to the huge steel freezer, she pulled it open and patiently filled the bag. Unfortunately, Angela knew her too well. When Angela simply stood there, her arms crossed, Samantha sighed. “Okay. Okay. I had forgotten my purse in the truck and was in a hurry to get it because I hadn’t locked the doors.”

“You did that to his foot?” Angela exclaimed. Angela had many sounds, good and bad. This one was definitely chastising in its own way, with a hint of I knew it added in for good measure.

Samantha simply nodded. At only twenty-two Angela had the ability to make the older Samantha feel like a little kid. “It was an accident.”

“You were worried about today, weren’t you?” Angela asked, referring to a meeting they’d had earlier to discuss the store’s condition.

Samantha sighed. “Maybe a bit distracted.”

Angela reached out and touched Samantha’s arm. “Don’t be. The business hasn’t failed yet. We still have Valentine’s Day to pull it out of the red.”

“But we didn’t at Christmastime,” she said quietly.

They’d been through so much together in the past five years. Angela had come to work for her when she was seventeen and had worked her way through college in this shop while pursuing her veterinarian degree. She was Sam’s assistant manager and definitely someone she confided in.

Since her grandmother’s first major stroke fifteen years ago, Samantha had been struggling to make a success of this store. Her mother hadn’t wanted anything to do with it—until her grandmother became an invalid. And then she only wanted it for the money she could milk out of it for her drinking habit. That had ended five years ago when her mother ran off with some trucker passing through town. Her mother died a month later in an accident. Unlike her mother, Samantha loved the store. She could remember the excitement of standing on a footstool so she could reach the cabinets to help stir the fudge, learning how to tell by smell and feel if the confections were just right. Fifteen years she’d worked to keep the store running. Everyone in the area knew and loved the candy she made. But new people were moving in, new stores, new competition that had the money to put into advertising and mass marketing of their goods. New malls were opening, like the one out on the edge of town. A tricounty area endeavor, this mall was going to revive all of the nearby towns and give people a place to go other than the bigger cities, which were located as close as a couple of hours from here.

“Maybe our Christmas sales weren’t the best, but I bet that store down the street isn’t going to be open by Valentine’s Day. They still have too much work to do. So that means we still have a chance to turn this place around.”

“You’ve been talking to my father,” Samantha said curtly. Her father wasn’t around much, but whenever he had a job in town, he made sure to stop by, or to pump Angela for information. And Angela always imparted the information that Samantha’s father passed on to her.

Angela shrugged. “I was at the Mexican restaurant and he happened to be there too, and I asked him about Dunnington’s.”

Her father had worked on many projects at the mall since it’d gone up this year. Samantha didn’t need her father’s ill-timed advice when she was struggling for her very livelihood.

“I’m only concerned about the store,” Angela said softly to her boss.

Lately Samantha simply wanted to give up and say God had forsaken her. Why had she struggled so hard with this store, only to see it sinking now? Putting her father to the back of her mind, she concentrated instead on what Angela had said about Valentine’s Day.

“I don’t know, Angie. I’m not sure I even have enough money to keep us afloat until February. I do know it’s going to take a miracle to keep this place open, though.”

“It’s all Dunnington’s fault,” Angela said now.

Ten years ago Dunnington’s Incorporated had decided to leave the shores of Ireland and the surrounding area and travel West. Landing in America like the pilgrims of so long ago, Dunnington’s had forged ahead to explore the new country and stake its claim. In a short time it had opened its first overseas store in New York City, and the previously unknown company had been an instant success. The ability to walk in and get whatever one wanted from whatever part of the world one wanted had intrigued the public as much as the way Dunnington’s advertised its store.

“They certainly haven’t helped, especially with their ad campaign,” Samantha admitted, thinking about how smart they’d been with their commercials, and how much money and time they devoted to advertising.

The commercial she most remembered was their first one, which had actually been one of the original commercials from Ireland. It opened with a young man dressed in a kilt, walking out, bagpipes in hand. He ambled across a grassy knoll with a loch in the background. A soft wind blew, whipping at the edge of his red, yellow and green kilt, causing the white shirt to ripple across his body as he walked. And he played a beautiful old love song—“Greensleeves.” Then others appeared in the background, in the slight fog that blew as they walked, and the young man let go of the pipe and began to sing in a gentle Irish brogue.

Dunnington’s had been smart, all right. Its commercial could sell anything.

“Still, you have to admit, though they had a great campaign, they didn’t have any stores here,” Samantha added. “So, that isn’t the root of our problems.”

Finally, Angela spoke. “I guess you don’t want Uncle Mitch to run them out of town?” she quipped.

Samantha laughed, though it was tinged with a bit of melancholy. “I don’t think that falls within the sheriff’s job, Angie,” she said wryly.

Angela shrugged. “Well, God can work bigger miracles than the luck of that Irishman can boast stores.”

Samantha nodded. “Anyway,” she said, dragging her friend back to the present, “I don’t want to rehash anything more about that nightmare down the street and how it’s going to affect our business.”

She took a deep calming breath.

“Here.” She shoved the ice pack at Angela. “Go put this on our guest’s foot while I make him up some hot chocolate. How’s Granny?” she asked as she closed the freezer and turned toward the kitchen. Angela blocked her way.

“Granny’s fine. She’s finally asleep. But I want to hear the rest of this before I go,” she protested, not moving aside to allow Samantha to pass.

At least she wasn’t rehashing their financial state, Samantha thought. So, she answered quickly, hoping to put it to rest. “I ran the man over. I hurt him and offered him a place to get some treatment since he wouldn’t go to the hospital and is new to town.”

“You ran him over? In the truck?”

Samantha frowned. “No, I ran into him and knocked him down.”

“He’s new to town?” Angela asked.

Samantha sighed. “Yes. He’s new here. Got in last night,” Samantha finally said, staring at Angela and waiting.

“You certainly learned a lot about him in a short time,” Angela said, lifting her eyebrows.