Make Your Move - By Samantha Hunter Page 0,24
None of the canisters are here. They’re all gone.”
“He’d need that to run tests, to back up the formula,” Dan said.
“But isn’t it patented or something? What can he do?” Ginger asked.
“He could share it on the Internet or do any number of things to ruin our sales. People wouldn’t be able to get hold of the ingredients, but commercial manufacturers could, and then they just tweak something, call it something different, and there you have it,” Dan said, wiping flour from the front of the designer shirt he’d been wearing all morning—the same one he’d come to her apartment in the night before.
“Or he could sell it, or who knows what else. But why wreck the rest of the place?” Ginger asked.
“To make it look like thugs did it. We can’t prove he stole it. We can’t prove it’s him, unless we can catch him with the icing, but Jason is too clever to allow that to happen. But I know it in my gut,” Dan said angrily. “And he’s going to pay, one way or the other.”
There it was again, Jodie thought, that little riff of excitement as she watched Dan’s jaw square and his eyes darken. Kind of like when he was having an orgasm….
I am a sick, sick woman getting turned on in the middle of this chaos, she thought with a sigh. But now that the barn door was open, so to speak, on her and Dan having a friends-with-benefits relationship, she wanted him even more than she had before. And she was only now willing to be really honest with herself about how long she had been fantasizing about sleeping with Dan.
And she was happy a million times over that she hadn’t done the deed with Jason Kravitz. What a monumental mistake that would have been. Jason had obviously been a stand-in for Dan, anyway, and the original was always better than a facsimile, she mused, and then turned her attention to the problem at hand.
“We can’t know for sure who it was, unless the cops turn up a usable print, or some other kind of evidence,” she said. “But Jason has an ego the size of King Kong. He’s going to want us to know he did it, and he’ll enjoy the fact that we can’t do a thing about it without any evidence. He’d get such joy out of thinking he’d outsmarted us.”
Dan met her eyes over the top of the case and nodded.
“Well, he’s in for a surprise, then. When he makes his next move, we’ll figure out how to beat him at his own game.”
“And until then, we have massive cleaning and baking to do,” Ginger said with a sigh. “I’ll call Mom and see if Anna can stay overnight.”
Jodie nodded, waving Dan off. “You don’t have to stay, Dan. I know you probably have more important stuff to do.”
He looked surprised. “Nothing is more important than being here with you right now. I want to help,” he said plainly, his eyes and tone speaking volumes. Jodie couldn’t help but be touched.
Ginger cleared her throat awkwardly. “Okay then. I think I’ll start working out back so that we can get some baking done as soon as possible. Not that things aren’t already pretty warm around here,” she added with a chuckle as she left them alone.
Jodie and Dan smiled at each other. They’d figure it out, she knew. Together, like they always had.
TWO DAYS LATER THEY were open for business while a contractor finished replacing some of the casing glass that had been wrecked by their intruder. Life was almost normal again. There had been no word from Jason, and Dan had said he wasn’t around the offices at all. They could simply speculate he was holed up somewhere, trying to decipher the frosting formula.
Every time Jodie thought of it, she wanted to strangle Jason Kravitz. But as time passed, she wondered if they didn’t have it wrong? Maybe it was a random break-in? Her cookies were well advertised. Maybe it wasn’t Jason. More likely some puritanical freak who didn’t approve of her Passionate Hearts cookies or their side effects had finally decided to cause her some trouble.
They did live in a large city, and there was crime. Dan was still sure Jason was to blame, but Jodie wondered if that wasn’t just a reaction to the fact that she and Jason had almost hooked up.
That was now in the past. They were exhausted but couldn’t seem to keep their