Free Make Your Move by Samantha Hunter Page A

random.
    “Hey, did you ever call that guy who stopped by and wanted to hook up with you?”
    “No. He came in again, though, and I had to tell him no, in no uncertain terms. I can’t expose Anna to this right now. She has enough to deal with without me dating.”
    Jodie nodded, patting Ginger’s shoulder. She wasn’t a mother, so she had no idea, and didn’t want to say more than she had.
    “Do you think that could have ticked him off?”
    Ginger’s eyes widened, but then she shook her head. “He didn’t even get upset. He just said if I ever changed my mind, to call, and that he’d still stop by if that was okay, to see me here. I didn’t want to encourage him, so I told him…oh crap. I told him customers are always welcome.”
    “Ouch. That was a bit cold.”
    Ginger’s back stiffened. “I didn’t want to encourage him.”
    “I know, I know. I’m sorry. I guess I’m trying to think of who else would do this, and your new admirer is the only other one I thought of. He doesn’t seem the type, but you never can tell.”
    “Other one? Who else are you thinking about?”
    “Jason—he was pretty pissed the other day. I just find it hard to think a guy of his stature would do something this…low.”
    “Then again, he might be smart enough to know that no one would suspect him, maybe.”
    Jodie nodded. She hadn’t thought of it like that.
    The police were done, and filed out the door. Now allthat was left was cleaning up the mess. Jodie closed the door as best she could behind them. A new lock would be installed before the end of the day, and she turned to hug Ginger tight.
    “I think your idea about Jason could be right,” Dan said from the doorway, joining their conversation.
    Jodie turned, a slight riff of some new emotion wafting through her as she made eye contact with him, even in the middle of this mess.
    “Dan, I know you don’t like him, and I don’t, either, but would he really stoop to something like this? Why?”
    “There’s only one good reason, especially since there was no money in the register and the safe is intact.”
    Awareness dawned painfully. “He came after the icing recipe.”
    “I’m afraid so.”
    She looked around and rushed to the back refrigerators. “All of the premixed icing I had made is gone, as well. 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’dbeen 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