Free His Command: (Billionaire Bound: Part 1) A Dark New Adult Romance by Ella Slade Page B

she couldn’t think that way. A sale was still a sale. It was better than nothing.
    “Oh, excellent. Let’s see here…” The woman pulled out a large pocketbook and started counting out the total—in dimes. Bethany forced herself to smile through the three minutes of waiting before waving goodbye as she shuffled out of the store with another chime of her bell. Deflated, Bethany ran her fingers over her face.
    As she slid the cash register shut, taking a deep breath with that meager sale accomplished, Bethany finally remembered her mail and started flipping through it. Most of it was just junk mail, ads from other businesses—including another, bigger bakery, she noted with chagrin—but she froze when she recognized the name of her landlord. Groaning inwardly, she opened it quickly and read through it. Oh, great. They had raised her rent. Again. She couldn’t afford $850 a month on this place, not when she was paying $600 for her apartment, and business had been awful lately… At this rate, she wouldn’t make it to her first summer, when things would actually start picking up, she was sure.
    When Bethany had moved here from Wyoming eight months prior, she had been certain she’d be able to start up a bakery in San Francisco and do well. Her parents had argued against her moving here by herself, but she would have never gotten anywhere in Wyoming, not in the small town she had grown up in. Yes, everyone there knew her and loved her baked goods—especially her brownies—but… everyone knew her there. Practically since she had been an infant, everyone knew her, and everyone knew they could probably get her to give away a few things for free. She’d be doing no better there than she was here.
    But she had found this cute little shop that had seemed like it was in a good place, already outfitted for a bakery so she wouldn’t have to do a lot of remodeling, and she had put all of her savings into a down payment so she could get it and move out here. Her parents had helped out a little bit upon seeing how adamant she was, but that support had long since been used up, and now she was the proud owner of this floundering little shop, and the only person she could get to work here was a young man who she was pretty sure was stoned half the time.
    She couldn’t let her parents be right about this, though. It had been Bethany’s dream since she was little to open up her own bakery in a city—to someday, hopefully, be able to open her own chain. At the rate of this project, that was never going to happen… But, please, God, please, at least let her be able to keep this one store.
    Beth was fairly certain there was flour everywhere on her, from her ass to the tip of her nose, but she tried to ignore that as she rolled out a batch of heart-shaped sugar cookies, pressing the cookie cutter into the sweet dough and putting the cookies on the baking sheet. The day had been just as slow as she had feared. A few people came in every once in a while, but the majority of them didn’t buy anything—they didn’t even sample anything. She had thrown herself into her baking to try and keep her frustration and uncertainty in check, but she wasn’t certain how long that was going to last at this rate. She had two weeks to come up with the money for the bank.
    She brushed a curl out of her face, coating it with flour from her fingertips, when the bell over the door chimed again and she looked up. She didn’t dare get too hopeful, but, rubbing her hands on her apron and hoping she didn’t look like too much of a disaster, she hurried out to greet whoever had arrived. “Hi, welcome to Bethany’s Brownie Bakery, how can I—oh, hi, Kylie.”
    The stick-thin blonde looked up at her greeting and grinned at her in amusement from where she was bent over the display by the register. “What, just because you know me, that means I don’t get your customary welcome? And goodness, Beth, you’re covered in flour!” She wrinkled her nose a