Bonbon With the Wind by Dorothy St James

Author:Dorothy St James [James, Dorothy St]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Barking Dog Press
Published: 2019-12-08T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17

At the end of the day, I flipped the open sign over to closed and went straight to the chocolate stash I kept hidden in a small drawer underneath the cash register and found a bar of pure Amar chocolate. After eating the chocolate bar bursting with the fruity flavors of the rain forest, I texted Harley and told him about my visit from Gibbons. Harley was busy filing papers for insurance claims. He returned my text, saying that he was still in downtown Charleston. We made plans to discuss everything that evening.

With that handled, I spent the rest of the day on the phone with suppliers from all over the region, desperate to get someone to deliver the ingredients we needed in order to run a chocolate business.

“Sorry. Really, sorry, ma’am. But there’s nothing I can do.” The man I had on the phone did sound rather distraught. He was a representative from the thirteenth company I’d called…and the last one on my list. “We won’t be able to get any deliveries out to your area for at least another week. We lost nearly our entire stock when Avery took off our warehouse’s roof. It’ll take time to restock. We’re having to ship in supplies from sources around the country.”

“I see.” I bit my bottom lip. The pantry’s shelving in front of me was empty. No ingredients meant we couldn’t rebuild our inventory of truffles and bonbons. We were even out of coffee, which meant unless Bertie had had better success on her shopping run we wouldn’t be able to open tomorrow. Or the day after that. Or the day after that.

After hanging up with the supply company, I mumbled several inventive curses (most involving fudge).

“What’s that?” Bertie asked as she came into the kitchen. She had a paper grocery bag in each hand. Neither looked terribly full.

“There won’t be any deliveries of goods to our area for at least another week. Please tell me you had better luck than I did.”

She placed the shopping bags on the counter. “Unfortunately, no. The shelves are awfully bare in the grocery stores. I suppose they’re dealing with many of the same suppliers you’ve been talking to.” She pulled out two vacuum sealed bags of coffee. “Since I paid retail prices for all of this, we might not make any money on anything we sell.”

I nodded as I helped unload the bags. In addition to the coffee, Bertie had purchased organic peanut butter, a couple of jars of maraschino cherries, even more jars of condensed milk, a few quarts of heavy cream, a bag of powdered sugar, a bag of brown sugar, and a bag of organic crispy rice cereal. It gave us enough ingredients to make some of our more popular chocolates.

“It’s a good thing we didn’t need bread or plain milk,” Bertie said as she handed me several receipts. “All three grocery stores I visited are plum out of essentials.”

I looked at the receipts and my eyes bugged out. She hadn’t been kidding about us not making money on anything we sold.

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