Read Online Sugar Rush by Rachel Astor - Free Book Online

would be nice pairings with sweet treats. But the wine wasn’t what got their attention.
    “This is maybe the most delicious thing I have ever eaten,” Dulcie said, trying her best to eat Nick’s cupcake in a ladylike fashion, though it was so not working.
    “Coming from someone who owns a candy store, that’s saying something,” Jess said, unable to eat hers in any sort of restrained fashion, either.
    “It’s almost like they’re a cupcake-brownie hybrid or something. There’s a satisfying caramelizing going on,” Constance said between mouthfuls. “The texture is like nothing I’ve ever had before.”
    “You have to ask him where he got these,” Lila said, and Dulcie didn’t disagree. “There’s no logo on the box.”
    They were almost good enough to risk another encounter as awkward as the one tonight, but she only nodded absently. The cupcake had taken over her entire being.
    As she walked home, though, disappointment flooded her. She knew in her heart none of the candies would get anywhere in the competition. Nick’s comments had proven as much—each one had been a pierce to her heart. The judges would yawn and think, Been there, done that.
    Things were not very candy coated, to say the least.
    Thankfully, Grams wasn’t home.
    Dulcie eased open the door to her mom’s old room and snuck over to the window sill, pulling her knees up, clinging on to them fetal position style. God, she missed her so much…talking, laughing, being a daughter.
    She leaned her head back and closed her eyes. The taste test had solidified what she feared: they didn’t have anything fresh enough to contend. In a contest like this, where originality made up a huge portion of the voting criteria, Candy Land Confections was doomed. And if the store was doomed, what did that mean for Dulcie? For her future, and for her mother’s dream?
    Dulcie picked up her mom’s photo book—it always brought her closer to her—and fiddled with a corner where the paper had lifted over the years, trying not to let the tears that threatened fall. The stupid lump in her throat hurt so badly, like she’d swallowed a Sour Cherry Drop, which stuck right in the middle of her esophagus. Soon the lump subsided and the tears settled back to where they came from.
    She smoothed her hand over the inside front cover, wishing that instead of the stupid book, she could touch her mom, just one more time.
    She felt something strange under the page, though, and wondered how she’d never noticed it before. A bump formed beneath the paper, like something was sealed inside.
    She glanced both ways, even though she was alone, and peeled at the loose corner. It gave way a little, pulling up without tearing, sealed with an adjustable adhesive. Sure enough, underneath the false page appeared an envelope.
    An envelope marked with the words top secret.
    If she knew her mother—and she liked to think she did—top secret meant one of two things. One, she’d become a spy for an unknown secret organization, ridding the world of overweight evildoers by forcing them into slow death by candy, or two, she’d continued to create new recipes during her illness.
    The envelope happened to be pretty close in size to the entries in the Spell Book of Sweets.
    Dulcie tore into it and sped through the recipes, five in all.
    They were magnificent. It was as if they were sent from the heavens in her mother’s beautiful—though a little scrawlier than usual—handwriting.
    She let out a long, deep breath, stress blowing across the room and out the window.
    She was going to be saved.

     
    “Ladies, I give you the Salted Caramel Apple Enchantment,” Dulcie said, smoothing the page over the worktable.
    As Ava and Constance leaned in reading, both let out a tiny gasp.
    “Where did you get this?” Constance asked, though Dulcie was sure she knew immediately who’d designed the recipe.
    “I was in Mom’s room looking at a book of old pictures she had of some of our candies and