Read Online Taste of Romance by Darlene Panzera - Free Book Online Page A

Then Kim saw a man with white hair holding a box close to his chest. “Rachel, I see
     him,” she said into the phone. “He’s over by the Polka Chicks, sitting on a bench,
     east of the cupcake stand.”
    “I’m on my way. Thanks, Kim.”
    Kim put her phone away and turned toward Nathaniel.
    “I need to get back,” she told him.
    “Can I see you tomorrow?” he asked.
    Another date, another kiss, another heartbreak when he left her for Sweden. She shouldn’t
     make the inevitable even worse. She shouldn’t say yes.
    “Yes?”
    She nodded. Common sense told her she should decline, but it looked like her heart
     had a different plan.
    K IM RETURNED TO the Creative Cupcakes booth to find Rachel screaming at Meredith.
    “What happened?” Kim asked, eyeing Meredith’s belligerent expression.
    Rachel swept her arm toward the back of the tent. “The cupcakes are gone!”
    Kim glanced at the empty table where they’d stacked the dozens of cupcake boxes they’d
     unloaded from the Cupcake Mobile earlier that morning.
    “We were pretty busy. Are you sure we didn’t sell them all?” she asked.
    Rachel shook her head. “When I left to find my grandpa, there were still thirty dozen
     boxes on the table. Meredith only sold eight dozen during that time. That means twenty-two
     dozen cupcakes are missing. How could Meredith not notice someone lifting the flap
     and stealing from the back of the tent?”
    “I was too busy to notice,” Meredith shot back. “With both you and Kim gone, I was
     the only one here to serve. You shouldn’t have left me here alone.”
    Kim glanced from one fiery redhead to the other, and guilt crept up her spine. If
     she hadn’t been with Nathaniel and had stayed to help Meredith, this never would have
     happened. There was no way twenty-two dozen cupcakes would have gone missing under her watch.
    “Hey, great cupcakes,” a young man said as he walked by. He took a bite of a cannoli
     cupcake with a Swedish red candy fish on top. “Tastes fantastic!”
    “I didn’t sell him any cupcakes,” Meredith said, her eyes wide. “He could be the thief.”
    “Where did you get that box?” Rachel demanded, stepping toward him. “You didn’t pay
     us for them.”
    “I got them from the troll,” the man said with a grin. “He said everyone had to try
     one.”
    “Troll? ” Kim demanded. “What troll?”
    Rachel pursed her lips. “Maybe a troll followed you from the race.”
    “The guy said he was a troll,” the young man replied, giving them both a mischievous
     grin.
    “Wait!” Kim shouted, running after him. But he had disappeared in the crowd. Then
     she realized that several other people around her were eating their cupcakes.
    “Excuse me,” she asked an older woman. “Where did you get that cupcake?”
    “A handsome man gave it to me,” the woman told her.
    Handsome? They had a handsome thief who claimed he was a troll?
    “What did he look like?” she persisted.
    “He was tall,” the woman answered.
    The next woman Kim stopped said, “He was short. He went that way.”
    Kim ran down the path in the direction the woman indicated and came across more and
     more people eating Creative Cupcakes.
    A group of kids laughed when Kim asked about the cupcakes, and one of them said, “The
     troll had white hair and a beard and a pointy green hat. He was fierce and ugly and
     handed us the cupcakes and ran away.”
    A mother with two young children told her, “He was such a nice man. Very kind. Not
     many people do good deeds for others anymore.”
    “What do you mean by ‘good deeds’?”
    “When I told him we didn’t have any money, he gave us the cupcakes for free.”
    Kim returned to the Creative Cupcakes tent and discovered the Cupcake Mobile had left.
    “Mike drove Grandpa Lewy home and went to get us more cupcakes,” Rachel told her.
     “Did you learn anything about our thief?”
    Kim nodded. “People described him as tall, short, handsome, ugly, young, old,