Love, Chocolate, and Beer (Cactus Creek #1)(39)

That was too fast, even for him. His heart had to know better; following his normal MO of falling hard and fast was a trip to heartbreak city where Dani was concerned. She’d made it clear she didn’t want the white-picket-fence ending with him. No...it wasn’t possible.

Then Quinn said Dani’s name again and the unmistakable gallop in his ribcage smacked the logicizing right out of his brain.

Well, apparently, it was possible.

Damn. When his heart set him up to fail, it evidently liked to swing for the fences.

His head was still spinning from this revelation when Quinn elatedly slapped a printout against his chest and turned her laptop around to demand his full attention.

Looking at the order on the screen he shrugged, puzzled at the degree of her excitement. “So Dani ordered some chocolates. Big deal. Most of our distributors get at least triple that.”

“Yes, but the question is why she ordered that chocolate. She’s planning something—a counter attack. And she’s using our chocolate to do it. I repeat, I love that woman.”

“You do know that whatever she has planned will probably skewer us.”

She dismissed that with a wave of her hand. “It doesn’t matter. All publicity is good publicity. Any tactical maneuvers she makes continues to build the hype over both your businesses.” She preened. “Our website and blog have been getting a ton of traffic since. Folks all across Arizona are weighing in...albeit, a lot for beer over chocolate, but who cares.” She swatted her hand against the shop’s financial tally paperwork she’d shoved at him. “Our sales quintupled this week alone, and that’s not even counting the advance orders for our Valentine’s Day home kits.” Tapping her finger on her chin thoughtfully, she continued to leave the muzzle off all the lightning-fast inner workings of her mind, “Maybe I should slide a mention into a few local news anchors’ twit feeds throughout the week? That might get them curious enough to look into it for a human interest story or something, get our foot traffic up even more.”

Luke shook his head in amazement. When it came to marketing, Quinn left no rock unturned. “Sometimes you scare me.”

“But most times you love me. Like now.” She pulled open a box sitting on her desk.

He leaned over to peer inside at its contents. “What are these?”

“You’d mentioned wanting something like it for women to personalize the chocolate valentines for their men. Well, I’m delivering. A week early. These are design transfer sheets similar to the ones you use to put our gold emblem on our elite chocolates. I had the same company make short little gold messages instead—just a few key phrases of our choosing. Sort of like a cross between M&Ms and candy hearts, with a provocatively sweet twist.”

Luke’s eyes widened. Provocative was putting it mildly for some of the messages.

“Oh, relax,” she said in a rare display of identity swapping with him. “They go on the bottom of the chocolates like a hidden message so they’ll be the couple’s secret. Plus, since they’re simple heat-transfers, customers can easily DIY them for their homemade chocolates. Or, for the women who’ll be buying instead of making their valentine chocolates, we can apply whatever messages they want to anything here in the shop as well.” She grinned. “I made sure to come up with a wide variety of messages—some sweet and heartfelt and ‘old school,’ others descriptively sexy. The extra racy ones that made your eyes pop earlier are courtesy of my sister’s dirty mind; anything more, ah, personal would have to be custom ordered, of course.” She looked at him expectantly. “So what do you think? If they get popular, we can do this all year round.”

He was impressed. “These are perfect. I have to hand it to you. You always manage to take my ideas and give ‘em a shot of steroids.”

“Try nuclear steroids. Check this.” She opened up their Facebook page, showing the small get-the-word-out contest she’d made.

Luke scanned the directions, impressed at both the simplicity and the sentiment of the contest. Folks just had to post to Facebook a photo of a place in Arizona they thought made a great romantic date site and then tag Desert Confections in the picture to get it to show in the Desert Confections album along with a brief description of what made the location romantic.

“We’ve already got dozens of entries, some of places I never even heard of.” Quinn’s eyes danced with excitement. “Everyone wants to win the ‘Chocolate Foreplay for Two’ kit.”

He arched an eyebrow in question, but before he could ask, she jumped up and grabbed the basket of assorted chocolates he’d started assembling yesterday.

At least he thought it was the same basket.

“What’s the ‘Chocolate Foreplay for Two’ kit you ask?” she offered animatedly. “Why, that’s the new name for this product gift basket you were working on, which I took the liberty of spicing up. It now includes an assortment of bonbons with classic aphrodisiac fillings, a chocolate mint drizzle to be served first cold then hot, and a strawberry wine cordial / whipped truffle duo to be, errr, ‘shared’ creatively.” She beamed. “I was thinking it’s high time we show folks how chocolate can be sexy as well as sweet. What do you think?”

Luke whistled in admiration. “Geez, woman. Did you even sleep the last few nights?”