Her Chocolate Fantasy

Her Chocolate Fantasy

By

Jamallah
Bergman

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

This is a work of fiction. All characters, places, businesses, and incidents are from the author’s imagination, or they are used fictitiously and are definitely fictionalized. Any trademarks or pictures herein are not authorized by the trademark owners and do not in any way mean the work is sponsored by or associated with the trademark owners. Any trademarks or pictures used are specifically in a descriptive capacity.

No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form (electronic or print) without permission from the author. Please do not participate in piracy or violating the author’s rights.

February
© 2014,
Jamallah Bergman

Cover Artist: Fiona Jayde

Editor: Nicholas Denmon

Dedication

First and foremost, I want to thank the two people who gave me the idea for ‘Her Chocolate Fantasy’ for without them, this story would have never been written. Thank you Lindsay Hutchison and to the person that I affectionately will refer to as “Cindy Lou Who” as to not give out her identity at this time. But honestly without these two ladies, I wouldn’t have brought this story to you all.

To Nicholas Denmon for helping me
with getting started on my dream as far helping me with finding someone to do edits.

To Fiona Jayde for bringing my cover to life, it was so much fun working with you and I cannot wait to bring you more of my idea for future covers for future books.

To Jimmy Thomas for not only being on my cover to my 1
st
self-published book but also for being such an amazing friend to not only me but to all of us authors you’ve helped out over the years. Thank You.

To Amy Newborn for telling me to make this story longer when she read the original story.

To my familyfor always standing by me through all of the obstacles that I’ve endured over the years. I want to thank you for being with me while I’ve gone through this.

And last but not least, I want to thank my fans and friends. I want to thank you for always believing in me and my work. For telling me how much you’ve enjoyed my stories. For messaging me when you want to ask questions about my books or just to ask questions period. I’ve always been there to take my time to answer them all and I’m grateful. I will always be here for my fans, telling story after story about ideas that I’ve always enjoyed writing about. Thank you for believing in me, for believing in my work for without you, I wouldn’t be here.

Chapter One

I love chocolate.

Let’s get that perfectly clear before I go on with the story. I’ve always had a thing for chocolate. I mean, what woman doesn’t love all things chocolate?

When we
were kids, we devoured the stuff on a daily basis, to the point that we would end up with the worst tummy ache of all time by the end of the day. Then we would hear the never-ending barrage of “I told you so” from our moms. “Well, that’s what you get for eating too much chocolate in the first place. Maybe next time you’ll listen to your momma when she tells you not to be eating so much dang chocolate all the time.”

But did we heed the warning
? Of course not; we were kids. We didn’t care what our parents told us. As long as we got more chocolate the next day, after our stomachsfelt better, we were alright.

My fascination with chocolate continued throughout my years. As I got older, my taste for chocolate grew beyond my childhood
preferences for Hershey’s and M & M’s, to Lindt, Cadbury, Ghirardelli, and Godiva, to name a few. For years, friends of mine would refer to me as “The Chocolate Chick” because I would often have chocolate somewhere near me, whether it was on my desk or in my purse.

“I swear you
’ve got a sickness or something, woman,” my friend, Darla, always told me. Darla had been my cubicle buddy for a number of years, and I treasured our friendship throughout that time. She was what I always referred to as the “Barbara Walters” of the office. It seemed that this woman would have the news on anybody as far as gossip. I had never seen anything like it before in my life for as soon as a person came into the office, she would have the 411 on them. I would tell her that this was the wrong line of work she was in and that she needed to been some kind of private investigator or something. But that wasn’t what made Darla so unique. The thing that set her apart from all the rest was her hair.

I thought I was a lover of the 80s
. Well, I mainly enjoyed the music and some of the shows from back then. But Darla had carried the hairstyle of that decade with her and wore her long, blonde hair permed, teased real big, and covered her abundance of curls in layers of hairspray. I tried and get her to change her hairdo and all, but of course, that would never happen. She kept it exactly the same for as long as I’ve known her, as if she were some eighties-rock groupie. I mean, seriously, if she was walking down the hallway and came around the corner, you would know it was her because of her hair.

“
A sickness, you say?” I told Darla now. “Well, that’s a first. Usually, you tell me I have an obsession or something, but this is the first time you’ve called my love of chocolate a sickness.” I pulled out a Hershey’s Kiss from the drawer of my desk.

“Your fixation with chocolate
. I swear if you went to give blood, when they drew yours, instead of blood, they’d end up with a pint of chocolate syrup.”

I tried not to laugh
, but the idea of such a thing happeningstruck me as too funny, and I laughed so hard I snorted. “Now, you have to admit, I have cut down on my intake of chocolate. I’m not overboard like I was years ago.”

“Yeah
, that’s true, but honestly, has there been anything else besides chocolate you have obsessed over?” Darla asked.

My heart kind of skipped a beat for a moment
, and I grinned.

“Oh
, whatever secret you’re hiding must be good woman, so speak woman speak.”

Moving my chair in closer to her, I had to admit I was happy we shared a cubicle
, because nine times out of ten, if we didn’t sit in such close proximity, we’d be on the phone talking instead of working.“Well, there is one thing I’ve never tried before, but I’ve always wanted to. Have you ever heard of a human sundae?”

She shook her head
, which only made me smile even more.

“The idea is to have a guy l
ie down while you pour whatever sundae topping you want on him. After that, you get to lick it off him
real
slow. I’ve always wanted to do that but haven’t found the right guy yet.”

“Now that’s something I could try with
someone; the messier the better. But who would you want to do it with, if you had the chance, Sarah?”

I honestly d
idn’t know why she had to ask a question like that. Rolling my eyes, I glanced toward the office. Visible through the open door, he sat at his desk talking to someone on the phone. I had been ogling this hunk of a man since he first stepped into our office, which has to be about four years ago now. He oozed sex, from his nicely tailored suits, to his dark brown hair, to his gorgeous smile and dimples. Oh my God! Did I mention even his dimples were sexy? My dream man come to life, working right there with us every day.

His name was Max
well I. Taylor, and for the life of me, I never found out what the “I” in his name meant. I honestly didn’t care, really. As long as I could watch the man walk around the office in those tight-fitting pants, I didn’t care about much of anything else.

“Damn
, he just keeps looking better every fucking day. How can a man that fine work at our company? He should be a model or something.” I forced myself to look away before he caught me staring.

“Have you tried to talk with him
? You should invite him for coffee.”

“Once and only once did I get the nerve to even say hello to him
, and that was a year after he got here. I mean, he would call me sometimes and ask me about certain files and such, and when he did, I would say something like, ‘How do you like working here?’ or ‘How are you feeling today?” or my favorite… ‘Nice weather we are having, aren’t we?’ So yeah, you should know the answer to that question.” With a shrug, I turned back to my work, answering phones while typing in data on my computer.

I
still had my dreams. At least I could be happy with those.

Later on
, when I had to make a run to the bathroom, I rushed around the corner and felt as if I’d literally run into a brick wall. All I saw were folders and papers cascading down in front of meto land at my feet in a huge pile. Whatever I had run into without looking was large and solid, and when I looked up, I discovered I’d about bowled over my six-foot-tall, hunky man of my dreams. The second thing I noticed was that he smelled like heaven on earth.

He stared at me with the most inquisitive looking eyes
, scanning my face as if to see what I was going to say or do.

I mumbled a quick
, “I’m so sorry,” and then got down on all fours and picked up the mess I’d made.

A moment later, he joined me, kneeling beside me on the floor.
I looked over to see him smiling at me while I frantically grabbed folders and other important-looking documents.

“No problem at all
, Sarah. I wasn’t looking where I was going, either.”

His voice was so smooth and soothing
, I immediately wondered how he would sound over the phone or while holding me in his arms, while whispering in my ear. Damn, I really needed to find a man…or maybe just get laid sometime within this millennium.

Wait just one minute
. Did he just say my name
?

We
both stood, and I handed over all the papers I’d scooped up.

“It was my fault entirely
,” I said. “I wasn’t looking where I was going, either.”

“Having a good day so far
, Sarah?” he asked, changing the subject.             

All I could do was nod and smile like some goofy teenager dealing with her first
-time crush. “Yeah, it’s been a good day today, and you?”

“I’ll be much better once I get some of this work done. That way
, I can have the whole weekend doing some white-water rafting with the guys.”

Damn
, could he smile any more than he did right then? I swore he was blinding me with those pearly whites of his.

“Sounds like fun
. Just make sure you’re careful while you’re out there on those rapids,” I told him while slowly walking past him, and noticed he followed me with his gaze.Time seemed to slow, and my temperature rose with my excitement. To have a man like him look at me was something I could so get used to.

“Have a good day
, Max.”

“Same to you
, Sarah.”

My God
, that was so close, even though the entire moment was hot as hell.

When I got back to my desk
, however, Darla appeared to be fighting to keep from laughing.

“What?”
I asked her.

“I saw the whole thing go down
. You said I would never have the chance with him. From what I could see, you could barely even talk, you were so tongue tied.”

Darla did have a point
. I was a complete nervous wreck around the man, which was odd, because I had always had a good rapport with men. You have to understand that when I was growing up, I was popular, and most of the boys I knew liked hanging out with me because I was like one of the guys… The buddy, the pal, the girl who had tons of male friends from every walk of life, but I could never get any of them to date me. That’s what happens when you are a thick chick living in a world where thin was in at the time. But like style and fashion, times had changed, and most men decided they loved a woman with a little meat on their bones. But this particular man made me feel like that young, teenaged girl, shy and vulnerable. Most of the time, if I developed feelings for a guy, I had kept them to myself for fear of being hurt by someone I’d come to care about.

“Just be quiet
,” I told Darla.

The rest of the day
passed smoothly, except for the occasional elbow nudge to the ribs I got from Darla every time she spotted Max. I knew I was never going to hear the end of this from her. For the rest of that morning, she constantly brought him up in conversation, throwing my awkward encounter up in my face.

“Honestly
, Darla, I wish you would get off my case about what happened today with you know who,” I told her as we sat together at lunch in the little picnic area outside the office building.

“Oh
, you mean you and Max by the elevator!”

She practically
shouted, and if I wasn’t so embarrassed by Darla and her antics, I would have knocked the taste out of her mouth for announcing my private business to the world.

“Will you be
quiet?” I bellowed, which only made Darla laugh while I looked around at our puzzled coworkers. “What in the hell is wrong with you, woman?”

Darla continued to giggle a bit more, tears welled up in her eyes
, and she grabbed a napkin to dab them. “I’m sorry, but you are so easy to pick on sometimes, Sarah.”

“I swear
, I don’t know why in the hell I put up with you.” I shook my head.

“Because I’m the brat
, and you love me, that’s why.” Her tone was playful, but still a bit mischievous and as annoying as fuck.

I continued eating my sandwich
, while watching people going by pause, as if to listen in on our conversation. Luckily, Darla started talking about random stuff.

When we made it back in
side the office, Randy, from three cubicles down, came toward us and said, “Sarah, you’ve got something on your desk. It was just delivered a moment ago.”

Darla and I looked at each other while making a hasty move toward our desk.
As we grew near, I was completely floored to see a bouquet of flowers, ranging from orchids, lilies, carnations, and roses of different colors and sizes all together in a clear vase wrapped in a pink bow. I honestly couldn’t believe someone had sent something so beautiful to me. I glanced up to find a crowd of curious co-workers peeking at me from over and around their desks.

“Is there a card?” asked Darla.

I looked around and found a small card stuck inside a lily’s blossom. I quickly pulled the card from the tiny envelope. I read the message, and then gave Darla a puzzled look.

Darla moved closer to read over my shoulder.

“Bump?” she said. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“I don’t have a clue
,” I told her, bending over to smell the sweet essence of the flowers.

Darla suddenly
hit me on my arm, and I stumbled a bit. Darla giggled.

“What the hell was that for?”
I asked.

“Bump
! Now I get it. Oh my God, Sarah, think about it. Bump…who goes along with bump?”

For a moment,
I honestly didn’t understand what she was hinting at with the guessing game, but then it finally hit me. I quickly glanced over toward Max’s office. He stood there leaning up against the doorway with an impressive smile on his face as he looked my way and gave me a small wave. All I could do was return his little greeting. He nodded, and then still smiling, he walked back into his office.

“Oh
, my God. Now he’s sending you flowers, girl. How sweet is that?”