Chocolate Kisses Read online

  Panic twinged inside her. Did it mean she would have to host pretentious galas like that evening’s cotillion? To become a garden-club matron and a dues-paying member of the historical society?

  “It means,” he explained, “that I’ll give Fantasy Feasts financial guidance for free, but you’ll have to keep me supplied in chocolate kisses for free.”

  She grinned. “That sounds fair.”

  He reached for the box with the candy in it. “When I saw Edie packing up the leftover chocolate kisses—and there weren’t many left—I grabbed the last one. I put it in this box so it wouldn’t melt all over the inside of my pocket.”

  “No,” Claudia teased. “You put it in the box because my kisses are as precious as jewels.”

  He wedged the candy between her lips to silence her. “They are,” he agreed, then angled his head and bit the other half of the kiss. Their lips touched, their mouths merged and their tongues shared the marvelously complicated flavor as Ned closed his arms around her.

  If this was his world, Claudia thought, she would never leave. She belonged here, in his arms, in his heart…and in his bed.

  As the final seconds of Valentine’s Day ticked away, they sealed their promise of love—with the sweetest of chocolate kisses.

  ###

  A Sneak Peek at Judith Arnold’s Change of Life

  Chapter One

  THE DAY BEGAN LIKE SO MANY OTHERS: with a fight.

  “You stole my pencil!” Michael shrieked.

  “Did not!”

  “Did too! You’re a little thief. That was my best pencil—and look, you got gunk all over it. How’d it get in your drawer?”

  “Well—you got all the good pencils,” Danny whined. “I don’t have any pencils with erasers on them.”

  “That’s on account of you’re an idiot. You don’t think before you write. So you write stupid stuff and then you have to erase it. That’s how come you use up all your erasers.”

  “I’m not an idiot! You’re an idiot!”

  “You’re an idiot,” Michael declared, and then proceeded to list several orifices into which Danny might consider inserting his eraserless pencils.

  “Do something with them, would you?” Ken muttered from inside the walk-in closet, where he was searching for a tie to wear with his charcoal pinstripe suit. “I can’t stand listening to this.”

  Lila’s head pounded. She couldn’t stand listening to it, either. She finished smoothing the blanket out across the bed and then lifted her robe from the hook on the back of the closet door. Flinging her arms through the sleeves, she stumbled out of the bedroom and down the hall to Danny’s room.

  Danny had on his underwear; his pajamas lay in a heap on top of his unmade bed. Michael stood near the dresser, clothed except for his shoes and brandishing a pencil. “Look at what he did, Mom!” he roared indignantly, waving the pencil inches from Lila’s face. “There’s, like, chewing gum or something on this!”

  “Well, I don’t have any pencils with erasers,” Danny complained in a querulous voice. “Michael has all the good pencils. He stole them.”

  “You stole them, Danny!”

  Lila shut her eyes held up her hand. “Hush, both of you,” she commanded. A brief exchange of snarls, and they fell silent. “Now,” she said, opening her eyes and staring at her two sons. “I’m going shopping today. I’ll buy a new package of pencils and divvy them up, half for each of you, and that’ll be the end of it.”

  “Hey, that’s not fair!” Danny protested. “He’s already got a hundred—”

  “Half for each of you,” she interrupted sternly. “But if I hear one more word about it, neither of you will get any. Is that clear?”

  They gazed up at her, their features nearly identical despite the two-year age difference between them. Both had scruffy reddish-brown hair, dark eyes, triangular chins and not yet developed button noses. Michael appeared a touch smug, Danny resentful, but neither of them dared to contradict their mother.

  “Okay. Finish getting dressed. I’m going to make breakfast.”

  Exhaling wearily, she turned and plodded down the stairs to the kitchen. Her headache seemed to have sprouted wings which batted incessantly against her temples. She ought to get some aspirin, but she didn’t have the energy to climb back upstairs. Instead, she turned on the radio for the weather report, got a more immediate weather report by looking out the window above the sink and seeing the morning sky dark with swollen rain clouds, and shut the radio off.

  Within a few minutes Ken, Michael and Danny had joined her in the kitchen. The boys engaged in a minor scuffle over who would get to read the back of the Cheerios box while they ate. Ken glanced at his English muffins, mumbled, “Sorry, hon—I really don’t have time,” and gulped down half his mug of coffee without bothering to sit. Time, she knew, wasn’t at issue as much as nerves. Sometime this week he would be learning whether he’d gotten the promotion. After having lived with uncertainty for so long, Lila would be relieved even to hear he hadn’t gotten it. Not knowing was driving him crazy—and he, in turn, was driving her crazy.

  He thumped his mug down onto the table, splattering brown drops of coffee across the front page of the newspaper, and left the kitchen. When he returned he was carrying his raincoat. He brushed Lila’s cheek with a hasty kiss. “Wish me luck,” he said before stalking through the mudroom to the garage.

  As soon as he was gone, Danny and Michael resumed their quarrel over the Cheerios box. Lila removed it from the table. “Five minutes till the bus gets here,” she alerted them. They scampered off to brush their teeth, their bowls still full of cereal.

  Lila gazed at the table, the array of breakfast foods served and uneaten, the stained newspaper and the mess of Cheerios under Danny’s chair. On some mornings she would simply shrug at such a dismal sight. On some mornings she would curse.

  Today she had to fight back tears.

  She shuffled the boys out to the bus stop, cleaned the kitchen, went upstairs and took a couple of aspirin. Then she got dressed and drove to the supermarket. She spent two hundred and ten dollars, including a buck-ninety-nine plus tax for a box of pencils, and drove home wondering how much of the food she’d purchased would actually be consumed and how much would wind up on the floor under Danny’s chair.

  By eleven o’clock the groceries were all put away and she left the house again, this time driving to the soup kitchen in the basement of Mt. Zion Methodist Church in Roxbury. She arrived too late to help with the food preparation, but Claudette told her not to worry about it. “I got most of it done,” she said. “Just carry in the apples. We haven’t got much today.”

  Lila surveyed the day’s offerings: macaroni and cheese, two large bowls full of limp green salad, milk, coffee, graham crackers and a bushel basket of macintosh apples. “No meat?”

  Claudette shrugged. “What are you going to do? We take what we can get.”

  Lila nodded. She thought of the food wasted at home and of the people lining up in the rain outside the church basement door, anxious to partake of a free hot meal. That she was here didn’t seem enough. She should have bought something extra at the supermarket that morning, some sandwich meat or canned fish or something.

  At noon the door opened and the people—clients, Claudette called them—filed in. Most of them were men, but a few women were scattered in their midst, some with children in tow. Lila scanned the line in search of Mitzie. She spotted her and waved.

  Mitzie waved back. A few years younger than Lila, she was dressed, as usual, in a grubby sweat suit and a tattered denim jacket. Her hair was the color and consistency of straw, lying in an uneven shag about her drawn, pallid face.

  “Is it still raining?” Lila asked Mitzie as she slid her tray along the counter.

  “Yeah, a little,” Mitzie answered. Thanks to the precipitation, perhaps, her face was less grimy than usual.

  “Have you got a dry place to stay tonight?”

  “Don’t worry about me,” Mitzie said. />
  “Fat chance of that,” Lila argued gently. “I will worry about you.”

  “Thanks,” Mitzie said, smiling bashfully. “Thanks for the food, Mrs. Chapin.” She waved again and carried her tray to one of the long tables set up throughout the room.

  Lila sighed and tucked a stray strand of pale brown hair behind her ear. Her head hadn’t stopped throbbing, but hearing Mitzie say “thanks” had done more for the pain than the aspirin she’d taken that morning. She smoothed out her apron and shaped a smile for the unshaven man across the counter from her.

  “How are you doing?” Claudette asked her once the flow of clients had ebbed to a trickle. “You look beat.”

  “Just tired,” Lila replied. “I’m feeling tired and old.”

  “Old!” Claudette let out a hoot. She stacked the empty macaroni pans and carried them into the kitchen, calling over her shoulder, “I’d like to be as old as you are.” Claudette was in her fifties, but she was so youthful and energetic Lila often forgot that the woman was a grandmother.

  By two-thirty, all the pots and pans were scoured, the remaining apples had been distributed among the clients and the basement was clean. “See you Wednesday,” Claudette said as she and Lila parted ways in the parking lot behind the church.

  “I’ll try to get here earlier,” Lila promised.

  Claudette swatted the air with her hand. “Whenever you get here, I appreciate it.”

  Lila smiled and climbed into her car.

  Michael and Danny were already home from school by the time Lila pulled into the garage. Danny had found the new box of pencils on the kitchen table and was sharpening them. Michael was storming around the basement, complaining about the lack of good materials for a science project. “Mark Nugent, his dad’s got dry cells and switches and everything,” Michael moaned. “He’s gonna get a better grade than me.”

  “I’m sure you can put together a decent science project with what we’ve got,” Lila attempted to bolster him. “Maybe you can make a weather chart out of oaktag and paint.”

  “I don’t want to make a chart. You don’t get an A-plus for something like a weather chart. I want to make something neat, like, something with electricity.”

  “Why don’t you do dinosaurs?” Danny hollered down the stairs.

  “That’s kid stuff.”

  “I’m doing dinosaurs in my class,” Danny noted.

  “Yeah, on account of you’re in third grade. In fifth grade we do better stuff—electricity and stuff. How come we never have any neat things to do science projects with, Mom?”

  Lila suppressed the urge to snap at Michael. “I’m sure we’ve got something down here you can use for a science project,” she said, surveying the shelves lining the walls. They were crammed with toys, art supplies, tools and seasonal items. “Maybe you could do something with ice,” she suggested, inspired by the cooler chest.

  “Yeah, what?”

  “I don’t know. It’s your project.”

  “Ice melts. Big deal.” Michael shoved his hands into the pockets of his dungarees and sulked.

  “How about mold? You could grow bread mold.”

  His face brightened. “Hey, yeah, that’s an idea. It’s not as neat as dry cells and switches, but yeah, maybe I could do that.” Michael bounded up the stairs, leaving Lila to turn off the lights.

  She helped Michael to set up an experiment with slices of bread, then prepared dinner. Ken got home late, and his piqued expression conveyed that he hadn’t heard anything about the promotion. Lila gave him a reassuring hug, which he returned. “Where’s Tom Petty when I need him?” he lamented before heading upstairs to change his clothes. “The waiting is the hardest part.”

  Dinner was the usual—Danny rambling about the intrigues of his classmates and Michael griping about how his meat was too dry. Lila picked at her own food, her appetite gone. Tired and old, she thought, trying to tune out Michael’s long-winded criticism of her cooking. Tired and old.

  After dinner the boys repaired to their bedrooms and Ken buried himself in the newspaper. Lila cleaned the kitchen, oversaw the boys’ preparations for bedtime, tucked them in and returned to the den, where she settled in the recliner to watch television. She waited, glancing occasionally at Ken, wondering whether he had remembered but comprehending, deep in her heart, that he hadn’t, that the day was lost, that this was her life and nothing was ever going to change.

  He was a handsome man, his body trim and fit in a pair of jeans and a cotton sweater, his thick auburn hair swept across his forehead and dropping to his collar in back, his eyes framed by faint laugh lines and the skin beneath his jaw as smooth and taut as that of a man half his age. He looked younger than she did, she thought. Despite his preoccupation with his status at work he looked young and rested and at peace with himself.

  She waited, resolutely dry-eyed but aching in her soul.

  At ten o’clock he tossed aside his reading, stretched and grinned at her. “How’re you doing over there?” he asked, patting the sofa beside him.

  “All right,” she said, refusing to move from her chair.

  “I’m about ready to head upstairs. How about it, Lila?”

  Sex, she thought. Her reward for having endured another long, hard day. Making love with Ken would be pleasant, but tonight it would be too little, too late. “I’d like to stay downstairs a while longer,” she said.

  He measured her with his gaze, then shrugged apologetically. “I know, Lila—I’ve been awful lately. It’s just so annoying, watching them parade all these outside prospects through the office—”

  “I know,” she murmured.

  “And I’m sitting there, thinking, ‘Come on, guys, how can you bring someone in from outside the company when I’m right here under your nose?’”

  “I know.”

  “It’s just…it’s frustrating, that’s all. And I’ve been a real bastard. But I promise I’ll make it up to you.”

  “That’s all right. You haven’t been a bastard.”

  “Then come upstairs,” he cajoled, moving across the room and circling her chair. He dug his fingers into the knotted muscles at the nape of her neck and massaged.

  She smiled sadly, her eyes growing damp. Even now, after so many years, his hands could work wonders on her. It would be so easy to say yes, to go upstairs and tumble into bed with him. He would make love to her and she would forget everything for a while. She would forget her exhaustion and anger and disappointment.

  She didn’t want to forget, not tonight, not on this day of all days. “I’m sorry, Ken,” she said, swallowing the tremor in her voice. “Okay?”

  He stopped rubbing her neck. “Okay. I’ll see you when you come up.” He leaned over and kissed her cheek, then forced a smile and wandered out of the den.

  She remained where she was for a long time, listening to his footsteps on the stairs, to the hiss of the shower and the creaking of the radiators and the mechanical laughter from the television set. Eventually—hours later, perhaps—she rose, turned off the TV, and crossed to the desk. In the side drawer she found a pad, in the center drawer a pen.

  Dear Ken, she wrote, They say that life begins at forty. Well, now I’ve turned forty, and it’s time for my life to begin.

  ###

  About the Author

  Judith Arnold is the award-winning, bestselling author of more than eighty-five published novels. A New York native, she currently lives in New England, where she indulges in her passions for jogging, dark chocolate, good music, good wine and good books. She is married and the mother of two sons.

  Judith is thrilled that her out-of-print books are now available to new generations of readers.

  For more information about Judith, or to contact her, please visit her website.

  Here’s a list Judith’s e-book reissues, all available for sale:

  A> Loverboy

  Barefoot in the Grass

  Change of Life

  Cry Uncle

  Father Christmas


  Father of Two

  Follow the Sun

  Found: One Wife

  One Good Turn

  One Whiff of Scandal

  Safe Harbor

  Somebody’s Dad

  Survivors

  Trust Me

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  A Sneak Peek at Judith Arnold’s Change of Life

  About the Author

  Other books by the author