In this frothy novella, pastry chef Claire Reidling is having one of those good news-bad news days. The bad news is that she's lost the heirloom engagement ring given to her by a man she's not even sure she wants to marry. The good news is that she thinks she knows where it is. But then there's more bad news. She fears it may be in one of five hundred single serving chocolate desserts she's just sent to a high society fund-raiser for the rich-enough-to-sue-her and famous-enough-to-ruin-her-career. Only one person can help her now: her best friend since first grade, Gus Brody. What does he say? Will he go with her to the Plaza Hotel and help her eat her way through mountains of chocolate in an effort to find the missing ring? Gus isn't all that keen on helping Claire at first, since he doesn't think she ever should have gotten engaged to her jerk boss in the first place. Still, a friend in need and all that. And hey, the good deed does involve mass consumption of chocolate, something Gus loves almost as much as Claire. Now if he could just get her to see how much she means to him... Chocolate is the ultimate aphrodisiac. But can it turn best friends into lovers? "Just Desserts," along with four other short reads by Elizabeth Bevarly, can also be purchased in the omnibus collection, SHORT WORK, for a reduced price! Originally appeared in the anthology: Love by Chocolate in 1997.
Author
Elizabeth Bevarly was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky and earned her BA with honors in English from the University of Louisville in 1983. Although she can’t recall ever wanting to be anything but a novelist-oh, all right, she toyed briefly with becoming an archaeologist, until she realized how awful she looked in khaki and flannel, and there was a brief fling with the interior decorator thing, until she realized she had trouble distinguishing chintz from moiré, and… (Where was I? Oh, yeah. My brilliant career.) Anyway, her career side trips before making the leap to writing included stints working as a bartender, a waitress, a movie theater cashier, a soap-hawker for Crabtree & Evelyn, an apparel-hawker for The Limited, and a bridal registry consultant for a major department store. She also did time as an editorial assistant for a medical journal, where she learned the correct spellings and meanings of a variety of words (like microscopy and histological) which, with any luck at all, she will never use again in this life. She wrote her first novel when she was twelve years old. It was 32 pages long-and that was with college rule notebook paper-and featured three girls named Liz, Marianne and Cheryl, who explored the mysteries of a haunted house. Her friends Marianne and Cheryl proclaimed it “Brilliant! Spellbinding! Kept me up past dinnertime reading!” Those rave reviews only kindled the fire inside her to write more. Since sixth grade, Elizabeth has gone on to complete more than 60 works of contemporary romance. Her novels regularly appear on the USA Today and Waldenbooks bestseller lists, and The Thing About Men was a New York Times Extended List bestseller. She’s been nominated for the prestigious RITA Award, has won the coveted National Readers’ Choice Award, and Romantic Times magazine has seen fit to honor her with two-count ‘em TWO-Career Achievement Awards. Her books have been translated into two dozen languages and published in three dozen countries, and there are more than ten million copies in print worldwide. She has claimed as residences Washington, DC, northern Virginia, southern New Jersey and Puerto Rico, but she now resides back in her native Kentucky with her husband and son and two very troubled cats where she fully intends to remain.
