On Your Sole Read online

  Table of Contents

  Book Description

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  The Interview

  More books

  About the Author

  Books by Caitlin Ricci

  Lust Bites

  Loving Her Curves

  Single Titles

  Whip It Up

  The Interview

  On Your Sole

  Shifting Tides

  On Your Sole

  ISBN # 978-1-78651-451-6

  ©Copyright Caitlin Ricci 2016

  Cover Art by Posh Gosh ©Copyright 2016

  Interior text design by Claire Siemaszkiewicz

  Pride Publishing

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, places and events are from the author’s imagination and should not be confused with fact. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, events or places is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any material form, whether by printing, photocopying, scanning or otherwise without the written permission of the publisher, Pride Publishing.

  Applications should be addressed in the first instance, in writing, to Pride Publishing. Unauthorised or restricted acts in relation to this publication may result in civil proceedings and/or criminal prosecution.

  The author and illustrator have asserted their respective rights under the Copyright Designs and Patents Acts 1988 (as amended) to be identified as the author of this book and illustrator of the artwork.

  Published in 2016 by Pride Publishing, Newland House, The Point, Weaver Road, Lincoln, LN6 3QN, United Kingdom.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the authors’ rights. Purchase only authorised copies.

  Pride Publishing is a subsidiary of Totally Entwined Group Limited.

  If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book”.

  Book Description

  One feisty shoe-loving fae might be just what this shoe store owner needs to get back on track…if he doesn’t kill the fae first.

  Randal Tobit has recently taken over his father’s shoe store, On Your Sole, and is trying to make his father proud after his recent divorce from a woman his dad liked. The job is easy, but only because of the man his father hired and will not give Randal permission to fire under any circumstances.

  Casey is helpful and happy, bordering on obnoxiously so. He’s a morning person and he loves shoes, which makes him perfect for the store, but not so much for Randal, who prefers to be barefoot when he can’t wear flip flops.

  When the store is vandalized and Casey offers his help, Randal makes a bargain with him—one that he probably would have reconsidered if he’d had any idea what Casey actually was…

  On Your Sole

  CAITLIN RICCI

  Chapter One

  The neon sign for On Your Sole, my father’s shoe store, glared in bright green above my head. The small shoe store was in a mall and there were plenty of fluorescent lights around. There was no reason for my father to have tried to compete with all the other garish lighting in the mall. But he had, and now the tiny twenty-by-twenty space was mine. Every last exceedingly expensive inch of it.

  I came through the door to find my father’s only employee, Casey Solomon, neatly arranging a pile of new shoe boxes, all in awful shades of pink and yellow. I rolled my eyes, but I couldn’t completely ignore how good he looked bent over the pile in his pair of tight khakis. They were gripping his hips just as well as I would have—if he weren’t barely over twenty-one and obnoxiously excited about every little thing.

  “Mister Tobit!” He turned around and gave me a wide smile that made him look even younger than I knew he was. I’d seen his employee file, I knew his birthdate. I just didn’t believe it. “How are you this morning? Isn’t it wonderful outside? I brought you a caramel latte. It’s on your desk.”

  Obnoxiously happy and a morning person. I glared at him. Not that it did much good. My dad had hired him last month and in his retirement instructions for me and this store, I wasn’t allowed to fire Casey for being nice. After meeting Casey, I’d asked for clarification on the circumstances under which I could fire him, and my dad had only laughed at me.

  Since the glare didn’t diminish his mood at all, I chose to go with a sigh. “Thanks,” I mumbled, heading into my closet of an office at the back of the store in order to put my things down.

  “You’re welcome. It’s going to be a wonderful day! I just know it!” Casey called back to me.

  I shut the office door behind myself and didn’t come out until lunchtime. It was only my third day of working with Casey, and I liked him no better than I had on the first.

  At noon, perfectly on time—because, of course, Casey would never be anything other than on time and annoyingly happy—I heard him knocking lightly on my door.

  “I told you the first day that you could just open the door when you want to go to lunch,” I called through the door to him.

  He opened it and stuck his head inside, beaming another smile at me. “I’ll be back in thirty. Don’t work too hard.”

  I huffed irritably, but I did come out of the office in time to see him sling his messenger bag over his shoulder and head toward the glass front door. “Is there anything I can bring you? Barbecue? Sushi? There’s that new muffin place that opened by the food court. They’re supposed to have some great chocolate chip goodies that taste wonderful but are horrible for your hips, at least, according to Traci who works in the natural soaps store upstairs.”

  Not caring who Traci was, or about anything else he’d said, I shook my head. “No.” His smile diminished slightly, and I figured I should be slightly nicer to him. Only a little, though. “But thank you.”

  “Of course, Mister Tobit. I’ll be back in thirty minutes, and not a second longer. I promise.” He waved at me with his fingertips and I glared at him again until he was out of the store and walking away from me, his black messenger bag thumping on his thigh the whole way.

  Once he was gone I shook my head, desperate to stop thinking about him naked. I probably hid myself away in the office partially because of the thoughts about him I couldn’t shake, and partially because this store was god-awful in so many ways. Starting with the bright pink picture frames surrounding posters of chick flicks even my ex-wife, in all her miserable cheeriness, had known better than to try to force me to watch. Added to that were the high heel-shaped chairs with leopard print and bright pink cushions. There were three of them in the store. It was a nightmare.

  My idea of shoes were the flip flops I threw on most days, or the hiking boots I wore when I went into the Rocky Mountains. The dress shoes I had on, because my dad had insisted that I look presentable in some way since I was the owner of the shop now, itched and made me feel as if my feet were being squished into unnatural positions. How anyone could wear these shoes and pretend not to be miserable was beyond me. I was barely able to hold my smile in place when a woman came in with her teenage daughters a few minutes later, all of them talking loudly and pulling shoes down to try on.

  My only salvation came when Casey walked back into the shop, exactly thirty minutes after he’d left, and smiled at th
e three of them while taking the boxes of shoes out of my hands before I dropped them all. I’d been trying to find more sizes for them to try on, more styles for them to gawk over, more colors for them to adore. These women were insatiable, and every second with them reminded me of my ex-wife. I’d been so close to screaming that as soon as Casey took the boxes from me, even before he had taken off his messenger bag and put it away, I was already halfway back to the sanctuary of my office.

  “Miranda! Kaylee! Stephanie!” Casey said, dropping off the shoes for each of them as if he knew their sizes as well as their names. He was so good at his job, so extraordinarily perfect at everything he’d done so far in the shop, that he probably did.

  I shook my head and retreated a few more steps. I should have been out there with him, since I was the owner and all, but with how good he was, I was fairly certain anything I could do to assist him would only end up with me getting in the way of the work he seemed to be doing. There was no reason for me to interfere with him at all.

  “Casey!” One of them got up and gave him a hug. I had no idea why I felt that only I should be the one hugging him. I’d only ever shaken his hand, once, so that stray thought was made of insanity. “Help me find shoes for prom. Please? Out of everyone I know, you have the best taste!”

  He laughed, dropped his messenger bag behind the counter, then gave me a subtle wave back toward the office.

  Fine, I could take a hint, and he was fairly clearly telling me to go away and let him handle this. I was only too happy to leave him, and the giggling women, for the next few hours. But I did keep my office door cracked a few inches open this time instead of shutting it completely, in case he needed me for something or other. I highly doubted that he would. He hadn’t at all in the past few days.

  At seven o’clock, right when he was supposed to be done with his shift, Casey knocked on the office door and stuck his head inside. “Hey, Mr. Tobit.” His damn bright smile was back in place, though he did look a little tired. Maybe all the giggling girls had exhausted him. “I’ve cashed out and here are the receipts for the day.” He handed me the stack of small pieces of paper, all neatly arranged. “Do you need anything else before I go home?”

  I took the receipts from him and shook my head as I put them on the corner of my desk. “No. Go home.”

  He hesitated by the door. His brown hair, which was longer than I would have ever tolerated, fell in front of his eyes and he pushed it back with one hand. “Would you like to go out to dinner with me?”

  It was the first time he’d asked me out—the first time in a year that anyone had. I’d become practically invisible after my divorce was finalized. And I preferred it that way. “No.” I might have been a bit ruder than I should have been to him, since his smile slipped a little and he narrowed his eyes at me for a fraction of a second, but it was only a small change, and it was gone just as quickly as it had come.

  “Okay. If you change your mind, you know my number.”

  I wouldn’t be reconsidering, but he didn’t need to be shot down even harder than that this evening. I simply waved him off and he was gone a few minutes later. I followed after him, making sure he’d locked the door behind him, which he had, and I looked around the store for something to do. In truth, there was nothing, though. All of the boxes were neatly organized. The tile floor had been swept. The counter was cleaned off. Even the sitting areas smelled like disinfectant spray, something my father had always done but I’d never seen as being a priority.

  Shaking my head, I went back into the office and added up the sales for the day. Damn. He’d even written the amount for me there on a blank receipt at the top of the stack, along with the money that was in his drawer. I went through and totaled up the receipts anyway, in case he was trying to skim some money off the top, but he hadn’t been. All of the cash was there, all of the card receipts were accounted for. And each purchase matched the inventory numbers in the system.

  Casey was an exceptional employee, and I had no idea how my dad’s simple women’s shoe shop, something he’d started as a joke to appease my mother and her shoe buying habit, had landed someone like him. Had he just come in one day and been perfect from the start? Certainly my dad had never been one to have the kind of patience needed to train someone to such a precise degree so quickly.

  It was just one more insane thing about Casey, and I already spent far too much time thinking about having him under me to wonder about how he’d gotten so good at his job so quickly, because from his employee file, I knew that he’d never had another job before this one. He simply made no sense at all.

  Chapter Two

  I went home half an hour later, glad to be free of the maddening experience that was the mall, and back to my apartment. It wasn’t much, just a one bedroom with a crappy view of a dirty river right by the industrial parts of the city and noisy neighbors, but it was all mine.

  Late that night, I tried to sleep, but couldn’t because thoughts of Casey kept interfering with my mind and my mood. He was obnoxious and way too excitable, but he had a perfect mouth and hair that would be long enough to grab onto. Overall, he was fairly average looking. He had a nose that was too big for him, and he was skinnier than I was normally interested in. Added together, I couldn’t understand why I was unable to shake these thoughts of him, or why I was hard imagining him as I lay awake trying to think of anything but him and his perfect mouth wrapped around my cock.

  Close to midnight my phone started ringing, bringing me out of a pretty decent sleep. I thought I was dreaming the sound at first, but when they called back a second time, I was awake and able to answer the phone.

  “Hello?” I grumbled into it, annoyed at myself for not turning the thing off entirely. Then I would have been able to actually make it through the night with a reasonable amount of sleep.

  “Mr. Randal Tobit? This is Hillary Cantier, from the Ramble Hills Mall security office. Sir, I’m sorry, but there was a break in at On Your Sole. We need you to get down here immediately.”

  I thought she was joking. She had to be. I started laughing and pulled the blanket further around my chest. I couldn’t wait to go back to sleep. “Nice prank call. Who is this? Really?”

  She sighed, sounding annoyed with me. “My name is Hillary Cantier. I am the manager of the security department at the mall where you rent a space. Your store was broken into tonight. No cash seems to have been taken, as the office was still locked, but all of your stock is damaged and your store was vandalized. Please get down here as soon as possible so that we can go over the damage together and fill out the insurance forms.”

  It took a long time for her words to actually make sense in my brain. A stupidly long time. When I finally figured out how to speak again, I was embarrassed. “I’ll… I’ll be right there.” Shaking my head, I got out of bed, then remembered something I should have thought to ask well before that moment. “Was anyone hurt?”

  “No. There was no one in the store, and our security team was in a different area of the mall when it happened. Though, it is strange that none of our cameras caught anything out of the ordinary during the break in. And none of the alarms were triggered anywhere in the building. I’m sorry I don’t have better news for you than this. Please come down to the mall to meet with me as soon as you’re able. The food court entrance will be unlocked for you.”

  “Sure.”

  I was dressed and ready to go within five minutes. I wasn’t exactly presentable, but it was the middle of the night and I hadn’t been able to search for my tie and nice shoes in time. Not that I would have really wanted to put them on. There was looking good for a meeting, and then there was just being ridiculous about it. I ended up in a pair of old jeans and my college hoodie. It was the least dressed up I would be in the shop since I’d started working there professionally a few times a week in high school.

  I sent a text to Casey on my way to the mall, while I was s
tuck behind some semi at a stop light before I could turn onto the highway.

  You have the day off tomorrow. The store was broken into. Will say more when I know something.

  I was pulling into the parking lot of the mall by the food court entrance when Casey drove up beside me. He got out first, bouncing around as he came to the side of my car.

  “I didn’t expect you to come out tonight,” I said as I got out of my car.

  He shrugged and pulled his jacket a little tighter around himself as he smiled up at me. He didn’t look tired at all. Instead, he was wide awake and appeared to be wired as well. I shook my head at him. “Thought you might have needed help,” he explained.

  I was sure he wouldn’t be any help to me, especially since I wasn’t going to be doing anything more than filling out paperwork that night. But I didn’t want to turn him away, either. His company would be nice. And, maybe since it was so late, he would be less enthusiastic, and therefore far less likely to get on my nerves.

  “Thanks for coming,” I told him as I locked up my car and started heading toward the mall’s entrance. He locked his up as well and trailed after me, his brown hair reflecting the harsh glare of the lamp lights above us as we walked between the parking spots in the nearly empty parking lot. There were only three other cars besides ours, and one SUV that had so much mud on it I couldn’t see what color the paint actually was under all the dirt when we walked past it.

  “Of course. Not like I was doing anything, really. This is exciting.”

  I looked over at him and thought he’d lost his mind. Going to see my father’s store in whatever torn up condition it had been left in was certainly not exciting. And really? He hadn’t been doing anything in the middle of the night? “Why weren’t you sleeping?” He hadn’t said that he hadn’t been, but I thought a normal person would have mentioned being in the middle of sleep. Though, Casey was far from anyone’s definition of normal.