Read Love's Choice for Free Online Page A

day.”
    “Then I'll have an iced dark chocolate mocha with a triple shot of espresso,” he answered, his smile growing.
    I smiled back. A moment of weakness before I put on my barista face.
    “I'll whip that right up.” I rang up his drink and quoted his price. He pulled out his wallet. Our fingers touched as he handed me the money. I shuddered again. He put his change in the tip jar.
    I felt his eyes on me as I made his coffee. I tried to keep my behind from wiggling too much as I moved around. It was hard. I so wanted to wiggle for him. My work slacks weren't that tight, but they still left my butt looking nice and perky.
    When I finished pouring his mocha over the ice cubes, I walked back to the counter and handed it over. “I hope you enjoy.”
    “I will,” he winked. “You wouldn't pick wrong for me.”
    “Such trust you have in me.”
    His head nodded. “You're trustworthy, Raven. It's painted on your face.”
    My smile returned.
    “What time do you get off work?”
    “I don't date my customers,” I told him. I had told poor Ben that enough times.
    “I'm not a customer.”
    I glanced down at his iced mocha. “Then what are you?”
    “A man.”
    His words were forceful. He wasn't saying, “I'm a man because I have a cock.” He was saying, “I am a capital M Man because I'm strong and passionate, and I know just what you want. If you trust me, I'll give it to you and more. Be my woman.”
    He grabbed his coffee and walked to a table. My eyes were fixed on him the entire way. I wanted to go to him and let him be my man. I wanted to take a chance with him. Maybe I would get hurt, or maybe I would find what my mother had in my father.
    Magnus pulled out a pen from his pocket and wrote on a napkin while he drank his mocha. What was he writing? Many customers came in to write, and I never had the faintest interest in what nonsense they were typing on their laptops. What could be so important that he would write on a napkin?
    Other customers entered. I went through the motions of helping them as I studied Magnus. He sat with his back to me. He crumpled up the first napkin and shoved it into his pocket, ripping a second out of the dispenser. Then a third.
    He was struggling with something. His shoulders tensed. He grappled with himself as his pen flew across the napkin. He growled, balling up the third napkin and starting on a fourth. My heart beat faster and faster. His mocha was finished, the ice melting in the clear, plastic cup. His pen flowed down the napkin.
    He capped his pen and slipped it into his pocket. Without a word, he stood and strode to the door. My heart tightened. I would never see him again if I let him go. Not because he wouldn't come back, not because I wouldn't go find him. He would die.
    Magnus lay broken in the middle of the street, blood trickling out of his mouth. A motorcycle accident.
    The bell chimed as he stepped outside. I shivered as the strange premonition passed. He walked to his bike parked before the store, squeezed between two cars. It was illegally parked. Magnus wouldn't care. He revved his engine and roared off.
    Did I just make the biggest mistake of my life?
    I rushed out from behind the bar to his table. The napkin was there, the small words written with blue ink spilling onto both sides of the thin paper.
To the Beauty of the Night,
I find that my words are failing me. I am striving to express what you are to me. How you crept into my soul and possessed me. They seem so easy in my heart and yet I am frustrated by how clumsy they sound when I write them.
So, instead, I shall quote a better man and hope you will realize his eloquence is only a mere shadow of what I truly wish to convey.
She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellow’d to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.
One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impair’d the