A SEAL's Temptation. Tawny Weber
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But not over sex.
Before she had to admit that, or react to the pitying look on her friends’ faces, the door chimed.
“Well, well, what have we here? Three lovely ladies and coffee. What more could a man want?”
“Eww,” muttered Cassia.
Sara pulled a face.
Lark barely managed to keep her smile in place as Paul Devarue approached the counter. The banker’s pale gray suit did nothing to disguise his bulk, nor did his carefully styled hair hide the fact that he was balding.
Lark told herself not to hold any of that against him. Nor should she blame him for his ongoing campaign to convince her to sell her mother’s coffeehouse so he could demolish Raine Sommers’s legacy to put in a minimall. As he so often said, that was only business.
Yet, no matter now often she told herself all of that, she simply couldn’t stand the guy.
“Good morning, Paul,” she said, grimacing when he subtly nudged Sara and Cassia aside. Before Cassia could nudge him back, Sara grabbed their mugs by the thick handles, shoved one at her cousin and gave Lark a little finger wave.
“What can I get for you?” she asked. “Your regular? Black coffee, large, and a banana hazelnut bran muffin?”
The kind that came from the bakery. Not from Heather’s creative kitchen. Not that aphrodisiac-laced treats would work on a guy like Paul. Lark’s mom had always said that the first tenet of magic was imagination.
“Coffee and a muffin sounds just right. The perfect start to the day.”
Lark glanced at the funky clock on the wall, a mosaic of coffee beans with spoons for hands, and gave a fond thought to the time in her life that she’d called 10:00 a.m. the start of the morning.
“Did you want it to go?” she asked, lifting the lid of the domed dessert dish and, remembering to use a napkin, grabbed the largest muffin.
“Here is fine. With business so slow, I’m sure you can keep me company for a while.”
Oh, goody. Lark filled a rich purple mug etched with stars with coffee and tried not to grimace. That sounded about as fun as being kicked in the gut by a scary clown during a tax audit.
Or barring that, having a pity party over her nonexistent sex life.
* * *
“I HATE THAT GUY. He’s such a jerk.” Her eyes narrow with suspicion, Sara watched the smarmy banker lean forward, damn near climbing over the counter to shove his capped-tooth smile in Lark’s face. “Look at how he’s getting in her space. That can’t be good. A guy like that, he’ll smudge her aura.”
“You’re a goofball,” Cassia said, shaking her head. But she twisted in her chair to check it out. “Quit worrying. It’s not like he’s hitting on her.”
“Worse. He’s nagging at her. And if he keeps at it long enough, she’ll cave and sell him The Magic Beans. If she does, she’ll move away and then we’ll lose a good friend. A good friend with a great wardrobe that she lets you borrow. Then what?”
Misery was what.
Misery for Sara, that was.
She’d lose her best friend. The coolest person she’d ever met. Lark was everything Sara wanted to be. Sophisticated yet bohemian. Clever yet sweet. She had a degree in Fine Arts, she’d owned a chic apartment in San Francisco and worked in a fancy art gallery and attended fancy art shows there featuring her own pottery. She’d had it all.
And she’d given it up for family. Lark had come to Little Lake, Idaho, a year and a half ago because her mom was sick. When Raine Sommers’s flu had turned out to be cancer, Lark had stayed. First to take care of her mother, then after Raine passed, to take over running The Magic Beans.
Sara thought Lark was the strongest woman she knew.
“Well, she’s not happy,” Cassia pointed out. “She puts on a good face and all. But she’s working her tail off to keep this place going like if she doesn’t her mom’s gonna come back and kick her ass.”
Sara winced and resisted the urge to look over her shoulder. If ghosts where real—and she was sure they were—talk like that would earn a good haunting.
“She promised Raine that she’d keep it going.”
“Lark shouldn’t be miserable just because she made a deathbed promise.” Cassia shook her head. “That’s, like, medieval.”
Sara hummed instead of answering. She knew Lark was sticking around for more than her mom’s legacy. Raine’s insurance hadn’t gone very far, so Lark had sold her San Francisco apartment and taken out a second mortgage on the coffeehouse in the hopes that something—anything—would change the prognosis.
The bottom line was that Lark couldn’t afford to leave. But Sara wasn’t telling Cassia that.
“And speaking of medieval, can you believe she hasn’t had sex in eighteen months?”
“Seventeen months, eleven days and nine hours,” Sara corrected. Then, frowning, she added, “Maybe ten by now.”
“No wonder she’s unhappy. I mean, can you imagine going that long?” Cassia gave an exaggerated shudder, but the horror in her eyes was real.
“Well, her heart was broken,” Sara pointed out. “Between her mom and that jerk, Eric, she’s had a lot to deal with.”
Eric had been Lark’s sexy San Francisco guy. They’d been practically engaged, and he’d cheated on her the first week she’d been in Idaho. Worse, Lark had found out when a friend posted New Year’s pictures on Facebook—one of which was her true love with his lips plastered on a busty blonde’s mouth and his hands on her butt.
“That’s the answer,” Cassia exclaimed, slapping her hand on the table. Sara hissed when everyone, including the woman whose sex life they were whispering about, looked over.
“What’s the answer?” she asked when they all turned back to their own business.
“Sex.”
Sara blinked.
“Sex?”
“Yeah. You know, the horizontal boogie? The mattress mambo? Riding the—”
“Stop!” In defense against the onslaught of euphemisms, of which she knew Cassia had legion, Sara threw up a hand. “We’ve already established that I know what sex is. What I don’t know is why you think it would help Lark right now.”
“Sex helps anything, anyone, anytime,” was Cassia’s sage response.
“How is sex going to help Lark’s situation?” She didn’t ask how it’d help Lark personally. She knew what Cassia would say to that.
“Sex will keep Lark from seizing her engine.”
“What do you mean?”
Her cousin grinned. “Remember that mechanic I went out with for a while?”
“The one who liked to, um, do you on the hood of his Camaro,” she asked. At Cassia’s nod, Sara shrugged. “So?”
“While we were doing the hood hop, he rebuilt my engine.” Smirking at Sara’s arch look, Cassia shook her head. “That way, too, but I mean he literally rebuilt the engine of my ’Vette. Chewed me out for not taking care of it properly, too. Said that an engine has to stay lubricated if it’s going to run right.”
Confused, Sara lifted her mug to lick the last of the whipped cream from the side. Maybe if the sugar high kicked in, she’d understand.
“Lark needs sex,” Cassia explained patiently, pushing aside her coffee mug, only half-empty. “It’ll give her a boost. If she’s boosted enough, she’ll be able to figure out