With Strings Attached (2 page)

“I’ll walk you out,” Matt said.

“You don’t have to do that. I’m parked right out front on the street.”

“I know, but it’s dark.”

And he didn’t trust her car. She knew what he was thinking about her poor old Toyota.

They stepped out of his house into the cool night air, damp and fresh with the scent of the Pacific Ocean less than a block away. Matt’s house was small, one of many cottage-type houses on the street near the beach. He didn’t really even have a front yard, just a small paved area leading to the street. He stood on the front steps and watched her walk to her car. “’Night, Matt!” she called as she slid into the driver’s seat. Thankfully the car started with no problems, and she watched him go back into his house in her rearview mirror as she drove away, shaking her head at his concern.

She thought about Dylan Schell, super surfer dude with his sexy grin and big muscles and easy charm, and shivered a little. Matt’s friend was really hot. She had to say, a guy who earned his living surfing the biggest waves in the world seemed very brave and daring to her. She, who was afraid of the water. That kind of daredevil courage had always appealed to her. And suddenly this visit by Matt’s friend seemed very exciting.

Matt walked back into his living room where Dylan sat.

“Dude,” Dylan said. “Your girlfriend is smokin’ hot.”

“She’s not my girlfriend,” Matt automatically replied. “We’re just friends.”

Dylan lifted an eyebrow. “Just friends? That’s why she was asleep in your bedroom? Just sleeping?”

“Okay, yeah, friends with benefits. But still, just friends.”

“Oh ho.” Dylan grinned. “Mondo, dude.” He held up his empty bottle. “Beer me.”

Matt laughed and headed to the kitchen. When he returned with two more bottles of ale, Dylan said, “So you two sleep together but you’re just friends?”

“Yeah.” Matt popped the top of his bottle.

“How’d you luck into an arrangement like that, man?”

Matt shrugged and frowned a little. “It just kinda happened. We were friends for a long time. We worked together at Pancho’s, and we had some classes together at UCSA. It was never more than that, because I was living with Lysett, and Corey was going out with some asshole who treated her like crap.” He made a face. “Corey finally got smart enough to dump his ass, and then Lysett dumped me, and Corey and I started hanging out more.”

“Just friends.”

“Yeah.” Matt huffed out a laugh. “You know that’s what girls always want from me. I’m not a chick magnet like you, stud.”

“Bullshit. That’s not all girls want from you.”

Matt shrugged. “Whatever.” He’d heard it enough times in his life. Women regarded him as a nice guy, friend material but not red-hot lover material.
“You’re too nice.” “Let’s just be friends.”
Yeah, he’d heard it a few times. He and Lysett had been together for years but in the end, she’d dumped him for a guy with two ex-wives and three kids, who played in a rock band and drove a Harley Davidson, and who “rocked her world”. Matt wasn’t a world-rocking kind of guy and after that, he’d decided maybe friendship was the best he was going to get with women.

“You’re telling me you just wanted to be friends with…that? Gimme a break, dude.”

“Well.” Matt couldn’t help the smile that tugged his lips. “I’m not blind. Yeah, Corey’s hot. It’s not like I never noticed that. There was always a little…spark between us, but like I said, it could never be more than that because we were both with someone else. Then we both swore we weren’t going to do relationships any more. But one night she and I were sitting at her place, drinking beer and talking and the next thing I knew, we were all over each other. I dunno—hormones got the best of us or something.”

“Sounds like a porn moment.” Dylan smirked.

Matt laughed again. “Yeah, like that. Talking one minute, screwing the next.” He took a swig of his beer, icy cold and pleasantly malty. “After that we were kind of…holy crap, now what do we do? But we both agreed we wanted to stay friends. And since the sex was hot and neither of us wanted any strings attached…” He shrugged. “We agreed we’d be friends with benefits.”

“You guys date other people?”

“Sure. Well. I haven’t. Like I said, I’m done with that.”

“But Corey has?”

Matt squinted as he thought about it. “No, I don’t think she has either. She’s a little gun-shy too. Like I said, the last guy she was seeing was an asshole.”

“Huh.” Dylan tipped his beer to his lips. “So it’d be okay if I hooked up with her?”

Matt’s head whipped around to stare at his friend. “You?”

“Yeah, me.” Dylan grinned, that sexy bad-boy grin that had women falling all over themselves to get with him. Matt sighed. “I like her.”

“Yeah, well…” Words stuck in his throat. He took another swallow of beer. “That’s up to Corey, man. I have no say in who she sees.”

Dylan nodded. “Well. I’m only here for a few weeks. We’ll see.”

Matt studied his friend and swallowed another sigh. Trust Dylan to want to put the moves on the first girl he saw after arriving back in San Amaro. And knowing him, knowing he could have any chick he wanted, made it pretty much a done deal. Shit. Matt rubbed the back of his neck, trying to figure out exactly why that annoyed him.

He’d never been jealous of the ease with which Dylan attracted women. Even back in high school they’d been all over him and hey, one of the advantages of having a best buddy who was a chick magnet was all the available girls hanging around. Dylan had always been very generous in fixing him up, talking him up to the girls. Matt became attractive by association. He felt a deep, undying loyalty to Dylan for that, including for the night he’d lost his virginity thanks to the girl Dylan had fixed him up with. But Corey…huh.

He was concerned for her. She said she wasn’t interested in relationships, but she’d said that before, every time she’d dated some douche bag who’d broken her heart, and he didn’t want to see that happen again. Because as Dylan had said, he was only there for a few weeks. So if Corey ended up emotionally involved with him, she was going to get hurt yet again. Dammit.

But what could he do about it? Not a helluva lot. “Don’t hurt her,” he finally said. “Or I’ll break your other foot.”

Dylan lifted one of his eyebrows once more and regarded him thoughtfully. “Dude,” he said slowly. “That is so not like you.”

“Yeah. You’re right.” Matt grinned. As usual, he preferred to cut through tension with a joke. “Even with one broken foot in a cast, I’d never be able to take you.”

Chapter Two

Corey kept careful watch on the Criollo beans she’d imported from a plantation in Brazil inside the second-hand roaster. They were almost ready. It had taken lots of trial and error, which really meant lots of errors, but now she had the timing down and knew the exact moment the beans were roasted to perfection, nice and dark but not burnt. The thumping bass of the Black Eyed Peas played on her sound system and she sang along with a little shake of her hips as she worked.

She was up early at work in her kitchen, roasting cacao beans in preparation for making chocolate. Music always energized her, but she also had her big mug of coffee nearby for the caffeine jolt she needed to keep her going. She was so tired lately, but she had to power on, making the chocolate, then creating her treats. She had a lot of orders to fill, which was a good thing, but because she made her chocolate so fresh she couldn’t stock up too much ahead of time. When a lot of orders came in all at once, she was working flat out to get the chocolates made.

These cacao beans were the finest hand-selected quality, and she’d actually visited the plantation in Brazil last year to meet the owners and discuss doing business with them. It had been an amazing trip, only deepening her interest and enthusiasm for chocolate. She’d seen the cacao trees growing, with their large glossy leaves, tiny waxy pink blossoms and maroon-colored pods. She’d learned how fragile the Criollo tree was and how long it took before it produced fruit.

Most commercial chocolate was made from Forastero beans grown in Africa, which were a much hardier tree and, without having control over the beans used in making chocolate, the quality was going to be much lower. She only wanted the best quality. She took pride in searching out the best ingredients and creating the best possible product she could.

She let that batch cool while she roasted another, and when it cooled enough she began grinding the beans to remove the husks. It was a labor-intensive process, but she’d worked for Matterhorn, one of the world’s biggest chocolate manufacturers, mass-producing chocolate, and that wasn’t what she wanted to do. She wanted to focus on quality, not quantity, creating small, finely-crafted batches and developing the purest possible flavors. She then ground the winnowed beans again to liquefy the cocoa butter, added her ingredients—sugar and milk powder for this batch, sometimes vanilla—and then into the conch machine it went. The conch machine’s rollers would continuously knead that batch of chocolate liquor and ingredients for several hours. She’d purchased most of her equipment used, but it served her well.

When she heard a knock on the front door, she hurried to open it. “Hey,” she said, smiling at the young girl standing there. “How’s it going, Amanda?”

“Okay.”

“I’m about to start some truffles,” Corey told her. “Come on in.”

Amanda pulled her long, straight black hair into a ponytail without being asked, leaving a wing of bleached blonde bangs angling across her small face. Then with a grimace she put on the plastic cap Corey insisted they wear when working on the chocolate, tucking her bangs up under it. “I hate wearing this thing.”

“I know. Me too. But we have to. There are laws we have to follow if we want to sell the chocolate. And think how you’d feel if you were eating something and found a hair in it.”

“Gross.”

“Exactly.”

Amanda had been helping her make chocolates on Saturdays now for a couple of months, though she’d known Amanda longer than that. She’d started meeting with Amanda soon after moving back to San Amaro, when she’d begun volunteering with F.A.M.I.ly, a support system for families affected by mental illness, which was what the acronym stood for. Amanda’s older brother, Justin, had been diagnosed with schizophrenia a few years ago and it had almost shattered their family. Corey knew only too well how mental illness could have a devastating impact on a family from her own life and what her mother had been through.

“Are you tired today?” Amanda asked.

Corey started. “Um…yeah, a little. Do I look that bad?”

Amusement flickered across the teenager’s face. “No, you never look that bad. But you do look a little bagged. How come?”

Corey swallowed a sigh. “The usual. Too much time making chocolate. Not enough sleep. Stayed out too late last night.”

“With Matt?”

“Yeah. And his friend who’s staying with him for a while.” Thoughts of Dylan and his sexy grin and hard body made her quiver inside. “He’s a professional surfer and he hurt his foot, so he can’t compete for a while.”

“That sucks.”

“Yeah.”

“Is he hot?”

Corey choked a little at the question. “Er, yeah, very hot.”

“Uh-huh.” The teenager shot her a far-too-knowing look.

Corey shook her head and began piping small mounds of ganache onto a tray.

“You need a boyfriend,” Amanda said.

“No, I don’t. I haven’t had much luck with boyfriends, so I think I’m going to go without for a while.” She didn’t tell Amanda that she was having hot sex with Matt, so going without a boyfriend really wasn’t difficult. “What’s new with you?” she asked.

“My parents won’t let me pierce my eyebrow.”

Corey repressed her smile and nodded, glancing at Amanda. Her dark brown eyes were heavily ringed with black liner and shadow. “No?”

“You’d let me pierce my eyebrow, wouldn’t you?”

“I don’t know. There are worse things, I guess. But it’s something to be careful about. You could get an infection.”

“Yeah.” Amanda sighed. “That’d be my luck. Then I’d be scarred. Maybe lose the sight in my eye.” She seemed to relish contemplating the gruesome possibilities.

“Maybe that’s why they won’t let you.”

“Nah. They just think I’m too young, but as usual they don’t even want to talk about it because they’re too busy worrying about Justin.”

“How is Justin?” Amanda’s brother had recently been hospitalized after a psychotic episode. It broke Corey’s heart to see Amanda feeling so neglected and ignored, but it was so difficult for parents to deal with the mental illness of one of their children.

Amanda shrugged and the corners of her mouth dipped down. “He might be able to come home next week.”

“That’s good.”

“I guess.”

“Do other kids your age have piercings?”

“Well…not many.” Amanda was fifteen. “Just ears. And sometimes, you know, the cartilage.” She touched the top of her own ear to demonstrate. “Brittany has eight piercings in one ear.”

“And she’s your age?” Brittany was a new friend who’d started popping up a lot in Amanda’s conversation.

“She just turned sixteen.”