Sweet Nothings: A Karma Café Novella by Tawny Weber

Chapter One
     
     
    There was delicious, and then there was delicious .
    Crowded around a café table with seven chattering women who looked at her as a combination of their favorite little sister and a kid to be protected was probably the wrong time to fall into deep lust.
    Still, Bianca Snow eyed the golden crust of the apple tart in the dessert display next to her table. Her gaze shifted to the sexy guy across the room. She wasn’t sure which she’d rather nibble on first.
    She shouldn’t be hungry for either.
    She’d just eaten a yummy bowl of rich minestrone soup with a homemade yeast roll.
    So she should be full.
    Last week, she’d been dumped by yet another jerk who subscribed to the idiot mindset that good girls didn’t . Didn’t have needs, didn’t have wants, didn’t have the utter gall to suggest a little hanky-panky after a tenth date.
    A suggestion that’d taken her eight dates to work up the nerve to make.
    She should be jaded.
    But both the tart and the guy were making her mouth water.
    Because the guy across the room was hot. Not in the usual, fancy CEO or snazzy lawyer way so common in this part of San Francisco. Although his pricey shoes and leather jacket said he’d probably hold his own with their income bracket. Sun-streaked brown hair shagged around his face like he’d been too distracted to get it cut. His face was made up of sharp angles, his lips full and even across the room, his eyes held an intensity that made her shiver, even though she couldn’t tell their color.
    Every time he looked at her, she got a tingle. The kind that made her want to walk across the crowded cafe and ask him if he preferred his women covered in chocolate, whipped cream, or both.
    Except she didn’t do that kind of thing. She didn’t approach men, she didn’t ask them out, and she’d never found a guy who thought of her in dessert-terms.
    Dammit.
    “Dessert, ladies?” Anja Karmanski’s smile encompassed the eight women at the table. Or, really since the Karma Café was a small place, the two tables shoved together to seat the noisy bunch.
    Bianca knew Anja wasn’t smiling just because it was her job, or even because she was glad to have seats filled.
    Anja’s smile was simply Anja. Fun, sexy, friendly and a little mysterious. Exactly the kind of woman Bianca wished she could be. Which was saying a lot given that she was usually surrounded by seven strong, independent, savvy women who she wished she could be like, too.
    All related in some way, some were sisters, others cousins even once or twice removed. But each and every one, the Miner women were amazing.
    They’d given her a safe haven when she’d shown up on her best friend’s doorstep with a broken arm, dislocated shoulder and a symphony of bruises. Having finally found the nerve to run from an abusive home at the age of sixteen, they’d opened their arms, their hearts and their home. They’d given her a job, a life, a sense of strength and purpose she hadn’t believed was in her.
    What they couldn’t give her, though, was a confidence. Not in herself as a woman. Between her admiration of them, and her voracious romance novel obsession, Bianca knew what kind of woman she wanted to be. She just didn’t know how to get there.
    Café sounds, chatter and utensils, all muted into a background hum. Around her, her adopted family ordered dessert, talked business and guys, making plans and laughing happily.
    Bianca didn’t join the fun. Instead she stared at the crumbs on her plate and sighed. It seemed like the only person she didn’t wish she could be like was herself.
    Quiet girls like her who looked fairytale sweet didn’t attract sexy guys with a talent for rocking the bed. Or the table, or oh man, a wall somewhere. Bianca poked at her crumbs with a fork, wanting more than anything to be the kind of woman who attracted that kind of guy, instead of ones who thought she’d make a nice Sunday School teacher.
    Even more, she wished she were