Treat with Caution (Treats to Tempt You Book 1) Read online

  Treat with Caution

  Treats to Tempt You: Book 1

  By Serenity Woods

  Treat with Caution

  Treats to Tempt You: Book 1

  By Serenity Woods

  Copyright 2014

  All Rights Reserved

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is coincidental.

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  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Epilogue

  Five Treats to Tempt You

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  “You are the most annoying man in the history of the world,” Tasha snapped.

  Kole grinned, stretched out on the sand, and put his hands behind his head. “Thanks.”

  “It wasn’t a compliment.” Tasha glowered at him, but he remained unrepentant, his grin spreading if anything. Gritting her teeth, she pushed her glasses further up the bridge of her nose and turned her gaze to the sea. Honestly. Trying to have a conversation with Kole Graham was like trying to wrestle a crocodile.

  They sat with Kole’s sister Maisey and his best mate Joss on Coopers Beach, a long crescent of sand that formed part of the beautiful Doubtless Bay in the Far North of New Zealand. The summer breeze played with Tasha’s hair, and waves crept up the sand and then slid back, sensual as a lover’s fingers. Over her head, the pohutukawa trees displayed their Christmassy red flowers, and her bare legs glistened in the warm December sun. It could almost be paradise. Except she was certain there weren’t any crocodiles in paradise.

  She glanced back at Kole. If she were anyone else, she might have considered him attractive, with his short dark hair, lean jaw, firm but sensual lips, and muscular frame highlighted by the All Blacks rugby shirt that stretched across his torso and around his impressive biceps. He carried himself with a confident sexiness bordering on arrogance, and this, along with his wry sense of humor, suggested he was probably excellent in bed.

  Too bad he annoyed the hell out of her.

  He looked across, saw her watching him, and raised an eyebrow. He was always trying to embarrass her, to make her blush and lose her composure. He hadn’t managed to do so once in the eleven years they’d known each other. Tasha didn’t embarrass easily.

  “Stare any longer, I’ll have to start charging,” he said.

  “You have chocolate on your top,” she pointed out. “I was wondering whether to find you a pelican bib.”

  He looked down at his rugby shirt, spotted the offending piece of confectionery, and scooped it up. “I was saving that for later.” He sucked it off his finger.

  Tasha rolled her eyes. “I’m not surprised you’re still single at twenty-eight. You’re like a trained ape. Without the training.”

  “For God’s sake, you two.” Maisey sent them an exasperated glare. “You’re like a couple of five year olds. I’m tempted to send you to bed without any tea.”

  “I think she meant separate beds,” Joss said at Kole’s approving murmur.

  Maisey snorted. “The space-time continuum would collapse if Kole and Tasha slept in the same bed.”

  “Damn straight,” Tasha said.

  Kole, however, smiled lazily. “Oh, I don’t know.” His gaze travelled down her, then slowly back up. His lips curved, and he opened his mouth to speak again.

  Tasha looked over the top of her glasses. “If you say anything about Uranus, I swear, I’m going back to the car.”

  Maisey and Joss laughed. Kole chuckled and winked at Tasha. She smiled, but didn’t let it reach her eyes. She really was mad at him, and she didn’t want him to think she’d forgiven him.

  Joss checked his watch. “I’d better be getting back. Afternoon surgery starts in thirty minutes. I can’t believe you talked me into having lunch on the beach on a Friday—I have a shed load of paperwork to do.”

  “Oh, stop being such a stick-in-the-mud,” Maisey scolded. “You’re no fun since you came back from curing A.I.D.S. in South Africa or whatever it was you were doing.”

  “I wish I had cured A.I.D.S.,” he said, “but unfortunately the universe had other things in store for me.”

  Maisey rambled on about how dull he’d become since he moved back and become a boring old G.P. Tasha shot him a sympathetic look. Her brother Fredek—who everyone called Fox—had told her that not only did Joss’s mother have Multiple Sclerosis, but his father had started to show signs of Alzheimer’s. Add to that a sister whose husband had recently left her with four kids to take care of, and it became clear family responsibilities weighed heavy on Joss’s mind.

  He went to get up, and Tasha held out a hand. “Oh no, not yet. I brought you out here to help me talk this idiot into giving us the shop, and you’re not leaving until he does.”

  “You’re going to be here a long time then.” Kole slid on his sunglasses. “Because I have no intention of giving it up.”

  Tasha pursed her lips. “Maisey!”

  “What?” Maisey flicked her fingers at her brother. “No good asking me. He never does anything I want him to.”

  Tasha turned her glare onto Joss, who shrugged. “He does tend to have a mind of his own.”

  “But it’s not fair. Come on, Maisey, you know that shop would be perfect for Treats. Kole can have a studio anywhere.”

  But Maisey just sighed. “We’ll find somewhere else, Tash. Stop getting your knickers in a twist.”

  Tasha blew out a long, irritated breath, tempted to kick sand over Kole. “I’ve known you eleven years,” she said to him. “And I swear you’ve frustrated and irritated me nearly every day.”

  “Only nearly? I’m slipping.”

  She glowered. “I should have guessed you were going to be a thorn in my side the first day we met.”

  “Where was that?” Maisey frowned.

  “You were making muffins,” Kole said.

  “You remember?” Tasha certainly did.

  The two girls had met on the first day of high school, had discovered they shared a love of cooking, and had quickly become firm friends. Maisey had invited Tasha to her house one Saturday to try out a new muffin recipe, and the thirteen-year-old girls had been halfway through the preparation when Kole and Joss had burst into the kitchen, hot, sweaty, and filthy after a weekend rugby match. At seventeen, both boys had been loud and arrogant, and they’d proceeded to make the girls’ lives a misery.

  “Oh yes, I remember,” Maisey said. “You dipped your muddy fingers in the mixing bowl, ate all our chocolate chip
s, flicked muffin mix at each other, and generally made a nuisance of yourselves.”

  “Doesn’t sound like us,” Joss remarked.

  “Maisey cried, and you stamped your feet like a toddler,” Kole said to Tasha.

  “Do you remember what you called me?” Tasha asked.

  “I said, ‘What a fucking banshee,’ and you threw your shoe at the door.”

  Maisey and Joss laughed. Kole grinned. Tasha just scowled. “At least Joss has grown up a bit,” she said. “You haven’t changed at all. In fact I think you’ve gotten worse.”

  “Thank you.”

  “It wasn’t a fucking compliment!”

  Laughing, Kole brought up a hand to adjust his sunglasses, and the gold ring on his right hand glinted in the sunlight. The ring had belonged to Harry, she was sure—his and Maisey’s older brother, who had died in a motorbike accident five years before, driving home too fast after an argument with a girlfriend. Tasha had watched Kole throughout the funeral as he’d comforted Maisey and her older sister, Skye. He had remained dry-eyed, jaw knotted and fists clenched, clearly determined not to show any emotion. He’d been the same ever since, as if he focused on only two things in life—what he wanted, and the easiest way to get it.

  “For the record, I’m close to throwing my shoe at you now,” she stated. “Maisey and I have planned this shop for years.” They were going to call it Treats to Tempt You, and they planned to sell handmade chocolate truffles, ice-cream, and espresso coffee, mainly to the thousands of tourists that flocked to Doubtless Bay in the summer, but also hopefully to locals as well as they spread the word. “You’re standing in the way of us fulfilling our childhood dream. How does that make you feel?”

  “I feel fine, thank you.”

  She tried again. “What about Elle and Caitlin? Maisey and I were lucky to find two other girls willing to come in with us and run the place, but what if they change their minds because of your idiocy?”

  “Tasha, I’m not stopping you from having a shop. Just from having that shop.”

  “I want that shop.”

  “So do I. And I got there first. So deal with it.” His good humor had vanished, and he was glaring at her behind his glasses, she was sure of it.

  But she’d fallen in love with the shop on the waterfront as soon as she’d seen it. She and Maisey had driven around for days looking at places, and nothing had seemed suitable—they were all off the beaten track, too expensive, or too run down and would take money to fix up. The shop in the harbor was ideal—small but not too small, with a proper kitchen, and a room out the back for storage. It was neat and clean, with enough room for a counter and a few tables and chairs, although mainly they were intending to offer a takeaway service. It was perfect.

  They’d gone into the agency and asked for details, only to be told that someone had already agreed to take the place the day before. He wouldn’t be signing the lease papers for another eight days because the owner, Andrew, was returning from a trip to Peru and wanted to check out the new tenant for himself. But for all intents and purposes, the deal was done.

  It was only when they’d met up with the boys and talked about their disappointment that they’d discovered Kole was the one who’d beaten them to it.

  She’d already tried several times over the past week to talk him into giving the shop to them, without success. But she wasn’t prepared to give up yet. “I know you want a new studio, but it doesn’t have to be on the waterfront. We need somewhere people walk past. I’ll help you look for somewhere else; I’ll even ring around the agencies and scout out some properties for you.”

  “Actually I do need somewhere visible as I want to pull business in off the street for family holiday portraits, and the waterfront shop is perfect.”

  “You’re such a selfish son of a bitch!”

  “A selfish son of a bitch with a shop,” he said, smirking.

  “Whatever happened to ladies first?” she snapped.

  He lifted his glasses to study her. “Oh, in every other way I believe ladies should always come first.”

  Joss sniggered, and she sent Kole a sarcastic look. “Call yourself a gentleman?”

  He lowered his glasses again. “Nope.”

  “Kole!”

  “I want the shop, Tasha, and I got there first, fair and square. Stop nagging. You sound like a fishwife.”

  Irritation and frustration whirled inside her, and she pushed herself to her feet. Glaring at him, she stuffed her hands in the pockets of her shorts. She didn’t usually like him to know how much he annoyed her, but for once she didn’t try to hide how upset she was.

  “You just don’t care, do you? You’ve got what you want, and you don’t care that you could be helping your sister and her friends achieve a lifelong dream.”

  “Nope,” he said again.

  She clenched her fists in her pockets. “You think you’re omnipotent, don’t you?”

  “Better than being impotent.” He grinned.

  She was too angry to smile, even though Joss and Maisey were trying to stifle their laughter. “You’re like it in everything,” she said hotly, “in work, in sport, with women.”

  “Impotent?”

  “Omnipotent,” she yelled. “Using them and then dropping them as soon as they get serious.”

  “Doesn’t sound like me at all.” He looked smug and self-satisfied, which only served to irritate her more.

  She ground her teeth. “I bet you think you can make any woman in the world fall in love with you.”

  He leaned over to take a mint from the tube Joss offered him, popped it into his mouth, and lay back on the sand. “Yep.” His provocative grin heated her up like a Bunsen burner, and steam almost hissed out of her ears.

  “Well, you’re not all-powerful, and anyway it wouldn’t surprise me if you were impotent.”

  He chuckled. “Want me to prove I’m not?”

  Fury swept over her. “Like I’d ever sleep with you! I can’t imagine why any woman would ever want to, and I certainly can’t conceive how a woman would ever fall in love with you.”

  He shrugged. “You have to get to know me first.”

  “Kole Graham, I know you probably better than anyone else save your sister, and I wouldn’t fall for you if you were the last man on Earth. In this galaxy. In the universe!”

  At that, he sat up and slid off his sunglasses, then studied her, his arms around his knees. “I see.”

  Maisey laughed. “Oh, I think you would, Tash. He’s quite determined when he wants something.”

  His lazy, amused smile turned the Bunsen up higher, and something exploded inside Tasha. “Absolutely not.” She bent to look into his eyes. “You’d fall for me before I ever fell for you.”

  A brief silence fell. Then Maisey said, “Uh-oh,” while Joss shook his head and gave a low whistle.

  Kole held his sunglasses by one of the arms, and he swung them around in a circle. “You reckon?”

  Not looking away, holding his gaze, she said, “Yep.”

  Kole’s eyes, a warm hazel, studied her with interest, as if for the first time in his life he was really, truly looking at her. He tipped his head to the side, and the corner of his mouth curved up. “Hmm,” he said.

  A frisson trailed down Tasha’s back as if someone had run a finger down her spine.

  Oops.

  Chapter Two

  “Tasha,” Maisey warned. “Don’t be daft.”

  “No, wait,” Kole said. “I’m interested to hear this. So let me get this straight—you think if we dated properly, and we were allowed to…shall we say…use the talents God gave us to charm the other, I would fall for you before you fell for me?”

  He studied the dark haired girl who had leaned forward to stare at him. He tended to think of her as short, although she was average height really, around five feet six. But from his six-two advantage he always towered over her, which was probably why he’d never completely shaken off his image of her as a kid, complete with braces, flat c
hest, and high pitched voice.

  She’d grown up over the past few years, though. Gone were the braces, to be replaced by straight white teeth, even though he didn’t see them very often as she so rarely smiled. The high pitched voice had been replaced by a lower, husky one he couldn’t say was altogether displeasing. And as for the flat chest…he had a clear view down her T-shirt, and she’d definitely developed in that department.

  “Are you looking down my front?” she asked suspiciously.

  He raised his gaze to hers. “Yes.”

  She stood with a mumbled curse and stuffed her hands back into her pockets, and there she was again, the thirteen-year-old fireball who had always driven him nuts. Raised by a mother who had been a famous model in her youth and who constantly hounded her about her weight and fashion sense, Tasha had rebelled completely against any advice Laura Wilde had given her. She never used makeup, pulled her hair back in a ponytail most of the time, and always wore black or muted colors. A blatant refusal to diet had led to her having a rounded figure, although she did enjoy exercise so she wasn’t quite as plump as she might otherwise have been. She hated the idea of contact lenses too, and always wore glasses with dark rectangular frames that made her look both studious and hard as nails.

  Oddly, perhaps, in spite of her refusal to bow to social conventions and spend time on making herself attractive for the opposite sex, she’d had several partners he knew of, and he suspected, a few he didn’t. Part of the reason may have been that, unfortunately for her, she couldn’t hide the fact she was the daughter of a model. If a person looked closely behind the tomboy façade, she was actually rather beautiful, the slight exoticness of her features reflecting her mother’s Russian origins. She had interesting eyes the color of polished mahogany with a fascinating circle of orange in the center, a straight nose, high cheekbones, and a wide but perfectly sculpted mouth.

  It was a shame that what came out of it were usually insults aimed in his direction. Including the ones about to tumble from her lips like tennis balls from a bag.