Chapter One

Cynthia Swanberg sighed as she looked out at the bustling coffee shop full of people in various stages of urgency to get their morning dose of caffeine on board and get on with their days. She imagined them all going off to jobs that must be more interesting than being a Starbucks barista, which she regarded to be a rather lowly state of affairs for a girl who had always been told how pretty and smart she was. And indeed, Cindy’s pixyish blonde good looks and cheerful demeanor as well as her diligent efforts to learn her regulars’ names and remember their orders meant that her tips were among the best of the workers. Even though it had been good money for a summer job when she had been in college, now that her parents’ messy divorce had forced her to drop out she felt embarrassed at working in such an intellectually non-demanding job. But it paid the rent and bills of her rather depressing studio apartment, and that security was precious to her given how badly the rest of her world had fallen apart.

She had been a pre med major and busy undergraduate participating in a wide variety of interesting college activities who was glad to have a summertime barista gig to secure her spending money for the next school year. And then her usually somewhat grimly stoic mother shocked her by collapsing in tears. Her always preoccupied and very busy father, it seemed, had been busier than anyone realized. He had sunk all of the family’s money into some cockamamie land development project in Costa Rica, where he had suddenly moved to be with his heretofore unknown second family. Cindy had suddenly literally not a penny left of her previous substantial college fund, nor did she have a home to return to as it had entered foreclosure. Her mother took a job in retail clothing sales in her hometown a thousand miles away, and our heroine talked her manager into keeping her on full time when the rest of her friends went back to the junior years in college. Her move into the drab studio apartment near her work was a depressing exercise in realizing how few supports she had when suddenly ejected from her previous apparently charmed existence.

The one bright spot in Cindy’s rather bleak life was her yoga community. Her mother had introduced our heroine to the practice of that art when she was a little girl. A lifetime of diligent effort had left the young blonde with a superb, strong, lithe body of remarkable flexibility. She arranged to work the front desk of the studio in lieu of her parents’ previous underwriting of her daily classes. As well, Cindy made a little money on the side subbing for the regular teachers in their all-too-frequent absences (yoga teachers being a notoriously flaky lot). It was as she was cleaning up the studio after teaching a vigorous vinyasa class that the fateful encounter took place from which her rather sad and drab life suddenly became much more interesting.

Most of the twenty students who had applauded our heroine warmly had finished their shivasanas and drifted out into the foyer as Cindy was stowing the props in their cabinet. Just one couple remained in the studio, a striking duo she had noticed before, and who always came to class together. Since she routinely checked them in as part of her front desk duties, she knew their names, and had even seen them in the Starbucks several times. They were clearly in love with each other, and Cindy detected an unusually noticeable sexual charge between them as they worked out side-by-side, never touching, but always somehow...connected, in a way that struck her as subtly but powerfully erotic. She envied them this, and knew she wanted something that they seemed to have. However, the immature men her own age that constantly hit on Cindy had proven both sexually and emotionally disappointing. Maybe she needed s