Black Flame (13 page)

Dear Jimmy,

How can I ever manage to tell you how much you have meant to me this year? You have brought joy back to Christmas, something I never imagined possible. Looking forward to seeing you soon.

Love, Nan

Nan. Her name was Nan. Of course it was! A beautiful, elegant name for Jimmy’s beautiful, elegant girlfriend. She stuffed the note back into the envelope, not bothering to be careful, her eyes blurring with angry tears. With each jab of the paper—because somehow it didn’t fit right now that she’d read it—she listed the accusations against Jimmy.

He brought his girlfriend
joy
.

He had come to mean so
much
to her.

She couldn’t
wait
to see him again.

None of which was a crime, right? But they weren’t the sort of things that a casual girlfriend, a friend-with-benefits, said to a man. They were intimate, loving words.

And how would Nan feel if she found out that Mr. Bring-On-the-Joy had been kissing another woman earlier today?

Fueled by righteous indignation, Deneen whipped out her phone and dialed her parents’ house. She might as well get something out of this terrible development—she’d use her rage to get through the dreaded call.

“Well, hello, darling!” Her mother’s voice. “You’re father’s right here. I’m putting you on speaker.”

“Mom, don’t—”

“There, you’re on speaker. Can you hear me?”

Deneen hated being on speaker. Her parents interrupted each other, talked over her, then demanded that she repeat herself because they couldn’t hear. Immediately she felt her anger begin to drain away, replaced by powerless resignation in the face of the twin juggernaut of Marjorie and Stan Burgess. “Yes, Mom,” she sighed. “I can hear you. Merry Christmas.”

“Well, it’s about time! Aunt Fay was just asking me how you were doing at the taqueria, and I was explaining that you’d been fired and gone to work at the brow bar, and then
that
didn’t work out and—”

“It’s very nice up here,” Deneen interrupted, already regretting the decision to call. “A white Christmas. Lots of snow. The fire is so delightful. Chestnuts roasting on an open fire, and all that.”

“How’s your sister?” That was her father, interjecting where he could. Typically he had little opportunity to speak, especially if her mother had “had a nip,” something she tended to do on the holidays.

“Fine, Dad,” Deneen said. Then she felt guilty—might as well not compound her first crime this evening with another one. “Actually she and Matthew went on a little trip.”

“A trip? After you went all that way to see them?”
“Um, well…the thing is, they left before I got here. I was going to surprise them and…so. They’ll be back tomorrow, though.”

Her mother tsked. “I hate to tell you I told you so, Deneen. But I
did
suggest that you call first.”

Deneen gritted her teeth—that was just like her mother, to pat herself on the back for not rubbing it in, and then rub it in with gusto.

“Everyone here is being very nice,” she said defensively. “We just finished dinner.”

“Well, that’s very generous,” her mother said. The implication being,
since you can’t possibly pay your way
.

“Do you need us to wire you any money, hon?”

“Thanks, Dad, but no,” Deneen said. Her father’s intentions were good, but she was pretty sure her aunts and uncles were all listening in, and her humiliation was growing every second. “I’m set.”

“You’re set? How can you be set?” Her mother had definitely had a tipple or two. “You don’t have two nickels to rub together. Oh, by the way, I saw Trina Kensington at the grocery. Her cat is having a catheter put in, and Trina needs someone to check on him twice a day, and she’s willing to pay. You just have to learn to express the urine—apparently it’s quite easy once you get the hang of it. Should I tell her you’re interested?”

“Mom! I’m in North Dakota. Plus I’m allergic, remember? I mean, otherwise there’s nothing I’d enjoy more than squeezing pee out of a cat.”

“Well, I’m only trying to help,” her mother said, sounding wounded.

“Trina’s got great connections,” a slurring female voice chimed in. Oh, great—Aunt Ida, the first female construction forewoman in Arkansas. “If you do a good job for her, she might consider you for light housekeeping.”

Shooting pains were beginning to spike behind Deneen’s eyes. This was all beginning to seem like her worst mistake yet. “Oh, gosh, they’re about to serve dessert,” she lied. “I’d probably better get going.”

“One more thing,” her mother said. “I saw Wes Burke in the office the other day. He and Laura are finally getting a divorce.”

Wes and Deneen had gone to school together, and her mother had followed his career in environmental law with great interest. His marriage to Laura, who wanted nothing more from life than to raise her children and tend her house, was a crushing blow to Marjorie’s hopes that Deneen might somehow snare him. And now that the ink wasn’t even on the divorce decree, she was circling like a shark, trying to set him up with her.

“Mom, I met someone!”

The words were out before she could think. A mistake if ever there was one—now she would be grilled, as she always was if she mentioned someone she was seeing (which was why she rarely did). Her mother would want to know what his politics were and what his relationship with his mother was like and if he believed a woman belonged in the White House.

“That’s nice, dear, but I was actually thinking of your sister. Do you think this thing with Matthew is going to stick?”

Deneen took the phone away from her ear and stared it. She had, apparently, reached a new low in her parents’ estimation; now she wasn’t even worthy of their matchmaking efforts. The unthinkable had happened—they had actually given all the way up on her.

Silently, she tapped the end call button. Then she stood in the cold, frozen winter wonderland, shivering, and wondering if she had actually just hung up on her own mother.

A snuffling sound at her feet was the only thing that snapped her out of her reverie. She looked down to see Angel lapping up the last few crumbs of the cookies, the ribbon stuck to her ruff by the tape that had secured it to the plate.

“Oh, Angel, what have you done?” Deneen wailed. She knelt down in the snow, the cold instantly reaching through her jeans to her knees, and regarded the dog’s big brown eyes. Angel wagged her tail and gave a small, apologetic woof. Then she lifted her paw and placed it gently on Deneen’s knee.

“What are you trying to tell me, girl? Are you mad at me for reading his mail? For hanging up on my mom?”

Another woof, more urgent, and the long fringed tail wagged harder. She really was a sweet looking dog—not pretty exactly, more…full of character. Which was what people said about homely girls—Deneen had said it herself. But at this moment, Angel and her owner might well be Deneen’s only friends for several hundred miles.

She sighed, and picked up the card, which had survived Angel’s assault with only a few wrinkles and a wet, snowy paw print. She leaned forward and put her arms around the dog.

“You’re nice,” she said. “You don’t judge.”

Angel whined and licked her cheek.

And it seemed more likely that Angel was trying to tell her that only the bold end up with the cookies.

Jimmy couldn’t exactly head for the Tar Barn to pound out a few sets of chest presses, not on Christmas, and not when the woman who was driving him crazy was out taking a walk, so he settled for washing dishes with fervor. He turned down all offers of help, and as he was drying the last of the wine glasses, Deneen returned.

After stomping the snow from her boots and hanging up her coat, she came into the kitchen. Her cheeks were rosy from the cold, and a snow-dampened bit of hair was stuck to her skin near her mouth. Jimmy wanted to brush it out of the way. No, he wanted to kiss it out of the way—no, what he really wanted to do was pick her up and carry her to his room and start there and kiss his way all over every inch of her body.

But that wouldn’t be socially acceptable, especially because she was glaring at him as she held out what looked like a crushed paper plate with an envelope on top.

“This is yours. Someone left it on the porch. It used to have Christmas cookies on it, but Angel ate them. Also, she stepped on the card.”

She jammed the plate against his shirt. For some reason, she seemed angry with him, which didn’t make much sense. Nothing she had just described—the delivery of holiday cookies, or the behavior of the dog—could possibly be blamed on him.

“Uh, thanks,” he said, taking the plate and glancing at the envelope. Sure enough, it had his name on it.
“Angel!” Roan exclaimed, hurrying over to her dog. “You are a very, very, very bad girl!”

Deneen caught the poor dog’s guilty look as she hung her head, and couldn’t bear to frame the creature. “It was my fault,” she said. “I was carrying them, and I got distracted when I called my parents, and I think she must have thought I was offering them to her.”

“Still,” Roan said, sounding mollified. She cupped the dog’s face in her hands. “We don’t eat other people’s presents, do we?”

Angel’s tail thumped the floor. Jimmy knew better than to ascribe human emotions to pets, but, for some reason, it appeared that the dog was grinning.

“We need to get going, anyway,” Cal said, getting their coats. “I’m back on tomorrow night, so I’ll be back tomorrow afternoon sometime.”

“It was really, really nice to meet you,” Roan said. She gave Deneen a big hug. “Don’t forget—tea at my place, okay? And I’m sure I’ll see you before then. I’ll come by when Matthew and Jayne get back.”

“Sure,” Deneen said, nodding brightly and smiling. Which also struck Jimmy as odd. Since the dog belonged to Roan, it would be far more logical to blame Roan for the destruction of the cookies. Instead, Deneen was acting like they were old friends.

Cal gave Deneen a hug too, then looked around. “Where’s Zane?”

“Crashed on the couch,” Roan said. Everyone looked over, and sure enough, he was stretched out on the old plaid sofa, covered with a crocheted afghan. “Poor thing, he must be exhausted. He’ll probably sleep for the next week.”

Roan hugged Jimmy too, a habit that he had to admit was rather nice, not because he found Roan attractive, but because, as many studies had shown, human contact was responsible for many benevolent physiological effects. And then they were gone. A few moments later Jimmy heard Cal’s truck pulling around the drive.

Someone had turned out most of the lights while he had been cleaning up in the kitchen. The fire was winding down in the hearth, a few flames licking the logs.

“Wow! So late! So very, very late,” Deneen said.

“It’s only nine,” Jimmy pointed out. “Not an especially late hour to depart from a party. Of course, I think Roan and Cal may have been hoping for some privacy.”

“Obviously,” she said shortly, turning away from him. She sounded irritated again. Since she was pleasant with others, and snappish only with him, the only logical deduction was that he was the irritant.

Which was most unfortunate, given the attraction he felt for her, which was only growing despite his best efforts to exercise, ignore, and now dishwash it away.

What Jimmy wanted more than anything else in the world right then was another chance with Deneen: a chance to kiss her, certainly, but also to get to know her better, so he might understand why exactly she affected him like no woman he’d ever met.

He needed a smooth line, a silver tongue. For the first time he could recall, he envied his roommates. If only he were smooth like Matthew, or could sing like Chase. If he were passionate like Cal, or had Zane’s immaculate manners. He’d seen all four of his roommates in action, and he’d seen all of them succeed with women. Since he’d had plenty of opportunities of his own, it hadn’t occurred to him to study their technique, something which he now regretted.

There had to be something he could say that would get Deneen to relax and talk to him. Earlier, when he had kissed her, he’d been overwhelmed by desire. His instincts had overridden his intellect. Now, while his attraction had only grown stronger, he’d become confused: it wasn’t a single night’s pleasure he hoped to attain with Deneen, but something more. What exactly that might be, he couldn’t even hope to imagine, since she lived many hundreds of miles away and was not compatible with him. And yet that very unreasoned desire was getting in the way of him approaching their interactions in a logical way.

“So, it’s late, and I think I’ll just go read,” Deneen said, edging away from him.

He was losing her fast, and he didn’t want to.

“We all dance to a mysterious tune,” he said quickly.

“Excuse me?” Deneen was frozen in the door to the hallway. Slowly, she turned and looked at him. “What did you just say?”

Jimmy didn’t reply for a second. He knew exactly what he had just said—after all, it was a quote from the man he admired more than any other human being besides his mother—but why, of all the things the great man had said, that particular one had come out of his mouth, he had no idea.

“Er, it’s just something Albert Einstein said.”

She was watching him quizzically. “Okay, then. Well…like I said, I’m tired, and—”

“That’s not the whole quote.”

“It’s not?”

No, it wasn’t. There was more…something about the forces of nature and—but that wasn’t quite it. “Everything is determined by forces over which we have no control,” he recited from memory.

“Well, I’ll agree with you there,” Deneen said, softening a little. “I don’t have any control over the weather or it would be seventy-five degrees and sunny. And I don’t have any control over my sister, or she’d get her ass back here tonight so I wouldn’t have to stay in this sub-zero hell any longer than necessary.”

The temperature was, in fact, above freezing—twenty-nine degrees the last time Jimmy had checked—and Western constructions of Hell generally held that it was hot, not cold, but Jimmy didn’t feel the need to correct Deneen. Instead, he was still trying to remember the rest of the quote, which he had discovered in a book his mother bought for him in a secondhand store for his sixteenth birthday—a book which was still among his prized possessions. After her death, he had spent long evenings finding comfort in its pages, and some of the quotes had spoken to him more than others.