Black Flame (16 page)

“You’re being sarcastic, I assume. The media would have no interest in—”

“Yes, I’m being sarcastic. Jeez, Jimmy, for a genius, you’re the dumbest guy I’ve ever met.”

Jimmy gave up rocking and took his hands off the wheel. He was out of ideas. Deneen was right: he had failed in this situation, much as he had failed in every encounter he had had with her. And that indicated a profound deficiency, probably relating to his difficulty expressing his emotions.

He cleared his throat. If ever there was a time to follow his mother’s advice, it was now.
Think with your heart
, she had told him when he was thirteen. For the next sixteen years, that advice hadn’t made much sense to him.

But now, he thought he got it. The things he’d tried so far—fixing the error, explaining the circumstances surrounding it—hadn’t helped at all. Deneen was worried, anxious, and afraid. Those emotions were most effectively combatted with reassurance and comfort.

Jimmy could provide that.

He took a deep breath and reached for Deneen. When he put his hands on her shoulders, he felt her stiffen under his touch, and nearly gave up. But then he caught a whiff of her perfume—that flowers and spices and lemons scent—and his intentions became muddled. Comfort and reassurance gave way to something else. Not just arousal but
longing
—a sensation Jimmy rarely experienced. Need, even—to touch her and hold her and stay with her until he was able to make her feel better.

“Deneen,” he breathed. Then he pulled her closer.

The console between the seats made it awkward, but every other sensation—her hair against his face, her hands on his shoulders, her scent on every inhale—felt exactly right. She melted against him, circling his neck with her arms, and tucked her head under his chin. He could feel her heart beating against his skin.

“I’m just so worried,” she said in a small voice, after neither of them moved for a very long time. Then she added, even more quietly, “I’m sorry I was so awful to you.”

“It’s quite all right. Also, you are not awful.”

She laughed.

It wasn’t much of a laugh, more of a weak giggle, but as she pulled away from him, her mouth quirked up in a faint smile. “I know you didn’t mean to get stuck in the snow. I know you were just trying to make me feel better. And I even know that Jayne is probably fine, and it’s just my imagination making everything worse. It’s just—I’m not very good at just sitting still. You know what I mean? I like to be
doing
something, not just—I don’t know, waiting for whatever to happen.”

“Like with the packages.”

“The packages?”

“The ones I had gift-wrapped for the brunch. The wrapping was perfectly adequate, so at first I didn’t understand why you wanted to modify it. But I see now that your nature is to embellish and augment practical objects and arrangements. You’re—you’re like strontium aluminate.”

“Like
what
?”

Jimmy blushed. The notion had just popped into his head, and it didn’t really stand up to scrutiny, but now that he’d said it, he saw no choice other than to explain.

“Strontium aluminate is a phosphorescent pigment. That means that the energy it absorbs in the form of light is released unusually slowly, making it appear to glow in the dark. They use it in highway signage and other applications where high visibility is desirable. You, uh, do that. I mean, you don’t glow in the dark, obviously, but you…glow. Long after everyone else has settled for ordinary. You never stop making things…”

He was out of his depth now, talking nonsense out of a sense of acute discomfort, following his intuition. But wasn’t that what his mother had made him promise to do? Because wasn’t intuition just another way of saying that he was trying to speak from the heart?

“You never stop making things prettier. Sparklier. Nicer. It’s—it’s more than what you do. It’s who you are.”

“You’re comparing me to a glow-in-the-dark exit sign,” Deneen said slowly.

“No, that’s not—I don’t—it isn’t—” This was coming out all wrong. The harder Jimmy tried to do what his mother had told him, what he thought would make Deneen feel better, the worse he was making it. He really wanted to find release through physical exercise. But he couldn’t very well jump out of the truck now and start doing jumping jacks. “Please just forget that I said anything,” he said faintly.

“But I think I like it,” Deneen said. “An exit sign—it can be designed to be pretty, but it also makes the world better. Everyone’s always telling me to get a real career, to pick something worthwhile. But maybe it’s enough to just…make things nicer.”

She smiled at him. And then suddenly her hand was resting lightly on his cheek, and she leaned across the console and kissed him.

She’d meant to kiss him on the cheek. She really had. She’d puckered up and aimed…and then, somehow, her lips brushed against his mouth.

The minute she touched his incredibly warm (what kind of man was that warm when he’d been outside in the arctic freeze shoveling snow with only a scraper?), soft, gorgeous lips, any hope of backtracking was gone. Especially when he kissed back. He didn’t even hesitate. Instinct was driving both of them—and driving them hard.

Deneen made a sound as she pulled him closer. Her ribs pressed against the arm rest painfully, but she arched across the space, trying to get as close to Jimmy as she could, given the constraints of the truck’s cab. He kissed like a world champion, like he’d gotten a doctorate in the art of kissing, like he headed an institute for the advanced study of kissing. His tongue was neither too tentative nor too bold. His hands drew her closer; he tasted wonderfully of cinnamon and coffee and…well, and desire. He wanted her. And she wanted him.

Ordinarily when she was kissing a man, Deneen wasn’t trying to analyze what was going on. But this was the second time in two days she’d completely lost her head and found herself in a clinch with Jimmy; after the first time, she’d sworn to resist even casual contact with the man. So her current situation—locked in an embrace with him in the middle of an emergency—bore some examination.

Until he did a kind of low growling thing and nipped her bottom lip, then kissed his way along the underside of her jaw. After that, it was all over. No analyzing, no second thoughts, no regrets. She was all in, and if Jimmy Mason wanted to peel off her clothes one article at a time and throw them out into the snow, until she was stark raving naked on the edge of the highway, then she was game. In fact, she had tugged down the zipper of his parka and was trying to loosen the top button of that marvelously soft sweater when someone rapped on the window.

Deneen jumped so hard her head hit the rear-view mirror. Jimmy uttered a very un-Jimmy-like curse. Then he had to wipe the window with the sleeve of his coat because they’d managed to fog up the entire cab.

An elderly man in a fur-trimmed cap was peering in at them. He made the universal sign for “roll down your window,” circling his hand in its deerskin mitten. Jimmy turned the key in the ignition and complied.

“Hello,” the old man said, his breath making clouds in the cold air. “Are you folks all right?”

“We’re fine, sir, we just managed to lose the road there for a second and ended up in the ditch.”

“Well, I can see that, son. Would you like me to tow you out?”

“That would be great,” Deneen said, leaning across Jimmy.

“I’ll get out and help you tie on to the hitch,” Jimmy said.

“That’s all right, son. I already took care of that while the two of you were canoodling.”

They were back on the road in a little over eight minutes. It would have been even quicker, except that after the man had refused to accept any payment for his help, Deneen made him write down his address so she could send him a proper thank you note.

“Do people still send thank you notes through the postal service?” Jimmy asked, mostly to avoid making conversation about what they’d been doing before their Good Samaritan came to their aid.

“People with good manners do,” Deneen said primly.

Before the events of the last half hour, Jimmy would have interpreted her body language—terse voice, rigid posture, averted gaze—as disinterest and even irritation. Now, however, he wasn’t so sure. The woman had, without provocation or warning, kissed him. And then continued kissing him, and he was pretty sure she was even beginning to remove his clothes when they were interrupted.

Of course, Jimmy was aware that he’d played his own part in the kissing. He had kissed back—of course he’d kissed back. It would be asking too much of any man to overcome a biological imperative stretching back through the entirety of human history. When the most beautiful female in the tribe makes overtures, biology advised you to respond. And respond he had. In fact, he was still responding, in a certain uncomfortable, frustrating, needful way.

But Deneen appeared to have shut down as completely as an interrupted circuit. If the kiss had affected her, she wasn’t letting on; she stared thoughtfully out at the passing scenery as though it was the most captivating tableau she’d ever witnessed. Even her earlier anxiety about her sister’s condition appeared to have vanished.

As the miles rolled past, Jimmy ran through a dozen possible gambits to kick-start their conversation, and abandoned all of them. What he really wanted to say was something along the lines of, “So, you know that kiss we shared back there? What the hell was that about?” but she seemed determined to close down that avenue of discussion. He thought back to what they had been discussing right before the kiss—he had compared her to a phosphorescent substance, which probably wasn’t the best choice he could have made—and wondered if he’d said something either to trigger the kiss or to explain her reaction now that it was over.

This line of thinking, unfamiliar to Jimmy and thus far more time-consuming than his usual mental exercises, kept him busy until the hospital loomed in view.

“Here we are,” he said heartily, which wasn’t really necessary since Deneen was clutching her purse tightly, one hand on the door handle, apparently ready to leap from the truck the minute he slowed down.

“Just drop me off at the entrance,” Deneen said. Then added, “Please,” as though it were an afterthought.

“I think it’s best if I accompany you,” Jimmy said, turning not toward the circular drive at the front of the building, but to the parking garage. Deneen pursed her lips but stayed quiet as he found a parking spot.

Then she was out of the car like a shot. Jimmy did his best to keep up in pursuit. He chased her down the stairs, out the door, down the sidewalk and into the sliding glass entry doors. By the time they reached the information desk she was short of breath. Due to his conditioning and strengthening regimen, Jimmy was more flummoxed than winded; he had no doubt Deneen would have left him behind if she could.

“Jayne Burgess?” she demanded, breathing hard. “Admitted today?”

The startled volunteer clicked away at her computer. “Second floor, room 235. Elevator on your left.”

“Thank you!” Jimmy called over his shoulder as he followed Deneen. When the elevator doors didn’t open, she ran for the stairs, taking them two at a time. Down the hall, barely glancing at room numbers, until she arrived at the nurse’s station.

“I’m here to see Jayne Burgess! Is she out of recovery yet?”

The nurses at the desk glanced at each other. “Recovery?” one asked politely.

“You know. After her surgery!”

“Miss Burgess didn’t have surgery. She’s been released. You missed her by about ten minutes.”

“Released?” Jimmy took hold of Deneen’s arm.

“Released?” she echoed, trying to tug her arm back. “You mean she’s all right? She’s not…”

“She’s fine. The doctor went over follow-up care with her, of course. She’ll need to rest for a day or two.”

“Are you the auntie and uncle?” the other nurse asked, smiling.

“Auntie!” Deneen recoiled in horror. Was the nurse blind? Surely she didn’t think that Jayne could be her niece. “I beg your pardon. Jayne is my
older
sister. Much, much older.”

Jimmy tugged with a little more force. Deneen was showing signs of irrational thinking again. Maybe he could take advantage of the nurses’ confusion—they obviously thought he and Deneen were a couple—to coax her out of the waiting area.

She had dug her phone out of her purse and was already dialing. Before he could get another word in, a familiar voice screeched across the lobby.

“Neener!”

Deneen wrenched her arm free and went tearing across the lobby. There were Jayne and Matthew, holding cups of coffee. Jayne had a large white bandage on her forehead, but otherwise, she looked fine.

The sisters embraced as though they hadn’t seen each other in a decade or two. Matthew pried Jayne’s coffee from her hand and brought it over to Jimmy.
“Hey,” he said, handing Jimmy the steaming cup. “You might as well have this. Those two aren’t going to come up for air for a while.”

Jimmy accepted the coffee gratefully. The stimulant powers of caffeine might help clear his head—it was continuing to be a very confusing morning.

“I’m glad you’re both okay,” he said after taking a sip.

“Yeah, me too. It was a little scary, losing traction like that. I’m just glad no one was hurt.”

“But Jayne—”

“I mean, besides that—but it ended up being just a half dozen stitches above her eyebrow. And she’ll probably have quite a shiner. They kind of overreacted, sending two ambulances out, but they had to check her spine and…well…” Matthew grinned and shrugged.

“And?”

“And, just, I guess you can’t be too careful. Hey! Thanks for bringing Deneen out here. I know she’s not really your type of woman. She’s sweet as can be, but she can be a little…bubbly.”

“Uh, I was happy to do it,” Jimmy said, suddenly very self-conscious. Matthew didn’t know that he’d been spending some very confusing interludes with his girlfriend’s sister. “She’s actually very…good at crafts. And entertaining.”

“That’s kind of you, but you can’t have enjoyed having your peace and quiet destroyed by the glue-gun cyclone.” Matthew chuckled. “That’s just one of her family’s nicknames for her.”