Black Flame (7 page)

“Deneen and I are not romantically involved,” Jimmy said, in a tone that suggested he was horrified by that idea. “She is in town to visit her sister, who also lives out at Sugar Hill Ranch.”

Mrs. Osterhaus looked deflated. “Oh, well. Do you have a boyfriend, dear?”

“Um, not really, no.”

“Oh, well then.” The smile was back to full wattage. “I think the holidays are quite romantic, don’t you?”

#

“I have one more errand tonight, and then I shall be going to bed,” Jimmy announced when they finally returned to the ranch, after a scary drive home past several more pileups. Deneen had helped him tie a tarp over the decorations that he and Dr. Osterhaus had carried out to the truck. “I suggest that you get some rest. We will have to get up early tomorrow, now that we will also have to decorate the center.”

“What time do you want to leave?”

“Seven o’clock should be adequate.”

“Seven!”

“You could always stay here. I can accomplish it by myself.”

“No chance,” Deneen said. Getting up early would at least ensure that she wouldn’t have to spend Christmas alone. “I’ll be ready. Er…what sort of errand do you have to do? Can I help?”

“No,” Jimmy said shortly, looking flustered. “I mean, it won’t take long, and it makes no sense for both of us to go back out into the elements.”

“Sure.” Deneen nodded, trying to cover up the hurt she was inexplicably feeling. It had been a dumb suggestion, anyway; she would much rather stay warm and dry in the bunkhouse. Besides, Jimmy was probably going to visit a girlfriend. Even though Jayne had confided in Deneen that the ratio of men to women in Conway was 5 to 1, Jimmy was just too drop-dead hot to stay single, even if he was as hard to read as a Latin textbook.

They were standing in the kitchen, on opposite sides of the long pine table. The air between them seemed charged. The pressure of the holidays, no doubt: their complicated histories, the family that Jimmy had lost, and the family that Deneen had purposefully taken a break from. She felt like she ought to say something profound to mark the occasion. But what? Jimmy wasn’t the sentimental sort, nor did he seem particularly religious.

“Watch out for reindeer,” she blurted, then wished she could take it back.

“I beg your pardon?”

Deneen blushed, something she seemed to be doing every other minute around Jimmy. “Oh, it’s just something my grandfather used to say, when we were kids. My mom and dad and my grandma weren’t really into the holidays. They thought they were just a big commercial indulgence.”

“A sensible viewpoint,” Jimmy commented approvingly.

“Yes, well, kids love Christmas no matter what. And my grandpa was the only one who got into the spirit with me and Jayne. Every year he’d tell us to watch out for reindeer, and sometime in the middle of the night, there’d be the sound of bells outside, and then we would hear the sleigh landing on the roof. Of course, it was just Grandpa—he’d get the ladder out of the garage and climb up there just to give us a thrill. When we finally found out about Santa, we knew it had been him. But by then he had died.”

Jimmy started to answer, and then a sad look crossed his face. Deneen wondered if he was thinking about his mother: about the things she’d been unable to do for him.

“What was Christmas like for you and your mom?” she asked, hoping she wasn’t poking her nose into things that weren’t her business. Maybe he’d feel better if he could talk about it.

“It was…” Jimmy frowned and studied the table. When he looked up again, his expression was guarded. “It was fine. So, I’d better go. Good night.”

Abruptly, he turned on his heel and stalked to the front door.

“Good night,” Deneen called after him. After the door had shut, she added softly, the words her grandfather always said when he gave Jayne and Deneen goodnight hugs on Christmas Eve, “Don’t let Santa see you out of bed.”

Jimmy knew his errand would take longer in the snow, especially since Nan’s house was at the other end of town. Still, the thick blanket of fluffy new flakes quickly covered the roads that the town crew managed to plow, and it didn’t help that the temperature had risen and now was hovering right under freezing, meaning slush turned quickly to ice on the roads.

It was nearly midnight when he returned home. He tried to slip quietly into the house, so as not to wake Deneen. Her door was closed, he noted with relief as he passed on his way to his room. Quickly stripping out of his clothes, he grabbed his towel off the hook in his room—there wasn’t room in the bathroom for everyone to hang their towels—and wrapped it around his waist.

He pushed open the door to the bathroom and stopped cold.

Sitting in the tub, under a mound of bubbles, and illuminated only by the glow of a couple of candles on the sink, was Deneen. Her hair was piled up on her head, a few blond strands having come free and fallen against her cheek, and her eyes were closed. A faint smile played across her lips as she languidly swirled the bubbles around the tub with one hand. She was wearing ear buds, but even so Jimmy could hear the faint sounds of music coming from her phone, which was perched perilously close to the edge of the tub.

Strangely, she had applied a gel-like green substance to her face, covering the skin from her forehead to her chin, leaving holes around the eyes so that she looked vaguely like a mint-green panda bear.

“At ninety-four decibels, which I’m pretty sure your music is exceeding, your risk of hearing loss passes acceptable levels,” Jimmy said loudly.

Deneen’s eyes flew open and she gasped as she yanked the ear buds off and flung them to the floor. “What are you
doing
in here?” she demanded, crossing her arms over her breasts and sinking farther into the tub, so that the bubbles came up to her chin.

“Also, if your iPhone is submerged, the odds of irreparable damage are high.” Jimmy grabbed the phone from the tub and placed it on the counter as far away from the tub as possible. His heart was beating irregularly and he found it hard to keep his eyes off the naked woman in the tub.

“Don’t you knock?” she demanded. “Hand me that washcloth.”

Jimmy took a folded pink cloth—Jayne’s, no doubt—from the sink and handed it to Deneen, trying to focus his gaze at the top of her head. But the idea of her warm and wet body under all of those suds was making him feel a little dizzy.

She scrubbed furiously at her face, rubbing the green goo off.

“What is that substance?” Jimmy asked, mostly to make conversation and distract himself from his thoughts.

“It’s a kelp masque, if you must know. Air travel is
very
hard on the skin.”

“Ah, yes. Kelp is an excellent source of potassium and iodine. I occasionally eat it.” Jimmy was aware that he was wandering from the topic. Babbling, some might say, but when nervous it was his habit to focus on the scientific, and he had done some research into alternative plant nutrients last year when he was working on a portable dehydrator that could be used in a challenging environment like an oil rig.

“I wouldn’t eat
this
,” Deneen huffed. “It costs forty dollars an ounce.” Her skin, cleared of the cosmetic kelp,
did
look smooth and blemish-free.

“Ah. I see. Now that your bath is complete, will you be vacating the bathroom soon? I need to take a shower.”

She didn’t respond for a moment, and Jimmy noticed that her gaze traveled down over his chest and torso…and lower…before resting briefly at a location he was trying to cover casually with the towel. Due to his growing interest in her unclothed state, however, he doubted his disguise remained effective. He grabbed the first thing he saw off the sink and clutched it to his waist, backing toward the door.

“Well, I can’t very well come out of the bathroom if you take my robe,” Deneen pointed out.

Jimmy looked down at the fluffy lavender fabric he was holding. He seemed to remember Jayne wearing the robe. Sensible, for Deneen to borrow her sister’s things. And more evidence that Deneen wouldn’t be staying long, since she hadn’t brought her own.

But he wasn’t sure how to put it down without revealing more of himself than he intended.

“I, um, I’ll be right back,” he said, bolting from the room. He hastily pulled on his jeans and returned to the bathroom with the robe draped over one arm. Deneen hadn’t moved, but the bubbles were beginning to pop and melt and the layer covering her was growing translucent enough that he could make out the outline of her naked body under the surface.

“I’ll just leave this here,” he said, setting down the robe.

“I wish you hadn’t walked in on me,” Deneen said. Was she angry with him? The tone of her voice and her expression suggested that she was.

Jimmy took a deep breath. “I greatly regret any discomfort I caused you. I understand that you wish to conduct your ablutions alone, as is typical of females, and will knock before entering for the duration of your visit.”

“My what?”

“Excuse me?”

“My ablutions. What you said. What on earth are those?”

“Oh—it is just a term for washing oneself.”

“Huh. I wish I’d known that a few weeks ago—I could have impressed them at the brow bar. Maybe they wouldn’t have fired me.”

“I must ask,” Jimmy said, knowing he should leave but finding it difficult, “what is a brow bar, exactly?”

“Waxing?” Deneen pointed at her eyes, but Jimmy was still mystified. “No? Well, I feel like I’m violating girl code by telling you, but waxing is the preferred method for shaping the brow. Melted wax is applied to unwanted hairs and then when the wax hardens, the wax is removed, taking the hairs with it.”

“You mean…you rip it out by the roots?” Jimmy winced. Other women had alluded to this practice, but Jimmy had dismissed it as unlikely and certainly potentially painful.

“Yup.”

“And your job was to perform this waxing, and you were let go for…negligence?”

Deneen sighed. She cupped a handful of bubbles and studied them, avoiding his gaze. “I let the wax get too hot. It wasn’t my fault, another employee had left the heater on the wrong setting. And my client was the excitable type—she had a very low tolerance for discomfort. So.”

“Is she permanently disfigured?” Jimmy asked.

Deneen laughed, her expression turning unexpectedly sunny. “Hardly. I’ve done it to myself lots of times. It just turns your skin pink for a while. But it was a pretty upscale kind of salon. The owner had zero tolerance for flubs like mine.”

“I see.” With one last, lingering look at the parts of Deneen that were exposed—long, creamy neck, well-shaped arms and shoulders, knees bobbing in the suds, toenails painted a fiery shade of crimson—Jimmy ducked out of the room.

#

When Deneen had toweled off, applied lotion (she had brought her own; she never traveled without her favorite scent), and pulled on the camisole and flannel Tinkerbelle pajama pants that Jayne had given her for her birthday, she crept quietly to her room and shut the door. A moment later she heard Jimmy’s door open and close. She listened to the water running through the pipes as she made up Regina and Chase’s bed with clean sheets she’d found in the linen closet. Then she started unpacking her travel case. By the time she was finished, the shower was turned off. Moments later, the sound of doors opening and closing again alerted her that Jimmy had turned in for the night.

She breathed a sigh of relief, tugging her sweater back over her head. She had a few more things to do before this night was through, and the house was chilly. She pulled on fuzzy socks she’d found in her sister’s drawer, and gathered up her supplies.

It was probably just as well that Jimmy had walked in on her with kelp masque all over her face and her hair pulled up. He’d been out to visit some girlfriend, obviously, and just wanted to get to bed, but he’d been fairly gracious about waiting for her to finish in the tub. Deneen had even forgiven him for possibly seeing more of her bubble-covered body than she’d have liked, since he was clearly unmoved by the sight.

She had wondered about the mysterious girl he’d gone to visit, however. What sort of woman would Jimmy Mason fall for? Deneen imagined a raven-haired temptress in a lab coat, at the controls of an instrument panel, making some sort of earth-changing discovery.

She smiled to herself, ruefully. Even her imagination was over the top and needlessly embellished—her mother’s words, which came back to haunt Deneen whenever she was short of confidence. The fact that her mother had been describing the prom dress Deneen had made herself didn’t really help; she might just as well have been describing any of the projects Deneen had undertaken.

But that’s why you’re here, right?
The little voice inside her head said. It was apparently time for a pep talk.
You’re in North Dakota, and Mom isn’t. This is your big chance to be yourself.

Well damn, sometimes the little voice had a point. Deneen squared her shoulders and picked up her cake decorating supplies. Maybe she couldn’t save the world, but she might be able to improve this small corner of it. She slipped quietly from the room with a spring in her step, like one of Santa’s elves finishing up a last-minute assignment.

Jimmy’s alarm went off at precisely 5:45. The alarm clock on his bedside table synced to the atomic clock in Switzerland, which was comforting to him. Jimmy liked absolutes—things that could be proved, that could not be denied on the basis of emotion or intuition. The master clock keeping time in Switzerland was accurate to within one second per thirty million—that was an incontrovertible truth.

Unlike, say—Jimmy thought as he knocked gently on the bathroom door, as he had promised to do—his feelings about the current guest of the ranch. Last night his dreams had featured Deneen Burgess doing any number of illogical and confounding things. Oh, he understood the erotic dreams; these were a natural consequence of a healthy sex drive and visual and olfactory stimuli (because Deneen smelled quite pleasant, like a blend of flowers and spices and lemons). But there had a been a dream in which she had been sitting primly on the tailgate of his truck, wearing a sparkling evening gown and reading aloud from his Advanced Physics textbook, a tome he’d carried around all senior year until he’d memorized every formula and corollary. And another in which she was wearing safety goggles and her sister’s bathrobe and working at his workbench, fiddling with the controls of a wax-melting heater. In that dream she’d come after him with a red-hot spatula smeared with wax, a look of intense concentration on her face.