The Flame (3 page)

“I can’t…”

“Why not?” he asks.

“It’s….”
Too much
, she wants to say. All of it is just too much. Its heady smells, the depth of feeling it stirs within her. It’s the aromatic equivalent of a bittersweet song played on a lone violin, and each note animates a desire she would like to stay dormant, the desire to once again be at the center of the raw, animal passion of the two men who own her heart.

Bastian Drake’s hand still rests atop her own. The candle’s base still hovers inches above the silver tray. The flame is small, but it flickers steadily. It’s hard to accept that such vivid memories of such raw desire can emanate from such a tiny, insignificant spark in the universe; a spark that doesn’t waver in the drafts blowing through the shop’s front door.

“My darling,” he says quietly. “Take it from a man who passed up far too many gifts in his life. There is no virtue in ignoring your heart’s desire. To deny it, perhaps, is a noble thing, if it will hurt others or betray a trust. But to ignore it is to condemn yourself to a lifetime of darkness.”

They’re standing so close now that if she turned to face him their proximity would seem inappropriate. Too intimate. But what could be more intimate than the words he just spoke into her ear? When he releases her hand, it feels as if a pressure wave has lifted from her arm. Before she can refuse his gift again, Bastian lifts the candle to his mouth, blows out the flame, and turns his back to her.

“This candle is yours!” he says brightly.

“How will I carry it? I—”

“I’ll have someone bring it to your shop before the close of business.”

“Mr. Drake, I’m not sure… How much is it? I know what rents are like around here and I don’t expect you to—”

Bastian pulls a flattened gift box from a stack behind his desk. “Consider it a gift from one proprietor to another.” But he won’t look into her eye as he prepares the gift in question.

She’ll risk offending him if she puts up any more of a fight, that’s for sure.

The skill with which he fashions an elaborate, four-leafed bow out of turquoise and purple ribbon is as disarming as everything else in his shop. But the quickness of his movements suggest he just revealed more about himself than he expected to. Or maybe he thinks the sooner he gets her out of his store, the more likely she is to take the candle.

“The rain seems to have let up. I’d be a gentleman and help you carry those rolls back to your store but unfortunately I am a one-man operation.”

“Of course. No. That’s fine. Thank you. Mr. Drake, I’m sorry. But I’m just not sure if I should—”

When Bastian Drake finally looks her in the eye, Cassidy’s first thought is that a passing car has bounced reflected light off the store’s front window and it slid across Bastian’s face. But they are facing the inside of a courtyard, not the street. Perhaps a bird flew by outside, or perhaps it’s exactly what she doesn’t want to believe it was. That some swell of emotion, some insistence within Bastian, caused a bright gold pulse to illuminate both of his eyes so briefly but so completely she’s been rendered slack-jawed and frozen.

“Please,” Bastian says quietly. “I insist.”

Cassidy is surprised she can pick up the rolls of tapestry from where Bastian leaned them against the doorframe. She’s surprised she can move her arms, or her legs, or her head. She expected to be hypnotized. She expected time to stand still or jump forward, because in films and T.V. shows that is what happens after someone bears witness to something as inexplicable and impossible as what she just saw. She isn’t frightened, just hollowed out.

Is it possible to feel the thing they call suspension of disbelief toward your own life? Because as she hurries from the store, that’s exactly what she feels. Between the candle’s strange power and the inexplicable illumination within its maker, Cassidy Burke feels suddenly ready to believe anything.

2

“So it’s a day for gifts, huh?” Andrew asks.

Cassidy is in the storeroom fashioning small blossoms out of the tissue paper she’s just stuffed into a gift bag. Seconds earlier, Clara brought her the store’s portable phone and tucked it between her ear and chin so she could continue working with both hands. Now her only employee is back behind the register, making cheerful small talk with their third customer of the day, a doctor from Birmingham who is about to plunk down three hundred dollars for an antique porcelain plate featuring an etching of St. Louis Cathedral.

“A day for gifts?” Cassidy asks. “I don’t understand.”

“Clara says some guy sent over a candle?”

“Oh. Yeah. That.”

“Don’t go breakin’ my heart with some secret French Quarter love affair, Mrs. Burke,” her husband says in a pronounced Georgia drawl.

He knows full well whenever he plays up the accent of his youth, Cassidy’s lungs and thighs tend to open at the same time. Most of the Louisiana accents Cassidy grew up with sounded more East Coast than Deep South. Andrew is a native of Atlanta who fell in love with New Orleans, and her, during his undergraduate years at Tulane.

“You’re the only man in my life, Andrew Burke. You know that.”

She’s issued this stock response time and time again over the years. This time it strikes a false note. The only sounds for the next few seconds are the steady rustle of her fingers molding tissue paper.
The only man in my life—except for that guy you made me kiss a few nights ago. Remember him? My best friend?

Made
her kiss him? That was hardly a fair description. It’s not like she put up a fight or asked him to stop.

“So…the flowers?” Andrew asks.

“They’re beautiful, as always.”

“Yikes. I’m not boring you, am I?”

“No, I’m just busy right now, sweetie.”

“I meant the flowers, Cassidy. My gestures of affection? I don’t know. You sound less than thrilled.”

The steady deliveries of lilies, lavender, and purple tulips have been far more than gestures of affection, she’s sure of it. Every day since his Mardi Gras mischief, some new jaw-dropping bouquet has arrived just after lunchtime. And while they certainly make Cassidy’s Corner smell better, they’re also adding to her dread that the three of them—she, her husband, and Shane—did something dangerous, the consequences of which are somehow irreversible.

Her husband must be feeling a similar anxiety. He has ravished her the minute she’s walked through the door every night since she’s gone back to work, securing her in his powerful embrace, rattling off a series of politically correct questions ensuring her consent. Then, in the comfort of their bedroom, and their living room, and their front hallway, he’s deployed all of her favorite perks: some ice cubes here, a silken wrist tie or two there, and always the intent and studied perfection with which he can devour her sex for what feels like hour after blissful hour. By the time he’s done, she’s too spent to bring up their little moment of weirdness at The Roquelaure House. (Even after spending most of their lovemaking wondering what it would be like to have Shane’s lips and fingers join her husband’s dutiful ministrations.)

“So any word from Superboy?” Andrew asks. He gave Shane this nickname when they were still in college, after Shane walked face-first into a sliding glass door at their beach house in Bay St. Louis. “The other night, you said you’d been texting him and he’s been…”

“Ignoring me. Yeah. I remember.”

She also remembers how quickly Andrew dismissed the topic when she did.

Probably sleeping off his hangover ’cause he spent the rest of Mardi Gras on Bourbon Street.
Andrew’s brusque response suggested he wasn’t ready to talk about what they’d done together. So she dropped it. But she still doubted that’s how Shane spent the remainder of the holiday.

Her best friend didn’t party like he used to. Not since he’d moved out of that ridiculously overpriced condo in the Warehouse District so he could start investing some of the money his parents had left him. He’d also earned his real estate license and traded in his shiny little Boxster for a sensible Jeep Grand Cherokee more suited to driving clients around the city.

But Andrew’s remark wasn’t completely off base. For years, Shane was the twist of lemon in their Diet Coke; the guy who brought a bottle of Maker’s Mark and some party hats to the hospital room after Andrew’s hernia surgery. There had also been a few uncomfortable conversations about which one of Shane’s friends was an appropriate guest at their more formal parties. (Gatherings of Andrew’s fellow architects were not always the right setting for perpetually stoned tarot card readers who had never met a piercing they didn’t like and porn star/dancer/models who had a tendency to go-go dance on any flat surface after consuming two beers.)

But those days were over. Shane Cortland was no longer a portal through which French Quarter eccentricity occasionally made flashy appearances in the midst of their buttoned-down, Uptown lives. These last few months the guy has seemed as career-focused and uptight as she and Andrew have been since graduating college. Cassidy couldn’t remember the last time she’d accidentally awakened Shane with a mid-morning phone call on a weekday.

More importantly, Shane was not the one who got all three of them blasted on Kir Royales at a crowded Mardi Gras party at The Roquelaure House. Shane was not the one who steered them to an isolated bench before initiating a make-out session that had rendered her the white-hot center of their dual, drunken passion. That distinction belonged to her husband, Andrew Burke. And if the irony in that fact wasn’t enough to make her head spin, Shane, the guy who’d spent most of his twenties seducing as many attractive gay men as he could (and a few straight ones), seemed to be more freaked out about it than either she or her husband.

Or so it seemed, if the smiley-faces, LOL’s, and various other emoticons he’d been using to dismiss her text messages could be taken as evidence.

Was Shane, like her, lying awake most nights wondering what would have happened if they hadn’t been interrupted by that drunken couple who had come stumbling down the garden path?

Does Shane remember feeling what she saw before it all came to an abrupt end—Andrew stroking the back of Shane’s neck while he guided Shane’s lips to his wife’s mouth?
Her
mouth!

Jealousy should flood her at the memory of this physical intimacy between her husband and another man. Not a delicious heat on both sides of her neck; a heat that flows effortlessly across her cheeks, her lips, even her brow, without a single needle of fear dragging in its wake.

It’s here, somewhere. She can’t smell it. But she’s sure it’s to blame.

“Clara!”

The older woman’s face appears around the curtain between the storeroom and the shop. “Yes?” she asks tightly.

“Where’s that candle?”

“Up here, under the register. Would you like me to bring it back?”

“No, no. Just leave it up there. And…” Cassidy isn’t quite sure what she wants to say next.
Be careful?
With a candle that doesn’t weigh more than a pound?

“And what?”

“Nothing. I just wanted to make sure it was here.”

“Sure,” Clara finally says. “Okay.”

“Cassidy…” Her husband’s voice trails off. She knows that tone, pregnant with a sense of duty. And he just brought up Shane; she can feel what’s coming. Her heart is racing faster than it did when Shane’s hand kneaded her breast while Andrew’s tongue traveled the nape of her neck.

“We should probably—”

“I need to go, sweetie. There’s just a lot going on here right now.”

And it’s all going on in my head, but I can’t talk about it. Because I’m not going to say I didn’t want it, and I’m not going to pretend like I don’t want more. But I’m terrified it will awaken something in you that I don’t understand, something you’ve never acknowledged. Something I won’t be able to control. As for me…?

“Sure, well, when you get home, maybe?” he asks. “You’ll be home around six, right?”

“Around then. But wait—” Grateful to be off the hook if only for a few short hours, Cassidy reaches for her iPhone and opens her calendar. “Eight o’clock,” she says, when she sees the appointment. “The Preservation Council’s letting me set up a table at their luncheon but I have to get in there tonight so I’m not in the caterer’s way tomorrow.”

“Sounds good. Where are you setting up?”

The Roquelaure House.
She bites back a quiet curse.
Well, if that isn’t just the most—

“I’m not sure yet. Clara has the info. Anyway, it should only take an hour or two.”

“Sounds good,” Andrew says suddenly. “I’ll probably swim a few laps or something.”

If she’s not careful, the thought of her husband’s muscular back slicing through their pool, powered by tan, sculpted arms, will have her as dizzy with desire as her visit to Bastian Drake’s shop.

“Good. Glad someone’s using the pool,” she says.
Huh? What is she—his mother?

“Yeah. Bye, babe. Tonight…”

“Yes. Tonight.”

Unsure of what these final words even mean, she hangs up.

The tissue paper blossoms she’s been forming with her hands look more like triffids than flowers. She feels like she just lied to her husband in a dozen different ways, none of them individually terrible. But in combination, they are enough to convince her she has to do something. They have to talk about what happened or they have to—

“Clara!”

“Yes.”

“Can you bring me that candle?”

A few seconds later, Clara appears, the candle in both hands. She’s grimacing. Cassidy has snapped at her twice now for no good reason—both times in front of a customer—and she’s preparing to apologize when Clara sets the candle down with a loud
thunk
.

“Smells like pond water,” Clara groans, then she picks up the customer’s gift bag without being asked.

So it’s the smell of the candle she hates.

Cassidy takes a whiff.

It’s all here, just as it was that afternoon: vetiver, baking bread, musk—and
men
, there’s just no other way to say it.
Her
men. And to Clara this all smells like pond water? One more suggestion that whatever happened inside of Bastian Drake’s shop was as fundamentally strange as it felt.