her concentration slipping. Before the fire she had operated a normal gift store, producing baskets for all occasion from holidays to bar mitzvahs to baby showers, but she’d had difficulty keeping the business solvent.
And then two things had happened. One, a regular client had asked her to design an erotic gift basket for her sister’s honeymoon and, two, Eden’s apartment building had caught fire.
She’d helped her elderly neighbor, Mrs. Grant, escape, but she’d then gone back into the building to help others. A burning ceiling beam had fallen, pinning her pelvis to the floor. Two burly members of the FDNY had arrived just in time to save her from succumbing to smoke inhalation. They hadn’t, however, been able to stop her from receiving third-degree burns.
Eden briefly closed her eyes, sucked in her breath and grimaced at the remembered pain of the fateful night that had changed her life forever. Involuntarily, she splayed a palm across her lower abdomen.
“Is there something going on?” Ashley angled her head. The tiny hoop earring pierced through her left eyebrow caught the light and glinted gold. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“Not really,” she denied. Usually people confided in her, not the other way around. She was more comfortable being the shoulder to cry on than the one revealing her feelings.
“Does it have anything to do with the fire?”
Eden shot her a look. Ashley was much more perceptive than most people gave her credit for. Her flibbertigibbet personality gave the impression of someone too mercurial for deep thoughts.
“Why would you suppose that?”
“Because every time you think about the fire you touch your scar.”
Immediately, Eden jerked her hand from her abdomen. She’d had reconstructive surgery last summer and the scars were much less noticeable now. She needed to stop focusing on her wounds. Not so easy to do when the burns were indirectly related to her current creative slump.
Following the fire, a prominent newspaper had done a feature piece on her, lauding her as a hero. She’d felt awkward with the title and uncomfortable with the attention. She’d only done what anyone else would have done in the same situation.
A reporter and her cameraman had come to the shop and spied the sexy basket Eden had started concocting for her client, but hadn’t completed before the fire put her out of commission. The reporter had honed in on that basket and enthusiastically touted Eden as the Renoir of erotic gift basket design.
After the article came out, Eden’s phone had rung off the hook with orders. Business mushroomed. She renamed the store, changing it from Hildy’s Hideaway to Wickedly Wonderful. Her financial woes vanished, but she had felt like a fraud. She knew next to nothing about the sexual adventures she created in her baskets beyond her own vivid imagination.
To counter her feelings of inadequacy, she’d studied every sex manual and erotic book she could lay her hands on. From the Kama Sutra to The Story of O. Her newly acquired but totally academic knowledge of sex, combined with her degree in art history from N.Y.U., had stimulated her efforts.
And for a while it had been great fun, living vicariously through her work. She loved mentally exploring the tempting fantasies she’d never gotten to experience in the flesh.
To date, she’d only had one lover. Harry Jackson, an old college friend she’d trusted but had never been particularly aroused by. She’d decided to lose her virginity at twenty calmly and rationally, unclouded by complicated passion.
She’d experienced enough chaos and drama in her upbringing and she’d been determined to keep her feet on the ground when it came to romantic encounters. She refused to end up like her flighty mother, bouncing from one lover to another always on the lookout for the heady high of a new relationship but never staying with any one of them long enough to learn the deeper pleasure of a meaningful commitment.
She and Harry had made a pact to deflower each other and poor Harry had been as inept as she. Their fumbling attempts at lovemaking were a clear-cut case of the virginal leading the virginal with neither one of them experiencing fireworks. But then again, neither one of them had gotten hurt, either, and that had been the entire point.
Now, she sort of regretted missing out on the crazy tumult of first lust—it might have kept her imagination fueled. But she was a consummate professional and very adept at hiding her lack of personal knowledge. Her limited sexual experience was a closely guarded secret. After all, who would buy erotic gift baskets from a woman with a nonexistent sex life?
Snap out of it, she scolded herself and furrowed her brow, probing the depths of her mind for even a whisper of a sensual fantasy, but she drew a complete blank.
She was officially tapped out. Empty. Drained.
Imagine a handsome, sexy guy.
Closing her eyes, she waited for a flash of insight.
Nothing.
Oh come on, visualize some sex-god movie star.
Zero.
Eden could not dredge up a single person who popped her cork.
Panic ripped through her then and she rhythmically worried red cellophane wrapping paper between her fingers. Her fussbudget mind snatched up the fear and sprinted with it, spinning a hundred what-if situations.
What if she never felt sexy again? What if she couldn’t break this block? What if business dwindled? What if she had to let Ashley go? What if she lost the store her grandmother Hildy had owned for forty years before Eden had inherited it?
Worst-case scenario? She would end up a bag lady on the street, pushing a grocery cart of discarded rubbish she’d gleaned from trash Dumpsters and mumbling crazily to herself.
Her eyes flew open. What was she going to do?
“Don’t start imagining some huge tragedy over this,” Ashley said. “Let’s just replace everything that’s red with black and call it Midnight Memories.”
“But the customer wanted red.”
“Then just change a few things. Instead of the pashmina, use a satin teddy. Replace the handcuffs with ropes. Instead of massage oil, go for body paints or edible panties.”
“That’s not part of the artistic vision.”
“Well, the artistic vision you came up with was a rerun. Either ditch the lofty standards or be happy with a duplicate.”
“You’re right. Let’s do it your way.”
They worked silently for a few minutes, exchanging and rearranging items and then Ashley ventured, “Are you sure you don’t want to talk?”
Ashley was a sweetheart, but Eden couldn’t see unburdening herself to the free-spirited nineteen-year-old even though the young woman probably knew way more about sex than Eden did and she was six years younger. Ashley’s advice was bound to be something wild and crazy. Like have a red-hot fling with a handsome stranger.
Well, she’d tried that, hadn’t she? Her one miserable attempt at reconnecting with her femininity had ended in terrible failure when Josh Cameron—a guy she’d known only a couple of weeks before going to bed with him—had been so repulsed by her burns he’d fled her apartment without having sex with her.
That kind of reaction didn’t do a hell of a lot for a girl’s self-esteem.
Eden clenched a red satin bow in her hand and sank her top front teeth into her bottom lip to eradicate the memory of her single pathetic attempt at having intercourse after she’d been burned. In the wake of Josh’s reaction she’d been too scared of rejection to try again.
“Do you wanna know why I think you’re so frazzled?” Ashley asked.
Please save me from the wisdom of teenagers.
“Not really.”
“You need to get some juicy