Page 2 of Mr. Scandalous

Before the fire, she’d operated a normal gift basket business, creating content for holidays, bar mitzvahs, birthdays and baby showers, but she had difficulty keeping the retail space solvent despite her success on Etsy.

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 returned to the building to help others. A burning ceiling beam had fallen, pinning her pelvis to the floor. Two burly FDNY firefighters had arrived just in time to save her from dying of 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 memory of that fateful night that had changed her life forever. She splayed a palm across her lower abdomen.

“What’s going on?” Ashley angled her head and the tiny hoop earring pierced through her left eyebrow caught the light and glinted gold. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“Not really.” People confided in her, not vice versa. She was more comfortable being the shoulder to cry on than the one who did the crying.

“Thinking about the fire?”

Eden shot her a look. Ashley was more perceptive than most people realized. Her flibbertigibbet personality gave the impression of someone too mercurial for deep thoughts. Those people were wrong.

“Why would you suppose that?” Eden asked.

“Because you touched your scar.”

Immediately, Eden jerked her hand from her lower 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 news outlet had done a feature piece on her, lauding her as a hero. She’d felt awkward with the title and the attention. She’d done what anyone else would have done in the same situation. A reporter and her camera crew had come to the shop and spied the sexy basket Eden had built for her client. The reporter homed in on that basket and touted Eden as the Renoir of erotic gift basket design.

After the story came out, orders poured in, and her business mushroomed. She renamed the store, changing it from Hildy’s Hideaway—after her grandmother who’d owned the shop before her—to Wickedly Wonderful. Her financial woes vanished, but she’d felt like a fraud. She knew next to nothing about the sexual adventures she created, beyond her own vivid imagination and diligent internet research.

To counter her inadequacy, she’d studied every sex manual and erotic book she could lay her hands on, from theKama SutratoThe Story of O.Her newly gained, but totally academic knowledge of sex, combined with her degree in art history from N.Y.U., inspired her creativity.

At first, she lived vicariously through her work and things were fantastic. She loved exploring the tempting fantasies she’d never experienced in real life.

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 lost her virginity at twenty calmly and rationally, unclouded by complicated emotions. She’d experienced enough chaos and drama in childhood, and she’d been determined to stay grounded when it came to romantic encounters. She refused to be like her mother, never staying in any one place or relationship for long.

She and Harry had agreed to deflower each other. Poor Harry, he’d been as inept as she. Their fumbling attempts were a clear-cut case of the virginal leading the virginal, with neither one of them experiencing fireworks, but at least they hadn’t broken each other’s hearts.

Her limited sexual experience was a closely guarded secret. Who would buy erotic gift baskets from a woman with a nonexistent sex life?

Snap out of it.You’ve got work to do.

She kneaded her brow. Her mind was empty of even a whisper of a sensual fantasy. She drew a complete blank. She was officially tapped out, empty, drained. Closing her eyes, she waited for a flash of insight.

Nothing.

Oh, come on, visualize some sex-god movie star.

Zero.

Eden couldn’t dredge up a single person who popped her cork. Panic ripped through her and she rhythmically worried red cellophane wrapping paper between her fingers, her fussbudget mind snatching up the fear and sprinting 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 her business failed? What if she lost the store her grandmother Hildy had owned for forty years before Eden 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 nonsense to herself.

Her eyes flew open.

What was she going to do?

“Don’t start imagining some huge catastrophe,” 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.”

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