Bliss (4 page)

“So you think it makes sense to stay out here?”

“Well, I mean, obviously you're going to need some kind of a plan, a job, and a structure to keep you on the straight and narrow. But there's no reason not to investigate the possibilities while you're already out there. What ideas have you and Pauline been tossing around so far?” Maggie inquired.

Sera set her mug down and toyed with the errant lock of hair which, ever since she'd allowed her stylist to cut it into what he'd promised was a
très chic
angled bob, never stayed tucked away for long. Twisting it between her fingers, she spoke hesitantly. “Actually, Aunt Paulie's got a whole lot of ideas for me, if I agree to stay. And I'm starting to get the feeling I'm needed here more than I knew. I think, for the first time in her life, she's feeling less than confident, not so independent as before. Hortencia's passing really seems to have shaken her, though she's still avoiding talking to me about it.” Sera glanced guiltily through the doorway leading from the kitchen to the bedrooms on the other side of the house, but Pauline hadn't stirred since heading to bed awhile earlier. “She's lonely, and who can blame her, after the loss she's just had? She's offered to have me come live with her, and I'd like to support her during this tough time. It'd be nice to be able to give back a little after all she's done for me. And I think maybe it'd be okay for us both to stay here together for a while. The house is plenty big.”

Boy, was it ever. Compared with Sera's tiny Tribeca loft, the house was practically palatial, if more homestead than showplace. From cobwebbed rafter to crocheted rag rug, her aunt's three-bedroom adobe fairly screamed “rustic.” But the kitchen… ah,
that
was a cook's haven of wide countertops, airy open spaces, herb-lined windows, and pot racks clanking with heavy-bottomed copper cookware. There was even a kiva-style fireplace big enough to bake her own wood-fired pizzas, should she ever manage to get the dough to cooperate in these high-and-dry climes. Next stop, a bookshop for some books on high-altitude culinary techniques. Pauline had mentioned there was an excellent cooking supply store in the downtown area…

Serafina pulled herself back to the present, aware that Margaret was waiting for her to continue.

“So I'm covered for a place to stay as long as I want—or as long as I can take a daily dose of Pauline Wilde.” Sera's lips turned up at the prospect. “Aunt Pauline had some great suggestions for what I could do out here, careerwise. Honestly, I think she's been plotting a life for me here for quite some time.” She chuckled. “Her plans are a wee bit grandiose, but the first
practical
hurdle is going to be scoping out the shop and deciding what to do with it.”

“Shop?” Maggie sounded surprised, then belatedly enlightened. “Oh, right. You mentioned your aunt leases some sort of a storefront in town. But I got the impression it was on its way out of business or something?”

“Pretty much,” Sera confirmed. “I don't think they get a lot of customers, and I doubt it's providing much income for Pauline. It's just about defunct, as far as I can tell. But the lease is paid through the end of this year, which gives me a few months to decide if I want to make something of it.”

“Like… open a bakery of your own?” Maggie's voice rose excitedly. “Oh, hon, if anyone could do it, it'd be you. And I know you've always dreamed…” Her sponsor was practically beaming over the phone.

Now it was Serafina's turn to be the voice of caution. “Well, I haven't seen the space yet. Pauline's really eager for me to take a look and see if it might be suitable for my needs. She tells me it's fairly roomy, but it may not be equipped—or zoned—for anything like that. And I haven't done any market research… Still.” Sera choked up. “Ah, hell, Maggie. I don't know what I ever did to deserve this. It's like Pauline is handing me my wildest dreams, gift-wrapped. She's as much as said that, if I like it, the store's mine to do with as I want. Who
does
that?”

Pauline Wilde, that was who.

“What's the space used for now?” Maggie wanted to know. “I don't think you ever told me what your aunt does for a living.”

Color stained Sera's normally ivory complexion. “Um, no… I didn't.” There was no way to put this delicately, but damned if she wasn't going to try. “Pauline was big in the seventies' feminist movement. But, ah… she kind of took women's lib in a different direction than a lot of her contemporaries. She had a bit of a following, back in the day. Started a movement that had about fifteen minutes of fame, and she's been living off it ever since.”

“A movement?” Margaret sounded curious.

“Yeah. It was called, um…” Serafina blushed harder, closed her eyes briefly, and blurted it out.

“Ourgasms.”
She cringed, anticipating Maggie's reaction. “It was supposed to be sort of a tie-in with
Our Bodies, Ourselves
, I think,” she rushed to explain. “Pauline is very much a believer in the importance of the female orgasm, and empowering her liberated sisters to have them on demand. Her followers were called the
Pink Panters.
”

A strange yipping sound came through the phone's earpiece. After a moment, Serafina recognized it as her sponsor's wild, uncontrollable laughter. “Oh my God, I
remember
that! I think I had one of her books, or maybe it was a lecture recorded on an old eight-track tape. It was right around the time
The Joy of Sex
came out, wasn't it?”

“Yes, that's right. There were books and lectures and seminars and videos that, um, Pauline kind of… ‘starred' in. Like, ah, ‘how-to' videos.” Remembered embarrassment made Sera's voice faint, and to cover it, she busied herself rinsing the cupcake pan in the deep, chipped porcelain sink. It wouldn't do to leave crumbs and crusty pans around for her aunt to deal with when she got up in the morning, Sera told herself, running a worn linen dishrag around the pan's cups and laying it in the dish drainer to finish drying. She'd probably plop herself down on the counter and end up getting gunk all over her voluminous skirt tails, trailing crumbs for the rest of the day. It wouldn't be the first time.

“So what's the store all about?” Margaret interrupted her mental nattering. “A feminist book shop or something?”

“I'm not a hundred percent positive, but I think it might be some kind of a…
sex shop,
” Sera confided in a pained whisper.

More laughter sounded from faraway New York City, and Sera relaxed at the sound, picturing her sponsor leaning up against her own scarred kitchen counter, absently twirling the cigarette she never lit while she scratched through a junk-heaped drawer in search of a menu for some Vietnamese takeout.

Margaret was about twenty-five years Serafina's senior, and far less squeamish about all things bodily. It was one of the things that had first attracted Sera to Maggie when she'd seen her around in meetings—her no-apologies, no-prisoners self-confidence. “We used to pass those Pink Panter pamphlets around in study hall when I was a teenager and think we were
so
risqué,” Maggie reminisced, still chortling. “There was one called
She Stoops to Climax
that we particularly relished. Too bad our male counterparts weren't nearly as interested in what your aunt had to teach. Ah, well.”

“Ah well, indeed,” Sera muttered, rolling her eyes. She was glad one of them could laugh about Aunt Pauline's proclivities. But then,
Maggie
hadn't had Pauline for a guardian while she was growing up, nor suffered all the awkwardness that had entailed.

When Pauline Wilde had first had occasion to get acquainted with her painfully shy preteen niece, her women's lib heyday had already been over for many years, though she continued to run “clinics” and write guest columns for various media outlets. Royalties from her seminal books had continued to subsidize her freewheeling lifestyle, which had taken her from Amsterdam to Bangkok, Brazil to Berlin and back, pursuing a career in cultural anthropology with a specialty in women's sexual norms. Sera vividly remembered her first encounter with her “hippie-dippy aunt,” as her dad had teasingly liked to call his big sister. It had been both an awkward and an intriguing moment in her adolescence. Had she known that, less than a year later, the woman who had asked her point-blank if she'd ever examined her “love-bud” in the mirror would be her sole guardian in the wake of the senseless car accident that had claimed her parents' lives, Sera would probably have run screaming into the night.

But Pauline's generous heart had more than compensated for her total lack of filter on word and deed. Upon inheriting her thirteen-year-old niece, she'd put a screeching halt to her travels and settled down in Serafina's home city to carve out a niche as a women's studies professor at New York's New School for Social Research. And she'd done it all, Sera knew, so that she could raise the orphaned girl and give her some much-needed stability. It wasn't until Sera was safely off to culinary school that Pauline retired from teaching and followed in the footsteps of another female sexual pioneer, Georgia O'Keeffe, absconding to New Mexico.

Enmeshed in her own
mishagos,
Sera hadn't really had much idea of what Pauline's life out here looked like. Apparently, she'd made some pretty wise business decisions for an aging hippy. This three-bedroom house and the store in town weren't even the whole extent of it. Pauline's book royalties still brought in a fair chunk of change to this day—and now, it seemed, she wanted her favorite niece to take advantage of all this largesse by helping her get started with her very own bakery.

Sera's embarrassment paled by comparison with her gratitude for the strong women in her life. “Anyhow,” she told Margaret once her sponsor's laughter died down, “the upshot is, I seem to have a bit of a unique opportunity brewing here. It's going to take some time to see what that amounts to, and I'm actually really glad of that. I want to open myself to whatever possibilities present themselves, you know?”

“I
do
know,” Margaret said approvingly, “and I think it sounds great, provided you keep your head on straight. Now listen, hon,
CSI Miami
's about to start, and I've gotta order some dinner before they stop delivering and I'm forced to gnaw on the curtains for sustenance. But before we say good night…”

Sera grinned, knowing what was coming.

Sure enough… “Run your plans for tomorrow down for me, sweetie,” Maggie prompted.

Sera rubbed her forehead once again, trying to massage away the last vestiges of headache and clear her thoughts. “Right now we're just focusing on what's right in front of us, the little stuff.” Sera's lips twisted wryly. “‘One day at a time,' right? Isn't that what you're always telling me? For tomorrow, Pauline's going to show me around downtown in the morning and we'll see the plaza and the most famous sights. She swears all else can wait until after I've had a taste of the City Different, which she likes to call ‘Fanta Se.' Then we'll go see her shop in the afternoon. Anyhow, that's my plan. Check out her store, see what we might make of it.”

“And then?” Margaret prompted.

Sera had to smile. “Then hit a meeting. Yes, boss.”

“You're a winner, kiddo. Don't forget that.”

Sera pressed the “end” button on her cell phone and set the device down on the Talavera tile counter next to her now-empty mug. She let out a shaky breath. She was in a strange house, in a strange city, sharing it with a woman whose major preoccupation in life was with whether or not one was sexually satisfied, and she had not a clue in the world about what tomorrow would bring. She was perched seven thousand feet up the side of a mountain, there were coyotes—real, live coyotes—howling away in the arroyo outside her window, and she was contemplating saying a great, big “fuck it” to everything she'd ever known.

And for the first time in a very long while, she
felt
like a winner.

P
auline's House of Passion made itself comfortable in a spacious enclosed courtyard containing a cluster of small businesses sharing common walls around a terra-cotta-paved open space carved out of Santa Fe's upscale Palace Avenue. A decorative iron gate with fanciful Spanish-inspired scrollwork and a long, arched entranceway gave only token resistance to the outside world; the discreet signage advertising the shops within flirted coyly with foot traffic from downtown Santa Fe's main thoroughfares, as if daring shoppers to explore the hidden treasures at the end of the trail. At the apex of the gate, a rustic wooden sign announced
“Placita de Suerte y Sueños,”
and Sera's Spanish, rusty as it was, translated it as something like “Place of Luck and Dreams.”

Once inside, the visitor encountered a wealth of sunlight streaming through the open center of the miniature plaza, lending the area a warm, cozy feel that could not fail to entice shoppers to stay and browse. Each of the buildings had a wooden porch, so that one had to climb up a couple steps to enter the shops nestled within, as though to protect them from flash flooding, or simply to give them a more rustic feel. A few shade trees planted in terra-cotta pots provided hints of green. At the center of the courtyard, a Spanish-tiled fountain basin had been grafted to a whimsical modernist sculpture of a Native American earth mother type, water splashing merrily from an urn upheld in her ample arms. The one-story adobe dwelling that housed Pauline's storefront was at the rear of the courtyard beyond the fountain, holding pride of place and drawing the visitor's eye.

The visitor's wide,
incredulous
eye. Sera inhaled a long breath.

Her aunt's shop was a jungle.

Or more precisely, the high desert equivalent. The storefront was overrun with a curtain of climbing vines, succulents, and cacti gone wild, their juicy, spiny petals plump and thriving across every surface. The wide, turquoise-trimmed front window was half obscured by tangled drapes of white moonflower, the fragrant, night-blooming petals now furled against the early autumn sun. Brushy yellow wildflowers competed with sweet-smelling lavender bushes to flank the front porch, while huge agave rosettes thrust their spears up from terra-cotta pots that stood like bristly sentinels on either side of the turquoise-painted wooden door. Purple passionflower twined round the weathered wood porch rails in a lover's embrace. Red cactus buds and orange Indian paintbrush added vibrant splashes of color from their homes in planters hung along the window frames. The chocolate gelato–hued adobe walls of her aunt's shop were barely visible through the profusion of foliage, and the sign painted on the front in faded purple cursive—
Pauline's House of Passion
—could scarcely be read.

The effect was intense. It was overpowering. It was beautiful—and vaguely frightening.

“What
happened
here?” Serafina asked Pauline in a shocked whisper.

“Oh dear,” Pauline murmured, pushing her battered straw cowboy hat back on her head and scratching the salt-and-pepper mane underneath. “It's been awhile since I took a proper interest in the shop. Looks like the Wolf's been letting his babies have the run of the place in my absence.” She tsked her tongue. “I'll have to speak to him about it.”

Sera tried to find a part of that pronouncement that made sense, and failed. Then she noticed there was not just one shop affected by the floral invasion, but two. Catty-corner to Pauline's was another, somewhat smaller shop at the far right. A wooden sign hung above it, carved with silver-gilt letters.

“Lyric Jewelry,” Sera read aloud, moving closer to investigate.

If possible, the jewelry store was even more overgrown with foliage than her aunt's. Sera couldn't be sure, but it looked as though the migration had begun from the smaller shop and crept inch by inch until it engulfed its neighbor like some primitive jungle.

Then, out of that jungle, stepped Indiana Jones.

Or at least, his doppelganger.

Tall. Lanky. Sandy blond, beneath a battered leather outback hat. Dressed in slouchy olive cargo pants and a waffle-knit thermal shirt that clung almost indecently to the angles and planes of his lean torso. He sported scuffed motorcycle boots and a heavy, intricately wrought silver chain about his neck. Another chain snaked from his belt around to his back pocket, probably anchoring a wallet as beat-up and worn-in as the rest of his attire.

The man brushed aside a stray vine and exited the jeweler's shop, pausing momentarily to adjust to the afternoon light. As he encountered the oddly lucent sunlight that seemed unique to Santa Fe, he squinted and tipped down his hat, but Sera had already caught a glimpse of the most astonishing green eyes beneath the battered brim. Her breath caught as the man vaulted easily over the porch rail, eschewing the two wooden steps and landing lightly on the dusty pavement beside the two women.

“Miss Pauline, so nice to see you today,” said the adventurer, nodding politely to Sera's aunt and tipping his hat to them both. “We have missed you around here.”

Sera's imagination couldn't have picked a more intriguing accent for Indy had she been writing his dialogue herself. It wasn't Southern, or British, or even Australian. No, it was…
Israeli?
It was very faint, but she'd lived and worked in New York long enough to recognize the distinctive lilt of the soft vowels, and the exaggerated precision of his diction.

“And who is your lovely friend?” Moss green eyes sized Serafina up from beneath the brim of that hat—a hat that should have been ridiculous, and somehow wasn't.

Lovely, my ass.
Sera had the unmistakable impression that his choice of words was no more than a courtesy. There was something chilly and imponderable in that green gaze—like the opaque waters of a hidden forest pond. She knew she was no supermodel; working around so much rich food meant she would never be anything but pleasingly curvy, and her petite stature—just five feet two—had earned her the nickname “short stack” in culinary school. Still, Sera wasn't used to such casual disregard from the male sex.

She squelched a childish urge to sniff her pits, crossing her arms defensively under her breasts instead.
Well,
he's
not that good-looking either,
Sera consoled herself.
Ruggedly appealing, yes.
But closer inspection of his features revealed they were a bit too strongly stamped upon his visage to be called traditionally handsome. His nose was a little too prominent, his incisors just a teensy shade crooked. He was on the south side of his thirties, with deep laugh lines around his eyes. And those lean cheeks could use a good going over with a razor—his five o'clock shadow, she guessed, probably started around eight in the morning. Plus—
ugh
—she'd always hated guys who wore chains around their necks. Still, with eyes like that, who was complaining?

Pauline drew Sera forward, beaming fit to crack her face. “Kiddo, I'd like you to meet Asher Wolf, who owns that marvelous jewelry store next door and is single-handedly responsible for every exquisite work of art inside. He's also the author of that floral exuberance that's been…ah…decorating our shops. Not to mention, quite easy on the eyes, if you hadn't noticed.” She winked outrageously at Asher, who seemed to think nothing of it, merely winking back companionably.

Oh, she'd noticed. This guy was a jewelry maker? With an Incredible Hulk–sized green thumb? And a name like Asher Wolf? She would have pegged him for a biker, maybe, or a kung fu expert—or maybe an artist's model. Ladies probably tucked panties with their phone numbers embroidered on them into his pockets as he strolled down the streets. The women he dated would be sensual, uninhibited, sophisticated. And probably stellar in bed. It should come as no surprise, Sera acknowledged painfully, that he failed to take notice of
her.

“Asher, allow me to introduce you to someone very special,” Pauline continued warmly, interrupting Sera's thoughts. “This is my niece from New York, Serafina Wilde. My very
single
niece. Everyone calls her Bliss.”

“
No one
calls me Bliss,” Sera mumbled uncomfortably, squirming under the Israeli's curious regard. “You're the only one, Aunt Pauline.” As Sera's godmother, Pauline had had the honor of gifting her niece with that fantastical middle name. Sera had secretly always liked it, even as it made her feel vaguely embarrassed to cop to it.

The lanky artisan had the grace to pretend not to notice Sera's ungracious tone. “Your aunt has a way with words,” Asher complimented in his lilting accent, filling the awkward space. “It is a true pleasure to meet you, Bliss. Any relative of Miss Pauline is a welcome addition to our little town.”

Now why did she get the feeling there was not a chance in hell of getting him to stop calling her Bliss and start using her given name?

And why, further, was she having an even more unsettling fantasy upon hearing the way the word “bliss” rolled off his tongue, of that name being a promise he might collect on?

“You had a delivery a few days ago,” Asher told Pauline, interrupting Sera's squirrelly thoughts with disheartening practicality. Somehow, she'd expected the guy to spout movie dialogue, not prosaic everyday stuff. “When you couldn't be reached, I put the boxes inside for you.”

“Oh, dear. I'm sorry, Ash. I did mean to call you back, it's just that things rather got away from me since…since Hortencia…” Moisture gathered in Pauline's coffee brown eyes, and she crinkled them valiantly to keep tears at bay. Sera felt a pang, and reached out instinctively to rub the older woman's shoulder. There were so many reminders of her life with Hortencia, and it had to be hard on her to carry on alone. They may have found each other late in life, but there was little doubt the two women had been soul mates.

Asher's quick gaze took note of her gesture and seemed to warm a bit. Sera wasn't sure what to make of that and glanced away uncomfortably. She did
not
need to get herself enthralled by another charismatic man, damn it! Especially not one as inscrutable as Indy over here. 'Cause yeah, that had worked out
real
well for her last time.

“Thank you for taking care of that for us, Ash,” Pauline resumed when her composure returned. “I always said you were a good egg, and I have
great
instincts when it comes to men.”

Unlike her niece,
Serafina thought.

“It was no trouble, I assure you,” Asher demurred gallantly.

Even the tiny half smile he offered was enough to threaten the steadiness of Serafina's knees.

“Bliss here has been thinking of taking over the shop and turning it into a bakery,” the older woman informed Asher blithely.

“Thanks for spilling the beans on that one, Aunt Paulie,” Sera muttered with a wince. She wasn't at all sure she was ready to share her secret hopes with the world just yet.

Pauline just rolled her eyes at Sera's modesty. “She's a famous pastry chef back home,” Pauline further confided.

Sera blushed.
“Infamous, more like,” she mumbled, shooting Pauline a quelling glance.

One slashing eyebrow rose beneath the hat. “Is that so?” Asher murmured.

“Oh, well, I… that is, yes, I was fairly well known in the industry at one time…” Sera muttered uncomfortably.
“Laughingstock” would have been a better way to describe it.
“As for opening a bakery, well, Pauline and I have discussed it briefly, and I'm really not sure yet, but I thought it would be worth taking a look at the space just to see… you know, whether it might be something I could try… that is, if it's suitable…”

Gawd, why am I blathering on like this?

Maybe it was how fragile this opportunity felt, how badly she wanted the chance for something new, and how afraid she was that something would come along and dash her dream before she could even fully develop it in her mind's eye. Maybe her hopes would sound foolish to him—a little girl's fantasy of being surrounded by sweets and sweetness 24/7. Then again, the guy was practically wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the word “iconoclast.” And wasn't she in a town famous for its free-spirited dreamers? If she were ever to find herself
not
judged for taking a flyer on an out-there idea, she had to hope it would be here, in the land of enchantment. But she'd get nowhere with a faint heart. Serafina took a deep breath.

“What I mean to say is, yes, I might open my own business here if the conditions are right.” There, that sounded dignified, didn't it?

“Indeed?” Asher smiled politely. “I should enjoy hearing more about this venture sometime, Bliss.”

Her heart fluttered. Wow, he sounded legitimately interested in her plans! Despite her determination not to let this ludicrously sexy man distract her, she couldn't help feeling flattered. Then she mentally smacked herself upside the head.
Duh, Sera.
He probably just wanted to scope out whether she was going to be competition or good for his business, given that his own shop was located right next door. “Um, right, ah… thanks, yeah, I'll be sure to let you know what I decide,” Sera muttered, going crimson for no particular reason she'd care to admit.

“Now, where did I put those darn keys?” Pauline was muttering, fully engrossed in rummaging through her voluminous tapestry bag. Sera half expected her to pull a Mary Poppins and drag forth a lamppost or a midsized potted plant from that monstrous sack. “Dang it! I was so sure I swapped them from my
big
bag the other day. But maybe they're still in Hortencia's purse? Of all the stupid…”

Pauline's voice wobbled and her eyes threatened to well again.

She's going to have to talk about it
sometime
,
Sera thought. But right now didn't seem like the moment. Pauline would share her grief when she was ready. “That's okay, Auntie,” she soothed. “We can come back tomorrow.”