I blinked, torn between indignation that he didn't think I was sweet enough, and relief that he'd at least noticed my sour attitude. "Previous engagement," I said. "Thanks, though. Some other time." At least he wasn't trying to drag us out for drinks, although I was pretty sure that if it had been a little later in the day-like, say, noon-it would have been Mojitos all around at the Cuban bar, and an expectation of a three-way at his fabulous bachelor pad later.
Marvin managed to look both crushed and lecherous at the same time. "Okay, doll. You girls go get your beauty sleep. Not that you need it!"
He was up to something. I gave him the flinty eye as he walked away, whistling a jaunty tune. Cherise shook her head, and preceded me off the set and into the changing room. She had to shower off body makeup; I just had to scrub off the zinc oxide and try to get my hair to do something that didn't look as if I was trying to take Best of Breed at the Purina Cup.
I finished first, and yelled into the showers, "Meet you outside!"
"Fifteen minutes!" Cherise was deep into conditioning territory. I navigated the tunnel-like hallways of the television station, avoiding harried interns and squinty-eyed techs, hid from the news director, and managed to get through the back door without being stopped to help out with anything that wasn't my job.
I walked over to the tiny lunch area, complete with palm trees, bolted-down picnic table, and overflowing trash container nobody seemed to remember to empty. Not exactly paradise, but it served, at times. I sat down on the cool metal bench, rested my elbows on the table, and watched the morning arrive.
Another lovely sunrise. Wispy clouds out to sea that glowed orange and gold; the ocean glittered dark blue, flecked with white foam. The sky shaded from turquoise in the east to indigo in the west, and a few brave stars were still glimmering through the dawn. A warm ocean breeze that slid over my exposed skin like silk.
It was a lovely way to pass a few minutes. I didn't do this nearly enough, just sitting, waiting, listening to the whispers of the world.
As I drifted up there I began to feel something inside me start to resonate.
Liquid light. A cell-deep hum. A deeply intimate feeling of coming home.
I had company again. The good kind, this time.
Down in the real world, warm fingers stroked my hair, and up on the aetheric I saw a white, sparkling flare of power, like a ghost.
The tense curls of my hair relaxed, and David's fingers dragged slowly through it, straightening it into a glossy black sheet of silk that fell heavily around my shoulders.
I turned. David was worth the resulting skipped heartbeat and raised pulse level on a visual level alone-smooth golden skin, dark auburn hair that glittered with red highlights in the sun, lickable lips, and eyes of an impossible bronze color behind a pair of gold-rimmed glasses. He was back in his usual uniform: blue jeans, a comfortably faded cotton shirt, an antique ankle-length olive coat.
David didn't look like a Djinn, most of the time. At least, not most people's idea of one, since that included pantaloons, loopy earrings, and bare, rippling chests. Not that his chest, when bare, didn't ripple satisfactorily. Far from it ...
"I thought you were resting," I said, to get my mind off of the image of him, shirtless. I tried to make it sound stern, but he made it difficult when he leaned into my space. He slipped his fingers through my magically straightened hair, tilted my head back, and came very close to kissing me.
And, teasingly, didn't. Warm, soft lips just barely brushing mine.
"It's been too long," he said. "I want to stay with you for a while."
My pulse jumped into high gear. I knew he could hear it. Feel it through the brush of our mouths. I'd left him alone in the bottle for more than a month, hoping he'd be stronger for it, although I hadn't capped the bottle and sealed him inside. I just... couldn't bear to do that. It was too much like prison.
"You're sure?" I asked. My voice didn't sound too steady. It sounded breathless with excitement, actually.
"Just say the word."
"Which one?"
"The one you didn't learn from your mother." He made a low humming sound at the back of his throat, not quite a growl, not quite a laugh. I could almost forget how fragile he was at the moment. My body wanted to forget, but then, it had Attention Deficit Disorder, big-time.
"Are you-" I hated to ask it-it was like asking someone with cancer how the treatments were going. "David, be straight with me. Really. Are you feeling better? Are you strong enough to-to do this?"
Because David had, since I'd met him, been through even more than I had. He'd fought demons and split himself in two to give me life when I died, and he'd allowed an Ifrit-a kind of Djinn vampire-to drain him nearly dry. He wasn't really healed from any of that.
Worse, I wasn't sure he could really heal. Jonathan, high muckety-muck of the Djinn world, hadn't been all that clear.
But today, he looked almost... normal. Maybe I'd been right. Maybe time healed all Djinn wounds.
He smiled. At close range, that was a deadly weapon. "Don't worry. I'm strong enough to spend a little time with you," he said. His eyebrows-fabulously expressive, those eyebrows-canted upward. "Unless, of course, you have a date?"
Right on cue, the back dock door banged open, and Cherise began flip-flopping down the steps to the parking lot. I looked over David's shoulder and expected him to mist away-like Djinn usually did-but he just turned to take a look as well. Which meant that he'd decided not to leave, but just to disguise himself with a minor use of his powers, a don't-see-me kind of magic that would direct Cherise's attention away from him...
"Whoa! Who's the hottie, Jo?" Cherise asked, focused directly on David. She came to a hard stop, wiggling her tanned toes in the designer flip-flops. Those bright blue eyes swept him head to toe, narrowed, and sparkled. "My, my, my. Holding out on me. Bad friend. No biscuit."
It was possible that David was just in the mood to be part of the human world for a while. He did that, sometimes; that was how I'd met him. It had taken me days to figure out that he wasn't entirely human, but in my defense, I was just a little distracted at the time with people trying to kill me.
What I was afraid of, though, was that David was visible to Cherise because he was too weak to magic himself out of being seen.
If that was the case, I couldn't see any sign of it in his body language. He looked relaxed, open, and friendly.
"Hi. My name's David," he said, and held out his hand. Cherise took it and made the handshake look way too intimate.
"I can be a friend. A really, really close friend." She pursed shiny, Maybelline-enhanced lips, and sent me a pleading look as she leaned into his personal space. "So, when you get tired of him, can I have him?"
"No."
"Trade you a date with Johnny Depp."
"Cherise, you don't have a date with Johnny Depp."
She sniffed. "Well, I could. If I wanted. So I suppose the arrival of Mr. Hottie means we're not going shopping."
"Would you go shopping if he showed up for you?"
"You're kidding, right? I would have shopping surgically removed from my system. And you know how much of a commitment that is for me." Cherise gave me a preoccupied kind of smile, tearing her attention away from David for about point oh two seconds, and finally heaved a theatrical sigh. "I suppose I'll just have to go abuse my credit rating all by myself. Although I plan to shop heavily, and it would be handy to have some nice, strong man to carry my-"
"Go," I said. She lifted an elegantly sculpted shoulder and flip-flopped off toward her red convertible, hips swaying, alien tattoo doing a funky hula to the motion. Yeah. She'd be carrying her own bags, sure. When hell opened a hockey rink.
"Did I interrupt something?" David asked, and moved back into kissing distance again. "I know how seriously you take a mall visit. Wouldn't want to stand in your way."
He was teasing me. I leaned in, too, brushed his lips with mine, and stared deep into his burning bronze eyes. Teasing could go both ways.
His pupils widened and drank me in.
"The mall doesn't open until ten," I whispered into his parted lips. "Plenty of time."
His kiss took control and dissolved me into sparkles and tingles and a massive surge of heat. Damp, urgent, passionate lips, demanding my full attention. I felt myself collapsing against him, wanting badly to be horizontal somewhere with a lockable door. Jesus, he made my whole body shake.
"I missed you," he said, and his voice had gone low and rough, hiding in the back of his throat. His thumbs caressed my cheekbones, drawing lines of heat like tattoos.
"Show me."
"Right here?" He looked pointedly down at the gravel, asphalt, and thin grass.
"Looks uncomfortable. Then again, I remember how much you like public displays of affection."
"Beast."
Those eyebrows went up again, dangerously high. His smile turned dark. "Oh, you really don't want to know how true that is."
I felt a tiny little tremor inside. Sometimes, David could be like a pet tiger-glorious and terrible. He wasn't just a sweet-natured, nice, agreeable guy, although he was certainly capable of being that. It was just that he was capable of anything. Everything. Djinn weren't fluffy little bunnies you kept as pets, they were dangerous. David was gentle with me, I knew that. But sometimes, occasionally, I would see the vast, dark depths underneath, and I'd get dizzy and breathless.
And hot. Dear God. Spontaneous-combustion hot.
He knew, of course. I saw it flash in his eyes.
I said, "I'm not afraid, you know."
His hands-everything about him-went still. Wind brushed over us with curious hands, ruffling my hair, belling his coat. It tasted of ocean. Palm trees rustled and shook out their fronds over our heads.
"Maybe you should be. You don't know enough about me."
Well, he was right. He'd live for eons. He'd seen human civilizations rise and fall. I barely knew a fraction of who David was, and what he was.
Sometimes I just forgot.
"Try me," I said. Cherise's glitter-bright flirting had reminded me, with a chill, that I wasn't some sweet young girl anymore, and next thing I knew I'd be buying in the Women's World section where dowdy clothes go to die. Reading Modern Maturity. Learning to tat lace and make scrapple. I wanted to know David.
I wanted this to be something bigger and deeper and forever, or as far as my forever could go. "If we're going to stay together, then you can't just show me your good side, you know. And I mean it. I'm not afraid."
He looked uncommonly solemn, and he didn't blink. There was a hint of the tiger in those eyes again. "I don't think you understand what you're saying."
I heaved out a sigh. "Of course I don't understand. Everything about the Djinn is one big, dark, booga-booga secret, and just because I've been one doesn't mean I got the operating manual-"
He stilled my lips with his, in a damp, slow, breathless kiss. His hands slid up into my hair, stroking those achingly sensitive places behind my ears, at the nape of my neck... I lost my train of thought.
Which made me jump tracks to another one when he let me up for breath. "We need to get you home." What that really meant was, to put him back in his bottle-yes, Djinn really had bottles, glass ones; they had to be glass and they had to come with stoppers or a way to seal them, no exceptions. The worst case I'd ever seen had been a soap-bubble thin ornamental glass perfume bottle; it was stored in the Wardens Association vault in the U.N. Building in New York, because that thing would shatter if you so much as gave it a hard look.
David's was a somewhat sturdy ornamental kitchen bottle, the blue-glass fancy kind that store flavored oils and decorative grains. I kept it in a very safe place, right in my nightstand drawer next to oils, lotions, and other things I wouldn't want casual visitors to inventory.
Which inevitably led to thoughts of my bed, soft sheets, cool soft ocean breezes sighing over my skin...
"Yes. Let's go home." His hands slid over my shoulders, stroked down my arms, and lingered on my hands before letting me go. The heat from him stayed on my skin. Afterimages of light.
My car was parked over in the far corner of the lot, away from casual door dings. She was a midnight blue Dodge Viper, and I loved her dearly enough for her to qualify as my second-favorite-ever ride. The first-place winner had been a Mustang, also midnight blue, named Delilah, who had gotten scrapped around the time I met David, as if I had to give up one really lovely thing for another.
David took the shotgun seat, and I prowled Mona through the morning traffic toward my apartment. I'd been really, really lucky when I moved-had to move, thanks to the overzealous actions of some real estate people, who thought that just because I'd had a funeral I'd broken my lease-and I'd ended up with a beachfront second-floor sea view. All of my furniture was secondhand, and nothing matched, but the bed was comfortable and the balcony was to die for.
The bed was the only thing that mattered right now.
I must have parked, but that part was a blur. Then stairs, and then we were in the hall and I was hunting for my key. It was after morning commute time for most of my neighbors, and the place was nearly silent, except for the distant, muted hum of a TV somewhere down near the corner. Probably Mrs. Appel; she worked nights and liked to wind down to a little HBO before nap time.
David came up behind me and put his hands on my shoulders, then let them drift down my sides, stroking. Gentle, slow moves. Anyone watching wouldn't have found it terrifically sexual-we weren't exactly humping in the hall-but I had to brace my hands on the door and close my eyes. There was something magic about his hands, about the slow, deliberate way he used them. They followed the line of my shoulders, circled my arms, and moved all the way down to my wrists.
He moved closer until he pressed against me like a second skin. I tried to fit the key into the lock again. Missed. My hands were shaking.
"Jo?" His voice was velvet, with a slightly frayed edge that rasped like a purr.
"Maybe you'd better let me do it."
I held the ring up. He took it from my fingers and leaned around me to fit the key in the lock and turn it.
Which shouldn't have seemed so suggestive, but maybe that was a combination of my boiling hormones and the heat of his body pressed against my back. Solid summer-warm flesh, hard in all the right places.
The door clicked open. I moved inside, flicked on soft, diffuse overhead lighting, and kicked off my shoes and dropped my purse.
He was behind me again, and this time there wasn't any holding back for the neighbors. His hands went right around my waist and pulled me against him, and I turned my head to look back at him.
Depthless black in his pupils, and the irises of his eyes were smoking-hot copper.
"I need you," he said, and moved my hair out of the way. His mouth found the side of my neck, licking and sucking, so fierce that it was right on the skin-thin border between pain and pleasure. His hands slid up to skim lightly over my breasts. "I need you."
"I-wait, David, I don't-are you sure you're-" Feeling up to this was a straight line waiting to happen. "-strong enough for-"
"You give me strength." His mouth was doing absurd things to my self-control.
"You give me life." He murmured it against that incredibly sensitive spot just at the base of my ear. "You give me peace."
Which might have been the sexiest thing any man-or male Djinn-had ever said to me in my life.
"We going to talk all day?" I asked breathlessly, and felt him laugh. Not a nice laugh, and there wasn't much amusement in it, either. It was the kind of deep, rippling chuckle you might hear from the devil right before he let you see the fine print of your contract on that condo in Aruba, and dear God, it made my spine turn to water.
"That all depends on you," he said, and the hands reversed course, moved in and down. Demanding. Skimming up the thin fabric of my skirt in handfuls while he pulled me back hard against him in the same motion. "Are you in the mood to have a nice, long chat? Have some tea and cookies?"
It was not what I wanted to do with my mouth.
We fell onto the bed with a bouncing jolt. I didn't need to undress him; where my hands landed, his clothes just misted away to reveal an incredibly beautiful expanse of flawless golden skin. His eyes turned vague, half-lidded, as I stroked my fingers over his chest and down. His muscles tensed underneath them, corded cable.
He rolled us over, his weight balanced on top of me. I couldn't stop an involuntary arch in my back, and once I saw the answering glitter in his eyes I kept moving my hips. He moved back. Long, slow, hot torture.
"Yes," I whispered.
He kissed me. Not romantic, this time. Demanding. Driven by something I didn't fully understand. I'd never seen him like this before, full of a kind of frantic hunger, as if he wanted to consume me, possess me.
Own me.
This wasn't equal. It couldn't be equal, because I still held his bottle, and I'd claimed him. It was a master-slave relationship, no matter how nice the master, how willing the slave. It bothered me.
Just at this moment, I wondered if it bothered him, too.
He was too weak. If I set him free, he'd fade into smoke and hunger. Lose himself.
I couldn't let that happen. Right or wrong, I couldn't let it happen.