by S. E. Smith
Unbelievable. The woman was abso-fucking-lutely unbelievable. Heat spiked in the room and the lights blazed brighter. Small tongues of flame licked across his body.
“You look like a freaking effigy,” she said, snatching up the fire extinguisher again. “All I have is cheap, very flammable furniture so I’m prepared to use this!” Her threat ended on a squeaky note.
Rayez glanced around the room. She wasn’t kidding about the furniture. There wasn’t much besides an ugly brown and tan plaid couch, a blue bean bag that seemed to have lost most of its beans, a pressed wood bookshelf packed with books and a scratched and marked coffee table. Oatmeal colored carpet and off-white popcorn walls. He could see the Formica covered kitchen cabinets from where he stood. Cheap and tiny.
Maybe she really needed those wishes. The thought gnawed at his conscience, but he wasn’t letting her off the hook yet.
He dampened the flames and stalked closer. She retreated, still clutching the extinguisher in front of her. “You’re the one who trapped me in the first place,” he said. “Now you want to be rewarded for releasing me?”
He leaned into her space, close enough to smell her light lavender scent. Close enough to see the rapid beat of her pulse in the sexy hollow at the base of her glistening throat. He wanted to kiss the spot. Need tightened his throat. Enemy. He tore his gaze back to her face and gave a scoffing laugh. “Doesn’t work that way, sweetheart.”
She backed up until she bumped into a wall, and then stood still. Worry and something else darkened her gaze. “How does it work then?”
The need to touch her, feel her skin against his, was like a siren call. A saner part of him knew he was thinking with his dick, that she was trouble and he needed to get away from her. As a compromise, he slammed his hands against the wall on either side of her head, trapping her in place with his arms and body.
Her gaze darted to his lips, then returned to his eyes. Her tongue flicked out again, wet her bottom lip. Her lips parted and she leaned forward just a fraction. Fuck, he was in trouble.
They locked gazes for a long moment. “Sorry sweetheart, I don’t come with an instruction manual.”
“Stop calling me sweetheart.”
“Why? Does it bother you, sw—he choked on the damn word. Being bound by her meant he had to obey her commands until she released him or gave his bottle away to someone else. But she didn’t seem to know that and he wasn’t going to give her a clue.
He managed a smirk. “You know what? I’ll call you honeybuns instead.”
“Don’t—
He interrupted before she could complete her sentence. “Maybe I should call you Honeytrap, since you trapped me.”
“Call me Selene.” Her gaze skittered away from his.
Again with that tongue. She looked up and blinked at him. “Okay, what I did was wrong, and I’m sorry.” Her voice shook. “But you have to help me.”
The compulsion washed over him like invisible rain. Rayez pulled in a deep breath and pulled his tattered control together. If he could just keep her from stating specifics. If he could just stop getting distracted by her enticing scent, by the desperation in her eyes. If he could just be free.
He stepped back, put some distance between them. “Why should I? Last time I tried to help you is when my troubles started.”
“I said I am sorry and I meant it.” She paused and drew in a deep breath. “You have to help me because if you don’t I’ll seal you back in the bottle.”
Her threat hit him like a bucket of ice cold water. How in two dimensions could he find this woman even remotely attractive? “I should call you a selfish bitch because that’s exactly what you are.”
“You can call me whatever you want.” Her voice rose to match his as she stepped into his space. “But you’re going to help me.”
He clenched his fists and leaned into her. Puffs of her ragged breath skimmed and fluttered over his skin, a sweet caress that sent shivers of pleasure down south. Think with your other head, bud. “You can go to—
“Sel!” A small whirlwind rushed past him and within seconds the small boy he’d seen earlier had his arms wrapped around Selene’s slender form. The boy looked over one shoulder at him with eyes wide with fear.
“Oof,” she gasped and dropped the extinguisher on the carpet, where it landed with a muted thud. Her arms wrapped around the boy in return and she tried to turn him to the side.
But the boy stiffened even more and dug into the carpet. “No! I don’t want him to hurt you!”
“And I don’t want you to get hurt,” she said.
Looking at the two, trying to protect each other, the fear in the boy’s gaze, threw a switch inside. Rayez found himself letting go of his anger. “No one’s getting hurt.”
Rayez’s words quieted the panic inside Selene at having Cade there in the presence of the angry djinn. For some strange reason she believed him.
She didn’t have much reason to trust anyone, learned at a young age she couldn’t count on anyone but herself. Their mother had married Warren and brought him into their life. And he’d taken every advantage of his position to get what he wanted.
“Sel, who is he?” Cade’s worried question pulled her back to the situation at hand.
Selene mustered up a smile. “This is a friend of mine. His name is Rayez.”
“If you’re friends, why were you both yelling at each other?”
She stilled wondering how to answer him. How much had he overheard?
Rayez hunkered down to the floor and looked Cade in the eye. “Sometimes when people talk they get so excited or upset about what they’re talking about they don’t realize how loud they are being,” he said. “I’m sorry our discussion woke you up and scared you.”
Cade nodded. “You sounded real angry.”
Selene ruffled his curls. “Sometimes people make mistakes and hurt others without meaning to,” she said, looking at Rayez. “I hurt Rayez and so he has a very good reason to be angry with me.”
The djinn’s gaze darkened, but his expression remained neutral. She supposed that was better than the angry clenched jaw and flaming eyes look he’d sported earlier.
“Did you apologize to him?” Cade looked from one to the other. “Because you know you should.”
Selene laughed. “Yes, I did.” Still grinning, she looked up at Rayez. “By the way, this wise young man is my brother Cade.”
“Nice to meet you.” The djinn held out a hand. Without hesitation, Cade grabbed it with his much smaller hand and shook.
“Now it’s back to bed for you,” she nudged Cade toward his room.
“Aww, but I just met Rayez and I still have more questions.”
She mock frowned. “One more question and then you say good night. It’s late.”
Cade turned toward their guest with a grin. “Why are you wearing such strange clothes?”
“Cade! That’s not polite.” She cast an apologetic look at Rayez. The clothes in question showed off his broad chest and tattooed muscles to advantage. As far as she was concerned, the clothes worked.
A smile twitched on the djinn’s lips. The man had a gorgeous mouth, well-defined full lips that looked like they’d been drawn by an artist. Kissable lips.
What? Oh God, no. She didn’t have time for such fancies given her screwed up life. She wrapped her arms around herself.
Rayez struck a modeling pose. “I come from a very far off land and this is what the men wear there,” he said. “It’s our native outfit.”
“That’s cool. It makes you look like a genie and that’s super cool,” Cade said.
Heat rushed through her. Could the earth please open up and swallow her? Now. “Okay, it’s time for bed,” she chirped and grabbed Cade.
“Thank you,” Raze said with a half bow to her brother. “And good night. May your dreams be bright.”
When she returned from tucking Cade back into his bed, Selene found Rayez studying her books. His rugged features somber and thoughtful. Beautifu
l. Her hands itched for her camera again. “Thank you.”
He pinned her with his dark gaze. Flames seemed to flicker once more in their depths. “For what?”
Being subjected to that intense gaze, breathing in his exotic scent of smoky sandalwood made it hard to think, talk. She swallowed and pushed words out. “Thank you for the soup. Thank you for being so gracious and kind to my brother despite…” She stopped and swallowed again. She clasped her hands together, the chill of her fingertips seeping into her. “Despite all I did. For what it’s worth, I really am sorry.”
He gave her a slow nod. “Why did you do it?”
His quiet question had her taking a deep breath. This was it. Her one chance. “It’s a long and rather fantastic story, I think we better sit down.”
They sat next to each other on her lumpy couch. Even though there was a decent amount of space between them, Selene was acutely aware of him, and the heat radiating from his body. He sat with his arms resting on his knees and hands loosely clasped. She noticed the veining on the back of his large hands and the calloused fingertips. What would it be like to run a finger over those veins and have him touch her in return?
The thought left her throat parched. “I better get some water,” she croaked, half-rising. “Want anything?”
He gently pushed her back down with one hand. In the other he held two bottles of chilled water.
Yes, of course, genie. Selene grabbed a bottle, opened it and took a drink. “Thanks.”
She started at the beginning about how her mother, tired of being a single parent, had considered Warren to be their savior and married him. At first, things had been better and Warren legally adopted them.
“Where was your real father?”
“I don’t know if my Mom even knew his identity, and she never really spoke of him.” She shrugged and continued.
“My mother died when I was thirteen and Cade was two, and that’s when things began to turn strange.” Selene picked at a loose thread on her tee-shirt.
The next part of the story stuck in her throat. Would he believe her? The one time she’d tried to share the story with a kind teacher, she’d ended up seeing a shrink to deal with her grief and imagination. And Warren had gotten a lot of sympathy. She gulped down some more water to wash away the bitterness of the memory.
“I passed out at the reception after the funeral,” she said, her voice breaking. “Everyone blamed my being upset and the summer heat. Obviously, I was upset and June in Houston is hot. But many years later, after I knew the truth about my stepfather, I wondered if someone hadn’t slipped me something in a drink.”
Rayez shot her a sympathetic look and took her left hand in his. His warmth chased away the chill in her soul, reassured her.
“What happened?”
“I woke up around dusk in my own bed. Warren sat in a chair next to me. He hadn’t bothered to turn on the lights so his face was in half-shadows. I still remember being terrified, until he asked me how I felt. His familiar voice comforted me,” she shook her head and shared a rueful smile. “I was so naïve.”
He responded with a gentle squeeze. “You were a child.”
She nodded. Truth. Warren had conned masses, he had money and knew magic, a thirteen-year-old hadn’t stood a chance in hell against him and his plots. “Anyway, there was a cut on one of my palms that he just shrugged off and I felt weak, like I’d woken from a long illness rather than an afternoon swoon.”
She paused for another drink. “After that, mysterious cuts would appear periodically on different parts of my body, usually parts hidden by my clothes,” she said. “And usually after blackouts.”
Selene fast forwarded to the next highlight. “Then when I turned fifteen, he turned me into a dopplegänger.”
She skipped over the details about being taken into Warren’s secret workshop hidden deep inside the house, stripped naked, bound and drugged with a hallucinogenic drink. There’d been spells, pain and blood. The need to throw up engulfed her as she remembered every single fucking detail. Details that were too raw, too personal to share.
The girl who’d entered that room remained trapped there. While she, a shade of that girl, had walked out with a story no one would believe and a life that was a lie.
“It’s a painful process,” she said, adding clinical characteristics and uses of a dopplegänger.
“Blood magic.” Rayez’s horrified whisper resounded in the room.
Strangely, the words comforted Selene. A relieved breath whooshed out of her as she sat up straighter. “You know what I’m talking about.”
The angles of his face hardened. “In the ancient times, there used to be human magicians who used blood—animal or human, willing donor or not—to make their magic more powerful.” His lips curved in distaste. “That’s why djinns were warned to keep away from humans. That’s why it was good the old ways have been forgotten.”
“Not totally forgotten,” Selene said, placing her empty bottle on the coffee table, next to the beer bottle. “He learned about blood magic, the trick of marrying widows to get to their children and about djinns from his mentor, a witch called Edgar. Apparently, he’d gotten hold of an ancient text.”
Selene stopped and stared at him. “Wait, can he use your blood to become even more powerful? Is that why he wanted you?”
Rayez shook his head. “Djinns don’t have blood, we are made of essence or what humans call matter,” he said. “But blood magicians are dangerous to us because a powerful one can enslave a djinn or several.”
The enormity of what she’d almost done caught up with her. “Oh.”
Rayez narrowed his gaze at her. “So that’s where you and I come in. Warren sent you to get me. How did he know about me?”
She intertwined her fingers with his. It just felt right. “Yes,” she said. “He did this scrying spell from time to time to locate djinn presence within a certain area. You apparently popped up on this magical radar. I’d been watching you for a while before we met.”
His hand stiffened in hers and he tried to pull away, but she held on tighter. “I’m so sorry, Rayez. He’s doing that blood magic on Cade. The doctors think it’s some rare type of blood disease, but I know. If I don’t listen to him, he weakens Cade to the brink of death.” A sob interrupted her rush of words and tears leaked down her face. “I know he’s planning to do to Cade what he did to me and I can’t let that happen.”
Rayez reached over with his free hand and wiped away her tears. The stroke of his thumb, both rough and gentle at the same time, made her eyelids flutter close. God, his touch felt so good. She wanted more.
“I can’t lose Cade. He’s my kid brother and the only family I have left.” She licked her lips. “That’s why I need your help.”
Finally, she let his hand go and clasped her hands in her lap. She looked away at the picture of Cade playing on the monkey bars at the neighborhood park. “But I’ll understand if you refuse to help me. Us.”
Chapter 5
Rayez stared at the woman who refused to meet his eye. Selene’s last words, spoken in flat-toned resignation, sucker punched him in the gut, left him speechless. She was used to getting the worst case scenario in life and expected the same from him. She deserved better.
Technically, he couldn’t refuse. But after hearing her story, after watching her and Cade together, he genuinely wanted to help them.
He scrubbed his hands over his face. How to go about it…that was the question needing to be answered. “I’m assuming you’ve tried to limit contact between Cade and Warren through legal means?”
She jumped to her feet and started pacing again. “He is a model citizen, a celebrated philanthropist, and the most popular mayor in decades,” she said. Her gut churned. Going against Warren also meant risking her comatose body. God only knew what he’d do to it out of anger. Whatever the cost, Cade came first. “If I brought these charges against him to people who had no clue about magic, I’d be the one to lose Cade because I’d be loc
ked up in a psych ward faster than you can say abracadabra.”
Selene stopped and gazed at him with hope brightening her eyes. “But I have a plan…of sorts.”
“Hit me with it.”
She dropped back on the couch, closer than before. One of her knees touched his thigh, and just that bit of connection was enough to send his mind tripping. What would it be like to hold her against him, touch in different places and in different ways?
He dragged his gaze back to her face and his mind to the matter at hand.
“If you agreed to help, I was thinking I could take you in the bottle to Warren and then you could come out and whoop his ass with your genie powers,” she said.
Despite the seriousness of the situation, Rayez couldn’t keep the smirk off his face. “As much as I’d loved to whoop his ass, it doesn’t work that way,” he said. “FYI, we prefer the term djinn. It’s much more dignified.”
“Oh, sorry,” she said, scrunching up her nose in apology and looking utterly adorable. “But why won’t it work?”
Rayez gnawed on his lower lip and tried to figure out how he should answer her. Did he trust her enough to share the truth about the bottle and give away his slight advantage?
He looked into her unusual lavender eyes. He’d seen resignation, determination, fear, love and hope in them. He’d seen her ruthlessness, her desperation, and her caring.
Without thinking, he reached out and brushed the back of his knuckles down one side of her face. She was soft and hard, vulnerable and strong. She was someone he actually admired. And, she was a woman who intrigued him, made him care.
“You bound me to the bottle and whoever has the bottle has power over me,” he said. He was surprised at how steady and soft his voice sounded. None of the trepidation came through. “If you give the bottle to Warren, I’ll have to do what he asks.”
He saw hope vanishing from her gaze, leaving behind speculation. “So right now you have to do whatever I ask?”
His neck prickled and he steeled himself to be asked to perform some ridiculous trick or another. Humans, so disbelieving at first, always wanted to test out their powers. “Yes.”
