by Judi Fennell
“It’s not?” Legitimate surprise lit up her face. God, she was beautiful.
Zane gritted his teeth. She’d pulled a sword on him; what was wrong with him to still be bowled over by her looks? As a pro football player, he’d seen his fair share of beautiful women. Had slept with plenty of them. But not one had tried to kill him. Not even when he’d broken up with them.
“No, this definitely is not the Harrison house. I was just there, and I lived there for the first twelve years of my life. I would’ve remembered a room like this.”
She put a hand on his arm. “You lived here? I don’t remember you.”
Considering she looked at least ten years younger than his thirty-two, and he and Mom had moved the year he’d turned twelve after Dad died, there was no way she should remember him.
“Look, I just want to know where I am and how I got here. Or better yet, where’s the door? I’ll get out of your hair”—bad word choice because his fingers were itching to get into her hair—“and leave the sword outside.” He hadn’t conked his head hard enough that he’d give her the chance to skewer him.
“I’m afraid that’s not possible.” She tucked a swath of hair behind her ear. She even had adorable ears.
“Sure it is. I’ll just lay the sword beside the door.”
Her hair shimmered as it swung in counterpoint to the movement of her head. “No, I mean it’s not possible for you to leave through a door. There isn’t one.”
This time he did look behind him.
Damn if she wasn’t right. Windows ringed the entire room. “I’m not picky. I’ll climb through a window.”
“Except that they’re for show.”
“Show?”
She nodded. “They don’t open. Watch.”
Then she… blew him a kiss?
Well, okay, he’d already established that he was as human as the next guy, and if she was offering, he was taking.
He pulled her to him, intending just one nibble. One taste. But when his lips met hers, the first turned into a second, then a third. A fourth. A fifth. And then he gave up counting and lost himself in the taste and feel of this beautiful woman in his arms. She was soft where a woman should be, her curves meeting the hard—and hardening—lines of his body, her lips perfectly shaped for his, her flavor an ambrosia he’d never tasted, and—
Zane pulled back. Ambrosia? What the hell? Since when did he spout Shakespeare?
He looked down at her, so much smaller than he was, her lips still pursed, her eyes fluttering open, their silvery gray depths sparkling like moonlight, her cheeks pink where the stubble he hadn’t shaved this morning had grazed them, and he leaned in for one more taste—
“Holy smokes!”
Until she said that.
Her eyes lost their sparkle as they flew open, and she spun around. “I said ‘show’!”
Zane looked over his shoulder to where she was staring.
Something white poured from the windows and crept toward him.
Zane took a few steps back as it approached, stopping only when he bumped into her.
The white stuff began covering his feet. Shit, it was cold.
The woman nestled against him, muttering something foreign-sounding and blowing more air kisses. He’d had women make moves on him before, but this… This was beyond strange and he couldn’t make any sense of it. He couldn’t make sense of any of it; not how he got here, not the room itself, certainly not her, and now this… this… snow?
She started hopping. “Bop, cop, fop, hop, lop, mop, pop…”
The snow kept coming.
Zane was sure his mind was going. It was July, for Christ’s sake. At least, it had been when he’d arrived three hours ago. He thought it’d been three hours ago, but with the conk on his head… Had it been another day? Why didn’t he know? And how had he gotten here, who was she, what was with the sword at his throat, and why was it snowing?
“Stop!” She yelled so loudly that the term “ringing in his ears” made sense because it felt as if a gong had exploded, stopping up his ears like a change in cabin pressure.
He was working his jaw and jiggling fingers in his ears to get them to pop when he realized that not only had she stopped hopping against him, but the snow had stopped rising, pausing at crotch level which, with her breasts pressed up against his back, was the perfect level to stop at, as if the Universe knew he needed some cooling down in that area.
Zane kicked at the snow and put a few inches between himself and the woman before turning around to see her brushing the snow in wide circles away from her.
“Uh, miss?”
She licked her lips again and brushed the snow away.
“Miss?”
She looked up, her eyes now a dark gray. “Sadly, I didn’t miss you. I’m sorry. But in a circular room, it’s kind of hard to when it’s coming in from all sides.”
“What?” She was speaking English, but that was the only part of what she’d said that made any sense.
She stood up and brushed off her hands. “I said I was sorry for not missing you.”
“With the sword?”
“That, too.”
As if that made any sense.
A chill ran up his spine and it had nothing to do with the snow. Well, yeah, the snow was part of it. So was this poor, beautiful, confused woman. And him being in this room and the snow and the windows and the sword… “Look, Vana. Can you just point me to the way out? I have someone coming by this week and have a lot of work to do beforehand.” As well as find some place to take her where she could get the help she needed.
He just couldn’t get away from the stigma of his great-grandfather’s mental illness that had pervaded every generation since, could he? Zane had tried to counteract it by moving away and making something of his life, and he’d thought he’d succeeded.
Yet, with his mother’s death, he’d inherited this place and apparently all of its craziness. He hadn’t even been back a full day, and lunacy was rearing its ugly head—well, not ugly; quite beautiful actually, but lunacy was still lunacy. Maybe she was a distant cousin he hadn’t heard about, which gave new meaning to the term “kissing cousins.”
Zane shuddered. It was an awesome kiss, but now that he knew the truth—that she was crazy (and probably some distant relation)—there’d be no more of that.
“The way out?” She nibbled on that bottom lip that had been designed to tempt men into lusting after their cousins, no matter how distant. (It was working, dammit.) “Um, well, I guess you could leave the same way you came in.” She pointed a finger upward.
Zane looked up. The ceiling tapered into a long, chimney-like structure that ended in darkness. “What do you mean?”
“You can go out through the…” She looked up. “Holy smokes!”
Zane was coming to dislike that phrase. “What now?”
“The stopper’s in.”
Zane jiggled a finger in his ear again. What she’d said made no sense—like everything else she’d said, including the foreign language she was muttering again and the fluffy white snow she was kicking… and the curly-toed slipper she was kicking it with.
A fencing harem girl. Yeah, this poor thing had gotten the entire family tree’s share of crazy.
“Look, sweetheart. I’ll just leave through one of the windows and you can go back to doing whatever it was you were doing.”
He slunk through the snow, keeping his gaze on her, his pace slow but steady so he wouldn’t spook her.
“I was only trying to whip up a party dress.” She slid her hands to her hips.
A whip dangled from one.
She looked surprised to see it there and flung it away as if it were made of fire. Too bad it didn’t melt the snow.
Snow. Right. He still hadn’t dealt with that issue. But if he could just get out of this place, he was sure the snow would be a non-issue because he wouldn’t have to deal with her. He’d get her to a nice facility, leave her in the care of trained professionals, and unl
oad this place as fast as possible.
Maybe then the Harrison name—and his ancestors—would finally rest in peace.
Except she muttered something else and Zane was afraid that peace was something he’d never find.
“Stuck?” He froze in place and it had nothing to do with the snow. “What do you mean we’re stuck?”
2
Vana stared at the man in front of her.
The man who’d kissed her.
She put a hand to her lips. It’d been far too long since anyone had kissed her, let alone kissed her like that.
Towering over her somewhere in the six-foot range, with jet black hair just shy of curling, and blue, blue eyes fringed in long, dark lashes that were at odds with a jaw that could handle a few punches—above shoulders that could throw even more—the guy could be an Olympian god, able with just one touch to make her feel as if she were merely a shimmering mass of magical Glimmer tightly coiled in a sandstorm of sensation, about to whirl apart if not for the force of his desire holding her together.
Not that she’d tell him any of that. It’d been her experience that gods—mortal or actual ones—knew their effect on women and relished the adoration.
She touched her lips again, unable to help herself. The last man to kiss her had been Wilhelm and, well, his kiss was only memorable because it’d been the last. The only men she’d seen since Peter locked her away had been on the television she’d ordered through the Genie Supply System about forty years ago. And, even that hadn’t turned out well. She’d tried hardwiring the television set to the toaster to sample one of those new-fangled TV dinners and had ended up hotwiring the appliances instead, frying everything but what she’d been planning to eat for dinner.
He looked good enough to eat.
She was going to ask him why he’d kissed her, but he also looked angry enough to bite her head off, so she decided to keep that question to herself because the answer she had to give him was not going to go over well.
Especially when he tried to move.
Vana didn’t even bother trying; she knew what the outcome would be. They were stuck. In every sense of the word.
“I can’t move my feet.”
She winced. “Try wiggling your toes.” She did the same inside her curly-toed khussas. Yes, toe-wiggling was possible; it was just forward momentum that wasn’t. Or backward. Or sideways.
“What in God’s name is going on?”
She wished he wouldn’t bring the gods into it. She was desperately trying to stay off their radar.
“What’s happening here?”
Actually, she’d like to know that, too. She’d have to check the Djinnoire for an explanation because she had no idea what he was doing inside her bottle. Obviously her magic had gone wonky yet again. Usually when a mortal opened her bottle, the cosmic pull of The Service whisked her up and out into their realm in a plume of pink smoke, but she hadn’t felt even a smidgen of cosmic energy before he’d been on the other end of the scimitar.
She glanced at it in his hand. Genghis’s. She didn’t need a panicky mortal swinging that thing around.
Unfortunately, however, The Code that governed all djinn mandated that she couldn’t take it from him. Other than seeing to their masters’ comfort and safety, genies weren’t permitted to do anything magical to their masters without their express permission. Well, do anything to them on purpose. Gods knew (and sadly, they did) that over the centuries, she’d done plenty of things accidentally to her masters that they hadn’t wished for.
But still, the more the guy tried to move his feet, the more frustrated he became, and guys and frustration and swords had never really worked out well, as history showed. So, with a dearth of magical options available to her, she tried pulling a trick out of the mortal hat—
Only to have a top hat float down behind the man and land on the snow, sinking in until half of the satin band was covered. Then a bunny hopped out. Luckily, it was white so it blended in with the snow, which hopefully would prevent the mortal from freaking out.
“Why can’t I move?”
Well, freaking out more than he already was.
Normally, she’d try to whisk the snow and bunny away, but she didn’t want to tempt Karma by attempting too much. Instead, she went with something light and easy. A little puff of a kiss managed to transport her pendant off the pouffe beside her bed and into her hand. She dangled the pink tourmaline in front of her, swinging it side to side. “You’re getting sleepy. Verrrry sleepy.”
“Are you serious?” At least that got him to stop struggling. The sword, however, was still swaying. “Who do you think you are, Freud? Snow White?”
She dropped her arm. If she was Snow White, that must make him Grumpy. Which wasn’t helping matters.
She kissed the pendant into a shimmer of pink Glimmer and sighed. “I told you. I’m Vana. Short for Nirvana.”
“Nirvana? Seriously?”
She didn’t kid about her name. Nirvana Aphrodite. It was a mouthful—and a lot of pressure. As if her parents had set her up to fail. Poor DeeDee, her twin, had the unluckier name of Aphrodite Nirvana, but she certainly hadn’t failed. No, DeeDee had the winning thing down pat. Enough for both of them, which balanced the cosmic scales.
At least, that’s what Vana kept telling herself. She’d tried telling it to her parents, but they hadn’t bought it. Not their daughter. No sirree.
“Ahem. Yes, my name is Nirvana. Nirvana Aphrodite, and, before you say it…” She held up her hand, knowing what he was going to say the minute his mouth opened. Over the past eight hundred years she’d heard it more times than she cared to count. “I do know I have a lot to live up to.” Her name was only one of a long list.
“Your parents were either hippies or Greek scholars.”
“Something like that.” The fact that her mother actually had been a scholar in Greece—ancient Greece—would probably fall on the TMI list should she choose to reveal it.
She’d learned a long time ago not to. People tended to believe the genie thing once she poofed a couple of items into existence—gold typically being the first choice—but the whole immortality issue usually freaked them out.
Go figure. It wasn’t as if they had to deal with immortality, since they tended not to live longer than it took her to age a few months, but when she started talking about Galileo and da Vinci as contemporaries, mortals looked at her as if she had two heads.
The one time she’d managed to duplicate her own head on her shoulders—not on purpose, of course—hadn’t exactly been her best moment.
“So Nirvana—”
“I prefer Vana.” Fewer expectations to live up to that way.
And fewer to fall short of.
He arched an eyebrow at her. It gave him kind of a rakish look, like d’Artagnan. That was a major compliment ’cause that guy had been a babe. There was a reason the story of the king’s most famous Musketeer had been passed down through the ages, and without much fictionalization. D’Artagnan had had enough charisma to fill a ballroom and the looks to go with it. She’d swooned into his arms like half the female population. What a time to have been in France.
“Fine. Vana. What’s going on? Why can’t we move? Where are we? Why is there snow?”
Vana fiddled with the knickers of her fencing uniform. Ugh. So far from Ungaro’s designs it wasn’t funny, and the uniform didn’t even keep the snow off her legs.
Ah, snow. Cold. That could explain it.
“Well, um, I think, on account of the snow, that we’re, uh, frozen in place.”
His other eyebrow went north, too.
Okay, that wasn’t going to fly—
Ah, but she was about to.
Her magic kilim glided out from under the snow, shook itself off like a puppy, whisked her off her feet, and zipped her over to him.
“Care to hop on?” First time today the magic had gone her way.
“What the hell? Hop on? A carpet? A flying carpet? Are you nuts?”
&
nbsp; Well, that took the wind out of her sails.
And the magic out of the carpet.
She ended up sinking into the snow, which had the added benefit of now covering her legs, freezing her in place for real. Or maybe that was her mortification in the face of his accusation.
“I… I’m not nuts.” She got the words out. Barely. They tended to get stuck in the back of her throat every time she had to utter them. “I’m a genie.”
The guy sank into the snow next to her. “A what?”
She folded her hands in her lap and twiddled her fingers. “I’m a genie.”
“A genie.”
“Yes.”
He didn’t say anything for a few seconds, but the silence was deafening. She always hated waiting for their response. Sometimes it was disbelief; sometimes it was overly enthusiastic; and other times it was downright greedy.
“As in I Dream of?”
That was one she hadn’t heard before. Mainly because she hadn’t run into any mortals since 1898 and that television show had come sixty-some years later. “Oh, you watched it, too!”
The guy looked at her as if she’d done the two-head trick again.
She slid a hand to her neck, under the guise of scratching an itch, just to make sure she hadn’t.
“So does that mean I get three wishes?”
She shook her head. “Actually, you can have as many as you want. I’m your genie for life. Well, unless someone steals my bottle. It’s very important for you to safeguard it.”
“My genie for life with unlimited wishes.” He flopped his hands and the scimitar—thank the stars it was in the hand not beside her—onto the snow and shook his head. “Oh my God. It must be catching. Like the flu.” His shoulders slumped and he looked at her, weariness etched around the bluest eyes she’d seen since Peter’s.
He had Peter’s eyes.
She did the math, but he couldn’t be Peter’s son; it’d been much longer than that. “What’s your name?”
“Zane Harrison.”
She clapped her hands together. “You are related to Peter!”
