by Marie Hall
Taking it with a swipe, she bit down. The juicy apple flavor exploded in her mouth. She’d never bitten into anything so wonderful in her life. In fact, Nixie had never been much of a fan of apples, and yet, the intensity of its taste, the crispness of it on her tongue…she was coming to crave them almost as much as she craved Robin’s company.
She grinned. “Fine. I accept your challenge.”
He lifted a brow when she failed to say anything after a minute. “What, cat got your tongue?”
For answer, she took a giant bite of her delicious apple. Let him wait for it. In truth, it was dangerous to make snap judgments about people. A lot of times first impressions were completely wrong.
“Well…” She swallowed and pointed to his clothes. “You’d like others to believe you’re not wealthy. Your clothes are threadbare. Your shoes worn at the soles.”
“Obvious enough.”
She grinned. “But it’s a ruse. Because on your pinky finger you’re wearing a golden ring.”
He stared down at his right hand, toying with the ring now. “Go on.”
“It’s a horse’s head, its eyes are either ruby or garnet, can’t tell. But that’s a lot of gold. Enough to probably keep you and your men well stocked for sometime. Which tells me it’s not about the money to you. In fact, you could probably care less about riches. And though your clothes are old, they’re clean. As are you. You’re a man meticulous with your appearance, though you’d like to make others believe otherwise. Your accent is educated.”
He cleared his throat, shifting on his bottom. She smiled, realizing her gut was right.
“You might steal from the rich to give to the poor—”
Robin snorted. “Again, let’s not confuse fairytales with reality. If I steal, I steal for keeps. Besides, it’s all mine anyway.” A hard thread of anger laced those words.
Maybe realizing he’d said too much, he took a furious bite of out of his apple. “Go on, then.”
“Who’s Crispin?”
Tossing his half-eaten apple away, Robin glared at her.
Nixie swallowed hard. She’d never had a master more reluctant to share his plan with her than Robin. In fact, all her previous masters had mostly just grappled with what to wish for first.
His bristled jaw flexed before he said, “My brother, and the man I aim to kill.”
Chapter 9
Why had he told her that?
Robin couldn’t make sense of himself. Was it to simply shock her? Or was it to see if she’d still look at him as she had back in the woods? If her large, doe-shaped eyes would still make him feel the urge to be better than he actually was.
“You know I can’t kill anyone for you!” she hissed with vehemence. “And you know who I am, I walk a fine line, why would you even think—”
Snatching the apple out of her hand, he threw it over her shoulder. It sailed like a tiny missile into the darkness, rolling away. He didn’t know why he’d done it. In fact, he suspected it might have been flirtation gone awry. What the bloody hell was wrong with him tonight? He scratched the back of his neck at her gaping look.
“What…why?” She stared at her suddenly empty hand. “Ugh! What is wrong with you, Robin? Just when I think there’s something decent about you, you go and act like an ass—”
“I’m not bloody asking you to kill Crispin, so let’s not get our knickers into a twist.”
Her mouth opened before she quickly snapped it shut. She was angry. Furious with him. The blood had risen into her cheeks again, flooding her bronzed skin and making it practically gleam molten in the firelight.
His pulse thundered and raced, his veins shot through with excitement. Hunger, for her, consumed him. To taste her lips. Just once. Maybe it would be enough to burn the madness out of him.
He hadn’t lied when he’d told her he was heartless, emotionless.
But he hadn’t told her the full truth, either.
Because the moment he’d seen the genie, the moment she’d opened her mouth and spoken to him, something he’d thought dead and buried had come to life with a violence and quickness that’d left him breathless.
For the first time in centuries he wanted more than just Crispin’s head on a platter.
“You’re psychotic. Like seriously,” she growled. “How I keep getting fooled by you, I’ll never know.”
Snorting, he reached into his pocket and pulled out another apple and handed it to her. But instead of taking it, Nixie slapped his wrist away, causing the apple to fall at their feet.
“No, thank you. No more gifts from you. Whatever you’re going to wish”—her cheeks warmed to an even brighter red, making his fingers itch to trace the path of it—“just do it now and release me. I don’t like mind games. I never have.”
Let her go?
Just like that.
Hell no.
He set his jaw. “I’ll make my wishes when I’m good and ready.”
“You make no sense. No sense at all. Most masters couldn’t wait to tell me what they wanted, it never bothered them that I’d leave after I was done. They didn’t care, because it was all about the wishes. So wish and be done with it!”
Her nostrils flared, her honeyed eyes sparked with passion and fury. Black tendrils of her hair danced upon the lush swells of her breast, and the madness of wanting her consumed him.
“Dammit it all to blazes,” he snarled, and, without warning, wrapped his fingers tightly around her wrist and yanked her onto his lap.
The genie barely had a moment to squeak out a surprise before he slammed his mouth down on hers, taking her lips almost violently.
Their teeth banged together. His blood pooled, coiling tight between his legs, making the hunger even more powerful.
And Nixie, she didn’t fight it as he’d half expected, half hoped she would. If she’d shoved him back, he would never have done it again. He’d wanted her to tell him to go to Hell. To slap his face. He’d wanted her to make this madness stop for the both of them.
But she was as wild and aggressive in her response as he was. Her nails raked the back of his skull, leaving welts in their wake. Her tongue was ravenous and seeking, drawing a wet line between his lips until he opened on a moan.
She tasted of fire and sweetness. His head swam, his cock ached.
“Goddess,” he whispered, plundering her mouth like he ached to do with her body. Sweeping his tongue along her teeth, wrapping it around her own, attempting to take her into his very soul.
“What have you done to me?” she whispered back to him. “You’re a demon, Robin. The devil.”
“Aye,” he groaned when one of her hands slid down his back, fingers teasing the line of his ass. “I am.”
He didn’t think. He couldn’t. Not rationally anyway. His fingers were desperate things as they ripped at her flimsy top, exposing her full breasts and dusky-hued nipples to him.
Too frenzied to study her at his leisure, needing to taste her now, he lowered his head and sucked one of her nipples into the warm recesses of his mouth.
An inarticulate grunt fell from her lips as her hands wrapped around his throat. Robin could feel the strain of her touch. Like she wanted to choke him and draw him closer all at the same time.
Swirling his tongue around it until it stood up in a tight, jagged peak, he moved on to the next one. Offering it the same type of tender devotion. Her flesh tasted of salt and floral perfume, teasing his senses. Filling his head with nothing but her.
Nixie undulated her hips on his turgid, achingly hard length, making his blood boil. He was going to explode in his pants if she didn’t stop. But it’d been too damn long for him. There was nothing on this world that could make him stop now.
Nothing, but her. And she wasn’t even trying to slow things down. She rode him hard. He shifted his hips, giving her a better angle to slide up and down on.
“Oh my god,” she hissed with eyes screwed tightly shut. “I hate you,” she grunted. “So much. Hate.”
But her
actions belied her words, because her teeth were nipping at his jaw, sliding down his neck, until her tongue swirled around the hollow of his throat.
Just a few more rubs would get him there, but Robin wanted her to join him. Wanted desperately to feel the wetness between her thighs coat his fingers. Slipping his hand underneath her waistband, he was seconds, mere seconds away from heaven, when she seized up on him and screamed, not in pleasure, but in pain.
His arms were suddenly empty as Nixie was flung violently out of them, struck by lightning. Ozone crackled through the air, offending his nostrils.
Robin blinked at her in a daze. She lay ten yards away from him, moaning and coughing, crawling to a sitting position.
It took him half a second to gather his wits long enough to go to her. But she held up a restraining hand. “Go away,” she grunted. “God, go away.”
“You’re hurt. What happened?” Feeling helpless, and still teetering on the razor’s edge of dark passion, he knelt beside her.
The tips of her hair snapped, as though they’d come to life like charmed cobras, dancing around her pinched features. “I can’t. I didn’t know.” She wasn’t speaking to him, more talking to herself.
It made no sense. None of this made sense.
His balls and cock ached, almost painfully now. But he shoved it aside out of worry for her. “Nixie, you must tell me what’s going on.”
Dark eyes flashed at him, she looked like a wild animal, and more lovely than he’d ever seen. The grass around her was charred, steam curled around her hands and ankles.
The innate supremacy of the genie snapped between them. Robin had always been attracted to power, and there was none more powerful than the dark one.
The realization was like a fist to the gut.
Coughing one final time, she sat up to her knees and tilted her head back, closing her eyes. Her naked breasts heaved with her heavy breaths.
Goddess, she was the most beautiful creature he’d ever beheld. Robin dug his nails into his palms to keep from touching her.
“Sex is forbidden me,” she finally said, turning hard eyes to him. “Courtesy of my father. Go away, Robin.” Her voice was twisted with pain and he suspected that whatever he was feeling was only a drop in the bucket compared to what she was going through now. “Just please, leave me alone.”
Then she vanished. Turned into a column of brilliant-hued smoke and sank into her lamp.
Robin slipped his hand beneath his shirt and pulled out her lamp. The metal was warm beneath his touch. He wanted to rub it, wanted to call her to him, wanted to demand she end whatever thrall she held over him.
Because he wasn’t like this. He was calculating. He was calm. Never prone to excitement, to rash decisions. Everything in his life was meticulously plotted out, everything…but her.
Clenching his jaw, he placed her lamp gently back inside his shirt, tucking her safely against the warmth of his chest, and rolling onto his side, heaved a mighty, miserable sigh.
~*~
Nixie stripped off her pants, gasping heavily as the raw volts of charged power continued to surge through her body.
Her stomach clenched, even her skin ached.
The rules of being a genie had never really been explained to her. It was a situation that when the time came, she knew. She knew she could not kill for a master. She could not make anybody fall in love, she could not go back in time…and now, thanks to Robin and his questing fingers, she knew she could never have sex while bound.
It’d felt like getting slammed into a wall of lightning while needles of acid had been plunged through her veins. Nixie had been sure her head would explode from the vomit-inducing pain.
When the shock had worn off, her brain had recognized what’d happened. What her father had done ages ago had caused the council to change many rules of the genie. One of them being that no longer could a genie engage in sex—it was forbidden.
As long as she wore the cuffs, she’d never be able to give into her need of Robin.
Huddled over in the darkness of the lamp, she moaned until the worst of the pain subsided. Her body trembled from the runoff of adrenaline.
“Oh, my dear.” Danika’s gentle voice was a welcome distraction to Nix.
Glancing up bleary-eyed, she nodded at the stunning fae bathed in the glow of her pink fairy light.
With a flick of her wand, the inside of the lamp shifted. Turning from void to light, from black to a world bursting with color. A hyacinth-scented breeze overwhelmed Nixie’s senses. No longer was she adrift in a sea of black, but gazing around at a garden teeming with flowers of all kinds.
Golden rays of sunlight bathed her still shivering form.
“There. Sometimes just a little bit of light can make all the difference in the world.” Danika settled herself upon a white wicker rocker that materialized, fluffing out the spidersilk strings of her dress.
Her sharp, pointed ears stood out in bold relief thanks to the way she’d styled her hair. Her chestnut tresses were tied back in a knot and threaded through with an abundance of baby’s-breath.
The fairy looked stunning. Hard to remember the matronly woman she’d once been when Nixie had first known her.
Very aware of her nakedness, Nix imagined a new outfit for her. One she might have worn on Earth. Low-rider jeans and a butterfly-print peasant top. It wasn’t that she couldn’t wear a dress or jeans and a top on the outside, she could, if she could ever afford to buy one.
But she had no money to call her own, so genie garb it was.
She could never take the magic of the lamp out of here. While inside the lamp she could dress and live as she liked. She could gorge on food for millennia and feel fine, but only so long as she remained inside.
The moment she left the lamp, it was like none of it existed. She always wore the same outfit in the outside world. Any hunger she’d abated inside would vanish in an instant, making her ravenous for real food.
So much power at the tip of her finger, and yet none of it was ever for her.
Walking over to Danika, she sat down beside the fairy, staring at the hedgerow of brilliant red English roses before them.
“Did you see what happened back there?” Nixie asked low.
“Nay, I did not.” Danika gave her a grim smile. “But I spelled the lamp just a wee bit, so that when you entered I’d know it. And how are you really, lass? Now that the men aren’t about?”
Nixie didn’t know whether to laugh, cry, or moan, so she did none of it. She simply shrugged.
“You do not look very happy at all, dear.”
Sighing, she finally looked at Danika. “Dani, why are you here? Not that I mind. Because I don’t, but you’re not my fairy godmother. You’ve no need to be here. And seeing you, sometimes”—she swallowed hard, choking back the sudden heat that’d rushed up her throat—“sometimes it makes it hurt.”
The fairy didn’t ask her to clarify. Her pretty blue eyes turned soft and kind. “Then I swear to ye, this will be my last visit, but I felt that perhaps there were things you needed to speak about. Things you might not be able to say to a master. I ken I’m not your mother, lassie, but I could be a good friend if you’d let me.”
The tears did slip down then. Danika didn’t blink or try to placate her into stopping, either; she let Nixie get it out, which helped.
Finally, with a teary sigh, she knuckled her eyes dry. “I don’t know what’s going on with me. I’m so confused. I mean, I’ve never really cared for any of my masters, but Robin’s got my head and my heart in chaos. I barely know him, but I crave him. I miss my family, so much sometimes it almost feels like I can’t breathe. I’m just one big, giant mess of emotions right now.”
Danika rocked for a few moments, just staring out at the garden. “Unfortunately, my dear, I can’t help you with your family. But I think perhaps I can explain what’s going on with Robin.”
She sighed. “I’m all ears.”
“Well, let’s just say, hypothetically speaki
ng, of course”—she winked—“that a fairy godmother simply can’t help being a fairy godmother. Even when the rules say she ‘shouldn’t.’” She finger-quoted.
Nixie frowned. “What are you talking about?”
Rocking lazily, Dani stared up at the blue sky. “Going off the understanding that everything I’m about to tell you is merely a possibility and that I am in no way admitting to any willful wrongdoing, because we all know how rigid genies rules are and to break them is verboten—” She winked and gave Nixie a broad smile.
Danika had never been known for following rules.
“Dani, what have you done?”
Twin brows rose. “What? Done? Pft.” She flicked a wrist. “Have ye heard nothing, child? I’ve done nothing. I’m simply giving you a for instance, that’s all.” She fluffed her dragonfly wings.
“Okay.” Nixie decided to play along. “What has ‘possibly’ happened?”
“Well…” The fairy twirled on her with a mischievous twinkle. “Say that there’s a tree imbued with powers of a fairy who was once a seer. Say.” She wrinkled her nose. “And that this tree was once a fairy’s very best friend. And just to take it one tiny bit farther, let’s just say an ingenious, beautiful fairy figured out how to hear her friend’s voice again, thanks to the guidance of a mate who knows and sees all.”
Nixie knew all about Miriam the Shunned and the tree she’d been turned into once the power of the Black had infected her. Miriam had been Danika’s truest friend, and had—as rumor had it—once given Danika the names of fated mates, to include her own parents.
“Dani?” Nixie cocked her head, starting to get a bad feeling about this.
The fairy’s wings began to vibrate, as if with excitement.
“So let’s say the fairy was sad and wanted to do something kind for the child who should have, by all rights, been given to her as a godchild, but because of some idiotic laws of birth, would never know the joy of finding her one true love.”
Nixie’s nails dug into the armrest, fear and even a thread of excitement beat violently in her chest.
