Firestorm

turn,' I said. 'Shirt.'

He went to it with a will. I watched the flicks of his fingers, the way the fabric slid away to reveal burnished skin, and swallowed hard. When the last button fell loose, I had a good view of his flat abdominals, and that sexy shadow of hair that was just barely visible at the waistband of his pants. They rode low on his hips, as if they wanted to come off.

Silence. He was watching me. I was watching him.

'You first,' I murmured.

He gave me a slow, completely wicked smile, and unbuttoned his pants, then let down the zipper. As the fabric slipped down his legs to puddle on the floor, I let out a slow held breath. He was perfection and flame made flesh, and oh God, how I adored him.

'You cheated,' I accused. 'What happened to the underwear?'

'Got impatient,' he said, and then my remaining clothes began to mist away, turning into cool wisps of smoke that made me shiver in delight. The bed creaked as he put one knee on it, looking down at me. 'I do that sometimes, with you.'

'Bet you say that to all the mortal girls.'

His eyes met mine, and for a second they weren't Djinn eyes, they were David's, and I saw the man he'd once been all those millennia ago before the fires had turned him into something else entirely.

'No,' he murmured. 'I don't.'

He had great hands. Incredible hands. They glided up my sides, skimmed over my breasts, cupped them in heat. Caressed my nipples until I was biting my lip and making whimpering noises of need.

And then his hand slid down between my legs, and my mind exploded in a haze of bliss so strong that it seemed to dissolve the world in opal swirls. Every muscle in my body convulsed, held, trembled and kept on going, and my thighs trapped his hand in place. It seemed to last forever, and just as I began to slip back into the mundane, he moved and did something else and oh God, it started again.

It felt like hours. Maybe it was hours, slow and hot and torturously wonderful, before he finally succumbed to temptation and slid inside me, melting us together into a mindless, perfect union. It felt so good, so right, and I wanted to move, wanted him to move… but he didn't. He stayed still, buried deep, and our eyes locked together in fascinated wonder. I could feel the energy running through him, hot and wild. The same energy that had overtaken him outside of New York, in the car, but he understood how to channel it better now. How to bend it to his will.

'Let go,' I whispered, and his lips parted in a gasp, and the light in his eyes brightened. 'There's such a thing as too much control.'

He'd made love to me so many different ways, and this was yet another—frantic, wild, tender, dangerous, sweet, and utterly open. Like the weather pounding at the window and crackling in my nerves, he was unstoppable. When the pleasure peaked, it was like a tidal wave carrying me to the sky, where I shivered into stars and fog.

I clung to him, exhausted and shining with sweat.

Panting as it passed. He collapsed with me in a tangle of arms and legs. Our hands were clasped together, still trembling from the force of the aftershocks. David's eyes were closed, and his face was—momentarily, at least—relaxed and peaceful. I studied it with the intensity of someone planning to do a portrait, the way the shadows defined his angles, the way his eyelashes feathered, the way his cheekbones demanded to be caressed.

'I need to tell you something,' he said with his eyes still closed. His voice was unsteady, his breath coming quickly.

I didn't feel any steadier. 'So long as it's not goodbye.'

His eyes flew open. 'I'm not that cruel, am I?'

'No.' I kissed the point of his chin. He made a lazy sound of pleasure, so I kept on, nuzzling his neck. He smelled clean and hot, with just a hint of musk. Lovely. 'Well, sometimes. But believe me, I know when a guy's getting ready to hit the door. That was not good-bye sex. That was whoa, hello! sex.'

His arms went around me and rolled me on top of him. Breathtaking, the strength he had. The control. The precision. His skin was hot and damp and wonderful to touch. 'Anyone who's ever said good-bye to you is a fool.'

'Well, obviously. Your point?' I was playing, but some part of my brain was arguing with me. It had been shut up in the basement while the rest of me had gotten what it wanted, but now it was telling me that time continued its inexorable march, that I shouldn't be wasting this precious few seconds with banter.

I didn't care. Not now. Not with him.

David stroked my hair back from my face, but it kept sliding over my shoulders to rain down around us, a privacy curtain that made the world seem small and perfectly safe. Illusion. But a nice one.

'Most of the Djinn are gone,' he said.

'What?' The illusion was thoroughly shattered. 'What do you mean, gone?'

'Withdrawn from this plane. I sent them to the place where Jonathan kept his house—you remember?'

I remembered. Not precisely where it was, or how to get to it, because it wasn't exactly explicable to mortal brains, but the point was that it was sealed off from the regular plane of our reality. A pocket universe, of a sort. A retreat. A sanctuary, in a sense.

'While they're there, they'll be outside of anyone's control—mine, and hopefully, even the Mother's,' he said. 'It's the best way I know to keep things from escalating out of control between the Djinn and humans, if the worst should happen.'

'If she decides to kill off the human race, you mean?' He didn't answer. He didn't have to. 'You said most of the Djinn were withdrawing. Not all?'

'A few volunteered to stay with the Ma'at,' he said. 'Ten or so. Enough to help them complete their circle. The Ma'at are working to try to stabilize systems—they won't intervene directly, but they can provide a kind of ballast, settle things down.' He paused for a second, and I could tell the next thing wasn't good. 'About twenty Djinn are staying with Ashan. I can't stop them, not without a straight-out fight. The problem is that by withdrawing, I let him have the field of battle. But if I don't… Djinn get hurt. And humans get caught in the middle.'

Not good news. Ashan was a force to be reckoned with, even by David's standards, much less by my own. And with a small army of immortal, arrogant, angry beings… twenty was more than enough to destroy everything in his path.

'I think Ashan's counting on you to give up, actually.'

'I can't fight him.'

'Can't—or won't? That was Jonathan's problem. I thought part of the reason he handed things to you was so that you'd be able to… act.'

He looked so grave that it chilled the lingering warmth inside me. I slipped off to the side and curled against him; his arm went around me, holding me close.

'I need time,' he said. 'I need time, Jo. What you're talking about is the beginning of the end for us. It's what Jonathan was afraid of all along. War. Death. Destruction. I'm not…' He hesitated. 'I'm not ready. I'm not sure I can be what he was. Ever.'

'So you're willing to let humans take the heat for you in the meantime while you debate it?'

His hand, which had been stroking my hair, went still. His eyes closed.

'Yes,' he said softly. 'I have to be willing to do that. And so do you. Listen, Jo—you spoke to the Oracle. That's unprecedented. You might have succeeded if the Oracle hadn't been—prevented—'

'Infected.'

'Yes,' he said, and kissed my bare shoulder. 'So we try again. We keep trying. And if it comes to a fight with Ashan, I'll do everything in my power to end it with a minimum of bloodshed.'

I rolled up on my elbow, looking down at him. 'Human bloodshed? Or are you talking about the Djinn?'

He regarded me with absolute steadiness, and there was that shadow in his eyes, the same one that had been in Jonathan's before him. Power. Vast and unknown power. 'I have to be true to my responsibilities, Jo. But