And some had to be treated by force.
“I hope that will not be necessary,” I said. I put the glass on the coffee table and felt my whole body relax as I curled in on the couch, knees up, body turned toward him. My head rested against the cushions.
“Yeah,” Luis agreed. He hesitated, then leaned over and put his own glass down. “You want another shot?”
I glanced at the bottle. “No,” I said. “Do you?”
“Can’t,” he said. “I set my limits, and I stick to them.”
Limits. That was a concept unfamiliar to most Djinn; we had few limits, and those few were imposed on us by the immutable laws of the universe. Still, I understood him; I had imposed rules on myself here, in this place, simply by agreeing to live as a human instead of perishing as an outcast Djinn.
Some of the limits were even my own choice.
I realized that I hadn’t spoken, and Luis had fallen silent, and we were still looking at each other. I had noticed that humans did not typically gaze steadily at each other, unless they were seeking confrontation; glances were more common, polite and fleeting.
This was different. Luis watched me as if he had forgotten how to blink. There were thoughts behind this, thoughts I could not understand easily, having little experience of the human condition.
I understood my reaction, however. Deep within my body, warmth was blooming, spreading, and my blood was moving faster through my body. My breathing had deepened. My pupils, I suspected, had widened.
Arousal—deep, violent, and primal.
And hotly enjoyable.
“I should get you home,” he said, finally. His voice sounded different—deeper, slightly rougher, as if he had to force the words out.
“You can’t drive,” I said, and looked at the bottle on the table. “Three drinks would be too many, correct?” Except that as an Earth Warden he could easily control that; he could dismiss the alcohol from his system with a simple pulse of power, or at least minimize its effects.
If he wished.
“That’s true,” he said, in a neutral voice. “I should probably wait a while.” He picked up the bottle and looked at it with dark, narrowed eyes, then slowly uncapped it and tipped another splash of amber into his glass, then my own. He didn’t speak. I didn’t either. We sipped the whiskey, intensely aware of each other’s presence, and when I had finished the glass I felt stickily warm, impulsive, aware of every nerve in my body.
I sat up abruptly and stripped off the pale leather jacket, dropping it onto a nearby chair with a heavy thump. Beneath it I wore a thin pale pink cotton top, sleeveless. I had not bothered with the inconvenience of a bra; my body was not built in such a way as to make it structurally necessary, although I sometimes wore one for comfort, or to satisfy societal expectations.
But not today.
As I sank down on the couch again, skin lightly flushed and damp, Luis looked sideways toward me. Not toward my face. Toward the thin cotton fabric, where my nipples were hardening in reaction to the cooler air, and responding to his rapt attention.
Still, I said nothing. Neither did he. He raised his eyebrows and took a last sip of his drink, then put the glass down.
“Cass,” he said then, very softly. “I’m not sure we ought to be doing this.”
“Why?” I asked. I angled my body sideways on the soft cushions, and met his eyes directly. “You want me to be human. Yet you resist when I try.”
Luis let out a shaky laugh. “Yeah, I’m resisting all over the place, here. Lady, if I was resisting, I would have stopped at half a glass of whiskey and booted you the hell out of my house.”
I frowned, trying to work it out through the warm hazy pleasure that was coursing through my body. “But you didn’t.”
“You noticed.”
“But you are not sure—”
“Indecision. It’s the human condition, Cass. Get used to it. Although they’re going to kick me the fuck out of the Guy Club if I go all virtuous right now, with a drunk hot woman trying to get in my pants.”
He said woman,not Djinn.That was somehow significant to me. Some barrier between us that I’d barely been aware of had fallen away, and I didn’t know why. It could have been the alcohol, of course, but I didn’t think so. It might have equally been the extreme focus of the two of us working to save the small child in the hospital . . . or, simply, that we had both been thinking of this moment for some time, and denying it was so.
I slid off of the couch again, shoved the coffee table back so violently that the open bottle of whiskey teetered in an unsteady dance on its surface, and I reached out to catch it and center it before it could tip. Then I lifted it to my lips and tilted it, my gaze still hard- locked with Luis’s. Silky, liquid heat poured into my mouth, and I held it for a moment in savor before swallowing.
Then I put the bottle down and knelt astride Luis on the couch. My weight came down on his tensed body, and I settled against him in intimate contact—closer than I had ever been to him, in fact.
He made a startled sound, low in his throat, and I felt his muscles go tight all over his body, as if he was fighting his own impulses at a well-nigh-cellular level.
“If you don’t find me attractive,” I said, “tell me to go.”
It was patently evident that he found me attractive. With my weight pressed hard against his hips, it was very difficult to argue the point.
He closed his eyes and pulled in a deep breath. I could feel his heart pounding. I could see the pulse throbbing in his temple. A drop of sweat slid down the gleaming flesh of his throat, and I watched its glide with single-minded intensity. I strongly considered licking it.
“It’s the whiskey talking,” he said. “You’re going to hate us both tomorrow.”
I laughed softly. “I don’t need whiskey to make me hate anyone,” I said. “It is my natural state. As you very well know.”
Luis pounded his head backwards against the soft cushions of the couch, twice, then opened his eyes to look at me. The distance between us seemed to contract, even though neither of us moved.
“I wanted to hate you right back,” he said. “I tried. When Manny died—”
He’d been right to loathe me. I had seen Manny and Angela fall, fatally wounded, and instead of leaping to save their lives as Luis had done, I ran after those who had harmed my friends. I had selected vengeance over mercy. That was Djinn instinct, and it was still a raw wound inside of me.
But complicating that pain was the knowledge that even had I done as Luis had, even had I applied all my skill and power to my two fallen friends, they would almost certainly still have died. And Luis knew that as well.
“I wanted to hate you,” he continued softly, “but I couldn’t. You’re just . . . baffling.”
“Baffling,” I repeated. I rather enjoyed that description. “How so? I try to speak my mind.”
“No shit.” He pulled in a breath as I circled my hips on his. “Holy crap, don’t do that.”
“Is it because I wish to touch you? To remove your clothes and touch you everywhere, to know you completely?” I was not certain of human protocols in these matters, but Luis didn’t seem offended. I leaned closer, slowly, and settled my arms around his neck. His skin felt hot and firm. “Because I wish to feel your body on mine? Your needs pounding through your veins?”
“Cass,” he said faintly, and then took a deep breath and said, in an entirely different tone, “Oh, what the hell, anyway.”
And he kissed me.
I didn’t know what I’d expected from this meeting of skins, but my body clearly did. In an instant, my mind blazed white, and I thought of nothing, nothing but the warm, damp glide of his lips, his hands gripping my waist and pulling me hard against him. It was challenge. It was surrender. It was an intoxicating brew of instinct and need and emotion, and I shuddered and opened my lips to the stroke of his tongue. One of his hands stroked slowly up the bumps of my spine, brushed the tender skin at the base of my neck, and cradled the back of my head in primal warmth.