“No, I’ll drive. I’ll send Rahel to you. At least she can keep you out of trouble until I can get there.”
Curious, that Rahel evidently hadn’t informed Lewis about her conversation with me, and the ass-kicking she’d received from Ashan. But then he was a mere mortal, and she was a Djinn, and hey, even the nicest of them didn’t exactly regard us as equals. He wasn’t her master, and she wasn’t anyone’s slave.
“Jo?” he asked. I felt a rush of power and heard a quiet pop of noise, like a champagne cork letting go. When I looked up, Rahel was standing on the other side of the bed. Unsmiling. Watching me with lambent gold-flaring eyes, and the kind of clinical interest you might see in your better class of death row guards.
“How long will it take you to get here?” I asked.
“Two hours,” he said. “Watch your ass. It hasn’t been all happy puppies around here, either.” Click. He was gone.
I hung up and let the phone slide down to the bedspread, cautiously stood up, and faced the Djinn, who crossed her arms and stood hipshot and elegantly neon, looking me over. Her head tilted to one side, cornrows rustling like silk.
“Huh,” she said. “Ashan is slipping. I thought he’d hurt you much worse than this.”
I glared at her. “If he shows up again, are you going to defend me?”
“No.”
“How about Jonathan? Would you keep him off of me?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Right. So you’re just here to observe while they beat the crap out of me. Hey, thanks for your help.”
“I am doing a favor for Lewis. That doesn’t mean that I am doing you a favor.”
She inspected her nails, and must have decided they weren’t sharp enough; the tips glinted knife-bright. Her eyes, flicking to me, were almost as unsettling.
“For someone in your position, you show remarkably little gratitude.”
“Gratitude for what? For provoking a fight and then bugging out and leaving me to face Ashan?” I felt a late-breaking surge of panic and my old friend, anger. “Here’s a tip: Help me less. It’s better for everybody.”
“I don’t come here at your request,” she pointed out, and made herself at home on my bed, testing the mattress. “Go on about your business, Snow White. I need no watching. You’re the one who requires nursemaids. However, I will tell you that if Lewis needs me, I will drop you without hesitation. Do you understand?”
I understood, all right. There really wasn’t much I could do to stop her if she decided to hang around in my bedroom trying on my clothes and generally making a pest of herself, or if she decided to bug out in the middle of a fight. She was not the most supportive support I’d ever had.
I gathered the tattered shreds of my dignity closer around me, and decided that I really was kind of hungry, after all, and staring at Eamon and Sarah would be better than enduring the sardonic, unearthly stare of a Djinn for a couple of hours.
“Don’t let anything happen to David,” I warned her, and glanced toward the nightstand.
Her face went very still. “Oh, believe me,” she said, “I will not.”
I went out to eat some dinner off the new plates.
Sarah hadn’t waited for me; she and Eamon were already sitting at the table, facing each other, with candles glowing between them. She’d switched off the overhead lights, and it was like a little island of romance in a sea of darkness. Very sweet.
I bumped into a corner of the couch, cursed, and ruined the mood. Sarah gave me a long-suffering look and paused, fork halfway to her perfectly rouged lips, as I sank into a chair next to Eamon and unfolded my napkin. It was in some origamilike complication of a swan. Another Martha Stewart-esque thing that few working mortals had the time to learn how to do.
The wine was pleasantly cool and tart, and the salad crisp, and she’d whipped up some kind of vinaigrette that for the life of me I hadn’t realized could come out of a noncommercial kitchen. Sarah should have become a chef, not a trophy wife.
“Were you talking to David?” Sarah asked. I nearly fumbled my fork. “On the phone.”
“Oh.” I stabbed a tomato wedge. The silverware felt strange and heavy, and when I looked it over, it was as unfamiliar as the plates. My total of debts to repay, whether karmic or Mastercard, was getting pretty hefty. “Yes. He was a little sick, but he’s feeling better.”
“Sarah told me that he’s a musician?” Eamon asked, and applied a little black pepper to his salad. Which was not at all a bad idea. I followed suit.
“A singer,” I said. Which would explain, should it ever come up, the lack of gear to haul around. “He’s with a band.”
“Have I heard of them?”
“Probably not.”
Eamon was too polite to try to work around that roadblock; he turned his attention back to Sarah, who practically combusted under the force of it. He did have a lovely smile, I had to admit. “I did enjoy the day, Sarah. I had no idea Fort Lauderdale had so much to offer.”
“It was educational,” she said, but there was color high in her cheeks, and a sparkle in her eyes, and I wondered if the wonders of Fort Lauderdale had been the standard tourist attractions or something a good deal less family-friendly that featured a tour of the backseat of Eamon’s rental car. “Thank you for everything. It was lovely, really. Dinner was the least I could do.”
“Careful,” Eamon said, and his voice had dropped into a range I could really only classify as a purr. “You feed me like this, I might never leave.” His eyes were luminous, watching her. As if she were the only thing in the world.
She winked at him.
I began to remember how I’d felt back in high school, watching my accomplished, polished older sister devastate the boys with a flick of her perfectly manicured fingers. Oh, yeah, this was that feeling. Like being the dumpy training wheels on the bicycle of love. I wondered if I should take my salad and go eat it in my room, with Rahel, who would make me feel like a particularly nasty insect but at least wasn’t going to be beating me on social graces.
“Get a room,” I said, and shoveled in a mouthful of greens. Sarah sent me a shocked look. Yep, we were right back to high school. Sarah the martyr, Jo the brat, poor Eamon caught in the middle.
Except Eamon was no hormonally overbalanced teenager, and he just smiled and reached across the table to pour my sister another half glass of wine.
“Actually,” he said, “I like this room perfectly well.”
The salad course mercifully ended before I could make more of an ass out of myself, and Sarah served pasta. She and Eamon flirted. I tried to look as if I didn’t notice. It was uncomfortable. My sister’s chicken primavera was unbelievably delicious, but I shoveled it in with reckless disregard for either manners or culinary appreciation. Sarah, naturally, ate about a third of her plate and pronounced herself full. Eamon came around to help her clear the table, shirtsleeves rolled up to reveal elegantly long-boned forearms, and brushed past her close enough to qualify as courtship in quite a few parts of the world. As they were standing at the sink together, I watched their body language. His was… comfortable. Proprietary. In her space, drawn to her by gravity. Over the rushing water, I caught snatches of their conversation. I sipped wine and watched him lean closer, put his face close to her neck, and draw in a deep breath. It was amazingly sensuous.
“Bulgari’s Omnia,” he said, in that lovely voice, so precise and warm.
“You know perfumes?” Sarah asked, startled, and turned her head to look at him.
He was over her shoulder, close enough to kiss. Neither of them moved away.
“A bit,” he said. “I had some training in chemistry; perfumes were always interesting to me. Omnia has a black pepper base, you know.”
“Really?” She dried her hands on a towel and turned to face him. “What else?”
“Is there any dessert?”
She blinked at the change of subject, but moved aside and uncovered a pan of perfect little tarts, pale with a browned crust on top. Crème brûlée. Dear God.
I didn’t even ownone of those fancy little blowtorches, did I? Well, apparently, I did now. Along with a double boiler.