Burning hands reached for Grace and pulled her out of the sea.
Grace plunged awake. She was lying on her back. Khalil must have turned on the bedside lamp. It threw a soft gold light over everything. He leaned over her. Black hair fell around his face. He was frowning sharply and shaking her by the shoulder.
“What’s wrong?” she asked blurrily, as she stared at him.
She had not really seen him nude before when they made love. Or perhaps she had, since she had seen his real form. This body he chose to wear was perfectly fashioned, from the heavy ripple of muscle across his wide chest and shoulders, to his tapered stomach, lean hips and long legs. Her gaze fell to his groin where his genitals were as perfect as the rest of him, his penis lying in a graceful curve over the twin mounds of his testicles.
She stroked a hand down his smooth, hot chest as she realized that, except for the shining, black fall of his hair and the slant of his eyebrows, he had no body hair. He was completely, inhumanly beautiful, his ivory skin gilded with the soft gold light from the bedside table.
In sharp contrast, her body was imperfect in almost every way. The pink of her nipples were still a darkened rose from his suckling. A bruise was forming on her hip bone where she had banged it on the corner of the kitchen table earlier that day. She had a long, thin scab on one of her forearms from Freaky Bitch. And yes, of course there were the scars on her knees, yada yada, and she smiled to realize how little they had come to matter to her.
The peach tint of her human skin looked shockingly rich against Khalil’s marblelike hue. The soft, fine tangle of her pubic hair was a darker red-gold than the hair on her head. In her own way, she realized with a trace of embarrassment, she was as beautiful as he was. They were especially beautiful together.
You are my lover, she thought, as she blinked at him. She swallowed hard. My lover. At least for this one night.
What a calamitous, incredibly spectacular first date. And why in the world would she have expected anything else from him?
Her heart squeezed, or maybe it expanded. Whatever it did, it wasn’t behaving normally at all. She felt light-headed and giddy, truly happy for the first time in she couldn’t remember when, and absolutely, utterly terrified.
His long fingers came underneath her chin. He tilted her head up. “Pay attention, I’m talking to you,” he said irritably. In contrast to his tone, the expression in his gaze was concerned.
“So that’s the noise I keep hearing,” she said. She glanced at the bedside clock, which read 1:42 A.M. She hadn’t even slept an hour and a half. She yawned hugely until her eyes watered, and her eyes drifted closed as she sank back against the pillows. While it was wonderful to stretch out on her bed, and frighteningly awesome to be in bed with him, the upstairs of the house was stifling, and he was far too hot.
Hey, she had a check in her purse. She could afford a higher electric bill. She muttered cagily, “I’ll have sex with you again if you close all the windows and turn on the air-conditioning.”
She was trying to bargain away something she would beg for anyway. For someone who always chose the dumb route, that was actually pretty smart thinking. She turned her face into his bicep and sniggered, even as her eyes watered more.
Oh gods, what he had done. Even more than the sheer physical impossibility of the lovemaking, he had broken her wide open.
He hissed a curse. She jumped as all of the upstairs windows slammed shut, and the ancient air-conditioner unit that was propped in her bedroom window clacked on.
Her eyes flew open as he took her by the shoulders and hauled her upright. “I said pay attention,” he snarled.
He looked entirely disturbed, and despite their nudity, not at all loverlike. Suddenly she felt wide awake. “I’m paying attention,” she told him. She frowned as her mind kicked into gear. “I was having a weird dream before you woke me up.”
“I woke you up,” he said between his teeth, “because you were acting weird.”
“What happened?”
“That old Power you inherited. You know how you said it sits deep at the edge of your consciousness?” She nodded. Now that she was really paying attention to him, his hard grasp on her relaxed. He smoothed back her hair. “I can sense it. It feels just as you described, very deep, like it sits at the edge of thought. While you were asleep, it…rose up.”
She frowned at him. “What do you mean, it rose up?”
“It filled you up like you were an empty glass. Then it spilled out of you and filled the room. That’s when I woke you.” His sharp diamond gaze searched her face. “What happened?”
She rubbed her forehead. “I don’t know. I just had a dream.”
“About what?”
“It’s hard to describe. It was very dreamy.”