How about that.
She let the caftan fall into the wastebasket and pressed her hand to her mouth. She closed her eyes and put her face in the shirt. It was saturated with his masculine scent. She took several deep breaths. The worn cotton material was soft against her cheeks. Then she gently folded the shirt and tucked it into the bottom of her leather bag.
Rune was as good as his word. When he rejoined her, she had opened the balcony doors and was looking over San Francisco’s distinctive skyline.
He had forsaken the bloodstained jeans in favor of slipping on the other pair, dirty though they were, although he had elected to remain shirtless and shoeless for the moment. The sprinkle of hair on his chest was several shades darker than his tanned skin and still damp. His wet hair lay sleek against his strong, well-formed skull, and just a whiff of his clean, masculine scent was enough to make the backs of her knees tremble.
She struggled between pride and desire. But really, how much would she miss her pride in a few weeks when she was dead?
Even with that thought, it was still remarkably hard to do what she wanted. She jerked forward and hit an unreasoning wall of fear. She had to shove her way through it to reach Rune’s side. His arms were already going around her as she put her head on his shoulder and leaned against his chest.
That was what she wanted. Just that one thing, his arms around her while she rested her head on his chest, and reaching for it had been one of the hardest things she had ever done.
Rune put his cheek against the top of her head. The rough haircut had done startling things, like lend a hint of piquant charm to her face. The odd flash of fear in her eyes as she came toward him tore up his gut, somewhere deep inside where that fucking hook was embedded.
I’m so scared, she had said to him, back on the island. He could not imagine what it must be like to face the possibility of one’s death. The thought of facing Carling’s death . . . He couldn’t process the thought. His mind whited out.
“Rune,” she murmured.
He realized he had clamped around her with bone-bruising force, and he made himself ease up. He cleared his throat and said roughly, “Sorry.”
“Are you all right?”
He didn’t answer her directly, mostly because he didn’t know if he was all right. “You need to call the Djinn. We need to get him looking for the knife.”
“Yes, of course we do.” She straightened and ran a hand through her short hair, making it spike all over.
She looked so rumpled and it was so unexpectedly adorable, Rune breathed between gritted teeth and pivoted sharply away. His hands shook. He felt like an addict looking to mainline his next fix. He was so busy fighting emotions that bucked like an untrained stallion that he missed the next thing that Carling whispered, although he felt her Power shoot out like an elegant, laser-focused spear.
A moment shivered. It held the trembling tension of a droplet of sweat about to fall from the Titan Atlas as he strained to hold up the world.
Then Rune sensed a maelstrom of energy streaming toward them from some undefined, faraway place. It tore through the open balcony doors and filled the suite with such a chaotic roar of Power, for a moment the walls of the massive hundred-and-ten-year-old hotel felt as thin, fragile and transparent as newspaper. Then the walls settled into place around them, and the Power coalesced into a defined point.
This was a very old, Powerful Djinn. This one was a prince among his people. Rune’s lips peeled back from his teeth in an instinctive snarl. He took a wider stance and braced himself against the cyclone’s presence.
The figure of a man formed in the room. Long raven-black hair whipped around an elegant, spare, pale inhuman face. Narrowed crystalline diamond eyes showed through the strands. The rest of his body solidified. He was easily as tall as Rune, with a lean graceful frame that matched his face. The male wore a simple black tunic and trousers, and a fierce regal pride. He gained form and substance.
The Djinn ignored Rune as if Rune didn’t exist. All of his attention focused on Carling.
Rune loathed the slippery-assed son of a bitch on sight.
Because, see, the thing about the Djinn, the really irritating thing about the Djinn, is that they could dematerialize at will at any time, so you could almost never get a good solid physical blow landed on one. And even if you did manage to get in a good crack, they were spirits of air that assumed the form of physical bodies like wearing a suit of disposable clothes, so you could almost never really hurt them. To battle the Djinn, you had to engage them in a Power struggle.
Rune knew very well how to fight Djinn, but it just didn’t have the same visceral satisfaction as planting a fist right in the kisser, the way he wanted to plant his knuckles in that handsome, too-perfect, regal, aloof face.