Robin chuckled. “True enough.”
Why was it so easy to talk with her? Instead of questioning her, trying to figure out what’d happened back there, or delve deeper into her story, he was the one sharing his story. And if it weren’t for the fact that he could see the truth, could understand that she meant him no harm, he’d walk away now. Lock her back inside her lamp and toss her down a pool just as John kept telling him to do.
But he couldn’t, because being with her, talking to her, it felt right. Vital, even. It was all he could not to give in to the overwhelming temptation to touch her.
“As you well know, and nearly gave John a heart attack over, I am Robin Hood.”
She laughed. And not just a simpering little lady laugh, either, but a full-scale eruption of it. He tipped a brow.
Her eyes grew wide as she held up a hand. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to laugh.” She giggled harder. “It’s just that”—she squeezed her eyes shut, knuckling a tear from her eye—“it’s just…well…” She shrugged, not finishing her thought.
He said nothing.
“And the other two? Merry Men, I assume.”
He nodded. Why was she laughing?
She picked up giggling where she’d left off. “Oh, you have no idea,” she huffed between breaths. “This is too funny. Way too…oh God, you’re pulling my leg, right? You have to be pulling my leg.”
Frowning, failing to see the humor in any of this, he cocked his head. “Pet, if you don’t watch yourself, I may just forget my olive branch and be the bastard you thought I was.”
“No. No, it’s not that.” She held up a hand, her face still red from laughter, and hanging on to her stomach as though in pain.
“Then what is it?” he snapped.
“Robin Hood: Men in Tights. Mel Brooks?” she finally said, gleam in her eyes going dull at his blank look. “Right. Okay, well, it was one of my dad’s favorite movies when I was growing up. Anyway, never mind. Wasn’t laughing at you, just, you know, whatever.” She rolled her wrist.
“Your father?” He ignored the “movie” thing for a moment. “Genies have no fathers.”
“Oh, I have a father. And a mother, too. In fact, I was born on Earth.”
That was a part of her story he’d never heard. “Tell me your story, genie, and leave out none of the details.”
Chapter 7
The man confused her, Nixie watched as he walked over the hill toward the men he’d left to camp several yards away from them.
His eyes had been distant and his thoughts his own, leaving her feeling perplexed by his sudden serious turn of thought.
Nixie had done as he’d asked, and even if he’d not compelled her to do it, she believed she might have still shared all of it with him. There was no way for her to really describe what it was she felt when she was around him. But from the moment they’d sailed through the air and held hands, something had passed between them. Something she could hardly comprehend, but it was like…she needed him.
Not for love.
Not for sex, either. Though yeah, she totally had the hots for him. Gah, that man was the definition of her kryptonite. Open a dictionary, look up Nixie’s Achilles heel, and she suspected a picture of a man that looked exactly like Robin would have been right next to it.
But it wasn’t just his looks, or the way he talked, or how hot and cold he sometimes was…there was something, a rightness about him that made her want to be totally open with him.
It actually freaked her out a little bit.
Robin had listened intently, pausing her telling of it every so often only for clarification. The man had literally seemed to hang onto her every word and every idea she’d had about who he was when they’d first met had been thrown on its axis. He was nothing like the Mel Brooks version of Robin Hood.
Intelligence had burned in his eyes and when he’d asked her questions there always seemed to be reasons behind it, though hell if she could make sense of why it mattered who her father actually was, or the fact that her family tree boasted of having a fairy godmother in it.
Robin was a master at interrogation. She’d found herself telling him everything. Literally every little tiny detail of herself. Where she’d lived, whom she’d dated, how many masters had come before him. Why she’d killed Josiah as she had. Everything—it’d all come pouring out of her. It was only after she’d answer that she wondered if somehow he was compelling her to do it, because why in the world had she told him her food likes and dislikes? That mattered not at all to her being his genie.
She frowned, rubbing at her temple.
One thing was certain: Robin didn’t strike her as the type who’d be asking for the typical wishes of riches and power, though what it was he did actually want, she was no closer to figuring out.