But her actions belied her words, because her teeth were nipping at his jaw, sliding down his neck, until her tongue swirled around the hollow of his throat.
Just a few more rubs would get him there, but Robin wanted her to join him. Wanted desperately to feel the wetness between her thighs coat his fingers. Slipping his hand underneath her waistband, he was seconds, mere seconds away from heaven, when she seized up on him and screamed, not in pleasure, but in pain.
His arms were suddenly empty as Nixie was flung violently out of them, struck by lightning. Ozone crackled through the air, offending his nostrils.
Robin blinked at her in a daze. She lay ten yards away from him, moaning and coughing, crawling to a sitting position.
It took him half a second to gather his wits long enough to go to her. But she held up a restraining hand. “Go away,” she grunted. “God, go away.”
“You’re hurt. What happened?” Feeling helpless, and still teetering on the razor’s edge of dark passion, he knelt beside her.
The tips of her hair snapped, as though they’d come to life like charmed cobras, dancing around her pinched features. “I can’t. I didn’t know.” She wasn’t speaking to him, more talking to herself.
It made no sense. None of this made sense.
His balls and cock ached, almost painfully now. But he shoved it aside out of worry for her. “Nixie, you must tell me what’s going on.”
Dark eyes flashed at him, she looked like a wild animal, and more lovely than he’d ever seen. The grass around her was charred, steam curled around her hands and ankles.
The innate supremacy of the genie snapped between them. Robin had always been attracted to power, and there was none more powerful than the dark one.
The realization was like a fist to the gut.
Coughing one final time, she sat up to her knees and tilted her head back, closing her eyes. Her naked breasts heaved with her heavy breaths.
Goddess, she was the most beautiful creature he’d ever beheld. Robin dug his nails into his palms to keep from touching her.
“Sex is forbidden me,” she finally said, turning hard eyes to him. “Courtesy of my father. Go away, Robin.” Her voice was twisted with pain and he suspected that whatever he was feeling was only a drop in the bucket compared to what she was going through now. “Just please, leave me alone.”
Then she vanished. Turned into a column of brilliant-hued smoke and sank into her lamp.
Robin slipped his hand beneath his shirt and pulled out her lamp. The metal was warm beneath his touch. He wanted to rub it, wanted to call her to him, wanted to demand she end whatever thrall she held over him.
Because he wasn’t like this. He was calculating. He was calm. Never prone to excitement, to rash decisions. Everything in his life was meticulously plotted out, everything…but her.
Clenching his jaw, he placed her lamp gently back inside his shirt, tucking her safely against the warmth of his chest, and rolling onto his side, heaved a mighty, miserable sigh.
*
Nixie stripped off her pants, gasping heavily as the raw volts of charged power continued to surge through her body.
Her stomach clenched, even her skin ached.
The rules of being a genie had never really been explained to her. It was a situation that when the time came, she knew. She knew she could not kill for a master. She could not make anybody fall in love, she could not go back in time…and now, thanks to Robin and his questing fingers, she knew she could never have sex while bound.
It’d felt like getting slammed into a wall of lightning while needles of acid had been plunged through her veins. Nixie had been sure her head would explode from the vomit-inducing pain.
When the shock had worn off, her brain had recognized what’d happened. What her father had done ages ago had caused the council to change many rules of the genie. One of them being that no longer could a genie engage in sex—it was forbidden.
As long as she wore the cuffs, she’d never be able to give into her need of Robin.
Huddled over in the darkness of the lamp, she moaned until the worst of the pain subsided. Her body trembled from the runoff of adrenaline.
“Oh, my dear.” Danika’s gentle voice was a welcome distraction to Nix.
Glancing up bleary-eyed, she nodded at the stunning fae bathed in the glow of her pink fairy light.
With a flick of her wand, the inside of the lamp shifted. Turning from void to light, from black to a world bursting with color. A hyacinth-scented breeze overwhelmed Nixie’s senses. No longer was she adrift in a sea of black, but gazing around at a garden teeming with flowers of all kinds.
Golden rays of sunlight bathed her still shivering form.
“There. Sometimes just a little bit of light can make all the difference in the world.” Danika settled herself upon a white wicker rocker that materialized, fluffing out the spidersilk strings of her dress.