Jinni's Wish (Kingdom, #4)

“Arise, Jinni. There is no need for formality around me. Not now.” Her words were soft and coaxing, but the shiver that raced across his skin and the heat that burned in his gut was anything but soft.

His gaze roamed slowly up her bare feet, along the peek-a-boo bit of ankle and then up the long expanse of legs and waist. To the ripe fullness of her breasts (and here he swallowed harder), before he finally came to rest on the beauty of her face.

King Abdullah’s newest acquisition held a whisper of a smile on her lips. Younger than the King by a good decade, if not more, she was the epitome of sensuality and verve. Married only two weeks ago, the Queen had kept to herself.

Until now.

“I came to see the girl, though I see,” she cocked her head, “she was not alone.”

The husky tenor of her voice rocked through Jinni’s core and made his legs tremble. “I should not have gone to her. But she is lonely and considers me--”

“A friend?” She stepped forward, her emerald green robes crinkling slightly with her movement.

The rich scent of nightshade and sage perfumed the air between them as she lifted up on tiptoe. Then her finger was pressed against his mouth and he knew he was drowning in her kohl-rimmed gaze.

“She needs a friend,” she whispered, “we all do.”

Then she turned on her heels and walked away. Jinni stood by, as if deaf and dumb, watching long after her shadow had fled.





***





Paz lowered her arms, and her gaze hooked his.

“You loved her,” she said, and it wasn’t a question. But Paz didn’t sound angry, or sad. Merely, stating a plain truth.

“It was forbidden.”

Her look was tender as she glanced over her shoulder at their newest painting. Him, in the traditional garb of genie, and Nala slightly disheveled, hair mussed (as if she’d just woken up), and a secret smile playing on her luscious lips.

But Paz had painted Nala too perfect. He walked up to the picture and with a swipe of his hand altered the scene, put a tiny cleft in her chin, and small gap between her two front teeth. He brushed her hair back (the Queen had never looked mussed), though the bare feet and ankles peeking out from below the gown were exactly right.

“Forbidden doesn’t mean you didn’t love her. It just means it ended tragically.”

Jinni stilled his hand, letting her words sink in. She didn’t know the rest of the story, and yet she didn’t have to. He turned on his heels, putting his back to Nala and all that she represented.

“Wise words for one so young,” he said.

She shrugged and glided toward the golem on the bed. Jinni had nearly forgotten where they’d been, retelling his story felt so real. So alive, and seeing her paint the pictures in front of his eyes, made the reality of the hospital seem dreamlike and ephemeral.

“Who is he?” she asked, switching subjects.

“Just a man,” he said, eyeing the piece of formed clay lying prone on the bed. If he didn’t know better, if he didn’t know the magic at work within that shell, he’d never suspect it to be anything other than human. It breathed, it grew hair and nails, it seemed so human. Except for its lack of a soul.

“But you know him?” she continued, tracing her pale blue fingers along the length of the golem’s hairy forearm.

“It is just a body, Paz.”

She stopped rubbing his arm and shook her head. “No, it’s more than that. He’s more than that. He saved my life on that plane.”

Jinni clenched his jaw. “It is not alive, it is a golem.”

“A golem?” She frowned and slowly pulled her hand back. “What is that?”

“Have you not wondered why he sleeps, and yet looks perfect? Why he is not connected to a life support machine, but refuses to wake?”

She blinked. “I don’t understand. He talked to me on the plane. He called me by name.”

Her last words were wistful and full of longing, the sound of it made him ache. Being around Paz, made him remember what it felt like to feel. To want and need. To see her reaching out to an inanimate object made his fingers twitch with anger.

“When your plane was crashing…”

How could he tell her this so that she would believe him? Paz hadn’t had a difficult time believing in ghosts, obviously, since she was one now. But would she believe in fairies and fairy tales? In creatures beyond this realm, fantastical beings that lived and breathed and required no soul to do it? He didn’t want to scare her.

“Yes?” she asked.

“My… friend,” he swallowed the lie that stuck in his throat like gall, “spoke those words to you, through its mouth.” He jerked his head in the direction of the golem.

“What?” Paz glanced at the golem, disbelief gleaming in her eyes. “No. No,” she laughed, “I don’t believe you. He called me by name, he was my Todd.”