Jinni's Wish (Kingdom, #4)

Too quickly they were on the thirty-first floor and the door was dinging open.

“I can’t do this,” he said with a shake of his head.

Danika rolled her eyes. “Good gods, did you lose your balls the second you entered that thing.”

“Dani,” he growled, not in the mood for her jokes.

She snorted. “Listen to me, boyo, all of this angsting and worrying, it’s for naught. I visited her last night.”

He hissed. She hadn’t told him that. His heart thundered. “And?! What did you see?”

Her blue eyes grew melancholy. “She’s so desperate for you, it’s really rather pathetic.”

Mouth dry, stomach ready to heave chunks, he released the bars and forced his rubbery legs to exit the elevator.

“It’s the one at the very end of the hall.” Danika nodded and then tapped him forward.

He felt a pop of air and then nothing and knew Danika had vanished, leaving him alone to face her.

Not that he was terrified of her. No, he wanted her. Ached for her each and every day. Every second of physical therapy, one thought kept him working in spite of the pain, one less day until he got to see her.

The time was now. He was here.

But what if this didn’t live up to expectations? What if he’d created a goddess of a woman in his mind that wasn’t really her? He’d done that with Nala. What he and Paz had shared had been intense, but unbelievably short.

And as he thought up a million different reasons why he shouldn’t go to her, the door opened.

Paz didn’t see him. But he saw her.

She was dressed in a white gown, exposing the long lines of her shapely calves. His stomach knocked around and his breath whooshed out of his lungs. A long, jagged scar raced up the side of her left calf, curving around her knee and disappearing beneath the hem of her dress.

She rested heavily on a cane as she tried to lock the door.

He couldn’t move. Frozen in place, his mind an empty canvas except for one thing. Her. His Paz, alive and healthy. Then she turned around and dropped her purse and cane as tears came instantly to her eyes.

“Oh my god, are you real?” she whispered.

She’d recognized him? He’d feared she might not. Tristan didn’t overtly resemble him.

She was shaking.

“Paz,” he whispered and then her eyes rolled to the back of her head and she fell ungracefully in a heap to the floor.





***





Soft cooing words of love and devotion were whispered in her ear. Paz shivered at the warm touch of a hand. His hand.

“Oh my god!” She sat and stared into his eyes. “Is it you? Really you?”

They were in her home, on her couch and the face was all wrong. Beautiful, but wrong. But the eyes, the eyes were full of tears and light and love and she knew. She threw her arms around his neck and cried, venting a year’s worth of pain and agony, crying and staining his shirt until there were no more tears left.

He held her and never tried to turn away, even though he must be uncomfortably wet by this point. Finally, trusting herself to speak and not blubber like an idiot, she pulled away. Not enough to get out of his arms, she never wanted to be out of his arms again.

“Jinni, how… I don’t…”

He placed his finger on her lips. “I’ve dreamed of this for a year, Paz. What I would say, how I would say it,” his voice was deep, throaty and lyrical. Slightly different than the one she’d grown used to; this one was richer, like a shot of amber whiskey. “And now I’m here and I do not remember any of it.”

She laughed, it felt so good. For over a year, she’d lived. Breathed. Ate. Painted. But hadn’t laughed.

It’d been so obvious that she was depressed, even Richard had stopped commenting on it. He’d gone from cracking jokes and giving her hugs, to casting worried glances in her direction. She was sure he’d planned an intervention at some point, but she’d always assured him that it was just going to take some time to heal.

And that’d been true. But not in the way he’d expected. Living without Jinni had been harder than she’d expected. Any time a good-looking man had cast a glance or smile her way all she could do was frown and think how imperfect it was.

She’d holed herself up in her studio and painted. Her art had morphed from something light and pretty to dark and mysterious. The brooding artist had lent her an air of mystique and suddenly she’d begun selling paintings hand over fist.

Paz gripped his face, tracing the lines of his hard jaw, the planes of his wide mouth, familiarizing herself with a body she didn’t know. “So what now?” she whispered.

“We get to know each other.”

“I’m all for that,” she agreed. “Do you have a place to stay? Do you live any--”

He chuckled and man was that sound a whole lot of awesome. Dark and rich, and made her stomach tighten and her heart beat fast. “I stayed at a motel on Danika’s dime until I was cleared medically and then took a bus here.”

“From Alaska?”

He shuddered. “Gods it was ghastly.”