The Cowboy Genie's Wife: A Paranormal Romance (The Dirty Djinn Series) (6 page)

Then she couldn’t stop.

And sometime between the two hardest laughs of her life, a sob ripped right through her, and soon, that couldn’t be stopped either.

She cried until her chest and face ached with it. Fazil said nothing when he stood before her, towel outstretched.

She shouldn’t have stood up. Shouldn’t have gone to him.

But there he was drying her off, bending to wipe her legs and feet as she rained down tears above him. He dropped the towel and bent again, this time to lift her into his arms.

She almost fought him off.

She almost told him that she was fine.

Almost.

He carried her to the bed, placed her down, and lay right beside her as her back heaved against his chest. Still silent, he dragged one lazy finger up and down her naked side, before covering her with a blanket from the foot of the bed.

She flipped over needing to see his face. “Aren’t you going to demand I tell you what’s wrong?”

Fazil propped up on an elbow and gritted his teeth in an unnaturally silly grimace. “I’m trying very hard not to. This listening stuff sucks, though.”

She snorted and managed a grin. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. I want to fix it but...”

She pulled the blanket tighter around her, sucked in a deep, solidifying breath, and let go.

Just ... let go. Weird thing about the truth, after being bottled up, it tumbles out like an avalanche at the tiniest crack.

“No responding text because my phone is off. Off, off. I’m late with my bills.”

He frowned, rising. “I send—”

“Plenty. I know.”

“And the condo’s paid for.”

“I know that too. It was one thing I didn’t have to worry about. But sometimes ... let’s just say I didn’t need to keep the gym membership to lose weight. Don’t be mad, but I—”

“As yet to be decided, but I am scared as hell.”

He looked it. Furrowed brows and his face lost its vibrancy, as if he stood seconds away from fading entirely.

The urge to comfort him. The butterscotch colored skin she laid her palm against was damp and clammy. Time to end this. “It’s my brother.”

Fazil’s face went blank. Nope, wrong word. Solid. Granite. Frozen. Pissed. He leaned back, or tried, but she held onto him with a viselike grip. “Come again?”

“He doesn’t know it’s me.”

“Ah, hell...”

“We never formally met. I’d left while he was still in diapers.”

He shot off the bed like a man scalded by burning water. He paced from one end of the bed to the other. “Rosa—”

“He has no one left. And no money. I Googled him before we split. I didn’t mean to. I mean, I did, but I just wanted to see that he was happy. Instead, I find my baby brother living off a government check that’s way too small and going to bed at night in a park. What was I supposed to do?”

“Our secret—”

“He’s my brother.” It ought to have been a shout, but it came out strangled and hollow. Weak. She swallowed and tried again, desperate to save the last of her family. “And I’m not the one with some pissed off half-witch on my ass. You’re the one having problems keeping secrets.”

“She’s not going to say anything, and that’s not the point. She didn’t know eighty years ago!”

“And neither did Manny. Emmanuel. I call him Uncle.”

“You talk to him?” He skidded to a stop, hand braced against the bedpost. “Don’t, I know. He’s your brother.”

“Yeah, you still have yours, remember? It’s no big deal to check in on your family every half-century or two, but I don’t have that luxury. This is real life, Fazil. It’s not like the movies—I can’t ride off into the sunset with my magical dude and forget where I came from.”

“I always knew you regretted me.”

“It’s not that. I can miss my family without wishing away the good years we had. But it doesn’t take away my sadness. I hurt for them in a way you will never understand.”

“How can you say that? I haven’t seen you in five years.”

“Because I can’t die! Whose fault is that?”

“Fault?”

“No. Stop. I couldn’t leave Manny out there. I funneled the extra money into putting him into the best home in the city. I worked extra to fill in the gaps. There. That explains everything, and I don’t regret my decision.”

He seemed to buckle—to visibly deflate. Fazil turned his back to her and sat on the edge of the bed, crouched over and bent. “You know that if you wished me dead, I’d try to do it.”

“Don’t be morose and you know it doesn’t work that way.”

“A
hamdullah
is everything. When you were away, breathing hurt. How fucked up is it, that I’m glad you killed someone, just so you need me again?” He fell backward, arms in the air, and tears ... legitimate tears ... glistened down his face. Eighty years, she’d never seen a single one out of him.

She took her time crawling to him, expecting her brain to make her stop.

It didn’t.

She waited for the voice to tell her not to drop the blanket.

It didn’t show up.

Fazil didn’t look at her, but he didn’t withdraw at her touch. Whatever held his attention on the ceiling didn’t let go when she leaned over to brush her lips with his.

Nor did he move when she kissed his chest.

Or even the bottom of his chin.

He didn’t trust her not to hurt him again. She saw it plain as day. So, she did the one thing she could think of to give him hope. The one thing that cemented her to him forever. The one thing that invoked her claim on eternity each and every time she did it.

She closed her eyes, leaned against his chest, and silently wished herself home.

* * * *

B
y the next breath, he was alone in the bedroom.

That lasted a split millisecond.

There was one place she had the power to disappear to. His lamp. Their lamp. She was the sole entity his lamp accepted, save him, and it said everything.

He’d halfway thought she’d leave again once this mess brushed over. Maybe leave him forever. But going into the lamp? It reset the magical clock. She wouldn’t have done it if she didn’t want to make this work. His foot brushed against her blanket on the floor.

“Yessss.”

After a quick prayer of thanks to the big man above, he closed his eyes and whisked himself away to the glittering gold and green walls of his lamp and the naked woman waiting for him inside.

Rosa smirked at him from beside the pool, wrapped in one of many silks strewn about the lamp.

“Damn!”

The sweet thing’s whole face fell at his curse. “You didn’t want me here.”

“I just thought you’d be naked is all.”

He dodged the pillow she threw and got down next to her, dipping his feet in the ever warm waters. “This lamp? She missed you.”

She kicked him beneath the still surface.

“She even missed your sasquatch feet.”

“Wow.” Rosa rolled back in laughter. “That’s the line to win me over?”

He slid into the waters and grabbed her left foot for a playful bite. “I missed these too.”

She splayed her red-painted toes across his chest. “First of all, my feet aren’t big.”

He made a very mature decision not to correct her gross misjudgment. “Right.”

“Second of all,
she
is inanimate...”

He coughed.

“Mostly inanimate lamp. She didn’t miss me. Much.”

He drew lazy circles around her ankles, memorizing them in case he screwed this up again. “But you missed her?”

“Yeah.” She dropped into the waters, lacing her fingers through his. “You’ll help me save my brother, won’t you?”

“So that’s what this is about.”

“No!”

Damn her. And damn him for not letting her go. If she wanted to use the last good thing they had between them to get her way, fine. But he’d get his too.

She gasped when he hooked his hands behind her legs to edge her to the side. He’d always taken his time making love to her, easy and soft. Not today. Not now. They were well past that. He whirled her around until her ass was flush with his body. She looked over her shoulder and winked, something that would’ve melted him any other time.

Now?

He rammed his cock into her as hard as he could, grunting as he pumped and trying in vain to ignore her moans of pleasure. She reached back and tried to rope her hand around his neck. Stupid him, he let her do it. Their lips found each other, and it shattered the glass hardening around his heart. “Please.”

He didn’t know who said it first.

Was she asking him to make her come? Or was he begging her to stay? She threw her head back onto his shoulder as she shoved herself upon him like a jackhammer. Her words devolved into sighs and guttural huffs of air until he collapsed within her soul.

This was sex to her.

This was everything for him. He’d do himself a world of good to remember the difference between the two.

Yet, even as she gazed up with eyes that sparkled with something too damned close to what they used to share, he found it hard to imagine this was anything other than good. She nuzzled his chest and nipped at his neck, raking her teeth across his skin before speaking. “And that’s the other thing I missed.”

He pulled away to clear his head but gave up at her frown. Damn his weakness as her face morphed once more into a smile that destroyed him. He reached down to help her out of the water. “Hate me or love me. Just pick one, already.”

Her small hand cupped his face. “You stupid man. If I could hate you, I would. I’ve prayed in churches until my knees bruised, but I can’t walk away from you anymore than you can walk away from me. Don’t you get it, dummy? You don’t give up everything for someone you hate, Fazil.”

He shivered as a chill of renewed hope coursed through his body. “But I’m still a controlling ass?”

Her eyes went soft at the corners, and that mischievous nose of hers twitched with naughtiness as he dropped her on the bed. “You were. You are, but less so. Not completely redeemed, but there’s something about you that’s very...”

“Desperate?”

He groaned as soon as he said it, but she didn’t laugh. She didn’t meet his hesitant gaze either. “Men should be a little desperate if they’re in love. They ought to get weak when their woman comes in the room. You’d stopped.”

Weak? More like a punch to the gut. And right now, his twisted and gnawed in shame, and yep, desperation. He tightened his grip and tried to regain command of the conversation. “I never stopped. Not once. This thing with your brother, it’s not good, Rosa, but we can fix it. Together. Tomorrow. Stay with me tonight. In here.”

“He was a newborn when I left.”

Shit. Why was he even trying? While she droned on, he went to the wardrobe and rounded up a bottle of brandy, before heading back into the ring. He took throat-seizing swigs and sat back down on the bed. “And I’m sure that as he grew up, your pictures were everywhere. At least one.”

She tried standing, but he yanked her back down, plopping her over his lap. She didn’t struggle, but if she rolled her eyes any harder, they’d break. “So? Some people resemble other people.”

“Right. The twin halted in space and time. That’ll go over even better.”

“There’s nothing to go over. We’ve been over it, and it’s fine. Totally fine. Manny acknowledges me as his niece already. Game over. We won. He’s not the problem.”

“We’ll get back to the missing dead guy in a minute. If what you say is true—”

“I’m a liar now?”

Her wiggling and turning had his cock prepping up for more action. “Stop moving. I need to concentrate. And I didn’t call you a liar, my little moral murderess. I’m saying that if what you believe is true—that he has no suspicions—we’re fine. But fuck, you should have told me, rather than wasting all these years. Next time—”

“I don’t have any other family.”

“Gee, thanks. Got it. Big picture. Next time something huge comes along with the potential to destroy the lives of me, my family, and my species as a whole, run it by me first.”

She settled down against him somewhat, but her back was still a little too straight, a little too unsure. He put down the bottle and let his hands dance up and down her spine, willing her to melt into him and to trust him as she had when they’d first met. Yeah, he was pissed, but telling her over and over again wouldn’t change what damage had gone down.

And to be fair to her, she seemed to have lucked into getting through this unscathed.

Minus the runaway corpse.

“I miss you slapping me in the kidneys while you sleep,
hamdullah
.”

“I miss watching an all-powerful genie driving in circles because he refuses to ask for directions.”

“Had to go there?”

She flicked his nipple between her fingers and nibbled at his ear. “I can show you some other things I missed too.”

S
he woke up wrapped in silks that smelled of old wood and desert markets. And love. Lots of it. Served with a heaping dollop of masculine self-congratulating smugness.

She’d love to wipe the smirk off Fazil’s face as he lay there with his hands laced behind his head. He cracked his neck and winked. “Last night was good.”

“You were all right.”

“All right?” The idiot spent the next thirty seconds screaming his own name in an annoyingly high feminine trill.

“I don’t sound like that.” The jerk-face switched to a series of “unghhhhhs” and “get it, babys” that had her flinging pillows at him. “I can’t stand you.”

“Liar. You never hated me. Remember? Your words.”

“You’re still a pompous jack-hole who thinks he’s God’s gift to women and—”

“Don’t hold back. Tell me how you really feel first thing in the morning after we’ve reconnected. Go on.”

She placed two fingers on his lips. Thankfully, he shut up. He was so much better like this. Quiet. Smiling. Happy. He had a million reasons to kick her out on her butt, but he’d offered to help, and every bit of her knew that he would. But could they ever go back to the way they were before?

No.

Even his powers couldn’t reverse time. And, well, maybe that was a good thing. In their time apart, she’d learned self-sufficiency, how to handle money, and the soul-fulfilling warmth that came from hard work. With him, she’d been waited on hand and foot. Without him, life hadn’t been easy, but it’d been rewarding in so many other ways.