Thea Harrison - Oracle's Moon

“I’m so sorry,” Grace said as gently as she could.

“As I said, this happened a long time ago,” he said. “You are so spirited I forget sometimes how recently you suffered your own loss.”

“We all lost,” Grace said. “Me, Chloe and Max, Petra and Niko.”

“Yes,” Khalil said. “But you have to shoulder the burden for all the rest.” He raised her hand to kiss her fingers. “I will come again tomorrow, with your consent.”

She smiled. “That would be terrifi—no wait, that won’t work. I won’t have the children tomorrow. Remember, I mentioned Saturday was a work day? Katherine is taking Chloe and Max tomorrow. They’re spending the night at her house.”

He frowned at her. He was silent for so long, she fell silent too and began to wonder what she might have said.

“Grace,” said Khalil, and her name had never been spoken so purely before in her life. He gave it an unearthly, haunting beauty. Just listening to it made her want to be better, more worthy of being called something so wonderful. If he ever sang, she thought, the song would be so unbearably gorgeous, it would soar over spires of stone and steel, and pierce the hearts of humans and other creatures, and he could rule the world.

If he ever sang to her, she would go anywhere with him, anywhere at all.

He had paused. “Why do you look so stricken?”

“Never mind,” she whispered. “Go on.”

“I no longer come just to see the children, you know,” he said. “When do your people leave tomorrow?”

“I—I don’t know, around five, maybe, or six,” she stammered.

“You will call me when they leave,” he said. His gaze was intent.

The thought of them alone in the house caused a slow, sensuous heat to spread over her body. He knew it, damn him, and the smile that spread over his ivory features was just as slow and sensuous, and unbelievably wicked.

She was sliding dangerously fast down a slippery slope, if she went from “no kissing” and “we’ll see” to him coming over when the children were gone. She cast around in her mind for something, anything, to stop her headlong plunge.

She blurted out, “Do Djinn date?”

He blinked. “That is not something to which I have given much thought,” he said. “Perhaps some Djinn might date some…creatures…some…times. Dating has not previously been a habit of mine.”

She nodded, too rapidly, and forced herself to stop. “I just wondered.”

“Humans like to date,” Khalil said thoughtfully. Then he turned decisive. “That is what we will do tomorrow. We will go on a date.”

Suddenly she was dying. She didn’t know from what exactly: repressed laughter or mortification or perhaps a combination of both. She managed to articulate, “You don’t dictate a date.”

“I do not see why not,” said Khalil, his energy caressing hers with lazy amusement. He tapped her nose. “Humans require air. Breathe now.”

She did, and a snicker escaped. “If you order a date to happen, it’s no longer a date. It becomes, I don’t know, a meeting or kidnapping or something.”

“What is the proper procedure?” he asked. “For a date.”

His low tone was sultry. It brought to mind all kinds of heated images for the concept of procedures and dates. Now he was definitely teasing her. She said firmly, “If you are interested in spending time with someone, you ask them. You don’t tell them.”

“Will you go on a date with me?” he asked promptly.

She did want to see him, and it shouldn’t be alone, in the house. It just shouldn’t. “Sure,” she said. “What will we do?”

“I have no idea,” he said. “You are the dating expert. I am sure you will figure it out.”

She, a dating expert? She shook her head. This conversation was surreal. “I’ll come up with something,” she told him. What on earth would it be? “It won’t be fancy. You might want to dress casual.”

He nodded. “Call me when you are ready.” He vanished.

A date. She stared at the empty place where he had been a moment before as his presence faded. “I am never going to see Damascus, am I?” she whispered to herself. “Not in this lifetime.”

Then his presence returned, and he curled around her caressingly.

“I forgot to say good-bye,” he murmured in her ear.

Instinctively she held up her hands, fingers questing through the air, but his physical form did not reappear.

Not quite.

Instead invisible fingers trailed down her face, stroked her throat, traced the edge of her T-shirt’s neckline. She couldn’t see him, touch him. She felt hungry, bewildered and blind.

So she reached for him the only way she could, psychically, and felt herself align with his presence again. Power to Power, spirit to spirit. Feminine to masculine.

Astonishment and heat roared out of him. She felt it as a sheet of flame washing through her. Her breasts felt hypersensitive, nipples distended, and sexual hunger speared between her legs, sharper and harder than anything she’d ever known. Her head fell back against the office chair.

His energy rippled with something like a physical shudder. He hissed, “ Good night. ”

Then he was truly gone, and all she could do was whisper, “Holy fuck.”

And all she could think was: we really do have to get out of the house tomorrow.

Caught in the last moments before Khalil had left, Grace had a difficult time going to sleep. The warm humid summer night pressed against her skin. She kept reliving the rush of heat that had roared out from him, flashing over her psyche. It altered her understanding of pleasure and desire. She did not think she would ever be able to respond to a mere physical embrace again.

Would he climax during lovemaking, as humans did? Her body throbbed. She kicked off her sheet, curled on her side and slid a hand between her legs, pressing against the hungry, empty ache. When she finally slept, she dreamed of his huge, invisible hands sliding down the contours of her body, easing her own hand away. Long, clever fingers dipped under-neath the shorts and panties she wore and caressed along the folded lips of her labia, at the edge of her clitoris.

Her hunger spiked, reverberated back and forth between the physical and the psychic, the one intensifying the other. She needed to climax so badly. It had been so long since she had felt pleasure, and she had never experienced anything like this before, but she needed his physical form too, needed him sliding into her, filling that empty ache, moving with the kind of rhythm her body craved…

She plunged awake before completion and struggled with disorientation. For one heart-pounding moment, she balanced between a frenzied hope that Khalil was really there and a shocked need for him to not be present, to not have taken his lack of human sensibilities to that extreme.

She cast out her awareness, searching for him—and he wasn’t there. The quiet, darkened house was serene, and she was quite alone. Her dream had just been a dream. That left her to settle into disconcerted disappointment. She didn’t want him present, but she still ached with emptiness and wanted his touch. She tossed and turned for the rest of the night.

Early Saturday morning, when the children woke, she started another long, full day feeling disgruntled.

The temperature had already reached eighty-six by the time she drove Chloe and Max over to Katherine’s at eight o’clock. Katherine gave Grace the phone number of someone who had a twin bed and was interested in exchanging it for Chloe’s toddler bed. Grace also took all the serving plates with the lids, along with the set of four heavy linen napkins, to give to Katherine, who was overjoyed.

Katherine was also intensely curious, and Grace’s explanation for how she had gotten them took a good twenty minutes. By the time she returned home, it was a quarter to nine.