Rachel Caine - Firestorm

"You look good enough to eat." He licked his lips. There was something incandescent going on in his eyes, so bright, I couldn't look for long. It was as if he were staring at my naked soul.

"Um—David—" His hand slid down the curve of my cheek, traced my chin, and then his fingers trailed down the line of my throat. His index finger explored the notch of my collarbone, and then dipped lower. He hooked it in the neck of my shirt and pulled. I swayed toward him. "What are you doing?"

"Don't you know?" he asked.

Oh boy. The energy piling up and swirling overhead. The hot crackle between us. The heat of his skin, the restless flare inside me. The sense of something…

Something present, up there.

Something vast, and beyond my understanding.

He leaned forward, and his lips touched mine. Liquid silk, warm and soft and insistent. Whatever defenses I had, they didn't exist against him; I could feel all my resolve evaporating like ice under a summer sun. His hands seemed to be everywhere, soft little touches on my face, my neck, my arms, sliding up under my shirt, thumbs tracing the undersides of my breasts…

I think my mind whited out for a while. When it returned from its sensory vacation, I was back against the driver's side window, braced, with my knees up and apart, and David was kneeling between my parted thighs, and I had no idea how that had happened. The rational part of my brain insisted that this was not the time or place but then his hand glided warm up my inner thigh and slid inside my panties, and I gasped into the hot cavern of his mouth, and my clutching fingers sank into the lapels of his leather jacket to pull him closer.

Overhead, lightning cracked the sky, blue white. Hotter than the surface of the sun. It raced from horizon to horizon, split into a million sizzling tributaries. It covered the entire bowl of the sky, as if the whole thing had shattered.

The pulse of power that shot through me was nearly as shocking as the visual. Power echoing from the sky, to David, into me.

"Whoa! Hang on," I blurted. He pulled back, and in a way that was worse, because now I could look at him, and damn, the ruffled hair, the kiss-swollen lips, the golden skin flushed with peach… He could single-handedly destroy the entire concept of celibacy, worldwide.

"Stop?" he asked. He took my hands and pressed them flat against his naked chest, under the leather jacket. Solid, velvet-soft skin. Real as it could possibly come. "You don't want to stop. You want to go, and go, and go."

I scrambled for sanity. "This isn't exactly the right place—"

"If you're worried about people seeing us, they won't." he said, and his fingers were at the bottom of my knit shirt, yanking it up. Stroking flesh. I was having serious problems getting my breath, especially when he leaned closer, and I couldn't stop myself from pressing back against him. We were still dressed—barely—but I was certainly in a compromised position. My skirt was already so far up, it might as well have been a belt, and he was one fast tug on my panties away from having me. Being a Djinn, he didn't even have to struggle to peel those leather pants off. He could just will them to disappear.

And oh, I wanted them gone. I couldn't keep my hands off him, and there was such an intensely powerful sensation, stroking my fingers down the tight leather pants and feeling him respond…

The sky turned white overhead as lightning laddered across, a hissing curtain of force traveling nowhere. The air smelled acrid and tasted of tinfoil. Wouldn't be long now. It would find a ground target…

Oh, crap .

I marshaled what was left of my dignity, pushed David back—not so far as all that—and when he tried to lean in again, got my bent leg in between us, my foot on his chest to hold him in place. "No," I panted. "David, you told me not to trust you. And this—this isn't like you. I don't think you're—yourself." Not that the whole new David didn't have some really, really good qualities.

"I'm more than myself. Better." He grabbed my ankle, wrenched my foot to one side, and lunged forward to pin me hard against the door, knees apart. Vulnerable. He was far stronger than a man, not that male strength wasn't usually enough for something like this. "You don't know what this is like, Jo, having this, being this close to her—feeling every breath of the world flowing through you—every heartbeat pounding inside—" He was babbling. Quivering. "It's new. I'm new."

"I like the old David," I said shakily. "Can I have him back, please?"

He froze, leaning against the glass with a hand on either side of my head. Bronze eyes swirling, inhuman, unreadable. I could barely breathe. If David wanted to take me, it wasn't like I could say no; it wasn't like anyone had any control over what the Djinn did, maybe not even the Djinn themselves anymore. And oh God, I understood what was driving him. There was wildness in the air, wild power coursing through the sky and, for all I knew, through the ground, as well. This was the consciousness of the planet, slowly coming back to itself. A living world, an organism and a consciousness so huge that the rest of us were just dust mites crawling along its skin.

Desperation was driving him. Desperation and intoxication and the need to feel .

I could see a pulse racing under his skin, feel the vibration of his aching, near-painful need. It was echoing inside me, every thundering heartbeat.

I dared an indrawn breath. "David, if you love me, back off."

He leaned away, and then shifted abruptly into a sitting position, braced on the far side of the car against the passenger window. No mistaking, in that position, that those leather pants were very tight and he was, as the artists like to say, in a state of interest.

But he was sitting on the other side of the car.

And his hands were shaking.

When he finally spoke, so was his voice. "I'm sorry," he said. "This is—it's—she's never felt like this before. It's—I don't know how to—" Apparently, it was indescribable, because he just shook his head in frustration and looked away. "It influences us. Seduces us. Makes us—"

"Crazy? Horny? Aggressive?"

The relieved smile he gave me was pure vintage David. "Yes."

"I like to know what I'm dealing with. And dammit, I don't like seeing you lose control."

"I wouldn't be over on this side of the car if I wasn't in control." Yeah, maybe… barely. I could feel the tension humming inside him, a coiled spring begging to unwind. He let out a long breath and deliberately flexed his hands, then laid them on his knees. "Thank you for reminding me."

"Is she awake?"

He parted his lips, not in answer but in surprise. Some of the fog left his eyes, and sanity came back. The bronze swirl muted to a soft brown, sparked with metallic highlights. "Ah," he finally said. "No. Not exactly. But she's—in the process of waking up. And the feelings are especially powerful right now."

"Like a hypnagogic orgasm," I said. He blinked. "The kind you have right when you're in that gray area between waking and sleeping. Really… deep."

"Hypnagogic," he repeated. "Have I told you recently how much you baffle me?"

"No. You were too busy trying to feel me up."

"Sorry."

"Don't be."

David lost the slight smile he'd managed to acquire. "The problem is, I can't tell when it's me, or when it's her driving me. This is—difficult."

"You were going to say 'hard,' weren't you?"

"No."

"Liar."

"Stop distracting me."

He was right. It wasn't a good time to be distracting him, especially not if his self-control was all that stood between the impulses he was receiving and the rest of the Djinn. That thought sobered me considerably. "Sorry," I said meekly. I slowly got my legs folded into something like propriety and curled them around to put my feet on the floor. Another lightning bolt unzipped the sky overhead, broad as a superhighway—this one didn't fork. It was like a solid cable of light and power overhead. Forget about the surface of the sun, that had about as much heat in it as the entire nuclear core. If it had hit a plane, there'd have been nothing left but a floating smear of ash and some raining molten metal.