Tales of the Djinn: The Double (41 page)

He hesitated for two heartbeats, then slid his hold up her sides and inward over her ribs. The gliding stopped when he cupped her bosom. She was small and his hands were large. They swallowed her breasts as his fingers contracted and massaged. Her nipples pebbled harder beneath his palms. Arcadius’s breathing turned jerkier.

“That feels really good to me,” he said.

She wasn’t sure she could speak. He was so thick inside her. Working her hungry walls against him was driving her to the brink. She’d reached the point where she truly needed an orgasm.

“Could I move faster now?” she asked.

Arcadius groaned. Like her, he must have been impatient. “Harder, too, if you would.”

His thumbs and fingers rolled her nipples just enough to stir a twinge of pleasure-pain. When Elyse undulated harder, his hips drove up to meet hers. He was tightening his glutes to lift him off the seat, thrusting his thick hard rod into her. His head flung back and then lowered.

His gaze locked on hers.

Their eyes told each other how close they were, the tensing of their facial muscles, the sweat glittering on their skin. Arcadius didn’t hide from her, and she couldn’t hide from him. This was just the two of them, their private moment together. Elyse couldn’t hold back from chasing her orgasm. Arcadius grunted, lengthening his strokes so that she rose and fell more inches along him. The friction killed her, the way it pushed sweet sensations ever deeper into her.

Her hands were on his back again, where the solid muscles of his shoulders met those behind his neck. The leather that wrapped her wrists gave her something satisfying to strain against. Maybe too satisfying.

Her nails dug into him hard enough to leave marks.

He knew what that meant. He released her left breast. She was moving wildly, desperate to go over. His thumb and fingers found her clit anyway. He frigged the soft sheath fast and snug over the little rod. Bolts of pure ecstasy streaked up its nerves and out her fingertips.

Her body felt like it wasn’t hers. The things he’d done to her and asked of her had remade it. She came with a banshee cry, her pussy contracting helplessly and hard. Her violent clenching around his shaft set off a response in him. He tightened all over, his muscles as hard as stone. He whispered something and his cock pumped into her crazy-strong. A handful of thrusts later, he roared and slammed all the way into her.

He held there like he didn’t ever want to come out. Heat flooded her but not wetness. He’d remembered to turn his seed to smoke.

Cade wasn’t the only responsible commander, apparently.

“Ah,” Arcadius sighed, relaxing under her into the chair. His thighs no longer felt like they were made of obsidian.

Reminded to relax herself, Elyse unclamped her fingernails from his shoulders.

“I broke your skin,” she exclaimed,
tsking
over the half-moon marks.

He smiled as she craned to check both sides. His hands settled on her hips. “I will heal. And how could I mind such flattering battle wounds?”

Because the battle was over, she lifted her wrists over his head and back in front of him. “Would you undo this?”

He unfastened the buckle, unwrapped the leather, and kissed the redness her straining had left inside her forearms—
her
battle wounds, she guessed. His lips were soft, his eyes closing for each kiss. When she first met him, she wouldn’t have thought him capable of such tenderness. Then again, she wouldn’t have thought herself capable of feeling so much for him.

Her hands finally back in her own control, she petted his face between her palms. “I love you, Arcadius.”

“I do not mind hearing that,” he acknowledged.

She laughed and laid her head on his broad shoulder. His arms came around her to rub her back. He was so warm, so protective and comforting that every scrap of tension in her body released at once.

“You may fall asleep if you wish,” he said. “I will wake you after you’ve had a nap.”

“You’re ridiculously nice,” she murmured—and took him up on his offer.

~

Cade had grown used to the rhythms of Elyse’s neighborhood. Sensing nothing amiss, he retrieved a beer from her fridge, popped the metal cap with a flare of magic, and relaxed at her round table. As he took a swallow, his feet found a resting place on one of the chairs they’d squeezed in to seat the kids.

Though they needed to return to the Glorious City, he realized he was equally at home in Manhattan. He could be happy here, as long as he was with his beloved.

His contemplations were interrupted by a long female moan trailing up the hall from the main bedroom. Muted but interesting feelings rolled through his groin as his double orgasmed.

That would take adjusting to, but he still thought he’d made the right decision to leave Elyse and Arcadius to themselves. Looked at in a certain way, Arcadius’s appeal for Elyse was reassuring. She loved who Cade used to be. To her, he’d always been a good man. It was even possible that meeting the missing part of Cade’s spirit had completed a puzzle for her heart. Maybe she hadn’t been able to fall in love until she knew all of him.

It was a theory anyway.

His beer was half gone by the time Arcadius entered the living area, looking considerably more relaxed. He wore baggy black cargo shorts that Cade didn’t recognize.

“Elyse is asleep,” Arcadius said as he sat across from him. “I believe these pants were her husband’s. I found them in a box in his old office.”

Cade nodded and slid the beer to him. “She has history besides us.”

“We will treat her better than him,” Arcadius declared.

His solemnity amused Cade. “That’s the plan.”

“We must come to an agreement, you and I.” Cade’s eyebrows rose, but Arcadius continued. “We shouldn’t force Elyse to play peacemaker. It’s too uncomfortable for her to be put in the middle. If we have differences, we should settle them ourselves.”

“I’d get on board with that—though we need to be careful we don’t keep too much from her. That undermines the idea of us being a team.”

Arcadius narrowed his eyes. He didn’t like being contradicted. “We
will
protect her.”

“Not from everything,” Cade countered. “That isn’t going to work.”

“She is proud,” Arcadius acknowledged.

“Luckily for us, she’s not as proud as you.”

Arcadius surprised him by laughing. He lifted Cade’s beer and drank. “You’re proud too,” he pointed out slyly.

Cade quirked his lips and shrugged. “I’m a work in progress. Kind of like our arrangement.”

“All right,” his double conceded. “I’m satisfied we understand each other well enough for now.”

When he leaned across the table to shake on it, Cade returned his grip unreservedly.

Chapter Fourteen

THE
muted thump of club music drew Elyse from her nap. As she pulled on fresh clothes, she noticed the floor was vibrating. The noise wasn’t coming from her apartment or the outdoors. The best she could tell was that the music issued from the unit across the hall.

Good grief,
she thought. What was her dad up to?

Whatever he was up to, he’d drawn Cade and Arcadius into it. They weren’t in the kitchen or the front room. She scraped her hands through her sleep-mussed curls. Should she be worried? Had a gang of ifrits snuck in to assault their eardrums?

She closed her eyes and tried to concentrate like the djinn but didn’t sense danger.

What the hell,
she decided and opened her front door.

The noise immediately went up a lot of decibels. A party was in full swing in the hall outside her apartment. Multiple festoons of Christmas lights, probably liberated from storage boxes in the cellar, flashed in time with the dance music. All six djinn kids gyrated on the landing, looking far cooler doing it than Elyse could have. She supposed this was the result of their view café education. Evidently, they had way hipper taste in music. She had no idea who was playing.

She spotted her dad leaning in the open door to his place. He smiled as he watched the teenagers, his head bobbing with the beat. Elyse dodged between dancers, then touched his arm to get his attention.

“Dad! Turn this down. The other tenants will complain.”

He grinned and shook his head. “It’s fine. You see that line of lights shaped like cowboy boots? The twins cast a spell on it to keep the noise inside.”

“I heard past it,” she said.

“What?” He held his hand to his ear.

She laughed. “
I heard past it.
”

“Oh,” he said. “I think that’s Balu’s fault. He poked a hole in the barrier by your door. He didn’t want you to miss the party.”

Yasmin’s brother spotted her through the bouncing crowd. He waved her toward him, but she shook her head. She wasn’t going to make a fool of herself.

The boy wasn’t put off by her refusal. His smile flashed out as he said something she couldn’t hear to his companions. Suddenly all the djinn were gyrating in her direction. The redheaded twins in particular looked amazing, their long hair whipping while their slender bodies writhed. Maybe their wildness was therapy? Whatever the case, Elyse’s distraction with their talent allowed Balu to catch her hands.

“Dance with us, Elyse,” he urged. “We’re celebrating our freedom.”

“Yes, Leo’s daughter,” the bathhouse girl Jeannine seconded. “This party isn’t complete without our heroine.”

Well, that was flattering. She hadn’t thought of herself that way. And it
was
nice to feel in demand, even if their affection was partially spillover from their fondness for her dad.

“Dance,” Celia urged, her manner as sweet as her angelic face. “We want to thank you for rescuing us.”

“
I
didn’t rescue you,” she denied.

“You did!” chorused the twins. “The commanders admitted it.”

Had they? “Where are Arcadius and Cade?”

“Foo on them,” scoffed Patrizio. “We want you to dance with us!”

She couldn’t resist them all. She let them tug her onto the floor, ordering herself not to care that she could only dance like it was ten years ago. The djinn didn’t mind. They were too busy laughing and having fun.

Apparently full of happy beans, Balu picked her up and spun her in a circle. “I can’t wait to tell my sister about our adventures.”

“Your sister had a few of her own,” Elyse reminded him between gasps for oxygen. “Yasmin was a bigger heroine than me.”

“She’s a pip,” Balu crowed, tossing her into the air. “We’re all pips today!”

Elyse laughed, the challenges of the past few months seeming to fly off her. They were well and safe and whatever the Creator’s true nature, they owed the higher power a big debt of gratitude.

Today was a day for hope and joy.

“Ooh,” one of the twins exclaimed. “Someone is getting a present!”

“Only if this idiot puts our consort down.” Arcadius’s crisp disapproval was unmistakable.

Still grinning, Balu set her on the floor. Elyse turned to find both Arcadius and Cade in front of her. Cade was holding up a large golden necklace composed of decorative hinged sections. Within each cleverly fitted piece, big cabochon rubies threw off flashes of crimson fire. To her amazement, the rubies weren’t the largest gems. That honor belonged to the central pendant: a heart-shaped emerald with a golf ball’s diameter. Elyse assumed the stone was an emerald anyway. The polished jewel was so clear it could have been crystal.

“Good Lord,” she said. “Where did that come from?”

“We made it,” Cade said. “Magically. From odds and ends Joseph had in his supply briefcase.”

He lowered the neckpiece around her head. He had to be careful. The thing was ludicrously heavy. If he’d simply dropped it, he might have injured her. Too stunned to speak, she tipped up the glittering green centerpiece and gaped. This hardly looked like
odds and ends
to her. The ornate setting was beautiful—suitably ostentatious for a medieval emperor. She couldn’t believe Cade and Arcadius had made it.

“If it’s not to your taste, we can get you something else.”

Cade’s expression was uncertain. Elyse found her voice again. “It’s exquisite.” Her fingers stroked the huge emerald, now warming against her skin. “And overwhelming. Why are you giving it to me?”

“It’s an engagement gift. Or have you forgotten you proposed to me?”

She had sort of done that, hadn’t she?

“They’re engaged!” Balu cried. “Hip hip hooray!”

She covered her burning cheeks as the other teenagers joined the cheer. Realizing she was pleased and not just embarrassed, Cade broke into a smile.

“
Now
you can dance with me,” he said.

Elyse flung her arms around him.

His mode of dancing was a cross between a Cossack and a dervish. They whirled around so quickly she lost her breath.

“You’re making her dizzy,” Arcadius scolded.

“Fine,” Cade laughed. “You take her for a while.”

He bussed her cheek and passed her over.

“We will waltz,” Arcadius announced. “That is a nice sedate human dance.”

“Uh,” Elyse said. “I’m afraid I don’t know how.”

Arcadius closed his eyes and focused, absorbing the technique from the metaphysical data soup. “Put your feet on my shoes. I’ll take care of it.”

He had the trick of it, no problem. With her feet on his, she did too.

Presto, change-o, I can waltz!
she thought giddily. He and Cade made her feel that way about a lot of things. Though the steps didn’t match the music, she enjoyed being swooped about. The feel of Arcadius’s hand on her back was especially appealing.

“Fun?” he asked after a minute.

“Very,” she confirmed.

“This is how humans dance at weddings.”

“Sometimes. If they’re fancy events.”

He swooped her around some more. “You could be married twice, if you wanted. Once in each dimension.”

“That might be interesting,” she said absently. “I wouldn’t mind seeing how djinn do things. You know, assuming two ceremonies isn’t too much trouble.”

“Djinn like parties.” He cleared his throat. “I would request that my marriage to you happen in our world.”