Your Wish Is His Command (6 page)

“
There, there, Mr. Peter, you’ll
feel better after you wake up.” Mrs. Hamm pulled the comforter up
to Peter’s chin.

No wonder Peter was getting sleepy. He was
probably suffering from heat stroke. The minute Mrs. Hamm left,
Vana would get rid of the covers and cool things down. She could
manage that most of the time, which came in handy for making
Peter’s favorite drink or lowering the temperature in the house on
a hot day.

She’d never tried to do so on a grand scale,
however. Too much potential for trouble. She could only imagine how
a snowstorm in July would go over. For today, though, she’d magick
a few little cool spots all around Peter. They ought to do the
trick.

Vana puckered her lips and kissed the air as
the door closed behind Mrs. Hamm and she—

No! Not actual spots! Holy smokes, she’d given
Peter cold sores!

Trying to keep her panic at bay, Vana puckered
up again.

“
Don’t do it, Nirvana.” Peter’s
voice was deeper and sadder than she’d ever heard. And he’d used
her full name. He never used her full name.

“
Whatever it is you think you’re
going to do, don’t. I can’t take any more right now, Nirvana. I
just can’t.” Peter sat up on the bed, the horrid spots looking like
some tropical disease.

“
First the bear, then the stairs,
and now this. This has to stop. We need your magic in good order if
we’re going to turn those dishes back into children.” He lifted her
bottle out of a drawer in the bedside table where he kept it, and
pulled the stopper. “You’ve been trying so hard recently, Vana. I
think you need a rest. Don’t you?”

A rest? Vana bit her trembling bottom lip and
rolled her shoulders back. She couldn’t rest. The children and
everyone else would be stuck in their enchanted forms unless she
could figure out how to undo them. She needed to keep
practicing.

“
Vana?”

She sighed again. At least he’d asked. Most
masters would have ordered her.

Most masters probably would have sent her into
the Light by now.

She opened the armoire door and walked across
the beautiful Persian rug he’d bought in the same souk where he’d
found her bottle.

She stood next to his side of the bed, her
head bowed, her hands linked in front of her. “I am sorry, Peter.”
He’d never insisted she call him “master,” a kindness for which
she’d forever be indebted to him. He’d never made her feel like his
servant.

Until now.

“
Vana, it’s just for a little
while. To give you time to calm down. To give everyone time to calm
down. That’s all. Just a little while.”

Vana nodded. Peter was trying to be kind. She
knew that.

That she felt like a failure was all her own
doing.

One last breath of the stifling July air, and
Vana dematerialized from the room and entered her bottle in a plume
of pink smoke.

As her body regained its corporeal form, the
stopper filled the hole above her head, sealing her inside where,
theoretically at least, she could do no harm.

Later that evening, Vana braced herself
against the cushions on her divan as Peter climbed the steps to the
attic (ones she’d never attempted to varnish), placed her bottle
stopper-side up in a trunk, cushioned it with a handmade shawl, and
closed the lid—his way of protecting her from someone taking her
from him, another kindness for which she was forever
grateful.

***

Two days later, Peter was killed in a wild
horse-and-buggy accident that Vana had had nothing to do
with.

And no one knew about the bottle in the attic
or the genie locked inside.

A Naked Man In The
Kitchen

There’s a naked man in my
kitchen.

The thought registered just as the terse, “Who
the hell are you?” had Jolie Gardener spinning around faster than a
figure skater on speed.

He
had the nerve to ask this? He of the
broad shoulders, six-pack abs, and other, nice, um,
parts...

Really
. A naked man. In her
kitchen.

Well,
technically
, she was in a naked
man’s kitchen. Even more technically, she was in a naked Todd
Best’s kitchen—and there wasn’t one hint of self-consciousness or
embarrassment on his part.

Of course with that body, there shouldn’t be.
The guy
should
flaunt his nudity for the world to see.
Which, at present, consisted of one single, solitary person: Jolie
Gardener, aspiring writer and personal chef
extraordinaire.

“
Well?” His hands slammed to his
hips.

“
You’re naked,” she squeaked,
which, really, was the only way to state that kind of
obvious.

“
I’m what?” Mr. Six-Pack Abs
glanced down.

Jolie tried not to—so unsuccessfully it was
pitiful.

“
Shit,” he muttered. “I am. I, uh,
fell asleep last night…”

As butter sizzled in the new super-slick
omelet pan on the top-of-the-line range, Jolie’s gaze alternated
between some rock-hard abs and a scruffy eight a.m. shadow while
her fingers danced along the speckled granite countertop in search
of a napkin, placemat, oven mitt… something.

Mercifully, they scooped up a thick dishtowel
that, in her world, would constitute a very plush, very luxurious
hand towel from The Ritz or The Four Seasons, but which, here,
apparently, was used to soak up water from designer flatware. She
dangled it in the direction of Mr.
Au Naturel
.
“Here.”

He placed an empty bottle of Jim Beam on the
island countertop with a
clink
, then took the towel with a
grunt. “So, who are you, what are you doing in my kitchen, and
would you mind turning around?”

She turned. “I’m the new girl the agency sent
over.”

“
Hell. There better be some aspirin
left,” he muttered beside her, his bare (of course) feet making no
sound on the limestone floor.

She peeked over at him.

His eyebrow soared skyward.

Right
.

She turned back to the sizzling butter. Which
had started to burn. Sigh.

He rummaged around in one of the drawers as
she carried the pan to the sink. Trying to impress the new boss on
her first day with his favorite omelet ranchero and she burned the
butter. Not good, but then, it wasn’t exactly her fault because
nowhere in those papers she’d signed with her employment agency,
Domestic Gods & Goddesses, was mention made of an optional
dress code. And she didn’t care how much they were paying her,
nudity did tend to throw one off. As for the
alcohol-before-breakfast debacle, she wasn’t even going to address
that. His rudeness said it all.

And here,
she’d
been worried about
making a good impression on
him
.

A click of plastic bottle cap followed by a
shake of the bottle, the fridge opening, a gulp, then Naked Guy
sighing punctuated the silence before she turned on the faucet. She
cleaned out the pan, all the while the Naughty Girl side of her
brain screaming, “Turn around!” with the other, Jolie side, going,
“You
want
to keep this job?”

Self-preservation being the backbone of her
existence since being dumped into the foster care system, she
decided to listen to the Jolie side—no matter how much groaning
Naughty Girl did.

Naughty Girl, however, couldn’t resist a peek,
and was rewarded with a swish of his longish golden hair, a flex of
his well-defined arm, and an accompanying sizzle to her own nerve
endings.

So not good. Jolie had known he was a hunk
before she accepted this position. Had had quite the crush on him,
too. How could she not? The guy had been plastered all over every
magazine in the country for years, most especially here in his
hometown.

Todd Best.
The
Best, as the media had
dubbed him. And rightfully so. The man’s landscape paintings were
hanging in every high-end hotel, public library, and courtroom in
the country. Even the White House, for Pete’s sake. Not that she
had an eye for art, but when a painting looked like the scene down
the road and made her think she was standing there, feeling the
leaves rustling by, smelling the fresh cut grass, hearing the birds
singing in the trees and the ducks quacking on the pond, the whole
set-up, that, to her, was talent.

And, of course, there’d been his fairytale
marriage. But then, sadly, his wife had died suddenly and he’d
moved out of their home, turned the reins of his company over to
his brother, and put down his paint brushes.

Yes, Jolie had known
exactly
who she’d
be working for. That’d been half the incentive.

“
So, new girl, do you have a name?
And what are you doing here today?”

Since he was talking, she assumed it was safe
to turn around.

The old adage about making an “ASS out of U
and ME” proved true.

Although he was the one with the A-S-S. And
what a nice one it was. As was the muscled shoulder leaning against
the stainless steel of the microwave above the stove, and the
ninety-degree jut of his jaw line, the sculpted cheekbones, a
perfectly proportioned brow, the fall of hair over his
forehead…

She tore her gaze away from the visual
smorgasbord and, traitors that they were, her eyes headed
south.

Thank goodness he had the dish towel spread
across his nether regions like a loincloth. But a hot guy in a
loincloth was just as distracting as a naked hot guy. And she’d
seen him in both. Or not in both. Whatever.

She ordered her eyes back on the pan. “Um yes,
I do have a name, and as to what I’m doing here, I think that’s
obvious—burning the butter for your morning omelet.” She raised the
pan to illustrate and managed a quick push with her hip to get him
to back away from the stove so she could start cooking again,
praying all the while she wasn’t hitting something
vital.

Luckily, the guy had quick reflexes—or a good
hunch—’cause he stepped out of the way before her hip came anywhere
close to anything important, saving them the extreme embarrassment
of
that
.

“
How’d you get in?” Mr.
Clothing-Optional asked.

Okay, what was the protocol here? How long did
one actually have to converse with a buck-naked human being before
someone said something about it? Or did a strategically placed
dishtowel negate all observances of nudity?

“
Look, um,
Mister
.” What did
one call their bare boss? Todd? Sir?
Big guy
? “How ’bout you
go freshen up a bit and I’ll make breakfast. We can have our chat
when we’re both, um, well, prepared for the day. ’Kay?”

“
Fine. I’ll get dressed. Then we’ll
talk.”

“
You do that.”

As he sauntered—okay, maybe that was her
overactive imagination, because could one
really
saunter
with a Jim Beam-sized hangover?—from the fourteen-foot-ceiling
kitchen with its state-of-the-art appliances that looked as if
they’d come out of their packing boxes yesterday, so stainless
steel shiny she could have used them as a mirror to fix her
lipstick—if she’d worn lipstick—and she inhaled enough oxygen to
jump-start primordial ooze.

Which posed a whole new set of problems for
this job. How was she supposed to focus if she kept getting
sidetracked by the physical?

But she would.

She could.

Heck, if she could outwit social workers and
manage to keep her teenaged self out of the gutter, not to mention,
actually
make
something of her life, she could certainly
keep her own libido in check.

She had to. Her job, her livelihood, and all
her dreams depended on it.

***

Each step up the goddamned grandiose stairway
reverberated through Todd’s skull, setting his teeth on edge and
his stomach roiling. Why the hell hadn’t the builder put carpet on
these stairs?