Jack and Djinn

by Amber Sweetapple

  Miriam’s passion for Jack was roused even hotter by that answer, by the sweetness inherent in it, and by the obvious truth of it. Ben hadn’t truly wanted her, not ever. But Jack did, and that made all the difference. Miriam made a decision, then: she pushed Ben from her mind, erased all thoughts of him, all comparisons of Jack to him, buried him completely in the past. She wouldn’t forget him, not entirely, because he would always provide a reminder of how perfect Jack was. She knew he wasn’t actually perfect. She knew there would be times he would make her mad, and he would annoy her in some way, but even those worst of times with Jack would be minuscule in comparison to the best moments with Ben.

  She breathed deep of Jack’s presence, smelling him, feeling him tangled skin to skin with her, his eyes drooping and his lips pressed against her shoulder as he drifted off to sleep.

  * * *

  An infinite time later, and Jack was next to her, snoring lightly, one arm thrown across her stomach. Late-afternoon sunlight streamed through the window above her bed, turning the dusting of stubble across Jack’s jaw to flecks of gold.

  Miriam smiled, running her fingers on his jawline, admiring the hard lines and soft contours of his face, relaxed in sleep. She didn’t want to move, feeling an almost overwhelming contentment in the moment. She couldn’t remember anything, suddenly. Her entire life up until that moment in bed with Jack was a haze and distant memory. She closed her eyes and brought up a memory of the night before, feeling the sparrow wings of desire flutter in her stomach.

  Jack stirred, rubbed an eye with his palm and glanced at Miriam. “Mmmm, it was real?” He mumbled.

  Miriam laughed and burrowed closer to him. “Yes, it was real. Should it not have been real?”

  “No, I mean, yes—argh! I don’t make sense without coffee.” Jack slipped his knee between her legs, ran a hand along the line of her body from knee to breast and back down to her hip, where it came to rest. “I may have dreamed about you, a few times. I always woke up afterwards, and it was always a dream. This time I woke up, and it was real. That’s what I mean.”

  “Oh. You dreamed about me? Really?” Miriam said.

  “Uh-huh,” Jack grunted his answer, kissing her neck where it met her breastbone and slipped downward to her breasts, kissing in quick soft pecks the skin underneath her breast, first one and then the other, his fingers splaying across her nipples as they hardened, rubbing his legs against hers. Miriam arched her back, pressed herself against him, luxuriating in his lips against her flesh.

  “What kind of dreams?” she asked, reaching down to caress the tip of him, the length of him, delighting in the way he gasped softly and pressed himself into her hand.

  Jack didn’t answer, not with words. He rolled over on top of her, and showed her.

  Turn the page for a sneak preview of

  Djinn and Tonic

  the second book in

  The Houri Legends Series

  by

  Amber Sweetapple

  coming soon

  Djinn and Tonic (sample chapter)

  Chapter 1: A Breath of Wind

  Detective Carson Hale wasn’t sure how he ended up at The Old Shillelagh, a highball of gin and tonic in his hand, watching replays of the Tigers beating the Rockies. He had left the station, but hadn’t gone home. He was watching the game, but not really seeing. The game was on, and it provided a distraction. He was trying not to think about the case. Or, as Carson thought of it in his own mind, The Case. It was one he’d not forget any time soon. Miriam stuck in his head, somehow. Not like he was attracted to her in a sexual way, it wasn’t that. She was beautiful, sure, but it just wasn’t there, and she was with Jack, anyway. There was something about her that kept Carson thinking. How could he just let it all go? Just write off the murder of a man as…what? It wasn’t self-defense, Miriam had admitted that herself. Defense of Jack. Or, more accurately, revenge. She’d killed Ben because he’d shot Jack. Two to the chest, she’d said. You didn’t survive that kind of injury, you just didn’t. A sucking chest wound was, by all accounts, one of the most painful ways to die, next to being gutshot. Miriam had been both. But that wasn’t really right either. According to their account, Miriam had been shot in the stomach, and then somehow taken Jack’s wounds into herself. Which, if that was at all believable–or rather, true, since Carson wasn’t sure he believed any of this–meant that she had had four gunshot wounds, chest and stomach, and she’d survived. Either she was inhumanly tough, or she healed like Wolverine. There was no other explanation.

  Carson finished his first drink, raised the glass and clinked the ice at the bartender–what was her name? Leila? Yes, Leila. That was it. There she came, highball half-filled with ice, a bottle of Bombay Sapphire tipping to pour a generous two fingers-worth. She smiled at Carson, a quick, flirting glance.

  “Start a tab?” She asked.

  “Yeah, sure,” Carson answered. “Thanks.”

  “You seem preoccupied,” she said, by way of making conversation. She leaned on the bar in front of Carson, toying with a book of matches. Her T-shirt was a low-cut V-neck, and when she leaned over, Carson found it hard to keep his gaze from straying to her spilling cleavage. Carson had spent enough time in bars and on patrol to know the various ways women leaned over. He’d categorized them: there was the absent-minded lean, in which the woman was simply assuming a natural, comfortable position, not realizing or not caring about how she was displaying herself; then there was the flirt-lean, where she was more aware of the spillage, but not necessarily trying to accentuate it; last was the overt seduction-lean, where she squeezed her arms underneath her breasts to prop them up and leaned over so they all but spilled out. Carson was pretty sure Leila was somewhere between the first two.

  They way she was looking at him and her body language hinted at flirtation, but certainly not seduction. He was kind of glad for that, actually. He’d been seduced on any number of occasions, mostly women trying to get out of a ticket or DUI arrest, the occasional witness hoping to sway the outcome of an investigation, and sometimes just a drunk badge-chaser. The ones who seduced, he’d found, were not the kind of girls he was interested in, at least not long-term. He’d like to say that he’d turned them all down, but he hadn’t. Not all of them. He never took favors on the job, he drew the line at that, but if a girl threw herself at him off the job, what was the harm?

  Carson realized he’d never answered Leila. “Sorry, yeah,” he said. “I guess I am a bit preoccupied, at that.”

  Leila laughed at him. “Delayed reaction, much? I’d started to wonder if you hadn’t heard me.”

  “No, I heard you, I was just…”

  “Lost in la-la land?” Leila teased. “It’s okay. I imagine your job takes up a lot of brain space.”

  “You have no idea,” Carson said. “Today especially though.” The bar was dead, Carson one of only three patrons in the place, so Leila had time to chat. Carson didn’t mind. She was a beautiful girl, tall and willowy with thick black hair tied back in a neat ponytail and wide, dark eyes that held a world of expression. She seemed to like him, and that made it even better. Carson could use a distraction.

  Leila grimaced, somehow making the expression look attractive. “You must see a lot of unpleasant stuff, huh?”

  Carson finished his drink, and Leila poured him a third without asking. “Yeah,” Carson said. “Part of the job, I guess. Most of it I can forget, some I can’t. Some things people just aren’t meant to see.”

  “I bet. So is that what’s preoccupying you? A bad case or whatever? I hope I’m not being too nosy.”

  “Not at all. And yeah, sort of. It’s not one of those gruesome ones that’ll give you nightmares, just a…confusing one. I’m not sure what to believe, you know?” Leila just nodded, her attention fully focused on him. She had her chin propped on a palm, listening, watching him. Carson found himself talking about the case out loud, which he knew he shouldn’t do with a random bartender, but Leila seemed different somehow, trustw
orthy. And the gin was clouding his judgment enough that he didn’t care, at the moment.

  She was pouring them stiff, more gin than tonic or ice, and Carson wasn’t protesting. He heard himself telling her about Miriam, how odd things were, how so many elements to the case seemed unbelievable, if not impossible.

  “Unlikely, sure,” Leila said, “but impossible? Didn’t we talk about impossibilities before? From what you’re telling me, this isn’t one or two odd little things. It’s several big things, almost too big too ignore, or to pretend it’s not what it looks like.”

  Carson nodded and drank. “Yeah, that’s what part of me says too. And I shouldn’t be talking about this with you.”

  “I won’t tell anyone. Promise.” Leila said, smiling.

  “Better not. But if something goes against everything you know to be true? What then?” Carson felt himself slurring a little. He should slow down on the drinks, but he didn’t want to. He liked the warm muzziness, the gentle floating of his mind. He didn’t feel as uptight about the whole business. Leila was easy to talk to, and easy on the eyes. It was past 2 in the morning at this point, and the last customer was walking out the door.

  Leila considered before answering. “Well, it depends, I guess. If you can’t deny it, if it’s just there and obvious, despite the apparent ‘truth’ of things, then you can’t really keep insisting on what you think is true, can you? I mean, isn’t that just being obstinate? There’s so much about this world and about life that we can’t see, you know? Just because we haven’t seen something before doesn’t make it impossible, does it?”

  Leila came around from behind the bar and started lifting chairs onto tables. Carson stood up to help her, a little more unstable on his feet than he’d expected to be. Leila rolled her eyes, pushed him back to his stool and sat him down. Her hands on his back were warm, the feeling of her touching him electric, sending thrills through him. He wanted her to keep her hands on him, but she moved away to finish putting up the chairs.

  “Yeah, you’re right,” Carson said. “But that doesn’t make it any easier to accept what you’ve always thought was impossible.” Leila was back behind the bar, wiping bottles with a rag, turning off the TV. Carson watched her move, admiring the easy grace of her motions. She was light on her feet, every step smooth, every twist of her body as she performed the closing ritual flowing into the next. There was something airy about her, Carson thought. The idea seemed odd, even to Carson as he thought it, but it stuck with him as true. She moved as if blown by a secret wind, like she was a leaf. She had a dancer’s body, he realized. Maybe that explained it. She was a dancer. She’d taken her hair out of its pony tail and was shaking it out to fall in glinting waves around her shoulders. But being a dancer didn’t explain the way her hair floated and fluttered as if blown by a breeze. There were no open doors, no windows, no fans, but her hair was definitely fluttering. That was the word, too, Carson thought. Fluttering.

  She was standing at the bar counting the register drawer, her hands peeling bills in quick, sure motions that spoke of years of practice; she was standing still, but her hair was moving. Carson felt himself repeating his thoughts, but he couldn’t help it. He was watching her, mesmerized, and he couldn’t deny what he was seeing. It was weird, all this talking about the case and Miriam and the strange facts, and now Leila was part of the mystery. He considered asking her about her hair, but the words wouldn’t coalesce in a way that didn’t sound stupid. ‘Excuse me, Leila, but your hair is being blown by a wind that doesn’t exist?’ That was…stupid.

  Carson finished his drink, handed his credit card to Leila and signed the slip with a sloppy signature, accepting one last drink. He’d lost count again. There may have been one or two that he’d drank so quickly he didn’t remember. Either way, the room was wobbling a little as Leila shut off the lights in the kitchen and locked the drawer in the office, sitting down next to Carson with a styrofoam cup of Coke. Carson could smell rum in the Coke and on her breath. She was sitting close to him, her shoulder brushing his, her thigh nudging his as she bounced her knee absently. He was aware of every point of contact between them; her presence grounded him, in some indefinable way, kept the spinning world centered.

  “So, what are you going to do?” She asked, toying with a matchbook. She lit a match, watched it burn down toward her fingertips. Before it could burn her fingers, it puffed out as if blown by a wind.

  “I don’t know. Legally, technically, what she did was manslaughter. She should’ve reported Ben to the authorities and let them deal with him. But, as one of the authorities, by the time she did that, there’s no telling where he would’ve gone. He might’ve disappeared before we could catch him, and honestly, there’s too many other cases to investigate that I doubt we’d spend much time chasing him. I investigated his death, but along the way he turned out to be an asshole who deserved what he got.”

  Carson drained the last of his drink, chewing an ice cube as he spoke. “I know what I should do, according the most correct definition of my job, but I just don’t think I can. I became a cop to get justice for people. There were other reasons, but that was one of them. Miriam did the only thing she could do in those circumstances, and I just can’t make myself arrest her for it. It’s like…ethics versus morals, you know?”

  Leila nodded, bumped her shoulder against his. “Hey, all you can do is what you think is right, you know? For what it’s worth, I think you’re making the right choice.”

  “Thanks. That does help, actually. My partner took the weekend off to go up to Traverse City with her boyfriend, and I’ve been investigating alone.”

  “She left you in the middle of an investigation?” Leila asked, surprised.

  “Yeah. I told her to go, though. It wasn’t a hard investigation, or one that looked like it was going to get messy or anything. She had this trip planned for weeks, had reservations and everything. Her boyfriend is an executive with Chrysler, so he doesn’t take many weekends away, you know? I couldn’t make her stay when I was pretty sure I’d be able to handle it alone. Besides, there’s other detectives I could’ve called if I’d needed help. But then, the further in I got with this case, the weirder it got, and the less I was inclined to bring anyone else in.”

  “So you’re gonna close the case?” Leila had a ring on her right hand that she twisted absently. It looked like a keepsake of some kind. It looked like something had emotional value to Leila, and Carson found himself wondering what the story was. He remembered the first time he’d met her, the way she’d paused before answering, and how much of a story he’d sensed there.

  “Yeah, I guess I am. I’ll tell the Captain it’s a cold case, that there’s not enough to go on. And technically, there’s not. There’s no physical evidence tying Miriam to Ben’s death, and even if there might be plenty of motive, there’s no way to make a charge stick, I don’t think. It would waste everyone’s time and money, and just cause more trouble for Miriam. And she’s had enough of that.”

  “Good,” Leila, said. “I’m glad.”

  Carson hesitated for a moment, then asked, “So…what’s your story? You said you needed a fresh start, so you came here. What’s all that about?”

  Leila glanced at him, took a deep breath, as if wishing he hadn’t asked that. “Oh, it’s a long story. Not very interesting, if you weren’t there.”

  “Oh, you never know what I’d be interested in.” Carson reached over the counter, grabbed the soda gun and filled his glass with water. “I’m interested in you, for example.” Oh god, he hadn’t meant to say that. He drank his water to cover his flush of embarrassment. Leila had turned on her stool, regarding him with several emotions written plainly on her face: surprise, embarrassment, curiosity, maybe a little fear.

  “You are, huh?” She said, a slight smile on her lips, chewing on her straw. Curiosity was winning, apparently.

  Carson laughed, an awkward chuckle. “Yeah, that just kind of slipped out. But it’s true enough.”

&nbs
p; “A Freudian slip? What else are you thinking about me that you’re not saying?” She had inched over on her stool so she was just at the edge of his personal space. Carson hoped he was reading her body language right. He wanted to believe she was expressing interest back.

  “Oh…I don’t know,” he said. “You’re hot.” Shit, he thought. That didn’t come out right.

  Leila laughed, an infectious, musical sound that made him not feel less stupid. “Is that right? Keep going.” She crossed one leg over the other, facing him.

  “Um…” there were a lot of things going through his mind. Her lips looked soft, a slight glimmer of lip gloss on them, making him wonder what her lips tasted like. He’d just met her, of course. It would be reckless to say that. “I’m wondering what flavor lip gloss you have on. What your lips taste like.” Carson heard himself speaking the words as they entered his mind. “God, I have no filters, suddenly,” he said.

  Leila arched an eyebrow. “Filters are a nuisance anyway,” she said. Was it Carson’s imagination, or was she leaning in to him, ever so slightly? “I’ve always believed in saying what you mean.”

  Carson was tipping toward her, thinking how ridiculous it was to be considering kissing a girl he’d met a handful of times. “Yeah? So what are you thinking? Now that I’ve embarrassed myself.”

  “Oh, so it’s my turn?” Leila was definitely closer than she had been a moment ago. Her wide eyes were inches from his, sparkling with amusement, and secrets, and something he wanted to believe was desire. “You haven’t embarrassed yourself at all. I’m glad you can say what you’re thinking.”

  “You’re avoiding my question,” Carson said. Leila was sitting facing him, her feet on the rungs of his stool between his legs. His hands were on her knees, and she wasn’t pulling away.