Firestorm Page 0,31

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,