Thin Air Page 0,131

Jersey bellow, barely contained by the phone's speaker. I held the phone farther from my ear. "Oh, hi, Paul," I said. "So, how's the fire going?"

"The fire is going fine, and you need to quit screwing around. You are not on duty. I have coverage on the damn fire, and you need to stop-"

"Helping you? Because three days is kind of a long-"

"Kid. Stop already. We're on top of it!"

"Let me talk to Lewis." Lewis being the only guy in the entire Wardens organization who had the right to tell me what to do, a fact that had made me a little smug and-yes, I could admit it-a little insufferable.

"Lewis doesn't want to talk to you. Lewis wants me to tell you to butt out. Get it? You're on vacation. Vacate."

He hung up on me. I stared at the phone, surprised and a little wounded. David took it from my fingers, put it on the patio table behind me, and said, "I assume he told you your assistance isn't required. No, actually I don't assume that. I overheard."

"Eavesdropper."

"People three doors down heard it," he said. "Not a great feat of supernatural detection."

Busted. I glared at him for a second, but honestly, I couldn't stay angry at David. Especially when he gave me that look.

But I glanced toward the fire again, anyway, and I heard him sigh. "Jo. Let go. I know how hard it is for you, but you need to let other people handle their jobs."

"Three days!" I said, pointing an accusing finger toward the smoke. "Come on, you don't think they could have been a little more aggressive about it?"

"You know as well as I do that sometimes managing a fire is more important than putting it out," he said, and stepped between me and my view of the conflagration. Not that he wasn't, you know, burning hot. Because he definitely was, and I felt myself inevitably getting distracted.

"Stop that," I said. Not with a lot of strength.

"Stop what?" He reached for my hands, and I shivered as a breeze moved across my back, which was left mostly bare by the sky blue halter top I had on. Florida had been kind to me, for a change; lots of sun, lots of untroubled cloud-free beaches. It was as if the Wardens themselves had conspired to make my vacation uneventful, at least on the weather front.

And that had been okay, for the first couple of days. And then I'd gotten a little bit...bored.

Not that David couldn't make that go away; he was promising to, just with the gentle pressure of his fingers moving up my bare arms.

"Stop making me want you," I said. That got the eyebrows again, and a slightly wounded frown.

"Making you?"

"You know what I mean."

"No, I don't, actually. You think I'm manipulating you?"

"You're Djinn," I said. "Manipulating people is basically built into your DNA. But-I didn't mean that. I'm just-I'm sorry. I don't know what I'm thinking. I just-"

"You want to be taking action," he said. "Yes. I know."

"What I don't need is a vacation." I stepped back from David and dropped grumpily into a deck chair, stretching my long, bare legs out in front of me. The tan was coming along nicely. Great accomplishment. Everybody else is saving the world, you're golden-browning.

"Oh, I think you definitely do," David said, and draped himself over the other chair, curled toward me, chin propped on his fist. "I have never met anyone who needed to learn to relax more than you."

And that was saying a lot. I still didn't have any clear idea of how old David really was, only that his birth date was so far back in history that the idea of calendars had been newfangled. He'd been around, my lover.

The fact that he was hanging around here, letting me be bitchy to him, was kind of amazing, now that I thought about it.

Before I could apologize to him, the phone rang again. I picked up the cordless extension, pressed the button and said, "Yes?"

A businesslike voice on the other end said, "May I speak with Joanne Baldwin?"

"Speaking." I rolled my eyes at David. Another attempt to sell me flood insurance or steel hurricane shutters. I readied the I'm in an apartment speech, which usually served to put a stop to these things.

"Ms. Baldwin, hello, my name is Phil Garrett. I'm an investigative reporter with The New York Times. I'd like to speak with you about the organization known as the Wardens."

I blinked, and my expression