Oracle's Moon (Elder Races #4)(104)

“As you wish.”

She turned in his arms, clutching his waist as the cyclone took her.

Khalil rematerialized them in the guest bedroom they were using at Isalynn’s house. As soon as the ground had firmed underneath her feet, Grace turned away, took three dizzy steps and collapsed on the bed.

“Kiiiick in the head,” she said into a pillow.

The bedsprings creaked as Khalil sat beside her. He rubbed one of her legs.

“I love you like crazy,” he whispered.

Her breath caught. Like crazy. Yes, that was how she felt too. Crazy outside of herself, like when they had made love and she literally left her body. She reached behind to grip his hand. His long fingers closed over hers, hard.

“What you did with my father—that was bloody magnificent, Grace. Few creatures have been able to face Soren down like that and win.”

“I did have something of an inside scoop,” she said. “And forty or fifty Djinn to back me up.”

For a while on Sunday, the visions of possible futures had never left her. Then they had passed as the Oracle’s moon had passed, leaving her anchored where she belonged, in the here and now. But she still remembered some of those possibilities, glittering strange horizons she hardly dared to contemplate.

She sensed him leaning over her, an impression of bulk and strength. Something happened, a tight compression of Power, like when he had pulled all of his rage into himself, only this compression was deeper and harder, a diamond being pressed out of thin air.

Frowning, she lifted herself up on her elbows and started to turn over. He pressed a kiss to her shoulder blade. The sensation lingered on her skin after he lifted his mouth away.

“Promise me something,” she said.

He traced the hairline at the nape of her neck lightly with the tip of one finger. “Anything you like.”

“Don’t change,” she said. “Not permanently, not without talking to me first.”

His finger stilled. He said nothing.

This time she did turn onto her back.

While he was still dressed in the same T-shirt and jeans from that morning, he wore his human skin again, those regal, elegant features with the touch of beard along his lean jaw, and the trace of laugh lines at the corners of his muted eyes and unsmiling mouth. His long hair was loose, still shining and black, but indefinably different. She put a hand to his chest, and there was the blaze of his Power, hidden deeply inside his body like a gleaming pearl.

She reached up to touch those amazing laugh lines. He shuddered and closed his eyes, turning his face into her palm.

“Promise,” she said. “Khalil, you have the ability to fall into flesh, but a goddess in a dream told me I can leave my body again if I want to badly enough.”

His eyes flared open. He stared at her, tension in every line of his massive body. He put his hand around her throat, his thumb caressing the line of her jaw. “‘What will a mortal do with an immortal Power?’” he breathed.

She lifted her shoulder and said awkwardly, “Well, it was just a dream. I don’t know if it could really happen. We need to take time to experiment with all of this. All I know is I don’t want to try to become something different from the kids while they’re growing up, because they’re never going to be able to change, and they deserve the best human life I can give them.”

“They deserve you alive,” Khalil said. “Gods—if you could change, you would be stronger, harder to kill.” He swallowed hard. “You’re all so fragile.”

“That’s part of what being human is,” she said. “We’re pretty damn tough, too. Besides…” She smiled. “I’m perfectly safe, remember? I’ve got you. I’ve always got you.”

“Please always stay mine,” he whispered.

“Always.”

She stroked her hand down his back, and he arched and shuddered. He reached behind him, bicep flexing, and grasped his T-shirt to pull it over his head.

Oh, my God, he had a sprinkle of dark hair on his chest. She ran her palm over it. It was as silken as it looked. He stared at her in naked surprise, and there was the hunger again, washing over her in a sheet of flame.

“Take everything off,” she hissed.

He arched away from her to tear off his jeans. She had meant to do the same; she really had. But the sight of Khalil’s nude body as he flexed free of his clothing tore almost every coherent thought out of her mind.

Except two. The same—different—the same—they were like two sides of a coin flipping in midair. She saw her lover in every line of Khalil’s body, but the newness of his more humanlike form made him almost a stranger. Silken black hair arrowed down his long stomach to his genitals and sprinkled long, muscle-corded thighs. His testicles had drawn up tight under a taut, large erection. She stared at the broad mushroom head and thick length of his beautiful penis.

He turned to her and growled in frustration. “You were supposed to take your clothes off too.”

She gave him a stricken look and whimpered, “I forgot.”

Laughter and affection creased his lean face before his expression turned sensual and wicked. “Do not trouble yourself in the slightest,” he murmured. “I will help you.”

He stretched his long body beside her and eased the buttons of her shirt open one by one. She could not stop staring at him everywhere. That cock. She took hold of the warm, hard length in both greedy hands.