Chapter Three
Felicity knew this could not be real. There had to have been drugs in that bottle, and eventually she would wake up and reality would reassert itself.
Not that she knew what kind of drugs would conjure up something that was at once both wackadoo as fuck and real to every one of her five senses.
The sight of Dimitri’s muscles cording and flexing as he carried boxes into her trailer.
Words of praise in his silken voice as she toiled to finish her sorting and packing.
The salt tang of sweat dripping into the corner of her mouth as she worked.
Faint ghosts of perfume wafting along with the hallucino-genie’s every move.
Dusty cardboard and crumpled newsprint catching at her fingertips.
And that inexplicable pull she felt to Dimitri. Pheromones? Hormones? Genie-mones? Whatever it was, it felt like yet another of her senses. A sixth sense, but not the usual kind, not clairvoyance or I see dead people or any of that mystical shit. Something much more primal, more basic.
Whatever drugs had been in that bottle, they were clearly the good ones.
Either that, or she was suffering the effects of sleep-deprivation.
She’d spent weeks now staying up late at night working, then getting up at the crack of dawn to hit the various sales and auctions, filling the intervening time with roommate-hunting and managing her online shop listings.
Maybe she’d gotten so little sleep for so many nights that her demented brain had decided to give her a fun fantasy night, as a treat.
Which was actually a good trick. She knew lots of people who had experimented with drugs in college, and while that really hadn’t been her thing, sleep-deprivation really was.
It was about time she got some kind of benefit from it.
And watching Dimitri’s ass shifting under his silky poufy trousers was a hell of a benefit.
A-plus to her brain for dreaming it up. Her fantasy genie’s muscles were extremely well-defined, and his fancy red-and-gold belly dancing getup was clearly designed to show them all off.
She was pretty sure the outfit had exactly zero historical accuracy, but was she going to complain?
It wasn’t like her brain had a suggestion box. She was just going to have to accept Dimitri’s cabaret clothing and the delicious bronze skin it exposed.
Darn.
And she had to give her wacky brain credit.
Not only had it managed to invent a delicious vision of a man for her to drool over, but it also was pumping the vision full of subtle nuance.
Dimitri’s smile might not have wavered once since he’d appeared, but there were signs of repressed emotion hinting at more.
A jaw twitch. The way his mossy eyes widened and narrowed, piercing and burning in what might be fury or might be desire.
Maybe both. It was that attention to detail that had made her decide to play along for now.
Well, that and the mistress thing. That was neat.
She was ninety percent sure the dream was going to take a crappy turn any minute now—like him turning into a huge snake-demon right before she found out what was under those trousers—but she was going to enjoy it while she could.
And yet he didn’t turn into a snake-demon while she was getting her trailer loaded up.
He sat in the passenger seat of her decrepit SUV without question, fastening his seatbelt normally and watching the city pass as she drove.
At the dump and the community thrift store, he helped with the unloading, blandly smiling at the employees side-eyeing his getup.
And when she got home and backed her trailer into her allotted parking space, he gave every indication of following her up the sidewalk to her apartment, carrying the open box of glassware for her, his genie-drugs-bottle right at the top.
Exactly like an awesome sexy dream.
Or like a candid camera prank.
Or a serial killer.
And she suddenly felt cold. What if this isn’t a hallucination? What if this is a real man, in real poufy pants, and this is all an elaborate trick?
What the fuck am I doing?
Felicity turned to him abruptly. “I don’t actually live here.”
He raised a single eyebrow, though his smile remained.
“I chose this place, where I absolutely do not live, as a neutral ground. How about you tell me what’s really going on?”
Dimitri’s eyes glittered. Which was something she’d read about but never actually seen. How did his eyes actually seem to set off sparks? Especially in the crappy lighting of her cheap apartment complex?
“I have said it,” he said in that velvet baritone. “I am here to grant your every wish.”
“O-kay.” Felicity huffed out an irritated breath. “At least you know how to commit to the bit. What’s with the fancy pants?”
Dimitri somehow managed to move every muscle of his body in a sinuous wave, like a cat preening, without dropping the box. “I wear what is customary for my kind.”
“And what is your kind?”
“I am a genie, Mistress.” He set the box on the sidewalk and went down on one knee. “And I am yours to command.”
“Uh-huh.” Felicity folded her arms with a jerk before she did something really stupid involving her hands and his hair, because this was starting to feel icky. “Phenomenal cosmic power, itty-bitty living space?”
His eyes narrowed to slits. Still glittering. “Indeed. And you may ask anything of your slave.”
There it was. The icky turn. Because slavery was not at all sexy. “I don’t want a slave.”
He looked up at her, his expression unreadable. “A wish, then. Wish for anything you desire.”
“Anything?” She raised both her eyebrows—she couldn’t do just one. “You’re not even going to make me count to three?”
His lips quirked in what seemed to be actual amusement. “There is no limit on the number of wishes you make.”
“That’s...”
“Generous?”
“Sus.”
Dimitri managed to frown in confusion without losing his smile.
“Suspicious,” she clarified.
“Ah.” He shrugged. “And yet it is true.” His eyes glittered again, and he opened his arms expansively; she noted with interest that that showed off more of his chest, and while she was noticing things, his arms were pretty darn cut, too.
She liked a good set of arms. “For far too long I have been imprisoned in that bottle and then... Then you released me. I cannot say how much joy fills me in your presence.”
“And you want me to make a wish.”
“Yes,” he said fervently. “You may wish for anything.”
“Anything?”
“Anything.”
It was tempting. Felicity was poor and lonely and desperate, and it would be so cool to be able to wish all her problems away.
But even in a weird sleep-deprivation fantasy, she couldn’t forget that wishing was bad. She knew about the monkey’s paw. She’d watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Even Aladdin, sanitized for children as it had been, had taught its own lesson. One that was even genie-specific.
No, she couldn’t wish her troubles away, not even in a hallucination. It would turn into a nightmare. She just knew it.
But she kind of wanted to see how far her tired brain was willing to go. What would happen if she wished for something? She’d make it small, something that couldn’t be monkey’s-pawed too egregiously.
“I wish...” she said hesitantly. Dimitri leaned in attentively—or more attentively, since he had been nothing but attentive this whole time. “I wish I had a decaf salted caramel latte,” she finished. “Like they used to sell at Espresso Paradiso. Medium.”
Dimitri stood up straight, folded his arms, and gave a decisive nod of his head.
A coffee to-go cup appeared on the sidewalk in front of him. He knelt again and picked it up, offering it to her with his head bowed.
Felicity took it and tried a sip. Mmm, caramel. This really was a top-notch hallucination. She’d never found out the secret of her favorite coffee shop’s recipe, but the chain that had taken over their space when they’d shut down hadn’t been at all the same. Nowhere was.
Dimitri stayed on his knees, looking up at her, and she was tempted to ask for a foot massage—but again, that was the sort of thing that tended to lead to badness, or, well, that kind of fantasy, and she really should sleep, because the whole thing was really starting to wig her out.
“That’s it,” she said with a negligent wave of her hand.
“Good hallucination. You can go on home.” She leaned down and yanked the stopper out of the drug-bottle.
And Dimitri’s eyes blazed with what she would swear was fury as he morphed back into a cloud of red smoke that was sucked right back into the bottle.
“Bye-eee,” Felicity said as the last bit of smoke disappeared.
She worked the stopper in, good and tight, just in case, tucked the latte securely into the top of the open box, and then headed to her apartment to finish off her imaginary latte.
It really was tasty.
That bottle had definitely held the best drugs.
Dimitri rematerialized in the center of his bottle, fuming.
A latte. A gods-be-damned latte. How mundane. How unimaginative.
How frustrating to his plans.
Never mind that he held an instinctive disdain for the American style of coffee.
Dimitri wasn’t like Harold, who had drunk black drip coffee that could have peeled paint.
He adored coffee prepared properly. Slowly hand-ground.
Carefully simmered and spiced. Served with a tantalizing selection of honeyed sweets and scintillating conversation, perhaps continuing to kisses and caresses if all were willing.
He indulged privately when the whim took him, though it was not the same without company.
He’d never offered it to any of his masters, not even Harold. Had never wanted to.
Still didn’t want to, even if the latte he’d served up for his new mistress had made him itch with the way it suffered by comparison.
But the memory of long-ago kisses gave him an idea.
He would have to find a way to put it into practice.
With a sigh, Dimitri nodded his head, sending his couch away into the ether and summoning his bath. It had been dirty work, assisting his mistress with her mystifying boxes, and while he could magic the soil away, he much preferred to bathe.
He settled into the perfumed water and selected another romance novel. They were frightfully inaccurate as to genies, these books, but at least they held dialogue he could practice and suggestions to make himself irresistible. Thinner silk trousers. Pierced nipples. Coy gazes from a low angle.
Not to mention the naughty scenes, which had been quite the surprise.
He hadn’t delved into the genre since Harold had claimed him, and those stories had largely been about nurses and doctors and ended chapters at the bedroom door.
How things had changed! But he couldn’t be unhappy about them.
They were clearly a guide to the sexual expectations of today’s women.
Very useful indeed, should he succeed in his plans.
He’d taken some notes—apparently cunnilingus was now mandatory, which was not something he would complain about.
It was heady, feeling a woman’s ecstasy beneath his tongue, knowing he’d brought her to the peak of sensation.
More powerful than anything his magic could do.
His magic was not truly his, after all. Not while he was enslaved. He was powerless despite it, unable to change his destiny.
When he pleased a lover, that was his.
And unlike the genie women he’d occasionally pleasured, a human woman would be able to remove her clothes. The thought sent a wave of sharp arousal through him.
He hadn’t tasted a woman’s bare yoni since...
Ah, so long ago he couldn’t remember what it tasted like without the bitterness of damp silk diluting it. He could only remember that it had been delectable.
It would absolutely be his pleasure.
Of course, Dimitri couldn’t imagine such things happening with his guttersnipe of a mistress, but he would persevere. Encourage her to bathe. Perhaps offer to comb her tangled hair. She might clean up to be passably attractive. And he could always close his eyes, think of the freedom awaiting him.
If he succeeded.
He returned to his book, determined to find the secret to his new mistress’s heart.
Whatever her name was.