The Accidental Genie (20 page)

Nekaar put a finger on his phone and dragged it toward them. He clicked the screen on and pointed to its face. “This is why, madam.”

Jeannie read yet another Facebook post, pausing before nodding in defeat. Of course.

She let her head fall to her arms on the table.

Oh, woe was the life of this djinn.

She tucked her chin into her palms, her next words muffled when she addressed the Facebook post. “Kidnapped?”

“It is so, madam. Our Grand Poo-Bah, our great leader of the Realm has been absconded with.”

So much shiny.

*   *   *

A
FTER
her chat with Nekaar, his promise to teach her how to fix the damage she’d done at the bridal store and the burger joint, and Darnell, Wanda, and Casey’s Surprise, You’re Expecting reconnaissance mission, they’d all gone to bed heavy of heart and with no answers.

As she lay in bed, Mat in the living room with Benito and Boris, and Sloan on her bedroom floor, and after the devastating revelation from Nekaar, she made an impulsive choice. One she didn’t allow herself to think about for long before she said, “Sloan?” Jeannie leaned over the side of her bed, placing her cheek on the edge and straining to see his sharp features in the dark. Then she closed her eyes.

“Jeannie?”

“Will you have sex with me?”

His silence made her want to spork her eyes out in humiliation. She’d summoned up the courage to just blurt it out, and he was staring at her as if she’d just asked him to do the closest thing to death.

Her world had narrowed even more today. It was time to take control of something, namely, how attracted she was to Sloan. Hesitant, but still attracted.

“I don’t think you’re ready for this jelly,” he quipped, smiling at her from the floor.

She ignored his Beyoncé joke. “So will you?”

“Are you going to hurl dollar bills at me next?”

“Forget it.” She flopped back on the mattress, her cheeks hot.

Sloan’s head shot up. He peered at her over the edge of her bed, his blue eyes twinkling. “Hold on there, pardner. Where is this coming from?”

It was coming from her long-ignored hormones. “I’m not sure.”

His eyes narrowed in twinkling suspicion. “Oh, you’re sure, Jeannie. Don’t bullshit the bullshitter.”

“Okay. I know where it’s coming from. Does my knowing where it’s coming from really make a difference?”

He flicked her fingers playfully. “Yep. It does.”

She pulled the covers over her head. “Why?”

“Because it does. So talk or I walk.” Sloan poked his head beneath the comforter and pointed to the door by way of threat.

Jeannie uncovered her head, though her eyes still couldn’t meet his. “This is a very uncomfortable conversation for me to have. You don’t need to know my motives to have sex with me, do you?” Were motives all the rage in one-night stands? She’d always thought there was only one. Sex.

“This is an uncomfortable conversation for
you
?” Sloan scratched his head. “Huh. You just propositioned me and
you’re
uncomfortable?”

Her face was getting redder by the second. “I figured you wouldn’t be offended. You do it all the time, and I’m sure there are plenty of bold blondes out there who’ve propositioned you. Turnabout and all.”

He paused for a moment, giving her a thoughtful look. “This is about my being pretty, right?” Sloan let out a mocking dramatic sigh. “I know, I know. I’m irresistible, charming, fun, fun, fun, but I’m not just pretty, you know,” he teased, tracing the tip of her nose with his finger, making her shiver.

“I know that.” She did. He had a job as something or other of marketing at Pack, yada, yada, yada. He was smart
and
pretty. Point taken.

“So then, answer the question. Where is this coming from?” he drilled.

Jeannie shook her head. “Why does this have to be so deep? Why don’t you just answer my question and stay out of my psyche?”

“Because I’m not that kind of guy.”

Jeannie rolled her eyes at him and flicked his knuckles. “Oh, you are, too. You’re exactly that guy. That’s why I asked you. Or did you forget Tootsie Pop?”

He chuckled and leaned closer to her, their lips but inches apart, his warm breath fanning her face. “It’s
Lollipop
, and I didn’t have sex with her. Not once.” He said it with such conviction it was as if he’d placed his hand on a Bible.

“Oh, but there have been plenty of others by your own admission. Did you ask them where their motivations lay?”

He grinned all white and pretty. “Nope.”

How unfair. “So why are mine so important?”

“Do you want me to list the reasons?”

Jeannie’s eyes widened. Did she? “Yeah. Yeah, I do.”

“Let me count them.” He held up three fingers and ticked them off. “Nina, Marty, Wanda. That’s just for starters. Add in Casey, Darnell, Heath, Clayton, Greg, and Keegan and we have a red carpet of reasons.”

She let out an exasperated sigh. “They don’t have to know. We’ll be quiet. Er, won’t we? I mean, is sex with you a loud affair? Never mind. We can keep it on the down low. Do you tell them about every encounter you have? Because if you do, that’s just creepy and we can call this a no-go.”

Sloan’s expression went from light and playful to ultraserious. “No. No, I don’t. Which is why they think I still have them.”

Jeannie’s eyes purposely widened again, this time in mock shame. “You don’t have sex with random women anymore? The stripper community weeps.”

“I don’t have sex period.”

She snorted so hard, it hurt her throat. “That was a joke, right?”

“No. It wasn’t a joke at all. I’ve been celibate for almost a year.”

How convenient. “Because?”

He smiled again, all Cheshire cat–like. “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”

Jeannie’s shoulders sagged back into the pillow in defeat. She wanted to stomp her feet in two-year-old protest. Instead she slapped her comforter. “You’ve just ruined everything.”

“How do you figure?” He ran his finger down the length of her nose, making her limbs warm and so buttery Jeannie had to remember she was angry with him for suddenly being celibate.

“Because you’re the only man I’ve been in close proximity to in several years that I’m semi-comfortable with—you have all your teeth—and you bang your gong at regular intervals without looking back. All that no-regrets thing. You remember, right? The thing I so admired about you?
Still
admire about you, but everyone else seems to hate?”

“Aha! So what you’re saying is I’m an easy mark because I played the field.”

“Yes!” She jabbed a finger into the air to punctuate her point. “And let’s not be coy. They named the field after you. And now you’ve ruined everything. How dare you be celibate, Sloan Flaherty.” She shook her finger at him. “I feel like you did this just to spite me.” Or maybe he was just lying to keep from hurting her feelings . . . God, that would suck. If she couldn’t get the man who’d sleep with Satan to sleep with her, she might as well just forget foraging the veils for her hunky genie soul mate.

But Sloan interrupted her thoughts with a very serious statement. “I did it because my life needed to change.”

“Why?” Why did it need to change when she needed it not to change?

“I’m not answering why until you answer why. You brought the dirty up first. You tell me why you suddenly want to have sex when, if I get even a little too close to you, you all but run away from me. Talk or forget it.”

She was just going to be honest. He didn’t need to know the whys and wherefores, just that they were. “Sometimes when I’m caught off guard, I panic a little. More importantly, intimacy is difficult for me, really difficult for me. But I’ve worked long and hard to get it together and—and . . .”

He folded his arms under his chin and shot her a playful smile. “I guess you haven’t worked hard enough.”

“What?”

“A one-night stand does not intimacy make, Jeannie. It’s meaningless, and I don’t have meaningless sex anymore.”

“That’s so unfair.”

“I didn’t make that choice just to piss you off. I made it for a reason, and I made it long before I met you.”

“I’m still considering it was just to spite me. I just thought . . .”

He gave her a knowing smile, the muscles of his biceps flexing when he shook his finger at her. “I know what you thought. You thought, because I was a real chick hustler, I’d require very little of you when I was done banging my gong. No fuss, no muss. Then you could run right back to the cave you hide in that keeps you from having a relationship.”

B-I-N-G-O. “Yes!” Yes, yes,
yessss.

“Well, guess what, Jeannie Carlyle? Not gonna happen. It’s obvious you have issues with intimacy. You have clear issues with men in general, judging by the way you cringe if I so much as brush against you when you don’t see it coming. And FYI, I hate it. I want to annihilate whoever made you feel like this. It’s keeping you from a lot of pretty great things. But guess what else? No can do. If you don’t want to share with me what made you so afraid, if you think I’m somehow unworthy of your trust, you’re not gettin’ a piece of this.” He slapped his ass, sharp and jarring. His delicious, hard, tight, encased-in-boxer-briefs ass.

“Is it because I’m not blonde?”

“It’s because I want making love to you to count.”

Jeannie’s breath caught in her throat and her stomach tingled. “So you’ve thought about it?” His honesty made her feel less like she was a desperate Sloan groupie and more like she was on equal footing with him.

Sloan nodded his dark head, reaching for her fingers. “Oh, you bet your sweet genie ass. I’ve thought about it every night since I met you.”

“Which is all of two nights.”

“That’s a lot in One-night Stand-ville,” he teased, his breath fanning her face.

Her throat began to constrict. Fear. Effin’ fear controlled everything she did, said, thought. But she just couldn’t. Not yet . . . “I can’t talk about it, Sloan. I just can’t.”

“And I can’t be your one-night stand,” he drawled with finality.

She stuck her tongue out at him. “You so suck right now.”

Sloan caught the tip of it and chuckled, the gesture somehow intimate. “Back atcha.”

“I can’t believe you went and got morals. Did you shop online for them?”

“I can’t believe you went and forgot yours.”

“Maybe I never had them.”

“Maybe you’re a liar.”

“I chose you because I thought it would be uncomplicated, and I could trust you to be gentle with me.”

His eyes narrowed and his jaw clenched. “Oh, you
can
trust me to be gentle with you. I’d never hurt you, Jeannie.
Never.
I’m going to assume the animal that did this to you really did some number on you, but I’m not an animal, despite my origins. I’m also unavailable for one night.”

“Would you consider two if I like it?” Her grin was mischievous even if her bravado was shaky.

“Two’s still closer to one than I’d like. And make no mistake, Jeannie. You’ll like it.”

She shivered in response to his confident words, tucking her chin to the bed to keep its trembling hidden. “I can’t know that unless you let me try it out for myself,” she taunted, letting herself run her fingers over his forearm.

He caught them and brought them to his lips, whispering a kiss over her fingertips. A hot, promising kiss. “Or unless you tell me what happened to you, and we work through it—together.”

She just didn’t understand. “You hardly know me. Why is what you think happened to me so important to you?”

“I don’t know.” His eyes pierced hers for a moment, and she was suddenly grateful it was dark in the room. “I just know that’s how it has to be with you, or it can’t be at all.”

“How definitive.”

Sloan smiled, obviously pleased with himself. “Yeah.”

“So are you proud of yourself for turning temptation down?”

“I’ll probably be in the shower later regretting that I turned temptation down, but for now, I’m feeling pretty good about it.”

“I feel like an idiot.”

“How long did it take you to work up the courage to ask?”

“Does the time frame matter?”

“Not really.”

“It was a little impulsive on my part. In fact, it was a lot impulsive. I don’t typically make decisions without thinking them through a hundred times over. So thanks for crushing my first attempt at impulsivity,” she teased.

But Sloan’s expression was serious. “I’m not asking you that to humiliate you, Jeannie. I’m asking because I want to know how long it took for you to be comfortable enough to do it.”

She didn’t know if she’d ever be totally comfortable in an intimate setting or requesting intimacy, but semi-comfortable wouldn’t upset her. Yet, even though she’d been turned down, she wanted to pat herself on the back and call her therapist to tell her she’d finally taken a chance. “Comfortable? Nothing about this rejection is comfortable.”

He shook his head again, his luscious lips pursed. “I’m not rejecting you. I’m
requiring
you to give me something more of yourself. If and when we make love, Jeannie, I want you to enjoy every nasty, dirty, sweaty, hot moment of it, and I want you to do it because you want something more than just some relief from a long stretch of lonesome. I’m not a guinea pig. I’m a man who’s interested in making love to a woman. A woman who wants more than just a dip of her frightened toes back in the intimacy pool only to yank them out if the water gets too rough. I want a woman who wants to explore something deeper. You’re that woman. If you decide you want to join me in a venture like that—I won’t be far away.”

Her heart raced at his words. Words she was inclined to believe and she couldn’t quite figure why they were so believable, coming from a player like Sloan. “I don’t want anything serious, Sloan. I
can’t
get involved. I just wanted to attempt to reenter a world I haven’t dabbled in for a long time with someone I’ve come to like. Someone who isn’t or wasn’t afraid to be honest about who he is . . . Uh, was.”

He cupped her jaw, making her want to curl her cheek into his warm palm. “Can’t or won’t, Jeannie?”