Three Wishes Read Online Free PDF Page A

windows and the front door he’d left ajar. Cali clicked her fingers, and for the mischief of it a fireworks chrysanthemum burst above the castle.
    David flinched. “I can see you.”
    She watched the firework drift and fade. Her own emotions settled into the same precarious peace.
    “Are you a djinni?” he demanded.
    Not used to being ignored, are you? Cali looked around, her smugness tinged with a question. Just where was Andrew? He ought to be on duty, working against her to protect his charge.
    Her gaze returned to David. He was physically attractive, lean where Andrew was broad, but still powerful and, she suspected, fast. The company he kept left no space for softness, physically or mentally. The angled lines of his face suited his ruthlessness. He had the merciless arrogance of a hawk.
    He moved abruptly, reaching for her, and she dematerialized on instinct. He grasped empty air, stumbled and swore.
    Andrew appeared in the open window.
    Cali glared. He was wet, his clothes plastered all too revealingly against his muscular body. Nor did she trust the gleam in his eyes or the satisfied curve to his mouth. She looked away and readjusted her pashmina. “I wasn’t going to push your precious David through.”
    “What?” David glanced around the room. He focused on Cali in the far corner. “You vanished.” He crossed over to his bed and took a gun from the bedside drawer. “Who were you talking to?”
    She pulled a face. “Your guardian angel.”
    The answer dumbfounded David. The muscles of his jaw loosened. “There’s another of you?”
    “No!” She repudiated the idea. “I’m not your guardian angel. I don’t wish you well.”
    David’s eyes narrowed and his jaw firmed. “You were responsible for the rock that damn near killed me. The Bringer of Death.”
    She smiled.
    “Hell’s teeth. I’m damned if I’m playing games with you anymore tonight. Get in your bottle and stay there.” He snatched up the bottle and its stopper and fitted the latter back in.
    “It doesn’t work that way. You took the stopper out. You released me to await your wishes until the three are complete.” She walked gracefully to a chair and sank into it, crossing her legs. “I’ll wait here and watch you sleep.” A false frown creased her forehead. “I do hope you don’t snore.”
    “I don’t sleep with a snake in the room.” He raised the gun, pointed it and shot her.
    Cali dematerialized, but Andrew was faster. He caught the bullet. It was an astonishing turn of speed, even for an angel. He pressed it between his fingers and a tiny spurt of magic transformed it into a metal rose. The delicate petals seemed to quiver.
    “I don’t accept war jewelry,” she said, seated again on the chair.
    Andrew nodded. He threw the rose and it landed at David’s feet.
    The man stooped and picked it up.
    “He can’t see or hear me,” Andrew said.
    “So he thinks I’m strewing roses at his feet?” she asked for Andrew’s ears alone. She had winked out of humans’ hearing and sight.
    He grinned. “Better than throwing rocks at his head.”
    The door crashed open. David’s bodyguard wore sleep shorts and carried a gun. He focused on David with a gun in his hand and an apparently empty room. Then his eyes widened as he saw the restored and well-lit castle through the window. The firm grip on his own gun wavered.
    David slid the metal rose into his pocket. He looked at Eli’s fascination with the castle, and then at Cali’s chair, which appeared empty to him.
    “What the hell happened?” Eli managed to wrench his attention from the castle.
    “I thought I’d move house,” David said. “The English say a man’s house is his castle. I intend to make that true.”
    “But…the castle is…was…a ruin.”
    “Yes.”
    Eli waved his gun in wild interrogation. “How?”
    “Sometimes, Eli, wishes come true.”
     
    Cali snorted.
    Andrew, leaning against the wall beside her, shook his head. “You should give David