Free Forsaken (The Djinn Wars Book 5) by Christine Pope

anything I could have gotten in a restaurant.” She didn’t bother to add that the days of Indian restaurants — or any kind of restaurant at all — were long gone.
    And she sure as hell wouldn’t mention how that unbidden memory of her and Jake screwing like a couple of crazed rabbits on the floor had sent an unwelcome flush of heat all through her. The overall loneliness had been bad enough, but the lack of any kind of physical intimacy was even worse. If she’d known, back before the Heat swept over the world, that she wasn’t ever getting laid again, she would have gone out and picked up the first promising stranger in a nightclub rather than being the good girl she’d been raised to be and waiting until the next relationship came along. Sometimes virtue was definitely not its own reward.
    “I am pleased to hear that,” Qadim said formally, although a certain edge to his inflection seemed to indicate he could tell she was holding something back.
    She’d have to watch that. He might be a djinn, but he looked and acted human enough, and he seemed to be better at reading humans than an otherworldly creature had any right to.
    Maybe it would have been better if he’d stuck to the Arabian Nights robes she’d first seen him wearing. Because right now, in that dark T-shirt and those nicely faded Levi’s and work boots, he looked too damn human.
    Shoving some more korma into her mouth seemed the best way to cover up the awkward pause that followed his last statement. She chewed, forcing herself to focus on the flavor. It really was very good; her earlier compliment hadn’t been an empty one.
    “You really made all this?” she asked, once she was done chewing.
    “Yes. I like to cook.”
    If he’d told her he liked to put on a tutu and pirouette across the stage at the Bolshoi, she couldn’t have been more startled. “Seriously?”
    One eyebrow lifted. “You sound surprised.”
    Madison started to shrug, then stopped herself abruptly as a nasty twinge went through her damaged left shoulder. “I suppose I hadn’t thought a djinn would even need to cook. You could just snap your fingers or wrinkle your nose or whatever to make the food appear.”
    “That is what some of my kind do,” he said. “Perhaps not the nose-wrinkling, however.”
    “It seems as if it would be a lot easier to just blink your dinner into existence instead of making a big mess in the kitchen and taking hours.”
    “You don’t like to cook?”
    “I hate it,” she said bluntly, then reached for her wine and drank some more.
    Over the course of her dating life, she’d met several men who’d been immediately put off by her admission that she couldn’t stand cooking. Qadim, on the other hand, appeared more curious than anything else. “Why?”
    The inevitable question. She was beginning to wish she hadn’t said anything at all, but something about being around another person — even if that other person happened to be a djinn — seemed to have disengaged the wall she usually put up around herself.
    But he was sitting there, watching her and clearly waiting for her to reply. Maybe she should give him a glib answer in the hope that it would be enough to keep him from asking more questions.
    She thought he deserved more than that, though. One might argue that she would never have gotten hurt in the first place if he hadn’t pursued her, but he hadn’t wished her any harm. He’d just wanted to know who she was.
    And he had patched her up. She’d always owe him for that.
    Another bracing swallow of chardonnay, and Madison said, “When I was ten years old, my mother got sick. Bone cancer. Very fast, very aggressive.” She paused then and glanced over at the djinn, who absorbed this information with a quiet nod but didn’t say anything. “You know what cancer is, right?”
    “Yes,” he replied. “That is, insofar as it affects humans. Djinn can be injured, but we cannot become ill. So we do not suffer from these sorts of