She is embarrassed about the corset she wears underneath. She doesn't know that he has already seen it and more, before his plastic surgery, when he had a wild one-night-stand with her.
Djetth has decided that their first priority should be to get a fire going.
"There are a lot of things we could do without for one night." Dinner came to
mind. Sex… Djetth grunted and rose to his feet.
The most natural thing in the world would have been to hook an arm around
Martia-Djulia's tightly cinched waist, and point to the campsite he'd chosen. Instead,
he put his left hand on his hip and pointed with his right hand.
"You see that little stand of trees -- the ones with twisted trunks, which fork
into three or four branches at about the height of my hip? Those two, there, will make good
supports for the entrance to a shelter. I'll thrust a long, straight branch between
their crotches as a ridgepole."
She looked doubtful, but Djetth was on good ground with his woodmanship.
"A 'crotch' is where a tree bifurcates," he explained, simply so she would think
about crotches, and long, straight objects being thrust into them. "They're a good
choice because their canopies lean inland, away from what becomes the obvious spot to
clear for a fire pit. Do you agree?"
He took her silence for consent.
"Right. I'll start by digging the fire pit. Do you think you could find something we can burn? There are three types of fuel needed for a fire. Tinder is the most important."
Chivalrously, he assigned the greatest importance to the easiest, lightest,
most enjoyable, most feminine task.
"I can't start a fire without tinder," he added with strategic disregard for the
fact that he was a Great Djinn in possession of three Rings of Imperial Authority, one of
which was the laser-like Fire Stone.
"What is tinder?" she asked, sounding suspicious.
"Ahhhh," he drawled, overcome by a mischievous instinct. "Look here."
With his left hand he lifted his T-shirt, with his right forefinger and thumb he
reached into his navel, confident that after eight weeks of hard exercise he had well defined
abs and a very deep and attractive "inny" of a tummy button.
He withdrew lint.
"Oh, slurrid!" his squeamish Princess exclaimed, predictably, but she stared at
his lower abdomen and perhaps at the bulge in his trunk briefs with flattering interest.
"This fluff--" He placed it in the palm of his left hand as reverently as a
scientist explaining an important specimen, "is created from the action of hard work.
Friction attracts filaments of fabric from my cotton T-shirt, and works them into a flat,
fluffy mat."
He moved his cupped hand closer to her.
"Good tinder needs to have irregular edges, plenty of airspaces." He teased his
tummy button fluff into a looser wad. "It must be dry. Would you like to touch it?"
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Featured Author Rowena Cherry