Page 45 of Try As I Smite
“Marry me.”
Delilah froze, her back to him, then slowly turned, even icier, which meant he’d gotten to her. “You know I can’t. I told you in the—”
He pulled the piece of paper out of his breast pocket and held it up. “In your note?”
She glanced at it, then back to his face, and drew her shoulders into stiffly perfect posture. “After what I did to my own kind… There will be retribution, against me in particular.”
Sucking in through his nose, he stepped closer to her. “The night I killed my father…”
Her eyes widened slightly, a shadow of confusion shadowing the dark depths. But she didn’t stop him, so he kept going.
“I had the demon wrapped up in bands of electricity. The thing was screaming. Howling with it, and suddenly his eyes turned blue, like mine, the blackness going away, and he was my father again.”
She licked her lips. “The demon pretending to be him? To trick you?”
Alasdair shook his head. “My father managed to break through, only for a moment. He said—”
The words choked off deep in his throat. He’d never told anyone this. Not even his sister. Breathe in. Breathe out.
“He said he was proud of me. That he loved me.”
Delilah stepped nearer. Only a tiny bit, but that obviously unconscious gesture gave him some small hope.
“Then he told me how to kill the demon. Knowing it would take him, too.”
Pain—for him?—rippled over her delicate features. Breathtaking features. Demon and angel. No wonder she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.
But that wasn’t what held him captive.
Her heart—he’d seen it over and over in his investigation into her, and now in their Christmas Carol. She took on the hard luck cases, the bleeding heart cases, the lost and pathetic, the downtrodden, the hopeless. Delilah might be half demon, but her soul was all angel.
She glanced away, breaking the connection, and when she returned her gaze to him, the frost had turned the windows of her eyes hard and cold. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because, killing my father molded me, but differently than what every single person around me assumed. They worried I would want revenge, or turn bitter, angry. That I’d use my own powers for the wrong reasons.”
“But you didn’t,” she said.
“Partly because of what he did that day. His reaching out to me in the way he did… I saw that love, maybe especially in death, would always be stronger. So everything I do for my people, every step I’ve taken, I’ve refused for it to be in anger or vengeance.”
The corner of her mouth tilted up, even as she pursed her lips. “A good man,” she murmured.
“Don’t you see? That’s you, too.”
Her eyes widened slightly. Was she hearing him? Could she see this truth as clearly as he could?
He stepped closer, daring frostbite to reach out and frame her face with his hands. “You set up a business helping others. Whatever went into your makeup, who you are is still up to you. And only you.”
She closed her eyes, shutting him out, and shook her head. “But don’t you see? That’s why I can’t. The danger I’d put you in…” She swallowed and opened her eyes, all her emotions shining there for him to see. Regret. Sorrow. Pain.
Alasdair smiled softly. “Haven’t you learned this lesson yet? We are always better together.” They wouldn’t have won this round otherwise. “And then there’s the love thing.”
“Love thing.” She scoffed and sent him a long, cold stare. One he could see now that she was forcing. A crack in the ice she’d built around her heart. “I don’t love you,” she said.
A bullet to the heart would’ve been less painful. But he pushed through, knowing she’d just lied. “I heard you, goddess.”
“You heard? Heard what?”
He nodded, grim now. Everything hung on this moment. “You said, ‘I’m not running, Alasdair Blakesley. I love you too much.’” He paused, for once in his life, scared to ask the tough question. “Do you still?”
