Page 43 of Try As I Smite
With arms that shook—a stark reaction he didn’t try to keep from her—he rolled her so that he lay between her legs, his hot, velvet and steel shaft pressed against that bundle of nerves that throbbed harder at the pressure and the heat.
Alasdair stared down into her face, hiding nothing from her. “I need you to be mine.”
For tonight. For always, she thought. But she didn’t voice the words, just nodded, unable to tear her gaze away. Wanting to remember every precious second.
He whispered a spell that protected them both, one of the best parts of sex with a warlock. Then he was there at her entrance, sliding slowly, beautifully, into her body until he was balls deep, filling her.
Delilah swallowed back a cry of loss, shaken to the core at how, even with him embedded inside her, she was already missing him, her heart cracking and bleeding internally.
Alasdair ran a finger down the side of her face. “Okay?” he asked with a small frown.
Delilah nodded, hair spilling across the pillow. “Perfect.”
Wonderful. Beautiful. Glorious.
He smiled and drew out of her as slowly as he’d entered her, then slid, just as unhurriedly, back home. Penetration like a claiming.
He gazed into her eyes as he controlled the pace, driving her already thundering body to a level that sent her into a hazy world where all that existed for her was the throb between her legs, the pulse of his body penetrating hers, and a pair of wicked blue eyes filled with everything she’d ever wanted to reach for.
But she couldn’t let herself. For his sake.
He increased the pace and she lifted her legs, wrapping them around his waist, sending him deeper, their twin moans mingling in the night. His control snapped in that moment, blue eyes turning glitteringly bright as he surged inside her, his body shaking over hers even as she trembled beneath him until tingling gathered at the base of her spine.
Pressure pooled and collected and grew until it burst outward, sucking her into a vortex of pure bliss as violent as the whirlpool to hell that had tried to take her. And every second, she looked into Alasdair’s eyes, memorizing the way his face contorted as his climax washed through him, the way his hands, fingers threaded through her own, gripped hers harder, the light in his eyes that she could almost fool herself into believing meant more.
They came down from the high together, chests heaving, sated and lethargic, the loving arms of slumber already wrapping themselves around her.
“Merry Christmas,” he whispered against her lips, making her smile even as sadness slid tendrils of worry through this moment that should have been sheer contentment.
Alasdair shifted them so he lay on his back, her head on his chest, the slowing thud of his heartbeat the most beautiful sound she’d ever heard as they both drifted into oblivion. But even as she fell into that blissful sleep, Delilah knew it couldn’t last.
They will come for me.
She was half demon, and they would see her choices, her actions, tonight as a direct betrayal. They would come for her and anyone near her. She could have this moment with Alasdair, but that was all.
She’d be gone by the morning.
Chapter Eleven
Alasdair walked into the outer room of Delilah’s offices, dressed in his best Armani, his usual control in place, at least outwardly. He wasn’t sure what her assistant, Naiobe, was exactly. Hopefully she couldn’t hear the violent thunder of his heartbeat. Not even the day he’d been voted to the head of the Syndicate had he wrestled with this level of nerves and doubts.
Of course, that day, his taking the role had been a foregone conclusion, at least as far as he was concerned.
The woman who held his heart in her hands—not so much.
That fucking note.
He’d woken up from a mind-blowing night of mutual pleasure secure in the knowledge that he’d found the one and only woman he wanted at his side through life and into death to find the bed beside him cold and empty, her things gone, no trace of her beyond the scent of cherry blossoms on his sheets.
And a politely chilly note on her pillow that shredded his heart like a cheese grater.
He’d decided to give her a week to realize what he already knew. A week. That had been an aspirational joke. Three hours were all he’d managed to wait before coming here to convince her. Of course Delilah and her assistant would be working on this holiday. He did the same himself most years. Maybe not any more, though.
This was Christmas morning, and he was going to get his Christmas miracle.
Another one. The demons had been the first.
Naiobe glanced up, her dark eyes flickering with an emotion he couldn’t pinpoint the second she recognized him. If he hadn’t been looking closely he would’ve missed the small twitch to her button nose and had to compress his lips around a grin. That had been a helpful tell to overhear Delilah comment on the other day. “I’d like to speak with Delilah.”
