Page 6 of Try As I Smite
He shook his head, expression confounded. “I expected more from you,” he said softly.
She swallowed.
“My people are in danger. You, the woman who helps everyone with a seemingly unending list of issues, won’t help?” A bitter sort of disappointment filled his eyes, a direct hit to her heart, which usually she did a better job protecting.
Delilah locked her lips against another apology and shook the paper. “A smart man would take this.”
A cauldron of emotion swirled and bubbled in his eyes. The disappointment definitely hit hardest. With another shake of his head, he snatched the paper from her hand and stalked to the door.
“I’ll be sure to pass on this experience to anyone interested in your future services,” he tossed over his shoulder. Then he was gone, leaving the door open between her office and Naiobe’s.
As soon as the telltale thunk of the outer door closing reached her, Delilah waved a hand and her own door slammed shut so hard papers on her desk fluttered to the ground. She sank into her chair and held up her wrists. Sure enough, angry red welts appeared where the magical shackles bound her.
“Fuck,” she breathed.
Because she would have done a hell of a lot more than hand him an address. If she could.
With a shaking hand, she picked up her cell phone and dialed. A sultry voice on the other end answered. “Hello?”
“Mom? A man will be coming to visit you any second. Please do what you can for him.”
Chapter Two
Alasdair prided himself on his ability to read a person, but Delilah—and he still didn’t know her last name—baffled the fuck out of him.
He didn’t like it.
Especially when he’d allowed himself to fantasize about wrapping his fist in that long, dark hair and plumbing those lush lips with demanding kisses as he thrust into her sweet body. She smelled of cherry blossoms. He’d finally pinpointed the subtle floral note in her office the first time he’d “dropped by” for a surprise visit.
That time—which had involved her calling him a control freak and him calling her a rabble-rouser—had gone way better than this one. The woman could make a glacier lose its cool.
And yet his mind insisted on overriding his common sense and providing fantasies of a time and place where they were on the same side.
A weakness, he could see now.
He’d seen the types of clients she handled. Her involvement with Rowan and Greyson had given him the impression Delilah had a guardian angel complex. Someone who liked to use whatever gifts she had in her possession to help the underdogs and lost causes.
After that incident, he’d investigated her. Money and power didn’t seem to be a motivation beyond building her business. No one seemed to know what powers Delilah possessed herself, but she had an impressive network of contractors and supernaturally gifted people who owed her favors. Likely even more impressive than what he’d been able to unearth.
She used that network to fix supernatural problems for paranormal creatures of all types, creeds, and spectrums. Anything from matchmaking, to job placement, to healings, to personal investigations, to relocations and creating alternate identities, and more. There didn’t seem to be any problem she couldn’t handle. Except, apparently, mass exorcisms.
Why? Because she couldn’t stand him? Was she that petty?
Alasdair wouldn’t have thought so. Perhaps he’d allowed a slowly growing regard for what she did combine with a festering need to claim her luscious body blind him to who she was as a person. He’d thought, beneath all that defiance, that she had a heart and a conscience.
Clearly he’d got that wrong.
The thought soured in his head, like even thinking the words introduced poison into his thoughts. But damned if he should be giving her any leeway here. He’d been prepared to pay, as much as it took. Prepared to grovel even. Not having answers himself stuck in his craw. While he prided himself on refusing to give in to the illusion of being all powerful, it still rankled. Magic, even for one as formidable as he, wasn’t going to fix a demon problem when the multitude he suspected were coming were involved.
Hold them off, at best.
Channeling his frustration with Delilah and the entire situation, Alasdair pulled it into the whispered spell that teleported him directly outside a home in…he glanced around his surroundings with a frown. In the middle of New York City? Upper West Side if he wasn’t mistaken. His gaze skated up the front of the white limestone-sided house with impressive relief work carved into the facade. Five stories. Not an apartment.
The doorbell was answered by the epitome of a stiff butler who left him standing in the foyer, which might be the most marbled room Alasdair had ever encountered. The floors, stairs, and even walls were decorated in a white swirling marble with a star pattern in black and gold on the floor and small onyx squares spreading out from there.
He’d been born to wealth and privilege, used to the upper echelons of wiccan society, even after his parents’ deaths, but this was a bit much. The only things not marble in the space were the shiny black iron balustrades of an epic curving staircase and the matching scrolling iron grills over each of the downstairs windows and the front door.
Not a single Christmas decoration in sight. Not that all beings celebrated, but it was a small clue into who or what Delilah had sent him to. Meanwhile, magical energy pulsed from those grills, skating across his skin, almost undetectable. Wards?
