particular fan of—” Her gaze dropped to his crotch.
Alasdair grinned, obviously throwing Naiobe off, based on another nose twitch. “I should have known Delilah wouldn’t have just anyone as an assistant.”
They stared at each other across the desk for a long moment before she gave a reluctant half smile, then sauntered to the door. “I’m not the one you need to worry about.” She paused, her hands on the door handles. “I don’t know what happened, but she’s been… I’ve never seen her like this.”
“She’s not the only one,” he confessed.
“Fix it,” Naiobe ordered. Then opened the door. “Sorry for the interruption, Delilah, but Alasdair Blakesley is here and insisting on speaking with you.”
He walked in to find Delilah standing beside both her parents, no shoes, and an expression caught somewhere between irritation and panic before she buried it under that layer of ice he hated.
“Remiel. Hazah.” He nodded at her parents.
Delilah whipped her head around to stare at her parents. “I’d hate to think you had anything to do with this,” she said through tight lips.
“Apparently, daughter, you learned nothing of the lessons I sent you through.” Hazah stepped up to Delilah and placed a kiss on her forehead and whispered something he couldn’t catch but that sent red flags of color into Delilah’s high cheekbones.
“You have both our blessings,” Remiel said, also giving her a kiss.
Then Remiel took Hazah’s hand in his—a gesture Delilah’s gaze shot to, and she couldn’t quite disguise the vulnerability that flashed across her features—and they disappeared. No sound. No wind.
“Must be handy to teleport indoors,” Alasdair murmured.
The face she turned to him was perfectly composed, not an emotion in sight behind the glacier she’d erected. “I’m sure you didn’t come here to discuss my parents’ form of travel.”
“No.”
“So, what can I do for you?” She started to move behind her desk.
“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