Page 65 of Demon Loved
“It did pose her quite a few difficulties,” he allowed, thinking there was no need to elaborate too much. “But she overcame those difficulties and married the man she loved about a year ago. I had promised her I would dance with her at her wedding, and of course I needed a human guise to do such a thing.”
Bree went silent again, her brain clearly working away at everything he’d just told her. “And you didn’t think it was suspicious that someone on the Council would give you grief over something so trivial, something that happened so long ago?”
“I did,” he said heavily. “But you must understand that the higher up you go on these planes of existence, the less meaning time has. I merely told myself that the voice — the person who tasked me with retrieving the artifacts — did not have a clear grasp of exactly when Elena’s wedding had taken place, or of the times when I visited her before then.”
“You couldn’t have refused?”
“I could have,” Belshegar replied, then paused to consider the best words to give her to explain how he truly had little room to maneuver when the voice — the Collector — had summoned him. “But the Council has broad power. If they’d determined that my transgressions were too egregious to be forgiven, they could have simply made sure I no longer existed.”
Brianna’s eyes widened again, and now she seemed pale under the light tan that still lingered even as summer faded. “They would have killed you?”
“That is a crude way to put it. They would have ensured my energies would have been dispersed and that I, myself — Belshegar — would cease to exist.”
“That’s your name?” she asked. “Belshegar?”
He nodded.
“That’s kind of a mouthful,” she continued, and now she appeared almost amused. “No wonder you were going by ‘Bill.’”
“Yes, I needed to blend in as much as possible.”
She uncrossed her arms and set her hands on her thighs, something about the movement signaling that she wasn’t quite sure what to do with them. Right then, she looked oddly vulnerable, like a child who’d just been told the truth about Santa Claus and didn’t know what to do next.
Her next question was the one Belshegar had been dreading the most.
“And this…this thing between us? Was that more protective camouflage?”
How he wished he could get up from his chair and go over to the couch so he could take her in his arms. However, her posture remained stiff, as though she was holding herself still with every ounce of control she possessed, and he doubted she would appreciate such an overture.
“No,” he said at once. He was new to this body, to making it do what he wished, but he hoped Brianna would be able to hear the sincerity in his voice and see it in his face. “I didn’t even know of your existence when I came here to Jerome. My sole thought was to retrieve the artifacts and deliver them to the voice so I could go back to my quiet existence. And then I met you…and I began to realize there was so much more to myself than I had previously understood.”
Those words felt hopelessly inadequate to explain the sea change that had taken place within him over the past week, but again, he could only hope that she would understand what he was trying to say.
“You never…?” she began, then paused delicately, every beautiful plane and angle of her face showing she didn’t quite know how to phrase the question.
“Never,” he said firmly. “The body you saw me shift into — that is my true form. It would not have been feasible for such a thing to occur, even if I had wished it. If we are being honest with one another, the thought had never even entered my mind. I interacted with humans at Elena’s wedding reception, but I did not experience an attraction to any of them.”
Brianna was quiet, those sunlit-sky eyes of hers fixed on him for a long moment. “Then…why me? I’m nobody.”
He wanted to tell her she was far from “nobody,” but he guessed those were not the words she needed to hear. “Why does anyone feel an attraction to one person and not another? That is one of the mysteries of the universe that I doubt even the greatest minds have been able to solve.”
For just a second, her lips quirked. It wasn’t much of a shift in expression, but it was still enough to give him some hope.
Surely if she hated him and wanted nothing to do with him, he wouldn’t have been able to arouse even the beginnings of a smile.
“Do you think it has something to do with my father?” she asked next, and Belshegar blinked at her, not sure what she meant by the question. He must have looked utterly blank, because she added, “Because of who he is. I mean, my brother and I look completely human — of course we do, because my father’s body is just as mortal as anyone else’s — but even with that, there’s something very different about his essence. His soul, I suppose.”
Belshegar hadn’t thought of the situation in those terms, and yet he thought she might have something of a point there. After all, he had met quite a few beautiful Castillo witches at Elena and Alessandro’s reception, but none of them had stirred this spark inside him. Could it be that he’d recognized the other in Brianna and his soul had realized there might be a chance at some kind of connection?
“I don’t know,” he said frankly. “There is so much about all of this I can’t begin to explain. There is only one thing I know, Brianna McAllister, and that is that I love you. Out of nowhere, against all odds…but there it is.”
Her jaw tightened, but he noticed how she didn’t look away. No, she sat there with those forthright blue eyes fixed on his face as she appeared to consider what he’d just said.
Then something about her expression seemed to relax, and once again, the faintest hint of a smile touched the corners of her mouth. “Well, I suppose that’s a good thing,” she said. “Because I fell in love with you a few days ago and had no idea what to do about it.”
She’d said those words, perhaps the most important in any language, whether on this plane or the uncounted others that occupied all of existence.
But….
