I could treat her so well. Soright.
Icould.
But I won’t.
Because I’m corrupt and wicked—a monster who thrives most when it’s toying with emotions and minds.
My disposition works well in business where the goal is getting what I want. It works less well in forging healthy relationships. Which is why, at some point amid the soul-breaking work that is tax season, I decided.
Why be healthy?
Why not use my usual exorbitant methods to obtain love just like I use them to obtain everything else?
The obvious answer is: because instead of love, you may accidentally create a fictional scenario in which the woman you’d die for believes she’s an accomplice in a scheme to kill you.
But.
Well.
Whatever.
I’ve already come to terms with that having its own charms.
Being hated to the point of pre-meditated murder means there’s only up to go from here. And turning that kind of hatred into love means nothing will ever be able to take it from me. Once Azalea is mine, she will bemine. She will have come through every last reason to turn me down. She will be helpless against me.
And she may not even know why.
Once she’s accepted me for what I am and claimed me as hers, there will be no going back.
Steadily, she will try me until she falls under the spell of my unwavering devotion and thinkswhat’s it matter if he’s wicked, so long as he’s mine?
Proving my point, Azalea stares at me, suspicious and tense and wary, and then she tests me. “My favorite color…is blue.”
My breath catches. “What shade?”
Her eyes lower, rise, and she points at her irises. “It’s…safe. The only color I can remember that ever has been. So. Specifically. It.”
This feels like a secret only I know. “Why do you want to wear gold to the Flag Day ball, then?”
“Wantis such a dramatic word, don’t you think?”
“Is it because you think of gold as closer to yellow, which is closer to white?”
Her jaw locks, and I can tell she regrets not only sharing something personal with me but also the fact I’m proving I know her better than she’d like me to.
I say, “I could find you an ice blue gown in the exact shade of your eyes, if you’d like.”
Breath leaves her in a constrained, steady stream. “You keep using such strong language.”
“I love you,” I say, offering her the strongest language I know. “Gold or ice blue. Which would you like to try?”
She scowls at me, expression distinctly sayingneither, but when her eyes close, resignation consumes her. She dips her brush in the orange to begin careful work on her dove’s beak as she says, “Ice blue.”
Progress. It looks lovely on her.
“Ice blue it is,” I confirm, dipping my brush in the navy to add highlights to the feathers of her crow.
Chapter Fourteen
