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Talan made a vague noise of approval that had her laughing. Thinking out loud, she said, “I think you secretly like that everyone’s afraid of you. You’re totally into the fact that there are only a select few who know you’re actually a big teddy bear.”
He merely raised an eyebrow and said, “I’m a businessman. A pragmatist. A predator. A—”
When Lilly began to tickle his ribs, he broke off from his speech and started squirming under her. “Stop,” he said as he valiantly tried not to laugh. “Lilly, love. Stop. Don’t tickle me! I’m four hundred and eighty-five years old, dammit!”
She mimicked him and laughed as he continued to halfheartedly wiggle away from her fingers. She knew that if he truly wanted her to stop, he could be across the room in a millisecond. It only proved her point.
“As I suspected,” she said, her hands stilling against his ribs. “A giant teddy bear under that big, bad predator exterior of yours.”
“Only for you, you know,” he said, his fingers tangling in her curls.
Lilly leaned in, her mouth hovering just above his, and said, “I know.”
It was a strange thing to realize the impact she had on him. She had no idea why this beautiful, complicated man had chosen to love her. She could only be grateful for it.
Chapter Twelve
“Tell me something,” Lilly said.
He waited patiently for her to continue. Eventually, when she nudged him, he asked, “Is there more to the question?”
“Not really. I don’t know much about you. Tell me something.”
“There’s not much to tell,” he said. “I am what you see.”
“You’ve gotten my life history. It’s only fair,” she complained. “We’ve got over four hundred years to cover, so you should probably start talking.”
He cracked one eye open and looked at her. He couldn’t help but grin when she gave him the “go ahead” gesture.
“Well,” he said. “I was born in 1592. My name is technically Talesin Craddick. It changed over the years. Anyway, I was born in a little farming village in Wales. I guess it would have been closest to where Llysfaen is. Northern Wales, a few kilometres from the coast. My father farmed the land, and my mother made babies.”
“She died in childbirth when I was twelve. In my entire life, I don’t think I ever saw her without a baby in her arms. There were six of us that survived childbirth, three that didn’t.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to drag up bad memories,” she said, apologizing.
“It’s all right,” he explained. “It was a different place back then. When people died, which was often, you buried them and moved on. I don’t mean to make it sound heartless, but the oldest person in my village was maybe fifty years old. I remember thinking that seemed ancient.”
Lilly shifted off of him, curled up against his side, but didn’t speak, so he went on.
“Anyway. My brother Culwhch was the only one of us besides myself that made it to age fifteen. He went to work crew on a ship, and that was the last I saw of him.”
Her eyes were watery when he looked down at her. “No, love. Don’t do that. It’s a consequence of being as old as I am. I’ve long since made peace with it.”
“I’m completely ashamed to say that I never considered how difficult it must be to watch everyone just turn to dust around you. Jesus. This is depressing. Forget I brought this up,” she said, wiping a stray tear off of her cheek.
He stroked a hand down her spine, then dropped a kiss on her forehead. Not that he wanted it, but it was sweet to know that she cried for his loss.
Eventually she asked, “If your family was gone, what happened when you realized you were different? How did you know what to do?”
“When I hit about thirty, my body began to change almost overnight. The sunlight began to burn my skin, and I could never get enough to eat. This lasted for about two weeks. I was sure I was dying,” he said remembering his fear. “The night my teeth slid out for the first time, I panicked and went to see the old woman in the village. She was the closest thing to a doctor we had. She sent me to a man who lived the next village over and told me never to come back.”
“She knew what you were?” Lilly asked.
“I think she suspected. We weren’t the Transfigured back then. We were either folklore or monsters who drank the blood of others, depending on who you asked. There wasn’t a system in place to determine when, where, and how much blood we consumed. We were, in essence, like any other wild animal. In any case, the man in the next village explained as well as he could, considering, and taught me how to feed. Once I’d become self-sufficient, he sent me away.”
Lilly interjected, “But why would he send you away?”
“The old saying about there being safety in numbers wasn’t true for our kind. We were hunters, essentially. Being alone was a way of life. Since we all risked exposure each time we fed, we had to move around quite a bit. Plus, there were those of us who didn’t exactly eat responsibly.”
