“So do I,” he says. “Although, I always had more fun taking them off you.”
I giggle again, now completely under the spell of 15th century Italy and who I was back then. I turn around to him and arrange my hair in a suitable style, braided up, the ends loose as was the style.
His eyes set on fire as he sees me as he wants me: a perfect replica of myself from back then.
“You look just as you were,” he whispers as he pulls me to him gently by the V-neckline of my gown. “I love you,” he says before he cups my face and kisses me harshly, expressing his deep emotion in that one action. I tug on his clothes wanting him free to be with me, but he stops me. “Not yet. I want to sit with you. Talk to you. Be with you like this.”
I nod and he leads me back out to the sitting room. In our absence, dozens of candles have been placed, in threes, around the room.
“Light them,” he says.
I focus and up they go in roaring flames. He flicks off all the electricity and I stand there mesmerized but now also slightly concerned.
“Do you love me as I am?” I ask suddenly. “I mean as Liv?”
He peers at me. “Of course. I told you earlier that I love every part of you. I always will. But this…” he gestures to me, “this is what I love most about you. Seeing you like this makes me ache to be with you. If I could go back in time, I would keep us there forever.” He pauses. “Remember what you said to Cole at Negru? That what I want is 15th century Aefre?”
I nod.
“Just be her. Just this night, be her for me,” he says quietly as he comes over to kiss me.
I want to die right there in his arms, wishing I, too, could go back in time. To take us back to Ponte when we were together and happy.
“I wish I had been your first,” he murmurs out of the blue to me.
“In a way you were,” I say to him and he smiles sadly.
“I hate to think what your first time was like. I wish it had been me. To show you as I did then what it means to be with someone you love.”
I chuckle. “But didn’t you have a rule? Fourteen would definitely have been too young.”
“Don’t cover up your heartache with jokes, Aefre. Tell me. Talk to me. You never talk about it.”
Erm… Hello? Isn’t that what I always say to him?
“Why do you want to know? It’s irrelevant.” I use his own words back on him and the irony is not lost.
“Don’t try and sidestep your way out of this. I want to know.”
“And I want to know about you. Who was your first? Was it good, bad, boring? Someone you loved? A wife? I know nothing about your human years, so if we are going there, ‘fess up D’Arcangelo.”
He laughs out loud. “I can always count on you to be bold, my sweet. Not even Sebastian would get away with a comment like that.”
“I should hope not. Although, I am madly curious as to your reasons for turning him, we can leave that for another time.”
His eyes cloud over, and he is quiet for a while. I don’t push. If he wants to tell me he will, if not he gets nothing out of me either. I eventually go to pour us some wine and sit on the sofa. He joins me as I hand him a glass.
“My first. Hm. I was fifteen and she was a prostitute my father hired to make me a man,” he says. I am utterly shocked at this piece of information. Not the content, just the fact that he is sharing. “It was bad,” he says with a half-smile and a sidelong glance at me. “I wasn’t interested in women. All I wanted was to be a warrior.
To fight for the city and to be a hero. To make my father proud and to make a name for myself. I did both. Probably too well, which is why Tiamat picked me. But I was never all that interested in having a wife or a family.”
“Did you though?”
“I was due to be married. To an honorable woman that I barely knew. I was made about three weeks before we were to be wed.”
I am over the moon that he has finally, after all this time, opened up, but I have no clue what to say to him. I just stare at him, expecting him to continue. To my delight he does.
“After what happened, well I don’t need to give you the gory details.” I shake my head vehemently. “I couldn’t go back to that life. I had to move on and become this thing that was expected of me. My family thought I had been killed in battle and I let them believe it. After all, it was practically true,” he says. I flinch at his harsh tone.