His gaze darkened. "My name is Valerius and I will not answer to Val."
She shrugged. "Fine then, Babycakes, have it your way."
He opened his mouth to protest, but already he knew better than to argue. Tabitha had a way of doing just as she pleased, all arguments be damned. "Very well," he said grudgingly, "I shall endure Val. But only from you."
She smiled. "See how painless that is? Why would you hate the name, anyway?"
"It's coarse."
She rolled her eyes at him. "You must really be fun in bed," she said sarcastically.
Valerius was stunned by her words. "Excuse me?"
"I'm just wondering what it would be like to make love to a man who is so concerned about being rigid-then again... Nah. I can't imagine someone so regal getting down and dirty with it."
"I assure you, I've never had any complaints in that regard."
"Really? Then you must be sleeping with women who are so cold you could freeze ice cubes on them."
He turned to leave the room. "We are not having this discussion."
But she gave him no reprieve as she followed him toward the stairs. "Were you like this in Rome? I mean, from everything I've read, you guys were raw with sexuality."
"I can just imagine the lies they tell."
"So were you always this uptight?"
"What do you care?"
Her response stunned him as she pulled him to a stop. "Because I'm trying to figure out what made you like you are now. You are so closed off, you're barely human."
"I am not human, Ms. Devereaux. In case you haven't noticed, I'm one of the damned."
"Baby, open your eyes and look around. We're all damned in one way or another. But damned is a far cry from dead. And you live like you're dead."
"I'm that, too."
She ran a hot look over his scrumptious body. "For a dead man you look remarkably fit."
His face hardened. "You don't even know me."
"No, I don't. But the question is, do you know you?"
"I'm the only one who does."
And that simple sentence told her everything she needed to know about him.
He was alone.
Tabitha wanted to reach out to him, but could sense that she needed to give him some space. He wasn't used to interacting with people like her... then again, few were.
As Grandma Flora, the gypsy seer of their family, always said, Tabitha tended to come on to people like a freight train and mow them down where they stood.
Tabitha sighed as he took another step away from her. "How old are you, anyway?"
"Two thousand, one hundred-"
"No," she interrupted. "Not Dark-Hunter years. How old were you when you died?"