"I know. You talked to me," he said, still smiling, and Tara remembered, with a shock, that she'd told him he was gorgeous. Well, she'd told the peacock he was gorgeous, and…
"…you, um, you understood me? You…how?" she added a bit plaintively.
The green of his eyes darkened into a generous kind of sympathy. "I did so, yes. There's a whole human mind in thattiny peacock brain when I'm shifted." His gaze went briefly distant and he laughed. "I'm to tell you that bird brains are much more complex thanhumanbrains and also thank you for recognizing how lovely I am. He is. We are."
Tara blinked very slowly, and, with careful thought and clarity, said, "Um," again. "Are you, ah. How do I put this delicately. Dissociative?"
Declan blinked back at her before that incredible roguish grin of his turned rueful. "Not the way you mean. Okay, c'mere to me now, I'll give it to you all at once and you can take as much time as you need to process like, yeh?"
"Oh sure. Go ahead. Give it to me all at once." That was not a phrase Tara was accustomed to saying aloud, and once she had, it soundedmuchdirtier than she'd meant it to. She felt herself blush hot pink, and blushed even more at Declan's brief, sly smile.
He didn't lean into it, though he did lean toward her a little, gaze intent. "There's loads of shifters, all kinds of different species. More than you'd think, but still not enough of us to get noticed like. We can shift back and forth from human to animal form, but nothing in between. And our animals, they're part of us, but a bit separate as well like. I can talk to my peacock, and he can talk to me."
Tara nodded a few times. "That's absolutely bonkers."
"Well…it is so," Declan agreed after a breath of thought. "I'm used to it, though."
She laughed. "I guess you would be, yeah. Okay, is that…everything?"
"It's certainly enough for now. Are ye fresh from America then?"
That, Tara could handle. "I flew in to Dublin this morning and took the bus down, yes. I'm staying in—Cove," she said carefully. "It is Cove, right? Not Cobb?"
"It is. Last stop for theTitanicbefore it met its fate on a cold Atlantic night. Although it was called Queenstown, then."
Tara's eyebrows rose. "TheTitanicwas called Queenstown?"
Declan laughed. "No, Cobh was."
"But…" Tara squinted, trying to do the math with a sleepy brain. "But Elizabeth wasn't queen yet? She hadn't even been born, had she? Oh, probably Queen Victoria, huh? Was she still queen then?"
"No," Declan said with amusement. "But Cobh had been Queenstown for fifty years when she died, and they didn't change it to 'Cobh' until the War of Independence twenty years later." He paused momentarily, and then, as if he couldn't help himself, added, "That spelling is just an Irish-ization of the English word 'cove,' though. It doesn't mean anything in Irish. Before the British started mucking about with it, the village was called Ballyvoloon, but that was nearly three hundred years since."
"Wow." Tara couldn't find anything else to say for what felt like a long time. Declan was a peacock who gave history lessons. That was a lot to take in after a sleepless overnight flight.
While she was searching for something to say, Declan smiled and got to his feet, offering her a hand. "You're looking shattered, love. When can you check into your hotel?"
Tara put her hand in his, and found out she'd been right. The callouses on his hands were rough, in a reassuring way. He pulled her to her feet effortlessly, and suddenly she was right next to him, gazing a long way up into fiery green eyes. He looked down at her in turn, a searching expression in his eyes until he smiled again, bright and sudden. "Hazel."
"What?"
"Your eyes. They're hazel. I couldn't decide, earlier."
"Oh! Yeah, they're finicky. Sometimes they're almost brown, sometimes they're really green. Not like yours." Declan's werethe greenest eyes Tara had ever seen. "Yours are the color of Ireland."
Sheer delight splashed across his face, not quite turning into a laugh. "Good God, love, have you already kissed the Blarney Stone, then?"
Tara felt another blush crawling up her face. "No, it's just, you know, Ireland is supposed to be forty shades of green, and yours have all of them."
Declan put a hand over his heart. "Thanks a million. You're dangerous already, with that kind of charm. I'd best keep you well away from the Blarney Stone, now that I'm thinking about it."
"Oh, but it's on my list of places to go," Tara said, suddenly feeling stubborn. "I know it's touristy, but I'm a tourist. I want to do all the tourist things. Blarney. The Cliffs of Moher. The Giant's Causeway. Waterford Crystal."
Declan's green eyes sparkled. "You've taken yourself all around the entire island with just those four things, and what about the Rock of Cashel, or the Hill of Tara? Or the Wild Atlantic Way? And did you know we've caves in Ireland? And you shouldn't miss Killarney National Park and Torc Waterfalls. And you can see the Elizabeth Fort in Cork itself, and the cathedral, and…how long is it you're here for?"
Tara had taken her phone out halfway through that and was making notes as fast as she could. "Only two weeks. I thought I had enough time to do things but now I'm not sure. What's the Elizabeth Fort?"
"Oh and Charlesfort at Kinsale," Declan went on. "You could spend two weeks in Cork alone, love. Cobh itself is worth a day on its own. Here now," he said suddenly, pulling his own phone out to check the time. "It's only just gone four. If we catch the next train we can do the Titanic Experience in Cobh before it closes tonight."
