“I don’t know what you think you were doing, baiting Antonia in that fashion.” Carys gave him a regal glare after her husband and the merchant had finished their business and she returned from bidding her guests farewell. Branwen had taken Nia with her, and they were alone in the courtyard. “She’s not a Roman whore you can bed simply because the urge takes you.”
He shrugged and prowled the length of the courtyard garden. It wasn’t as regimented as the other Roman courtyards he’d encountered in Britain but it was far too confined for his tastes.
“You only met the woman this day, Carys. You have no idea what she’s really like.” Except Carys wasn’t the only one who’d made such a swift assumption. Despite his low opinion of all things Roman, its women included, he was unable to level such an accusation at Antonia.
“I know a great deal more than you might imagine.” She sounded the way she had back in Cymru, in the days before the Romans had invaded and all their lives had been turned inside out. “Cerridwen foretold Antonia’s arrival long before the merchant informed Maximus of his daughter’s plans. I won’t have you using her as you might any other Roman woman. Do you understand?”
For a brief moment, a flare of dark longing seared his chest. Even after everything that had happened since the Romans had invaded, Carys was as intimate with Cerridwen as she had ever been.
Yet from the moment he’d left the sacred Isle of Mon and taken up with the rebels, his own god, Lugus, had been distant and unheeding of Gawain’s worship. Not once had the great god given any indication that Gawain was traveling the right path.
But in time of war what other path could a warrior follow?
He pushed his unease to the back of his mind, leaned his forearm against a column and flung Carys a sardonic grin.
“I understand, princess. But Cerridwen doesn’t dictate earthly pleasure. And I intend to use the Roman in any way I desire. Don’t fool yourself that she’s uninterested. Her arousal scented the air in a most intoxicating manner.”
Carys frowned. Obviously, that fact had entirely eluded her. Then she shook her head, as if dislodging displeasing thoughts and pressed her hand against his chest.
“Dear Gawain.” Her voice no longer held her previous note of exasperation. “I don’t want to see you hurt again, that’s all. Antonia is not for you. Please, don’t get involved.”
He laughed and threaded his fingers through hers. “Why do you imagine taking the Roman will hurt me? It’s only sex I seek with her. Nothing of any importance. Within a turn of the moon or less she’ll no longer be even a memory.”
“Perhaps.” Carys didn’t sound convinced. He couldn’t for the life of him fathom why she thought Antonia possessed the power to hurt him. No woman possessed that power. Not anymore. “But there’s a reason Cerridwen revealed Antonia’s existence to me, Gawain. And it certainly has nothing to do with her father’s wish that I find her another suitable husband.”
His amusement vanished. “Another suitable husband? How many husbands do Roman noblewomen possess at any one time?”
Carys pulled free of his hold and shot him a look that suggested she thought he was being deliberately obtuse.
“The reason she left Rome,” she said, as she began to pull the jeweled pins from her hair to loosen it from the constrictive Roman style, “is because her husband divorced her.”
Why hadn’t Antonia told him she was divorced? She’d deliberately let him believe she was still married. Why would she do that?
“All the more reason,” he said, unsure why the fact Antonia hadn’t confided in him irked him so much, “for me to sample her charms before she’s auctioned off to another arse-licking patrician.”
“If I have anything to do with it her next husband will not be an arse-licking anything.”
He knew that was Carys’ attempt to make him laugh, but he was too fucking irritated. It was bad enough he lusted after Antonia in the first place. But to still want her, after knowing she’d deliberately deceived him as to her marital status, was just plain infuriating.
To compound it all, he couldn’t fathom why the knowledge even gave him pause. It didn’t matter. It wasn’t her trust he wanted. Just her shrieks of fulfillment as he fucked her senseless.
And by the gods, he intended to quench this fire that raged through his blood no matter how Carys might disapprove. Antonia would part her thighs, he would have her and then she would be relegated to the back of his mind where all his conquests languished.
“Now, Gawain.” Carys’ mood became eager. “Did you reach Mon? Did you speak with my mother about leaving the sacred Isle?”
He dragged his attention back to the present. “She’s still determined not to leave until she can persuade all the Elders to agree to a mass exodus.” After the Druids had fled Cymru, almost two full turns of the wheel ago, they had sought refuge on the sacred Isle. But he hadn’t stayed long. He couldn’t stand the thought of hiding from their enemies yet again and so he’d left to join the rebellion led by the Briton king, Caratacus.
And look what a fucking mess that had turned out to be.
Lugus hadn’t graced Gawain with his presence at any time during the rebellion or the bloodied aftermath. Yet what was Gawain supposed to do? Remain on a secluded Isle while their people continued to suffer?
That was not the way of Lugus, the finder of paths and seeker of truth. It was not Gawain’s way either. Yet he couldn’t shift the knot of doubt lodged in his chest that his god not only disapproved of Gawain’s actions but had also turned his back on his loyal Druid.
Not that Gawain blamed Carys’ mother for her reluctance to leave the safety of the Isle. He knew that wasn’t her primary motive for staying. She wanted to ensure the continuance of their Druidic way of life. It was the reason she hadn’t left with him to join Caratacus. What had she told him? She didn’t want a foreign king to unwittingly lead her people into a Roman-conspired trap.
Her foresight, in retrospect, was chilling. And reinforced the unsettling suspicion that Lugus truly had severed all sacred bonds with Gawain. Otherwise, why hadn’t his god warned him of the treachery that laid in wait for the king?
It had been from that moment that he’d finally stopped trying to reach Lugus. When the time was right, his god would return.
Surely he would return.
Carys stared at him in disbelief. “But you told her of my vision? That Britain will burn and the Isle of Mon—it isn’t safe, Gawain. I don’t know why I feel that so strongly but surely she understands she can’t stay there?”
“She understands, Carys.” He took her hands. “She will leave, I’m sure of it. But for now she feels her place is to ensure as many of our people survive the Roman onslaught as possible.”
Carys snatched her hands free. “Her place is here, with her daughter and granddaughter. How will our ways survive if all our Elders perish when the Isle falls?”
Gawain was silent. How could he comfort her when in his heart, where hope had long since died, he believed that their way of life was already ultimately condemned?
When Antonia arrived back at the townhouse, a grand establishment her father had commissioned in the most prestigious district of Camulodunum, it was a relief to escape to her bedchamber. Her father’s incessant questions about the tribune’s foreign wife on the journey home had forced her to face the fact that it wasn’t Carys or what an advantageous friendship they might cultivate that occupied her thoughts at all.
Not that she had ever deluded herself for a moment that it was. Gawain’s mocking smile and incendiary touch left little room for anything else in her mind.
She went to the window and looked out into the central courtyard. It was smaller than the tribune’s, but meticulously tended as all Roman courtyards should be. But it wasn’t the decorative statuary or exotic plants and flowers that captured her attention. It was the incongruous vision of Gawain in her father’s domain, welcomed as an equal.
A foolish thought. Her father would never welcome a savage Cambrian warrior into his home, unless that warrior could be of use to him. And she certainly couldn’t imagine any reason why Gawain would want to set foot inside a Roman merchant’s dwelling, no matter how well-respected the merchant might be.
“Is anything troubling you, domina?”
Antonia glanced at her faithful slave, Elpis. They had always been close but it was only during the last year Antonia had realized that, in truth, Elpis was more of a friend than any of the refined Roman ladies she’d met since her marriage to Scipio.
“No.” Her fingers curled around the precious golden locket her father had given her to celebrate the day of her birth. A bittersweet celebration, since it was also the day her mother had died. Slowly she opened the locket. The likeness of her mother was painted on one half and on the other she’d illicitly commissioned the baby perfection of her daughter to be painted over her own portrait.
Her beautiful baby. The only child her womb had nurtured to term, the only one of the five she had conceived who had survived for longer than a few tortured breaths.
She swallowed, and traced a trembling finger across the perfect features. Her sweet Cassia Antonia, named not for her brutal husband but for her own mother and father. A small act of rebellion that had sustained her for the fraught hours after the debilitating birth, but a rebellion that paled into insignificance at what she had done next.
“You’ll soon be reunited,” Elpis whispered, her hand lightly covering Antonia’s in a gesture that a friend might make, not a slave no matter how highly esteemed that slave might be. “A few more weeks, domina, and she will once again be in your arms.”
A few more weeks, and she would be able to see Cassia whenever she wished. No more furtive journeys, avoiding Scipio’s fawning dependents who would betray her without a second thought, to spend a few stolen moments with her baby.
Scipio believed their daughter was dead. He would never know the truth. And because of Antonia’s lies, Cassia would enjoy a life away from Rome, away from her birthright, but a life filled with love and her mother’s utter devotion.
Even if Cassia would never know that her adoptive mother was, in truth, her birth mother. For if Scipio ever discovered her deception, she feared his rigid pride would never allow such devious disregard of his wishes to go unpunished.
When Cassia arrived, Antonia intended to devote her life to her precious child. She would never jeopardize her daughter’s happiness by taking a second husband who might resent another man’s child. And she would have no time for a lover.
But Cassia was not in Britannia yet. And the unsettling lust that had consumed Antonia while in Gawain’s company still seethed through her blood. If she truly wished to sample sex with another man then now was the perfect, the only, chance she would ever have.
She looked at Elpis. They had been inseparable since the day her father had presented the young Greek girl to her on the eighth anniversary of her birth. Her very own slave, barely a year older than her, yet even then the bonds of friendship had somehow woven through the constraints of rank and heritage.
Elpis had been the one who’d comforted her when Antonia had suffered from terrifying nightmares of darkness, confusion and the unshakeable certainty that her destiny balanced on a fragile thread. Elpis who had interpreted the mysterious feminine presence protecting Antonia as the great goddess Juno.
Elpis who had reassured both Antonia and her father that the unknown words she whispered while deep in the throes of sleep came directly from the queen of Olympus herself.
It had taken her too long to recognize the truth of their close relationship. She knew, in her heart, she should free Elpis but how could she bear it if the other woman left?
She pushed the thought aside. She needed Elpis and too much had happened over the last year for her to willingly seek any more disruption to her life.
So why in the name of Juno was she seriously contemplating taking Gawain as her lover?
“It cannot come quickly enough.” She longed to once again hold Cassia in her arms. Was it very wrong of her to also want Gawain’s strong arms about her? Just to experience the kind of sex she could give freely, without the demands of Rome chaining her to the bed?
“All will be well when she’s once again with us,” Elpis said. “But what else troubles you, domina?”
Elpis was too observant. What chance did Antonia have of hiding her plans from her? She didn’t even want to. Elpis, after all, was her closest confidant and would sooner cut out her own tongue than betray Antonia.
She closed her locket and took Elpis’ hands. “Do you still have the forbidden herbs?”
Elpis’ eyes widened. It was obvious Antonia’s question took her completely by surprise. For years, she’d encouraged Antonia to take the magical concoctions that would prevent conception. And Antonia had refused, until after the birth of Cassia. Not that she had needed them, then. Scipio hadn’t come near her since that blood-drenched night. But she had continued to take them, right up until the day she boarded the ship bound for Britannia. Nothing, not even the wrath of the gods, would have induced her to risk Scipio impregnating her once again.
“I brought them with us. And I’m certain I can find more in the markets if needed.”
Antonia took a deep breath. If she had decided to step foot on this path, then she would make the necessary preparations before her doubts overtook her.
“I shall start taking them this day.”
“Domina?” There was an unmistakable edge of concern in Elpis’ voice, reflected on her face. “Did something happen to you that the dominus is unaware of?”
“No.” Antonia could feel her face heating and she turned away from Elpis’ penetrating gaze. “I wasn’t attacked. But even though I’ll never marry again, I don’t want Scipio to have been the only man I’ve ever known.” She risked glancing over her shoulder. Reluctant understanding glowed in Elpis’ eyes. “There was a Cambrian warrior, kin of the tribune’s wife, who showed interest. I believe I will take him up on his unspoken offer.”