Cornelia kissed him first, leaning down to take his face between her hands. He looked up at her, startled, and all she could do was shake her head silently and press her lips to his again. His rough jaw scratched her skin as he rose, sinking his hands into her hair. He pulled the dress off her shoulders, burying his face in her breasts, and she sank down on the narrow bed as she helped tug the tunic over his head. So strange, she thought remotely as she pulled him down beside her, rubbing her cheek against his rough shoulder. The only other man’s body she’d ever known was Piso’s. Densus was broader, browner, harder. So different from Piso’s lean height. Cornelia tried to close her eyes against the strangeness of it, but Densus cradled her face between his hands. “No,” he said, “no,” and he kissed her eyes open as he moved inside her, so slowly. She clutched him, crying out, and Piso disappeared.

THEY lay on the narrow bed, hands clasped between them on the ragged pillow. The room was stifling. He ran a hand slowly over the curve of her hip, sheened with sweat. “Cornelia,” he said.

“What?”

“Nothing.” His face was serious, drained of rage, the chestnut eyes steady over their linked hands. “Weeks I spent following you around on guard duty, dreaming about calling you by name. Cornelia.”

“Drusus.” She said his name shyly. They had made love half the afternoon in the ferocious heat, and only now did she feel shy.

Fifteen

Fifteen

SHE said what?”

Marcella mimicked Diana’s flat matter-of-fact voice. “ ‘Get yourself a whore. I’ll never marry a Blues fan.’ ”

Cornelia winced. “That sounds like her. Which one of Vitellius’s officers was it?”

“The same German thug who proposed to you.” Marcella smiled. “Two rejections in a row! I’ll leave you to imagine the scene that ensued. Tullia said—”

Marcella lifted her feather fan to hide their whispering. The Theatre of Marcellus was full for once with the Emperor in attendance in his box rather than at the races, and the air was swelteringly close. The actors sweated under their masks and paint on stage as they declaimed through the lines of some turgid drama, and fans waved listlessly through the packed tiers of the audience—feather for the patricians, paper for the plebs below. No one from the Emperor on down appeared to be paying much attention to the play.