“But it could have.” Lollia grabbed a towel and hugged it about herself as if she’d suddenly gone cold. “It nearly did. Piso dead—and I had to marry that pig Fabius—and all of us were nearly killed, first before the Temple of Vesta and then by the mob when Vitellius was overthrown. And you just standing there on the Campus Martius, watching—”

Watching with flushed cheeks and shining eyes—Cornelia remembered that, very clearly. She’d thought it was shock, or disbelief . . . now she wondered if it had been pleasure.

“It’s not so much what you did.” Diana pronounced sentence. “It’s that you enjoyed it. You don’t feel sorry. And you don’t feel one straw’s worth of guilt.”

“Why should I?” Marcella picked up the comb again, stroking it through her damp hair. “Everything turned out all right.”

Cornelia spread her hands in her lap, looking down at the newly varnished nails that were no longer bitten to ragged nubs, and spoke politely. She didn’t look up—she didn’t think she could bear to see her sister’s face. “I don’t want you at my wedding.”

“Cornelia!” Marcella looked hurt. “You can’t do that. After what happened with Piso, I was so happy you found your centurion, you have no idea.”

“Yes, I’m very happy. And Drusus might join the Praetorians again, guarding the new Emperor, and if you prod Domitian into making trouble for his father, then Drusus might get killed too.” Cornelia looked up. “So I don’t want you at the wedding, wishing us happiness.”

Marcella looked from face to face, smiling her customary faint smile. Marcella the historian, the watcher.

“Oh, dear,” she sighed. She put the comb down, discarded the towel wrapped around her, and walked back toward the caldarium. For a moment the billows of steam surrounded her tall naked body, and then she disappeared from view.

“YOU’RE thinking again,” Domitian observed.

“I tend to do that, Lord,” Marcella smiled. He liked to be called Lord, but now he just scowled.

“I don’t like women who think so much.”

“Then why do you like me?”

“I don’t know.” He seized Marcella’s bare leg, pressing his mouth against her ankle. “You’re beautiful.”

He kissed his way up her leg, pushing the sheets aside, and Marcella lay back against the silk pillows. A blank-eyed slave stood at the head of the bed waving a peacock feather fan over her head, and another slave stood ready at the door with wine and sweetmeats in case she was hungry. Nothing but the best for a prince of Rome, Marcella thought. And for his mistress.