He was scraping the bowl before he knew it, and Demetra scurried to bring another. He thanked her with a bow, looking around the cozy little room. Not a large room, and it served as kitchen and bedchamber both, but it glowed warm and cheery—a far cry from the sweaty masculine ugliness of the fort. The bed had a bright covering pieced together from colorful scraps of cloth, the rickety table had a cluster of the last autumn asters crammed into an old jug, and there was still a lingering smell of fresh bread drifting up from the bakeshop downstairs.

Vix had already plunged into his own second bowl. “What are you staring at?”

“All this.” Titus cast another envious glance around. “Domestic bliss. I never knew how much I missed it until I got consigned to that barren barracks.”

“You should get a girl,” Vix advised. “Visit her off-duty. Bribe the right people, and you can even get permission to sleep out of the fort.”

“There’s already a girl I want.” For a heady moment, Titus pictured a little cheerful room like this one: books in cases against the walls, fresh bread and fresh flowers, and Sabina lying across the bed crunching an apple and reading. Dimpling up at Titus when he came in… “But she’s in Rome,” Titus concluded. And she’d never been his girl to begin with.

Not that he was still in love with her. If anything, he knew her far better than he had when he’d fallen head over heels at sixteen for a blue-eyed girl who’d been kind enough not to sneer at his very first attempt at a marriage proposal. She’d become someone to borrow books from; someone to take to the Campus Martius on the mornings her husband was busy; someone to share a couch with at dinner parties. Someone to make him secretly proud, when she glided along on his arm at the occasional social function. Somehow the other girls his grandfather kept trotting out as prospective wives looked flat, pallid, and passionless compared to Sabina.

No, he wasn’t in love with her. But until he found a girl just as captivating, why settle?

“So you’ve got a girl in Rome,” Vix was saying, oblivious. “Who cares? Have a girl here too. It’s not like they’re ever going to meet.”

“I won’t dignify that by arguing.” Titus felt a warm weight against his side, and looked down at the brown-eyed little boy with his curly hair. The child had retreated warily when Titus first entered, taking his carved wooden horse and edging back into a corner to watch, but now he blinked shyly up at his mother’s guest. “We were weeks on the road,” Titus accused Vix, “out to the edge of the Empire and back, saving each other’s lives—and you never told me you had a son! He’s what, two years old?”