“I once proposed marriage to your sister by telling her all the reasons I’d make her an unsatisfactory husband. She turned me down, and you should have a fair chance to do the same.” Titus smoothed a tendril of wet hair back behind Faustina’s ear. “Now. You already know about my complete lack of originality; I’ve been spouting Horace and Cato quotes for years. People used to just yawn in my face; now they tell me I’m terribly clever. I suspect the change came somewhere around the time I inherited my grandfather’s assets.”

Dimples were starting to quiver in Faustina’s chin. Titus continued on in his sternest from-the-Rostra-to-the-back-of-the-Forum baritone.

“I live simply, and I hate pomp. I expect I’ll be a praetor someday, but nothing much grander than that. I’m a thoroughgoing plodder, I’ll add no luster to your name, and since my grandfather and father both went bald it’s a safe assumption I will too.”

“That’s a shame,” Faustina said gravely. “I prefer men who go gray.”

“So, Annia Galeria Faustina—” Titus lifted her wet hair, coiling it into a rope around his hand. “I’ve decided not to put you in blue draperies in the floor. I’d rather put you in a red veil, and in my bed. If you have no objection to having the dullest, most ordinary husband in Rome?”

She tasted like water when she leaned forward and kissed him: bottomless, calm, and sweet. Her wet silks floated around him like blue smoke as he gathered her close, and her hands pressed urgently against his chest, gathering handfuls of his tunic and pulling him closer. He reached around her neck for the clasp of the gold heart amulet that Roman girls wore until the day they married and unfastened it, letting the heart spin away into the water.

“Oh, good,” Faustina murmured between kisses. “Ennia will be so pleased.”

CHAPTER 26

PLOTINA

“My dear.” Plotina couldn’t help a note of reproach. “Two years apart, and you didn’t join me to eat?”

“A busy schedule, I’m afraid.” Trajan did not look up from the dispatch he was scanning. His table was piled with scrolls, tablets, spare whetstones, a discarded scabbard missing its dagger, and a broken bust of Alexander that Trajan had used to weigh down a stack of maps. Secretaries busily took dictation, aides hovered with more stacks of dispatches, freedmen brushed past Plotina into the hall on errands and came rushing back with new messages.