“Got another party?” Verus grinned. “Maybe an intimate dinner for two?”

“Nope.”

“Oh, come off it. It’s that singer you’ve been tagging after—Antonia?”

“Athena. And no, it’s not her.”

“Don’t blame you; she’s a nice piece. Pricey, though. Expects lots of little presents. How much is this intimate little dinner for two going to cost you?”

“It’s my father, you ass. He’s in town.”

“Your father, eh? Didn’t think he ever came out of the Senate.”

“Don’t you know anything? Senate’s out for the summer. Like school.” Paulinus waved the bath attendants away as they approached with oil and strigils. He never felt comfortable letting slaves scrape him down. Soldiers should look after themselves.

“Maybe I’ll pay your singer a visit for you. Tell her how much you miss her, while you’re off listening to all those backbone-of-the-Empire types declaim the virtues of the Republic in Alexandrine verse.” Verus groaned as the bathhouse attendant dragged a strigil across his back, scraping away the sweat. “Or maybe I’ll say you’re paying court to that toothsome stepmother of yours.”

“Hey,” said Paulinus.

“Oh, don’t start. I’m just expressing my heartfelt admiration for that absolutely mouthwatering creature who happens to be your legal mother—”

Paulinus flung a towel at him. In the ensuing scuffle, a tray of bath oils was knocked over. Paulinus waved the slaves back, neatening the little vials into soldierly rows.

“You know—” Verus flopped down on a marble slab, beckoning the masseur. “I’ve never thought your father would wed a girl a third his age. My father, now, that old goat’s on his fourth. But yours—”

Paulinus drew the strigil down his arm, sloughing away the sweat. He could remember thinking the same thing. “Father—this Pollia girl—well—she’s a child,” he had blurted out five years ago. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t—”

“A natural observation.” His father smiled. “I know what people are thinking—old lecher, young girl. I don’t mind giving people a laugh.”

A rush of angry color flooded Paulinus’s cheeks. No one was going to ridicule his father while he was there. “Who’s laughing?” he demanded.

“Everybody,” said Marcus dryly. “Don’t bristle, boy.”

“But if they’re saying—”

“They’re saying I’ve lost my head over a girl young enough to be my daughter. They don’t know that the Emperor ordered it, rather against my wishes. Though I think we may do well enough together, Lepida and I.” Marcus smiled. “I have no illusions, Paulinus. Not at my age. But Lepida likes me well enough, and that could be pleasant.”

Paulinus was uncomfortably aware that his own mother had not really been . . . pleasant. “Pleasant?” his aunt Diana had snorted once. “Paulinus, she was a bitch on wheels.”

“Aunt Diana . . .” but he hadn’t really been able to refute that. He had only been three when his mother divorced his father, ten when she died, but even so he could remember her shouting and throwing things. Once, he recalled, she had dumped all one hundred forty-two scrolls of Livy’s Ab Urbe Conditi into the atrium fountain. “Not a very good edition anyway,” his father had remarked calmly.