I glanced up, anticipating hard words, but found her face unexpectedly soft. I smiled ruefully. Then, as my smile began to fade, Helena Justina leaned forwards and kissed me.

I had my free hand tangled in her hair to stop her if she tried to move away, but she did not try. After an aeon of blissful disbelief I remembered to start breathing again.

“Sorry!” she teased gently. She was no more sorry than I was. I tightened my grip to bring her back, but found her already there.

Until then my encounters with women had relied on strategic wine jugs and heavy-handed wit, followed by an elaborate ballet I choreographed to arabesque me and my partner offstage into some convenient bed. The experiences of Didius Falco had been less frequent, and far less interesting, than constant allusion may suggest, but to my credit I did usually manage to supply a bed.

Now, without seriously intending it, I was kissing Helena in the way I had been wanting to kiss her for so long I had no idea when the yearning began. She looked at me quite calmly, so I went on kissing her—just as I ought really to have kissed her at Massilia, and every night for a thousand miles before—while she kissed me back until I knew this time neither of us thought it was a mistake. I stopped.

“We’re embarrassing the horse…” One of the first facts of life a man understands is that you never tell a woman the truth. Yet I told this one the truth; I always had done and I always would. “Helena Justina, I gave up seducing women.” I held her face between my two hands, keeping back her hair.

She considered me gravely. “Was that a vow to the gods?”

“No—a promise to myself.” In case she felt insulted, I kissed her again.

“Why are you telling me?” She did not ask why the promise, which was just as well because I did not really know.

“I want you to believe it.”

Very carefully, Helena kissed me. I turned one palm against hers; her cool fingers interlaced with my own. One of her bare feet was making friends with mine as she asked, “Is this a promise you want to keep?”

I shook my head in silence (she was kissing me again). Various connected circumstances forced me to admit: “I don’t think…I can.” It was so long since I wanted a woman so intensely, I had almost forgotten the pain of acute physical desire. “Tonight I don’t want to anyway…”

“Marcus Didius Falco, you are not seducing me,” smiled Helena Justina, as she solved my moral dilemma with the sweetness I had for so long failed to recognize in her. “I am trying as hard as I can to seduce you.” I had always known she was a forthright girl.