Mistress of Rome (19 page)

“You know how many men I’ve had?” Lepida rippled her back under Paulinus’s hands. “I started with a gladiator when I was fifteen, so I wouldn’t have to go to your father a virgin bride. I told your father the bruises came from falling down the bathhouse steps, and he believed me. What a fool!”

“Don’t say that,” Paulinus muttered. “He’s not a fool. He’s brilliant—and he’s honorable—and he’s everything I’ve ever wanted to be, so don’t—”

“You want to be an ugly hunchback?”

“Don’t insult him.” Paulinus was shaking. “Don’t you dare—”

“Oh, the dutiful son rears his ugly head. Well, dutiful son, if you love your father that much, then get out of my bed.”

She was sprawled on her side, the sheets pushed down around her hips, her hair half-covering and half-revealing her breasts, her mouth parted in a smile. He couldn’t move.

“I didn’t think so.” She slid down onto her back and crooked a finger at him. “Come.”

He came.

I
could make Paulinus come to me just by twitching an eyebrow. I could sink my nails into his back and watch him arch up in agony and ecstasy. I could bite him and caress him, and whether it was pleasure or pain he came back for more. Paulinus the immaculate, the good; Paulinus the soldier, the saint; Paulinus my stepson: enmeshed and enslaved and utterly under my spell.

How wonderful.

What fun it was, making him dance to my tune. I made him brush my hair and oil my back, I made him run my errands and carry my parcels. I kept him waiting in uncomfortable places, summoned him and sent him away again, pouted when he shouted at me and giggled when he wept. I made a tryst with one of his friends at the Praetorian barracks and summoned Paulinus to catch us in the act, feeling his eyes behind the crack of the door hating me as I moaned and writhed under another man—and that night he still came crawling back. Who would have thought that men tortured by guilt could be so much fun?

“Skip guard duty,” I commanded when he pulled away and reached for his breastplate.

“I can’t.”

“I said, skip guard duty.” I spider-walked my fingers up his spine and laughed as he came back to bed with a groan. He missed quite a few of his Praetorian duties, thanks to me. And then he missed his punishment details.

“This has to stop,” he muttered thickly. “It’s wrong—shameful—”

“Oh, but that’s what makes it fun. If you want someone tame, run back to that sticklike singer of yours and see if she can squeeze you into her busy, busy schedule.”

He glowered at me helplessly, but he didn’t run back to Thea. Oh, no. I was better than Thea. Finally someone had realized that.

 

N
OT here!” Paulinus pushed me away as I drew him off behind a garden statue at a dinner party.

“Why not?” I flexed my fingers along his chest.

“They’ll—they’ll see!” Not so far off were the sounds of well-bred laughter and soft joking, footsteps and rustling gowns. “If they catch us—”

“Isn’t that part of the fun? Doesn’t it . . . excite you?”

He opened his mouth in horror, but I snaked upward to suck on his lip and draw his hand inside my
stola
, and there was no more argument.

We weren’t caught. But we could have been, and what a scandal it would be! A senator’s wife and her stepson? The laughter would follow Marcus all the way into the Senate. “Did you hear about Norbanus’s wife? Yes, the fool left her alone in Brundisium and now the son is doing his father’s work for him!”

Oh, yes, that was exactly what they’d say. As I never hesitated to tell Paulinus.

“You’ll ruin him, you know.” I leaned back on my elbows, tracing my toes over the small of Paulinus’s back as he pulled away from me. “His career. His writing. His standing in Rome. All gone.” I snapped my fingers. “Marcus Norbanus, cuckolded by his own son. It would destroy him.”

“You think I don’t know that?” His voice was muffled.

“I think you do. Fascinating, isn’t it? You won’t give me up for your own father.” I coiled myself against his back, reaching around to smooth my hands over his chest. “What if he walked in right now? What if he saw the two of us together like this?”

“Stop it.”

“Imagine his face.” I put my lips very close to Paulinus’s ear. “He limps in, tired from a long day. All he wants is to kiss his lovely wife and invite his beloved son over to dinner. And what does he find? His beloved son riding his lovely wife, rutting with her, right in his own bed, so close he can hear them both
moan
—”

Paulinus wrenched away, knocking me back against the sheets, and swung around with his fist raised.

“Are you going to hit me?” I murmured. “Oh, do. I might enjoy it.”

He faltered. I threw my head back and laughed. He fell on me with a strangled curse. I wound my body around his and branded him with my teeth.

 

 

 

HE
hated her. He hated the leap of triumph in her blue eyes every time his feet dragged him unwillingly toward her bed. He hated her little pink tongue flicking catlike over her lips. He hated the cruel, casual words that fell so easily out of her lovely mouth.

He couldn’t stay away.

“You all right, Norbanus?” Verus tossed out at him one evening at the barracks. “You don’t seem yourself these days. That singer giving you hell?”

Athena. He hadn’t gone to visit her in a month. She seemed cool and colorless beside Lepida’s fiery insolent dash.

Sabina was wistful. “You never play with me anymore.”

Centurion Densus was more blunt. “Snap out of it, Norbanus. Or I’ll have you on punishment detail till Saturnalia.” Centurion Densus was a legend among the Praetorians; graying but still vigorous, a hero who had once fought off a mob in the terrible Year of Four Emperors and saved the life of a young Empress-to-be. Paulinus had looked up to him like a god. Now he couldn’t even meet the centurion’s eyes.

In his sleep he heard Lepida’s sly whispers. He saw her demure and shy on her wedding day under the red veil; saw her shameless and hopelessly tempting on his father’s bed. She lived under his skin like a thorn.

“You hate me, don’t you?” she asked suddenly one evening after he’d finished in sweat and despair.

He turned his face away.

“Yes, you do. Whatever for?” She propped her chin on her hand. “Because I’ve cost you your honor? What a bore. Why is it always the woman’s fault if a man loses his honor?”

“No,” he jerked. “My fault.”

“Well, at least you’re honest.” She curled her finger around his ear.

“So if it’s your fault you’ve lost your honor—such a quaint phrase!—then why hate me?”

“Because you don’t care,” he said baldly.

“Neither do you, darling.” She pinched his earlobe between her lacquered nails. “Or else you’d leave me right now. And you can’t, can you?”

He opened his mouth—and paused. The pause stretched out into minutes.

“Didn’t think so.” She crooked a slender white ankle around his chin. “Kiss my foot, Paulinus.”

He bent his head, pressed his lips against her instep—and saw his father’s eyes. Her skin tasted like honey and betrayal.

 

 

 

THE
letter fluttered from his hand, and his stomach rushed into his mouth. He barely made it to the
lavatorium
, throwing up again and again.

“My dear Paulinus,”
Marcus had written in his firm unaged hand.
“The Senate has finished its wrangling over the problem of the drains and the new aqueduct and the declining birth rate (at least briefly) so I am coming home to visit. You may expect me—”

“I thought I’d see you this morning,” Lepida yawned as Paulinus appeared in the atrium. She was still wrapped in her white sleeping robe. “Got one of these, did you?” She waved a roll of parchment between the tips of her fingers.

“He’s coming back.”

“Yes, so I read. Care for some barley water?”

“No.” His feet took him across the room and back, across and back. “He’s coming back.”

“Will you stop repeating yourself?” She arranged herself among the couch cushions.

“Lepida, it’s got to stop. Now.” He could see the slaves clustered in the anteroom beyond the atrium, whispering behind their hands.

“Why?” She reached out and caught him by the wrist. “Won’t you miss me?” Her other hand found his knee.

“Don’t,” he whispered. “Don’t do this to me.”

“Do what?” Her fingers slid up his thigh, higher. “This?”

He closed his eyes with a groan, hearing the slaves scatter.

 

P
AULINUS!” Marcus gave an open-handed wave out of his litter. “Give me your arm, boy. I’ve been riding in this contraption since dawn and I’m stiff as a board.”

Paulinus handed his father down before the gate and was enveloped in a one-armed hug. The familiar smells of unpressed linen and fresh ink enveloped him. He buried his burning eyes briefly in the humped shoulder. The gray morning was crisp and cool, but his face flamed.

“Good to see you, boy.” Dusty and beaming, Marcus looked him over. “You look tired. Are they working you too hard in those barracks?”

Paulinus felt his ears burning. He was spared an answer when an armload of scrolls fell out of the litter. “Did you bring a whole library, Father?”

“Not at all. Just Seneca’s meditations, a little Cato, some Pliny, Martial’s satiric verses—gods, there goes the rest of them. Here, take these. No, take them all while I give my daughter a kiss.”

Sabina skimmed out of the house like a bird. “Father, Father!” She swarmed up into his arms.

“Miss me, little one?” Marcus kissed her soundly. “I missed you, too. And I believe I’ve got a present with your name on it.”

“A pony?” she asked eagerly.

“No, I couldn’t fit one in the litter. Just a very pretty set of coral beads. Guaranteed to make you as beautiful as your mother.”

“Marcus.” Lepida floated down the stairs in green silk and her wedding pearls. “Home at last!”

Paulinus dropped his armload of scrolls and bent clumsily after them. He could see her cooing into his father’s ear, her face fi xed in a breathless smile . . . how could she do it? Less than an hour ago she had been writhing underneath him, limbs locked around his hips, nails leaving long cat-scratches in his back. How could she do all that, and still look his father in the eye and say, “Welcome back”?

“Welcome back.” She kissed her husband on the cheek, and her eyes slid over his shoulder to rest on Paulinus.

He didn’t think he could ever look at his father again.

At least it was finally over. It was over, and his father would never know. Not even Lepida would try anything with his father in the same house . . .

Her blue gaze locked with his over the dinner table that evening, and she ran her tongue around the rim of the wine cup.

He knocked over a bowl of grapes.

“Careful, there.” Marcus caught the bowl before it could slide off the table. “Are you feeling all right, Paulinus? You don’t look well.”

“They keep him so busy at the barracks, darling.” Lepida stretched to refill her husband’s wine cup. “I’ve hardly seen hide or hair of him for two months. Sabina is quite desolate at the way he’s been neglecting her.”

“I’m—I’m asking for a transfer,” Paulinus blurted out. “There’s a company of Praetorians with the Emperor in Dacia—”

“Just when I’ve come back?” Marcus protested.

“Surely there’s no rush.” Lepida gave her slow white smile.

Paulinus rose, nearly upsetting the grapes again. “I should get back to the barracks.” He grabbed the bowl just in time.

“Stay.” Marcus rose, too. “I’ll put Sabina to bed and catalogue those new scrolls, and you can entertain Lepida with all your tales of valor.”

Paulinus’s heart dropped into the pit of his stomach.

“You’ll do all that cataloguing this evening, Marcus?” Lepida’s eyes never shifted from Paulinus. “It will take all night.”

“Better get it done now. If I leave the scrolls out the slaves will insist on putting them away, and then I’ll never be able to find anything.”

“I have to go.” Paulinus hated the note of entreaty in his voice.

“Stay.” Lepida’s soft hand descended on his arm.

He followed her.

 

 

 

MARCUS
only meant to take a moment organizing his scrolls—his first evening home, after all, and he should spend it with his wife and son. But he sat down for a moment to look at the new copy of Martial’s verses, and that reminded him of a line he’d read in Catullus so he went rummaging to find that . . .

“Father?” a little voice piped from the door. Marcus smiled at his daughter, already dressed for bed in a little white robe.

“Don’t worry, Vibia Sabina, I’ll come to kiss you good night.”

“No, Mother sent me. She took me aside today and said she had a surprise for you after supper, so”—he could hear Lepida’s voice through his daughter’s—“if you weren’t out of your library an hour after dinner, I had to come fetch you to her chamber
immed’ately
.”

Marcus laughed. “Then I abandon Catullus and surrender to the ladies of the house.”

Sabina tugged him by the hand through the library doors, little bare feet pattering the mosaics, and up the stairs toward her mother’s chamber. “I like Mother’s room. It’s all blue an’ silvery an’ it has a bed like a shell. She let me play on the bed today, with her jewels. When she was telling me how to bring you down.”

“Did she?” He’d been right, bringing them all to Brundisium—he’d never seen Lepida play with her daughter like that before. But she’d been hardly more than a child herself when she bore Sabina. Now she was growing up.

They halted outside Lepida’s chamber door. “To bed now, little one,” said Marcus. “I’ll come tell you a story later.” He smiled, watching Sabina’s nursemaid tug her away down the hall, and pushed open the door of Lepida’s chamber. Her bed did look like a shell, all veiled in white and silver—he always thought Lepida could have been a pretty mermaid inside it, curled shyly inside her hair.