Page 71 of Enslaved
“I’m sorry I criticized one of your heroes. Do you forgive me?” she asked, tracing Caesar’s noble profile with her finger.
“Only if you wear my coin, and nothing else!”
She laughed up into his eyes. “You are so persuasive. How can I deny you anything?”
“Veni, vidi, vici,”Marcus quoted.
“No. I came, I saw, I conquered,” Diana said slowly, challenging his manhood, knowing he would master her before their loveplay reached its tumultuous climax.
Later, she sat between his legs as he showed her how to use the stylus. When she learned how to make legible letters in the thin lead that covered the wooden tablet, she took up a fresh one and said, “I’m going to put down our names and bury this so that our lovely day will be recorded forever.”
He laughed at her. “It’s common practice to bury these things, but they usually contain curses.”
“What sort of curses?” she asked curiously.
“Oh, wives who have unfaithful husbands write nonsense such as: ‘I curse his life and mind and memory and liver and lungs’ and then they bury them in the superstitious belief that the curse will work.”
She glanced over her shoulder to look up into his black eyes. “And what if it is the wife who is unfaithful?”
“The husband would bury the wife, not some writing tablet.”
It sounded as if it could be a veiled warning. “Perhaps I am lucky that I have no husband,” she said lightly.
A look of contemplation came into his dark eyes, but Diana, intent upon holding her stylus at just the right angle, did not see the longing writ clearly on his face. He watched from over her shoulder as she wrote:
Marcus Magnus,
Primus Pilus
and General of Aquae Sulis.
Loved Forever by Diana Davenport,A.D.61
His finger touched the numbers. “What is this?” he puzzled.
“That is the date, the year we are in.”
Marcus shook his head. “This is the eighth year in the reign of Nero.”
“Yes, I know that, my love, but future generations date everything from the birth of Jesus Christ. So the year is either B.C., before Christ, orA.D., anno Domini.”
Marcus accepted her explanation without demur. He was too filled with love for her to argue and spoil their precious time together.
They buried it among the roots of the copper beech like two children intent on burying a treasure. When it was time to return, Marcus lifted her before him in the saddle while her own mare followed. Though they had spent the entire day together, he was loath to let her go from his arms.
Upon their arrival at home, Kell presented Marcus with a message that Julius Classicianus was to arrive on the morrow, which meant Marcus had to rush off to see that all was in order at the fortress, in preparation for the Procurator’s visit.
As Diana lay alone in the pedestal bed with its towering columns, her thoughts wandered back to the time before she had come there. Her other life seemed a thousand years and a million miles away. Like another lifetime. Her thoughts touched for a moment on the Earl of Bath. It was amazing how much he and Marcus had in common. What if they were one and the same man? Were such things possible? Now that she was a woman in the full sense of the word, she realized that she had been sexually attracted to Mark Hardwick’s dark, arrogant maleness. Sparks had flared between them every time they met.
A smile curved her lips as she drifted off to sleep. What a comforting thought it was that Marcus might live again and again, down through the ages, in the place that he loved. Yet if it were true, seventeen hundred years of civilization had not altered his dominant, arrogant personality. Thank God. Marcus would be Marcus forever!
* * *
“It’s official,” Julius told Marcus. “Emperor Nero has decided to keep Britannia in the empire.” They were sitting in the map room of the principia at the fortress.
“I imagine your shipment of gold and silver ingots stampedDE BRITANmade it impossible for the Emperor and the Senate to even consider giving up such a lucrative source of income.”
Julius came straight to the reason for his visit. “I am recommending that Paullinus be replaced. We need a governor who is a statesman, not one who massacres the native tribes by the thousand.”
