Cailin giggled. 'Your choices, my lord, bear a great similarity to one and another.' She already liked this man. He was kind, and he had humor. These were not bad traits in one so powerful.
He smiled back at her. She excited him very much; rousing him in a way no woman really ever had, even his beloved Anna. It had been a long time since he had really desired a woman, although he had visited Villa Maxima quite regularly. He firmly believed that a man should not allow his juices to be pent up for too long. To do so foggled the brain and made a man irritable. He knew, however, looking at this beautiful girl before him, that he would never visit Villa Maxima again.
'I like it when you laugh, my beauty,' he said softly.
'I like it when you smile at me, my lord,' she responded, and then she kissed him on the lips, quickly, without passion, but sweetly.
In answer he cupped her head in one hand and began to kiss her face and throat with warm lips that sent tingles of pleasure throughout her entire being. She moaned low in the back of her throat, arching her body as his other hand began to knead at a breast and he pushed her back against the side of the pool. He ran his tongue over her lips, nibbled at her eyelids, tongued the column of her straining neck. His hand dug into the tightly bunched curls pinned atop her head, and then he groaned as if pained when her body pushed against his lower torso. Her arms slipped about his neck. Cailin, returning his kisses with fervor, realized she had no need to employ Casia's tricks with Aspar. She felt his hungry arousal against her thigh, pushing, pressing with urgency.
'I want to wait,' he half sobbed, 'but I cannot, Cailin!'
'Do not, my lord,' she encouraged him, tightening her hold about his neck as he slid his hands beneath her buttocks and sheathed himself within her passage, sighing with deep relief. He pumped her with long slow strokes of his weapon, and she felt him, hard but loving, within her body. She murmured low as he moved inside her over and over again until he could bear no more and his lover's tribute exploded in hot bursts of passion that left him weak and Cailin shocked that she had felt nothing but his physical presence. She shuddered, horrified.
Aspar opened his eyes. 'What is the matter?' he asked her. 'You had no pleasure of it, did you, Cailin? Yet 1 think I do not displease you, my beauty, do I?' He was free of her body now, and they stood together facing each other, her back still against the bathing pool.
'Is there only pleasure with a husband?' she asked him, honestly confused, and needing desperately to know. 'I felt no pleasure when 1 was forced to couple with Jovian's trio of Northmen, but I thought it was because I did not love them, because what they were doing to me was wrong. You are not my husband, but you are kind to me. I want to serve you like a wife. Should there not be pleasure then, my lord? You do not repel me!
He took her in his arms and soothed her as best as he could. He was not a doctor, but he knew that the mind was probably the most powerful weapon that God had ever created. He had seen strange things happen to soldiers in the field, particularly after a cruel battle: Men, normally hardened and fierce, who would break down weeping. Men who could never look at weapons again without breaking into a fit of trembling sweats. Perhaps the brutal savagery Cailin had endured had hurt her in a similar way. He remembered the blank look in her eyes the night he had attended the entertainment at Villa Maxima. She had, in a sense, removed herself from what was going on upon the stage because it was the only way she could survive it.
'What has happened to you since you left Britain has hurt you in some unseen manner,' he told her comfortingly. 'If you will trust me, I will help you to heal yourself, my beauty. I very much want you to have the same pleasure of me as I have had of you. Unlike most men of my age, I have a rather unusually large capacity for lovemaking, Cailin. We will continue on until you, too, are pleasured, no matter how long it takes.' He took her hand. 'Come now before we are so weakened that we are washed away in this bath.'
He led her from the bathing pool, and they dried each other off. Then, taking her hand again, he brought her to their bedchamber. Cailin was surprised to see that her pretty, narrow little couch had been removed from the dais and pushed against a wall. In its place upon the raised platform was a large striped mattress and several large, colorful pillows. Aspar began kissing her again, and shortly they fell to the bed, their limbs intertwined. The sensation of his body against hers was totally different here than in the bathing pool. He seemed harder.
'Lie still,' he commanded her, and pushing two of the pillows beneath her hips to raise her up, he told her, 'I want you to spread your legs wide for me, my beauty,' and when she obeyed him, he leaned forward, gently spread her nether lips with his thumbs and began to touch her lightly and softly with his tongue.
Cailin gasped with shock and surprise. Her first thought was to push him away. This was an invasion of such a deeply intimate nature such as she had never experienced. Yet there was a tenderness to it, and a sweetness that hypnotized her so thoroughly that she found she was unable to deny him his way with her. His tongue gently caressed her flesh, then began to tease at the tiny core of her very being. Cailin felt heat suffusing her entire body, yet she shivered. The little nub began to sharply tingle, the sensation growing in intensity until she thought she could simply bear no more, but for the life of her she could find no voice to beg him to stop.
She let the deliciousness take her, and she heard herself, as if from a distance, moaning with her own pleasure. Her limbs were heavy with a longing she had never experienced but did not find unpleasant in the least. The feeling was building even more with each passing moment, until finally an intense sweetness swept over her like a wave from the sea, and receded as quickly, leaving her weak, but most strangely satisfied. 'Ahhhhh,' she exhaled breathily. Then quite unexpectedly, she began to cry softly.
Aspar pulled himself up and gathered the girl in his arms. He said nothing. He simply stroked those riotous little auburn curls, marveling at their softness as his fingers became tangled amid the silk of her lovely hair. She pressed herself against him as if seeking his protection, and he was overwhelmed by his own desire to keep her safe from all the cruelty of the world. No matter what had happened to her, Cailin was in her heart an innocent. He was not going to let her be hurt again.
Finally her sobs subsided and she said, 'You received no pleasure, my lord, yet I did. How can this be? I did not know a woman could be pleasured in such a way.' She looked up at him, and he thought that her beautiful eyes resembled violets, wet with a spring rain.
'There is pleasure in just giving pleasure, Cailin; not perhaps as intense for me as when I am encased within you, but pleasure nonetheless. There are many ways of giving and receiving pleasure. We will explore them all. I will never intentionally do you harm, my little love,' he told her, stroking her cheek with a gentle finger.
'They say you are the most powerful man in the empire, my lord. Even more powerful than the emperor himself,' she said.
'Never say that aloud to anyone else, Cailin,' he warned her. 'The powerful are jealous of their power, and would not share it. My survival depends upon remaining a good servant of the empire. It is really the empire 1 honor. God, and the empire. No man. But that, my little love, must remain our secret, eh?' He smiled at her.
'You are like the Romans of old, I think, my lord. You honor the new Rome, Byzantium, as they once honored the old Rome,' Cailin said.
'And what do you know of Rome?' he asked her, amused.
'I sat with my brothers and their tutor for many years,' Cailin said. 'I learned the history of Rome and of my native Britain.'
'Can you read and write?' he questioned her, fascinated.
'In Latin,' she responded. 'The history of my mother's people, the Dobunni Celts, is an oral history, but I know it, my lord.'
'Jovian told me little of your background, Cailin. Your Latin is that of a cultured woman, if a bit provincial. Who were your people?'
'I descend from a tribune of the Drusus family who came to Britain with the emperor Claudius,' Cailin said, and then, as they lay together, she told him her family's history.
'And your husband? Who was he? Also of a Romano-Briton family?'
'My husband was a Saxon,' Cailin said. '1 married him after my family was murdered at the instigation of my cousin Quintus, who wanted my father's lands. My cousin was unaware I had escaped the slaughter until I came with my husband, Wulf Ironfist, to reclaim what was rightfully mine. Wulf killed Quintus when he attempted to attack me. It was his wife, Antonia, who betrayed me, but you already know that part of my story, my lord.'
'It is amazing that you have survived it all,' Aspar said thoughtfully.
