To Love Again - Bertrice Small [97]
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 I 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. “I 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.
“Now you know everything about me. Zeno has told me that your first wife was a good and an honorable woman. What he did not say about the wife you now have is more of interest,” Cailin said. “If you would tell me, my lord, I should like to know.”
“Flacilla is a member of the Strabo family,” Aspar began. “They are very powerful at court. Our marriage was one of convenience. She does not live with me, and frankly I do not even like her.”
“Then why did you marry her?” Cailin asked curiously. “You did not need to marry again at this time, my lord. You have one grown son, Zeno says, and a second son as well as a daughter.”
“Did Zeno mention my grandchildren?” Aspar demanded with a certain humor in his voice. “My daughter Sophia has three children, and my eldest son has four. Since Patricius, my youngest, shows no signs of wanting to be a monk, I can assume he, too, will give me more grandchildren one day when he is grown and wed.”
“You have grandchildren?” Cailin was astounded. He did not look that old, and his behavior was certainly not that of an old man. “How old are you, my lord Aspar? I was nineteen in the month of April.”
He groaned. “Dear God! I am certainly old enough to be your father, my little love. I am fifty-four this May past.”
“You are nothing like my father,” she murmured, and then she boldly pulled his head to her and kissed him softly, sweetly.
His head swam pleasantly with her daring. “No,” he said, his gray eyes smiling into her violet ones,