Neither of them moved.
Then she kissed him softly. “Is it always like this?”
Not until you.
He brushed a lock from her cheek. “You mean so intense?”
“So beautiful I’m at a loss for words.”
He wasn’t at a loss. He should speak the truth, tell her he was in love—but he held them back instead of trusting hisinstincts. Theirs was no polite marriage of friendship. It was a love affair. In time, she would come to that conclusion too.
She smiled. “Who knew that when we discussed morbid poetry we’d be making love like this?”
He’d known.
Somehow, he’d always known.
But she sounded like a woman bathing in the afterglow of lust, and despite the ache in his chest, he wore his usual confident smile.
Now wasn’t the time to say what burned behind his ribs. But it was coming. Sooner than he was ready for.
“The circumstances we found ourselves in were rather unusual.” He drew his handkerchief from his pocket and wiped her thigh. “Who knew I’d be tending to you while Rome mourns Caesar on stage?”
“I feel terrible about missing the second half of the play.”
He laughed. “I don’t. The idea that we might find our villain disguised as a plebeian carrying a placard was always fanciful.”
“Perhaps we’ve let imagination get the better of us.”
“It’s our imaginations that put us here.” He brushed his thumb along the line of her jaw, arousal quietly thrumming beneath his skin. “You’re still astride me, and I’m in no rush for the play to end.”
She brushed an errant lock from his brow. “Clothes are cumbersome, and I’d prefer we were at home in bed.”
“Then I revise my earlier statement. Let’s leave now before?—”
He didn’t finish.
The paintings on the far wall caught his attention. Six small prints of ancient amphitheatres, collected by his father on his Grand Tour. Rome, Verona, Athens, to name a few.
Olivia followed his gaze. “What is it? What have you seen?”
“It’s probably nothing.” He lifted her gently off his lap, buttoned his trousers, and helped her straighten her clothing. He caught her hand and pressed a kiss to her knuckles, a small promise of what awaited her later. “We’ll continue this at home.”
But his gaze had already returned to the wall.
He didn’t move at first. Then something, a vague remark made years ago, drew him forward.
Olivia moved with him, silent, yet equally curious.
He stopped before one print. Not the Colosseum, nor Verona’s arena, nor a theatre in Athens.
The fourth. The smallest. The Theatre of Pompey. A ruin barely recognisable as anything grand, columns half-buried, a portico of broken stone.
His father had once held the print and called it ahive for traitors.The comment had meant little to Gabriel then. Now it sounded like a prophecy.
“You’ve seen something,” Olivia whispered.
“Caesar died at the foot of Pompey’s statue. Not in the Senate House as Shakespeare depicted or people like to claim.”
