“By the great and little gods, Claudia, it’s not the senator you’re marrying, remember? I’m the one,” he said, thumping his chest with stiffened thumb. “Me, understand?”
“Of course, silly man.” She sat up again and fluffed the pillow behind her. “But the senator might object, Longinus. He’s a proud man, proud of his name, his lineage. He’s not going to like the idea of his son’s marrying a bastard and a divorcee, even though she may be the granddaughter of the Emperor Augustus.”
“He won’t object, Claudia; I’m sure of it. But even if he should, I’d marry you anyway, despite him, despite Sejanus, despite even old Tiberius himself.” He adjusted his tunic, then came over to stand by the bed. “Remember that, Claudia.”
“Even in spite of last night?” She was smiling up at him, and she said it capriciously, but he thought he detected a note of seriousness in her voice. “You don’t think I’m terribly wanton, Longinus?”
“Last night makes me all the more determined.” He studied her for a long moment; her expression was coy, but radiant too, a little wistful and warmly affectionate, he saw. “Wanton? Of course not, my dear.” A mischievous grin slowly crossed his face. “Wanting, maybe. And wanted certainly, wanted by me. The most desirable woman I’ve ever known, the most wanted.” He bent down to her, his eyes aflame, and gently he pushed the outthrust chin to separate slightly the rouge-smudged lips raised hungrily to his. Greedily their lips met and held, and then as the girl lifted a hand to the back of his head to crush his face against hers, he grasped the protecting sheet from her fingers and flung it toward the foot of the bed.
“Oh, you beast!” she shrieked. “By all the silly little gods!”
Roaring, he darted for the peristylium. As he fled past the long mirror near the doorway, he caught in it a glimpse of the laughing Claudia struggling wildly to cover herself with the twisted sheet.
4
The magnificent villa of the Prefect Lucius Aelius Sejanus clung precariously to the precipitous slope high above the blue waters of the bay. The greater part of the mansion had been built some hundred years before in the days of Lucius Licinius Lucullus by one of the general’s fellow patricians. This man’s family had suffered the misfortune of having had the villa confiscated after the pater familias had been beheaded for making the wrong choice in a civil war of that era.
Sejanus had acquired the property—many Romans wondered how, but they were too discreet to inquire—and had added to it extensively, including a spacious peristylium with a great fountain that spouted water piped from higher on the slope and palms and flowers and oriental plants. But most interesting of his improvements was the spreading terrace pushed outward from the peristylium to the very edge of the precipice, paved in ornate mosaic with slabs of marble transported in government barges from quarries far distant—gray and red from Egypt, yellow in various shades and black from Numidia, green cipolin from Euboea—and bordered by a protecting balustrade of white Carrara.