Red rose underneath his tan. “It’s notably deficient.”
His lips looked so dark, nearly tan like his skin. If she leaned across him, she could touch her mouth to his.
“I checked for political positions first, but they wouldn’t take me without my father’s backing,” Eric’s ears turned red, “so, I took a job as dock loader.”
Cara thrust back from him. She was a loathsome person. Dock loading was backbreaking, underpaid work, and Eric shouldn’t have to turn his hand to it. If only she could express her sorrow that she’d done this to him. He, drunk. She, sober.
Worse yet, she couldn’t fix this for him. No matter where women labored, employers paid them a fraction of a man’s earnings.
Warmth brushed her belly. Eric spread his fingers across her midsection. “Enjoy yourself in there, baby girl, before you have to emerge into reality.” The faintest hint of a smile curved Eric’s mouth.
Her breath caught. Gazing into his eyes, which reflected the flickering rays of sunlight that now filtered through the eaves again, Cara touched his shoulder. “Our son will get to meet his wondrous father, though, when he emerges.”
Eric startled, then a smile split his face. He pressed his finger against her lips. “She.” He tasted of dust and sweat and he certainly acted pleased with her.
Pushing aside his finger, Cara touched her lips to his. The roughness of wind-chapped lips tasted sweet, his breath blowing against her cold cheeks. “He,” she whispered.
Instead of kissing back, Eric shifted right on the straw, parting their lips. “Did you love him prodigiously?”
“Who?”
“The carpenter.”
Oh. Cara tightened her fingers against her kneecaps.
Hands behind his head now, Eric leaned back. “Did you?”
“I didn’t love him at all, and I hope Conan didn’t love me overmuch, because I was ghastly to him.” Conan had told her numerous times how much he loved her. He must be heartbroken, and she bore the blame for that, too.
“If he’d loved you, he’d have wanted to marry you anyway.”
The breeze whipped through the stable door, carrying Eric’s words with it, but, mouth gaping, she stared at him.
Outside, the chill morning wind whipped through the villa’s windows. Cara stood in the doorway of Eric’s room.
Leg wrappings covered his legs and a cloak hung from his broad shoulders. Taking a knife, he dropped it inside his thick wool sock, which the elite Romans wore underneath sturdy sandals in winter, rather than Celtic boots.
Eric bent and grasped the belt and scabbard lying on his mattress. He pulled the leather tight around his hips. “Have you gathered what you need?”
Nodding, she lifted a knotted length of cloth.
Eric’s fingers brushed hers as he took it from her hands. He placed the bundle on top of the pack by his bed. Pushing the top flaps down, he cinched off the pack. Then, he grabbed the strap and swung it up over his shoulder. “Ready then?”
She nodded.
He passed through the door and she followed him out of the villa, to the road beyond the gate.
Parting from her, Eric walked to the guard shack and spoke in a harsh dialect. The leader of the guards inclined his head and replied in the same language. Eric tossed the man a ring of keys.
Then, Eric walked to where she stood underneath the boughs of an oak tree, the pack containing all they owned in this world standing by her feet.
Surely Conan lied about how many thousands would starve this winter? Eric had found work, and she’d look for work as well, though no employer would pay a woman enough to keep body and soul together.
What if Eric lost his position? What then? If they starved in Londinium, the townsfolk would throw their bodies into the snow drifts without so much as discovering their names.
Striding up to her, Eric swung the pack up off the ground and started down the dirt path. Just him and her and two days’ worth of food in that pack on his back.
A hundred paces down the road as the dirt trail turned into paved rock, Eric gazed back at the villa. “I think I’ll miss the horses most.” A wistfulness lingered in his eyes.
“Most of what?”
“My father’s wealth.”
Her gaze sank to the muddied road beneath her feet. Eric had lost all for her. If he’d let her suffer the shame alone, like any other patrician would have, his father wouldn’t have disinherited him.
Eric looked over to her and he smiled. “We’d best hurry if we’re to make Londinium by nightfall tomorrow.” He clasped her hand. Calluses from the javelin and discus throw pressed against her fingers. She clutched him back.
They walked for hours, one mile, two, four, ten. They passed travelers, soldiers, and some unshaven men who resembled highway bandits. One glance at Eric’s short sword and the unshaven men kept walking.
Her legs grew weary as the shadows of night stretched across the road. Then, in a knoll surrounded by the spicy smell of evergreen trees, Eric built a fire.
Opening the pack, Cara broke bread and cooked mutton over the fire. Eric ate hungrily, but she let the food lay half-eaten on her lap as she sat cross-legged by the fire.
Reaching into the pack, Eric removed a scroll. He unrolled it and skimmed his gaze down the parchment.
“You brought a scroll?” Theseus and the Minotaur? Hercules? Shoving crumbs off her lap, she looked over Eric’s arm. Latin letters stared back at her, incomprehensible.
“Galatians. I copied it five years ago.” Eric tilted the parchment toward her.
Not nearly as interesting as Hercules. She reached over him and brushed her finger across the dark swirls. “You write beautifully.” His chest moved with breath, the muscles of his arm swelling out his tunic sleeve. He was so large.
She shouldn’t have hesitated last week when he broached the topic of touching. Pruella’s mother would have her head, not to mention he’d agreed to marry her despite everything. Now that his foul mood had passed, he looked enticingly frightening, not terrifyingly so.
Firelight played over Eric’s face, making his dark eyes even darker. A flame sparked up, lighting his fingers, tanned palms large enough to lose her hands in. “Didn’t feel so at the time. The copying it down was a punishment.”
“Why?” She moved her fingers inside his. Warmth spread through her hand up to her arm.
Self-consciousness tinged his voice. “We were visiting my mother’s family at her village.”
“Village?”
“My mother was a Celtic farmer before she married my father. Hence my strange first name.”
“I love the name ‘Eric.’” She touched his knee. If this baby was a boy, she’d name him that without thinking twice. Only the father had the legal right to name the child, so her opinion mattered naught. Conan once told her that he’d name his firstborn son Bendigeidfran. She’d never heard a more revolting name, but little say she would have had over it.
Eric touched his gaze to her hand, no grunts or terse words now.
Her heart soared and she laid her other hand on his leg. “What happened next?”
“Oh.” Eric’s cheekbones reddened. “Wryn and Gwen and I visited my cousins’ farm one afternoon. It was almost spring. The ground had thawed, and Mother always told so many stories about plowing and new seed that I wanted to try my hand at it.”
Fingers still touching Eric’s wool leg-wrappings, Cara nodded.
“Uncle Cedric said no, it wasn’t time, and he didn’t trust me with his horses. I’ve been on the back of a horse since I got my first armatura sword, and his horses are not as extraordinary as he thinks.”
“And?” She traced her hand up his arm, his muscles hard beneath her fingers.
He flicked his gaze to her hand, and he didn’t look displeased. “Uncle Cedric went hunting, so I took his horses and plow anyway. I ended up not only breaking the ploughshare but spraining both horses’ legs. You know how Vergil extols the peaceful quiet of farming life?”
She shook her head.
“Vergil’s a madman. I never came as close to death as that afternoon with one horse rearing right, the other rearing left, the ploughshare skipping out of the furrow, and my body slamming into trees as the horses careened toward the edge of the clearing. So, yea, my deserved penance.” Eric held up the scroll.
“You hadn’t planned to break anything.” She scooted so close to Eric her leg pressed against his and her shoulder touched his chest. Did she dare wrap her arms around his neck and press her lips to his? Feel the warmth of his mouth as she slid her body over his leg that separated them to sit inside his crossed knees?
“I may have also beaten up Wryn that evening for telling. He only got two uppercuts to my jaw, nasty blows, though.” Eric rubbed the left side of his jaw.
No, she didn’t dare. Pruella said men considered girls who initiated kisses wanton and if Eric thought her wanton, he might suspect she’d been sober that night. She’d just wait. Now that he smiled at her instead of grunting, he’d take what was his soon enough this night.
Her shoulder and chest brushed his upper arm as Cara touched the scroll again. Beautiful letters, magical letters, letters holding mysteries she couldn’t decipher. She hadn’t wanted to tell him this, but he might as well know before he left her another note. “I wish I knew how to read it.”
He stared at her. “You don’t know how to read?”
“My Father tried. I went to school a few years, too. I learned the numbers, but the words always swam.”
“Oh.” Eric shifted his hand onto the fallen leaves at his side. “Then you didn’t know where I’d gone when I left that note?”
“No.” The fire crackled behind them. A log broke, crashing into the dirt, sending up sparks.
“I’ll teach you.”
She cocked her head, a question in her eyes.
“To read. You have to. If you want to, I mean, but you ought to. I guess we should start with Latin, but the Greek’s important, too.”
She blinked. “I don’t even know how to speak Greek. How am I supposed to read it?”
Eric leaned forward on his elbows, his chiseled face grave by firelight. “We’re having a child. To be a mother it’s important to know these things.”
Yes, that’s what the midwives went around the countryside teaching young girls. Cooking, cleaning, weaving, not so important. To be a good mother, dear girl, you must know Greek. She laughed, peal after peal of merriment that she couldn’t contain.
“What?”
She shook her head. “You wouldn’t want me as a pupil. I’m too thick-skulled to learn.”
“You’re astute, all those numbers, money-counting, tabula.”
“Numbers, not words.”
Eric lowered his voice, so soft in the darkness. “I can’t do numbers.”
She dropped her hand. The linen tunic on his shoulders and that beautifully crafted scroll in his hand marked him as a patrician man. Of course, he’d know how to work numbers, yet he said he didn’t.
“Wryn always could. I can’t. They get muddled on the page and come out wrong.”
“Numbers are easy.”
“Says you.” He flicked her hand with his forefinger.
She watched his eyes. They tracked her every move. Now he’d lean down and kiss her, tug her onto his staunch legs and press her chest up to his. Did his lips still taste of faraway lands like back at the training grounds?
“Anyway, back to the story. When Father said I had to copy an entire scroll as punishment, I chose Galatians to spite him.”
She dropped her hands to the cold dirt. “How does choosing to copy down Scripture spite anybody? Except the Emperor, I guess.”
“After what happened, it’s Galatians.” Eric raised his voice above the flames as the firelight flickered on his strong jaw. Surely now his gaze would slide down from its respectful position on her face. He’d called her comely, compared her to the goddess of beauty even. He’d lost his inheritance to marry her; he could at least take advantage of that fact.
“And?” She looked at him. Nothing. Except that he smiled breathtakingly at her. Bringing her knees up in front of her, Cara wrapped her arms around them.
“You do know what Galatians is about?”
“Umm… the apostle Paul wrote it… to Galatia?”
Laying aside the scroll, Eric rested both hands on his crossed knees and surveyed her boldly.
Perhaps not nothing? Releasing her knees, she looked up at him, waiting for him to touch her. No going back, then.
He grinned. “You really never did listen in First Day service, did you?”
“Eric!” She rammed both hands against his muscular shoulder.
Her husband’s broad chest, covered in white patrician linen, didn’t budge.
Heat swarmed her cheeks and her fingers trembled a little. “I’m sorry.” Leaning forward, she touched his shoulder as if to erase the shove.
“How sorry?” Eric snaked his hand around her waist, pulling her close to him as his eyes laughed at her. Her.
A wondrous feeling swept over her. “Sorry enough to let you explain Galatians to me.” Or kiss him right now.
Eric dropped his hand, releasing her. “In Galatians, Paul berates the church for following too many rules. Says they have to stop bothering about ‘do this’ and ‘don’t do that’ and who’s a ‘better’ Christian than another.”
The leaves crumpled underneath her as Cara fell back. “Christianity is nothing but rules.”
Eric shook his head. “It’s about love, God Himself coming down to earth because He loves us.”
“That too, I guess,” though she’d never felt much of that from Conan-approved friends, “but God loves us more if we follow all His impossible rules.” The stars twinkled in the heavens above her. She’d broken God’s rules and she could only imagine what God thought of her.
The firelight gleamed on Eric’s hair as he shook his head. “I don’t think so. I think He simply loves us.”
“Pruella certainly doesn’t agree.”
“Who’s she?”
Cara wrinkled her nose. “A vexatious girl who the church elders think can do no wrong.”
“Ah yes, the one the Most High arranges breakfast chats with so she can reveal His marching orders to us.” Eric grinned. “Now you have completely changed my understanding of my religion.”
He made it sound so silly to listen to Pruella, but he’d never met her. With a shake of her head, Cara leaned back into the pack.
The roaring fire only barely warmed her dress, promising even colder winter nights to come. They had another day’s journey to Londinium, where Conan said starved bodies would line the street, and if they survived the winter, then she’d have what she’d never wanted – a baby.
Eric was pleased with her, though, so she smiled.
“They call these houses?”
Cara glanced up at Eric. The splintered wood of the tiny dwelling created what she’d thought impossible, a hovel worse than Edna’s.
The refuse in the narrow Londinium street assaulted Cara’s nostrils. Bony street urchins, women in patched clothes, and unshaven men crossed the cobblestones as the sun sank over the cold river. Cara swallowed hard. Eric might change his mind about not hating her now.
“They expect people to pay to live in such a thing?” Eric stared at the holes in the low roof. His gaze moved to the mud-covered wood of the chimney, which didn’t boast a single brick. A dirty straw pallet lay in one corner of the shack. A rusted cooking pot sat by the miniscule hearth fire, and the door’s missing board let the wind in.
Cara glanced back at the filthy man on their heels. He lacked several teeth. “I imagine he does.” Oh, Eric would hate her now. Then they’d die of starvation and have their bodies cast into the snow. Which was worse?
“Eight denarii if you want it for the next two weeks.” The man hooked his dirty thumbnails over his belt. “Five more by the end of the month.”
“Five for these two week
s.” Eric spread his feet, shifting his cloak.
“Eight.” The man ran his gaze over the fine linen of Eric’s tunic, which his shifted cloak revealed. “Though I should raise it higher for someone like you. You can pay fifteen denarii at least.”
Eric rested his hand on his sword pommel. “Killed a man, took his tunic.”
The filthy man slid his tongue through his bare gums. The man spat. “Five denarii then.”
Eric counted out the money and the man left, swinging the rotting door shut.
Cara turned to Eric. “Killed a man? What if the legionaries show up at our door?” Then again, execution would end quicker than starvation.
“I only had six denarii.”
Six? One left then. Freezing wind blew through the broken door. The few logs in the hearth released only a faint warmth. They had half a loaf of bread left.
Eric’s head almost brushed the roof. He reached up and touched the sagging hole that the next rainstorm would send water pouring through. Four paces took him from the hearth fire to the other side of the room, and three paces stretched between the mattress and the door. “If I get some wood and nails, it’ll keep the rain out leastways.”
She glanced at the dirty pallet. One denarius left, not enough money to buy new straw, let alone nails. He’d hate her a thousand times more now, or divorce her.
“I start work tomorrow. We won’t be here forever.” Unfastening his cloak, Eric sat on the pallet.
She’d try for money-counting positions, but if Conan spoke truth, she wouldn’t get one. No employer would pay a woman one-quarter of what such work was worth anyway. A gust of wind blew through the broken door board. Cara glanced at the dying flames and shivered.
Eric touched the edge of the pallet beside him. “It’s warm here.”
Her gaze jerked over to him. No hate in his eyes.
Eric did seem deliberate in his actions. He’d hate her in a day or two when he realized that they would starve to death, or else he’d abandon her in this remote town to please his father. Then she’d starve to death!
Her heart raced, blood pounding.
The dirt floor lurched beneath her feet.
When Gambling (Love and Warfare Series Book 2) Page 20