Greta Gilbert - Forbidden To The Gladiator

He lifted his foot to show her his missing digits, laughing harder. ‘I dug for worms each morning to fill my stomach. My flesh baked in the sun each day and then froze in the wind each night. And I wronged Rome? Ha!’ His laughter was crazed, like the laughter of a hyena, but he could not make it cease. ‘Ha! Ha! Ha!’ He doubled over, feeling the warmth of leaking blood down his side.

And then suddenly he was drowning.

Chapter Three

He choked and coughed as the cold water poured over his head and dribbled down his limbs. Already there was a pool of it expanding at his feet. The woman had apparently discovered the dipping pot and he watched in horror as she slung it over the lip of the urn for another filling.

‘What…? Why…?’ he sputtered.

‘Your wound. It has not been properly cleaned.’

He peered down at the long diagonal gash across his chest and felt another assault of cold water. ‘Cease!’ he hissed and watched in horror as she returned to the urn for yet another potful.

She approached the bars. Mercifully, she did not give him a third dousing. Instead, she set down the pot and studied the wound. She reached out and touched the skin of his stomach.

A shiver rippled through him, followed by an uncomfortable heat. He grabbed her wrist. ‘What in the name of Erebus do you think you are doing?’

‘Be still,’ she commanded. ‘I am merely assessing the depth of the wound.’ Ignoring his grip, she gently traced the skin around the gash with her other hand. Her audacity was stunning, but her fingers were like soft wax. Their touch sent an unexpected pang of sadness through him.

Fifteen years. That’s how long it had been. Fifteen years since the last time a woman had touched him without the expectation of bedding him. That woman had been his yellow-haired wife.

‘There is sand within the wound that will bring infection,’ she explained. ‘Take this in your mouth.’ She pushed the thick, tasselled end of her tunic belt into his grip. ‘Now bite down. This may hurt a bit.’

There was no time for protest. There was only exquisite, burning pain as he bit down and felt her fingernail razor into his soft flesh. ‘Ugh,’ he groaned.

‘Just a little bit of sand…’ she crooned.

He bit down harder, envisioning certain forms of torture.

‘I fear there is some dirt lodged very deep,’ she said, absently picking a tiny metal hairpin from her braid. She held the pin to her lips and bent it taut with her teeth.

It might have been her proximity. Or it might have been the unusual shapeliness of her lips. Or it might have been the fact that he had just survived an excruciating amount of pain and was savouring its absence. But watching her bend that hair clip was the most deliciously sensual thing he had ever seen a woman do.

Then she plunged the terrible instrument deep into his wound. ‘Ah!’ he shouted.

Across the hall, Felix was laughing. ‘What? Is the Empire’s greatest gladiator crying?’

‘Piss off, Goat-Man!’ shouted Cal.

‘Not much longer now,’ she assured him, probing deeper.

He twisted his body in agony. ‘I did not ask for this.’

‘No, but you must have it if you wish to survive.’

Survival was not exactly the plan.

‘Hold this,’ she said, handing him the hairpin. She lifted the pot and gave him a final dousing.

He gasped for air and for something to say: something scathing and clever, something that would burrow beneath her skin as painfully as she had just burrowed beneath his. But the words did not come and all he could do was stare as she began to dab the wound with her handkerchief.

Her face was lovely in the torchlight. Haunting brown eyes and ruddy red cheeks. Eyebrows so high up her forehead they looked painted. For all her vitriol, her appearance was bright. Cheerful, even. The colour of her skin reminded him of well-fermented beer.

‘I wish I had some dried yarrow,’ she said. She was dabbing his wound with a strange reverence. ‘My mother used to keep some on her night shelf to help mend my father’s wounds.’ Her eyes searched his cell. ‘Ah! I know what we can use.’ She pointed over his shoulder to the distant corner of his cell. ‘Do you see it?’

Cal studied the dark corner, wondering if the woman had lost her wits. ‘Just there,’ she said. She was nodding her head, full of certainty. ‘The spider’s web.’

‘A spider’s web?’

‘You must fetch it for me.’

‘Are you mad?’

‘I am trying to help you.’

‘I did not ask for your help,’ he said.

‘And I did not ask to be…’ She bit her lip, stared at the floor.

Enslaved. That is what she wanted to say, but she could not find the courage to voice it. How could he deny her anything, knowing that she had been condemned to such a life?

He sighed and found himself crossing to the corner of his cell and gazing down at a fine silken temple shining beneath the torchlight. At the temple’s edge, a large black weaver posed regally. ‘How should I… collect it?’ he asked.

‘Just wave your palm through the web gently and gather it on your hand. Do not take it all, lest you incur Arachne’s wrath.’

Cal did as instructed, giving a nod of reverence to the tiny creature whose sanctuary he had just harvested. Reverence for all creatures big and small . It was what the white-robed Druids had taught him in his youth.

He returned to her with the silken prize and was no less fascinated watching her ball up the strands and stuff them into his wound. Why was she helping him? He did not understand it at all. Nor did he have the heart to tell her that her effort was pointless.

‘My mother used spider webs on my father’s wounds, as well,’ she explained. ‘It is an old Greek remedy. My mother is Greek, you see.’

Pride lurked beneath her words. Cal knew that the Romans despised the Greeks in the manner of a jealous younger sibling.

‘Is your father Greek?’

‘No, I am afraid he is as Roman as they come. Born in Pompeii and left before Vesuvius blew. Lucky him. Though he could not escape the wounds of war…and now, I suppose, of peace.’

‘Was your father often wounded?’

She nodded. ‘After he returned from military service he became a lictor for a new aedile here in Ephesus. The young mayor had as many enemies as he had gold auris and my father was paid to protect him. I was always so worried for my father back then. Pah! I had no idea what worry was.’

She pursed her lips, and Cal sensed her trying to stifle her emotion. If there had been any doubt in his mind that she had been sold into servitude, it was washed away by the small tear he watched leak from her eye and trace a path down her cheek.

Without thinking, he pressed his finger to her skin and caught it.

She blinked, stared up at him.

His stomach tightened. He realised that he wanted to kiss her.

‘There,’ she said with finality and her deep blush told him that she had felt it, too—whatever it had been that had just passed between them.

Lust , he told himself. Simple, physical lust, born of the fact that he had not enjoyed a woman’s company in months. But that would be remedied—and very soon, thank the god Gwydion.

The woman stepped away from him and he was glad of it. If she had not, he might have taken one of those small, coiling curls of hair and wrapped it around his finger. He might have made the mistake of reaching through the bars, catching her by the waist and pulling her close enough to drink the tiny bead of water that had lodged itself in the small crevasse of her shapely upper lip.

He might have violated one of his most important rules: never to kiss a woman.