Free Caesar's Women by Colleen McCullough Page B

his father-in-law,” said Caesar, getting up.
    “That would delight me,” said Servilia, conscious of a vast and unsettling disappointment. Nothing was going to happen! Her instincts had been terribly, dreadfully, horribly wrong!
    He went round behind her chair, she thought to assist her departure, but somehow her legs refused to work; she had to continue to sit like a statue and feel ghastly.
    “Do you know,” came his voice—or a voice, so different and throaty was it—“that you have the most delicious little ridge of hair as far down your backbone as I can see? But no one tends it properly, it's rumpled and lies every which way. That is a shame, I thought so yesterday.”
    He touched the nape of her neck just below the great coil of her hair, and she thought at first it was his fingertips, sleek and languorous. But his head was immediately behind hers, and both his hands came round to cup her breasts. His breath cooled her neck like a breeze on wet skin, and it was then she understood what he was doing. Licking that growth of superfluous hair she hated so much, that her mother had despised and derided until the day she died. Licking it first on one side and then the other, always toward the ridge of her spine, working slowly down, down. And all Servilia could do was to sit a prey to sensations she had not imagined existed, burned and drenched in a storm of feeling.
    Married though she had been for eighteen years to two very different men, in all her life she had never known anything like this fiery and piercing explosion of the senses reaching outward from the focus of his tongue, diving inward to invade breasts and belly and core. At some stage she did manage to get up, not to help him untie the girdle below her breasts nor to ease the layers of her clothing off her shoulders and eventually to the floor—those he did for himself—but to stand while he followed the line of hair with his tongue until it dwindled to invisibility where the crease of her buttocks began. And if he produced a knife and plunged it to the hilt in my heart, she thought, I could not move an inch to stop him, would not even want to stop him. Nothing mattered save the ongoing gratification of a side of herself she had never dreamed she owned.
    His own clothing, both toga and tunic, remained in place until he reached the end of his tongue's voyage, when she felt him step back from her, but could not turn to face him because if she let go the back of the chair she would fall.
    “Oh, that's better,” she heard him say. “That's how it must be, always. Perfect.”
    He came back to her and turned her round, pulling her arms to circle his waist, and she felt his skin at last, put up her face for the kiss he had not yet given her. But instead he lifted her up and carried her to the bedroom, set her down effortlessly on the sheets he had already turned down in readiness. Her eyes were closed, she could only sense him looming over her, but they opened when he put his nose to her navel and inhaled deeply.
    “Sweet,” he said, and moved down to mons veneris. “Plump, sweet and juicy,” he said, laughing.
    How could he laugh? But laugh he did; then as her eyes widened at the sight of his erection, he gathered her against him and kissed her mouth at last. Not like Brutus, who had stuck his tongue in so far and so wetly it had revolted her. Not like Silanus, whose kisses were reverent to the point of chasteness. This was perfect, something to revel in, join in, linger at. One hand stroked her back from buttocks to shoulders; the fingers of the other gently explored between the lips of her vulva and set her to shivering and shuddering. Oh, the luxury of it! The absolute glory of not caring what kind of impression she was making, whether she was being too forward or too backward, what he was thinking of her! Servilia didn't care, didn't care, didn't care. This was for herself. So she rolled on top of him and put both her hands around his erection to