Free Desire of the Gladiator (Affairs of the Arena Book 3) by Lydia Pax Page B

plague turned to thoughts of the shortage of gladiators in the ludus turned to thoughts of Conall.
    He walked directly behind her, eyes scanning the crowd. While he seemed perfectly content to simply be next to her, he also had the clear intent to guard her and do his job well.
    Her heart still throbbed with strange and undefinable desires for him. Never had a man sent her head in such a disastrous spin. She tore between wanting to yell at him furiously for mixing up her thoughts how he had and sliding into his arms to find out what he had for her between his legs.
    It didn't seem to matter what she thought about him. All thoughts ended up being passionate.
    Men passed by, and she graded them on how Conall-like they were. Most had no beards, and so most failed. The few that did were not quite wild enough, or too tall, or too dark, or too skinny or too fat. No one was just his shape, his size, his form in all its dangerous, hardened perfection.
    It was hard to process so much at once in the city. And so instead her mind floated back to what it had been dancing upon all morning and all the previous night when she wasn't carrying on with herself about Conall.
    The letter that Publius held from her family. The first in her entire term of service to this awful ludus.
    If she were being truthful, then she would have to say that her hopes had begun to wane when it came to hearing from her people. The world was large, and messengers took time to get from one place to another even traveling on the well-maintained roman roads.
    The messages were expensive, and she had spent any expendable income—and any favors from Publius—mostly on her letters to the Antioch emissary for her brother’s cause. So, she had not sent as many to them.
    Still, she would have thought that at least one of her letters would have, by now, have merited a response.
    Leda’s father and mother were still alive and well, and along with Leda—the middle child—they had brought two more daughters and two sons in the world. Her sisters, Gaiane and Endza, were both younger than her. Her mother and father had been blessed—in the minds of the populace—with two healthy sons with their first couplings. Taniel was the oldest, followed by Dzovag.
    Leda had always been close with her sisters. She missed them now, heart aching with the knowledge that they were just now coming into their own as young women in the court society. Probably their mother was preparing matches for them, and they were learning how to dance.
    Leda did not care for much of court life—it involved so much incessantly useless talking—but she did love to dance.
    Endza would be lovely at it. The youngest, and by far the prettiest, she was always a bundle of exuberant energy. Her imagination ran wild with games, and always she was pulling in her siblings—even Dzovag, who was notorious in the household for hating such distractions.
    Gaiane would have more trouble with court life—perhaps almost as much as Leda. She was shy, and had a terrible anxiety about crowds. When she was young, she had almost been run down in the street by a charging mob running away from a wagon caught fire. Social situations with lots of people made Gaiane nervous ever since, as, in her own words, there was no telling what someone might be up to when she wasn’t looking at them directly. She operated best in circles.
    Leda had done her best to get her younger and older siblings to get along, despite their very best efforts. Taniel’s rebellious streak rubbed Dzovag entirely the wrong way, and Endza and Gaiane were always in a tiff about something.
    A plate broke on the street, catching Leda’s attention. Some passers-by clapped their hands in sarcastic appreciation. The man who dropped the plate took a deep bow, smiling roughly, and then dropped to a knee to gather up the broken clay of the plate.
    The small episode brought Leda’s mind back to the present. Looking around her, she noticed that Conall was gone