To Love Again Read Free

strengthen their family. Titus Drusus Corinium was as relieved as he was delighted.
    Berikos, chieftain of the hill Dobunni, was not. “We have never mixed our blood with that of the Romans, as so many other tribes have,” he said grimly. “I will barter with you, Titus Drusus Corinium, but I will not give your son my daughter for a wife.” His blue eyes were as cold as stone.
    “I am every bit as much a Briton as you are,” Titus told him indignantly. “My family have lived in this land for three centuries. Our blood has been mixed with that of the Catuvellauni, the Iceni, even as your family has mixed its blood with those and other tribes.”
    “But never with the Romans,”
came the stubborn reply.
    “The legions are long gone, Berikos. We live as one people now. Let my son, Gaius, have your daughter Kyna to wife. She wants him every bit as much as he wants her.”
    “Is this so?” Berikos demanded of his daughter, his long mustache quivering furiously. This was the child of his heart. Her betrayal of their proud heritage was painful.
    “It is,” she answered defiantly. “I will have Gaius Drusus Corinium for my husband, and no other.”
    “Very well,” Berikos replied angrily, “but know that if you take this man for your mate, you do so without my blessing. I will never look upon your face again. You will be as one dead to me,” he told her harshly, hoping his words would frighten her into changing her mind.
    “So be it, my father,” Kyna said with equal firmness.
    She had left her Dobunni village that day and had never looked back. Though she missed the freedom of her hill country, her inlaws were loving and kind to her. Julia, her mother-in-law, had wisely insisted the marriage be postponed six months so that Kyna could learn more civilized ways.Then, a year after their marriage was celebrated, she and Gaius had left the house in Corinium for the family villa some fifteen miles from town. She was not yet with child, and it was thought the serenity of the countryside would aid the young couple in their attempts. Sure enough, when Kyna was in her seventeenth year, their twin sons, Titus and Flavius, were born. Cailin came two years later. After that there were no more children, but Kyna and Gaius did not care. The three the gods had blessed them with were healthy, strong, beautiful, and intelligent, even as their mother was.
    Berikos, however, had never forgiven Kyna for her marriage. She sent him word of the birth of her sons, and another message when Cailin had been born, but true to his word, the Dobunni chieftain behaved as if she did not exist. Kyna’s mother, however, came from their village after Cailin’s birth. She immediately announced that she would remain with her daughter and son-in-law. Her name was Brenna, and she was Berikos’s third wife. Kyna was her only child.
    “He
does not need me. He has the others,” was all Brenna would say by way of explanation. So she had stayed, appreciating perhaps even more than her daughter the civilized ways of the Romanized Britons.
    The villa in which Brenna now lived with her daughter, son-in-law, and grandchildren was small but comfortable. Its porticoed entrance with four white marble pillars was impressive in direct contrast to the informal, charming atrium it led to. The atrium was planted with Damascus roses, which had a longer blooming season than most, due mainly to their sheltered location. In the atrium’s center was a little square pool in which water lilies grew in season and small colored fishes lived year-round. The villa contained five bedchambers, a library for Gaius Drusus, a kitchen, and a round dining room with beautiful plaster walls decorated with paintings of the gods’ adventures among the mortals. The two best features of the house, as far as Brenna was concerned, were the tiled baths and the hypocaust system that heated the villa in the damp, chilly weather. Beyond the entrance there was nothing grand about the house,