PROLOGUE

      Her hair was the colour of newly frosted beech leaves; glossy; rich; tumbling from its combs as he pulled her against him, his lips seeking hers. His skin was tanned by the sun and the wind, hers, naked against him, white as the purest marble.

      The heavy, twisted silver of the torc he wore about his arm cut into her flesh. She did not notice. She noticed nothing but the feel of his body on hers, the strength of his muscular thighs, the power of his tongue as he thrust it into her mouth as though he would devour her utterly.

       ‘Claudia …’

      He breathed her name as a caress, a plea, a cry of anguish, and then at last a shout of triumph as he lay still, shaking, in her arms.

      She smiled. Gazing up at the sky through the canopy of rustling oak leaves she was utterly content. The world had contracted into the one small clearing in the deserted woodland. Child and husband were forgotten. For this man in her arms, she was prepared to risk losing both; to risk losing her home, her position, life itself.

      He stirred, and, raising himself onto his elbows, he stared down at her, his face strangely blank, his silvery eyes unseeing.

       ‘Claudia …’ he whispered again. He rested his face between her breasts. It was the little death; the death a man sought; the death which followed coition. He smiled, reaching his fist into her hair, holding her prisoner, tracing the line of her cheek-bones, her eyelids, with his lips. What would this woman’s husband, a son of Rome, an officer of the legion, say if he ever found out? What would he do if he learned his wife had a lover, and that the lover was a Druid Prince?