One With the Darkness by Susan Squires

dark. She noticed how drawn he looked. Dark half-circles hung under his eyes. Marching, wounded, from Gaul to Rome at the tail of a cart had been an ordeal.
    “Relaxing, isn’t it?”
    He sat forward and shrugged, unwilling to admit even so simple a truth if she suggested it.
    “Hold out your hands.” She reached for an amphora set on a low table along with a tray of salt and several curved, ivory-handled strigils. She poured some oil scented with sage from her gardens into his cupped hands. His right palm was calloused from long contact with the pommel of a sword. Both wrists were raw. “Rub this in your hair.”
    He looked up at her, incredulous.
    “How else am I going to drag a comb through it?”
    He glared at her and set his lips. But he smoothed the oil over the tangled ends, then reached up and untied theleather strip that held the sides of his hair back. She poured more oil on his scalp, and he worked it into his hair. The bulge of his biceps and the revelation of dark hair under his arms were intimate and frankly arousing.
    She cleared her throat. “Now, more for your body.” He held out his hands and she poured them full of oil again. It smelled like summer.
    “Do you Romans not even know of soap?”
    “Soap? What is this?” She watched as he rubbed his chest and belly. This was definitely torture. It was distracting her so that she had forgotten to demand he be respectful.
    “A way of cleaning. Much better than oil. How can one be clean with oil?”
    “Well, what is your ‘soap’ made of?”
    “Sheep’s tallow and charcoal.” He was rubbing his thighs. “It creates a lather.”
    “Sheep’s tallow and charcoal? That sounds clean. I prefer olive oil and salt.”
    He glanced up at her, as if he had not realized before how absolutely insane rubbing sheep’s tallow on your body sounded. Then he returned to smoothing oil over his arms.
    “You forgot your … your genitals.”
    This time his glance had all the disgust of a glare in it, but he rubbed the oil over his private parts. They weren’t private now. They belonged to her. That thought was dangerously exciting. She mustn’t be seduced by her reaction to him, or by the insidious lure of slavery. She bit her lips and throbbed between her legs.
    “Turn round.” She stood on the bench and poured the oil over his back and rubbed it in. The touch of his flesh was hot, but that didn’t explain the jolt it gave her. She vowed to ignore her reaction, but both her body and hermind seemed disobedient tonight. “Now use the rock salt in that tray to scrub yourself. The salt will hurt the open sores, but it helps prevent infection.”
    He shrugged. “No matter.” He scooped up the salt and rubbed it over his body, even into the wounds at his wrists and ankles. He didn’t make a sound other than a sharp intake of breath as it seared him. The man was practically a Stoic. She took up a handful of salt herself and climbed up on the bench again. She spread it carefully, focusing only on the fact that he must be cleaned, not on the fact that she was hurting him.
    He didn’t even flinch.
    “Now,” she said. “Hand me one of the strigils. You take the other.”
    “What?”
    “The ivory-handled scrapers.” She had to remember that he was a barbarian and knew nothing of the civilized world. Sheep’s tallow, for Jupiter’s sake! “You scrape the effluvium from your body.” They scraped in silence. She concentrated on avoiding the welts.
    “There.” She stepped down, feeling like she had passed an ordeal herself. “Into the pool.”
    He rose and stepped down into the steaming pool. At this end the water came to his knees. He looked around. “How is this done? A volcanic spring?”
    A slave should not be allowed such questions. But there were limits to how much slavelike behavior she wanted. If she was successful in taming him, she would be around him for much of her night, every night, at least for a while. A totally silent and submissive