She lay sprawled atop him, her cheek against his chest. Both of them were still naked, and it felt so very right, to be with her this way, staring up at the moon and stars through the glass roof of the gazebo. Like being back in the fields of ancient Sparta, where things were natural and real. When life had been simple and pure, he and his wife, Gorgo, had sometimes made love up in the hills overlooking the Eurotas River, and they would lie in the sun-touched grass afterward. It wasn’t that he’d never loved Gorgo, for he had, and she’d been a good wife. It was that he loved Daphne in a different way; she gave his weary heart joy and lightness. She made him feel young again, not like a man of more than twenty-five hundred years. She’d been his only real hope in centuries, as year after year had mounted upon another. He’d not realized his own loneliness until the day she’d appeared as if from a mist on the moors behind his castle in Cornwall. That morning, just finishing his walk, he’d felt his ancient heart beat faster than it had in eons.
