Rendezvous in the Romanowskian Empire

Romanowski and Rosemary

He's laughing behind my hand, which he easily removes, continuing. "I wish I could please y-"

"Julian, no!" Now I am burning hot at what I must've mumbled in my sleep. Oh Lord, no. He did not hear that.

"Just as you do to m-" 

"I will not talk to you for the entire day!" I cut him midway, looking anywhere but at his fun-filled face.

"Is that so?" he laughs. We are pressed chest to chest and I could feel the rumble of his deep voice in me. "When I can make you take my name, right this moment?" He's confident and revelling in the feel.

My heart is tumbling out of my chest. "No, you can't," I say.

"A bet it is, then?" He smirks. "I lost the last one, but not this one, Mila."

"So, do you accept the bet, Althea Rosemary?" he challenges.

I accepted, and I lost.

And that was the reason I didn't talk to him that morning thereafter. But I didn't know that I could never talk to him again.

Romanowski and Rosemary were never meant to be.

My eyes welled up. Taking in a deep breath, I exhaled through my mouth, blinking back my eyes.

"You're still left with so much work. Complete this one fast," the lady spoke with a scowl, jolting me back to reality. She strutted away to the other workers to give them what she liked to call, a piece of her mind.

I sighed. Now, when I thought about it, life in the twenty-first century seemed mundane. 

Just collecting loads and loads of data, both manually and digitally, looking after excavated sites and making reports, simultaneously working on my PhD thesis, seemed overwhelmingly boring.

My current work as a novice priestess, to light candles at the inner borders of a fourth-century temple, seemed much better. 

The past few days were difficult due to managing Cheryl's dead body because Lorenzo was hellbent on not leaving her. He said he wouldn't until the department sent us a message regarding the situation.

I looked around the golden interiors of the temple, all spick and span with fresh offerings served at the large idol of Aphrodite. My bestie, priest Remun Ra was in another corner, smiling and talking with that said cute priestess, with a five-feet distance between them.

Smiling a little, I looked around at the other amateur priestesses like me, going about their chores. It had been a few days since I was selected. Dunkin had talked to the senior priests, and fortunately, they had agreed. There were other priests like Dunkin too, who wanted to marry and, therefore, were the other priestesses like me around here.

Although I was happy with the new settlements, the quickness of it unsettled me. They had accepted me and the other young priestesses with no issues, saying that they needed new priests because a new religion was in the making.

Majority of the priests were changed from the last time I saw them. Even the head priest was changed. 

For precautionary measures, Dunkin had dyed my honey-coloured hair black, with a temporary hair spray because I didn't want to change my natural colour. I also wore black eye contact, so no one could identify me as the court writer of Romanos.

"Priestess Chryseis," Priest Remun Ra came forward with a bow, a few stalks of wheat crop in his hand.

"You really had to name me after that priest's daughter in Iliad, who got abducted," I snorted.