After falling from a cruise ship, Vera was swept by the waves and carried ashore.
The ones waiting for her were not a rescue team, but a group of Vestal Virgins devoted to the goddess.
The god who brought her to Rome granted her beauty, charm, a graceful figure, and a fragrant aura. No one could resist her allure, and no one would refuse her beauty.
Vera did not know that the price of all this was that she had to make that proud, untamable man fall in love with her.
…and then abandon him.
The consul Ulysses was temporarily exiled for his blasphemous words. At home, he had said to his slaves and guests, “I will never love anyone. Not even the power of Venus could make me lose my senses. I despise love, just as I scorn the burning flames of the god of love.”
After witnessing his parents’ failed marriage, the proud, untamable consul had come to hate love, even scorning the power of Venus. So the god of love sent Vera to him, as if Venus meant for Ulysses to taste love’s bitterness, fall to his knees beneath its power, and suffer as though death would be a mercy.
In a garden where myrtle bloomed, Vera’s magic struck Ulysses like Cupid’s arrow. As he strolled through the garden, Ulysses caught sight of a young woman by the spring, combing her long golden curls.
His heart was never supposed to beat for any woman. But when he saw the girl combing her hair and singing, her snow-white feet wrapped in golden sandals and swaying beside the stream, and she smiled at him without thinking, he… laid down his arms.
