“Why not?” He folded his arms across his chest, looking down at me in challenge. “The two best cooks in Rome, married to each other. Why not?”

Because I’m a nun, I almost said. Because the vow didn’t disappear just because I ran from it. Because you’d face charges if we were caught. Charges of profanation, desecration, adultery—crimes meriting at the least exile, at the most death, for marrying a nun who already had her Lord for a husband.

Bad enough that we bedded once—but if that was found out, Bartolomeo could at least claim he didn’t know my secrets. Likely he’d be spared as the innocent dupe of a wicked seductress. But if I were ever mad enough to marry, then my so-called husband’s guilt would be assumed, and his whole future in ruins. Oh, maybe I’d shared Marco’s bed on occasion, but Marco knew my past, knew the risks and the sins attached, and he certainly knew he couldn’t marry me. Bartolomeo didn’t know anything of the kind. You want to lay that on his conscience? my own conscience snarled, raking guilt through me like a lion’s claws. A boy who can’t bed a girl without offering to marry her after, and you want to tell him he’s violated a nun?

All my life I’d been taught that girls grew up to be wives, or else they became nuns or whores. I’d said that once to Madonna Giulia, when we first met. But she occupied an odd limbo between wife and whore, and I occupied an even odder one myself between whore and nun. There were shadowy spaces between the stark trinity of futures I’d been offered as a girl—but however you defined me, there would be no marriage in my future. I felt a moment’s pang of regret go through me like a sword, but I hardened my heart. I’d made my choices: work, only work, and the occasional casual tumble with men like Marco who knew about my past. Or maybe lordlings who liked to bed servant girls and were too high and mighty to care about consequences.

Bartolomeo was neither.

“Is it Maestro Santini?” Bartolomeo said, as though reading my mind. “Don’t tell me you mooned after him too like all those silly maidservants, just because he’s handsome and has curls. He’ll waste every scudo he earns, and besides, he couldn’t cook his way out of a flour sack. He lost his place here, and he’ll lose his place with the Duke of Gandia too.”