“Maybe.” I turned Laura around, stroking a comb through her hair. She was already begging me for chamomile pastes to help it grow as long as mine. “Maybe not. Sitting for Maestro Botticelli, well, it won’t be so bad with just him in the room. I don’t mind that so much. But after the portrait’s done it will be displayed everywhere, and I don’t know if I want that.”

“Perhaps His Holiness will keep it for his private apartments.”

“He won’t.” Once, yes—Rodrigo would have been too possessive to let any other man see what I looked like under my gown, even if just in a painting. That Rodrigo would never have pressed me to strip naked before a roomful of cardinals either . . . I struggled to pinpoint the change, dividing Laura’s hair to plait. “He’ll enjoy watching them be envious. So he’ll show the painting to everyone, and all Rome is going to know exactly what my breasts look like, not just a handful of cardinals and papal functionaries.”

And then my brother Sandro really would put a fist into someone he shouldn’t, possibly my Pope. The only way I’d been able to calm him after all the rumors that had flown about . . . well, I’d lied completely and told him it was all just vicious gossip. How was I supposed to maintain that little fiction if there was a portrait of me in all my nakedness, and everyone in Rome had seen it?

“You may console yourself with one thing,” Leonello said at last.

“What?”

“All Rome has wondered for years what your breasts look like. If you have the painting done, the citywide suspense will at last be ended.”

I laughed, feeling lighter somehow. “Will you stay in the room with me, if I go to Maestro Botticelli for another sitting?”

“I thought you wanted fewer men gazing on the breasts in question, not more.”

I tied off Laura’s blond plait, and sent her skipping out of the sala with a kiss to the top of her head. “You don’t count.”

“No, of course not.” My bodyguard’s voice had gone sharp and cutting again, and I winced because I hadn’t meant to anger him. “Dwarves are not men, to be sure.”

“Now, that’s not what I meant.” I could see him retreating behind his book as he so often did, and I put my hand out and tipped the book down so I could meet his eyes. “You were there in the papal apartments when they stripped me, Leonello, and you were the only one I didn’t mind being there. Because every other man stood ogling me, but not you.”

“I assure you, I ogled.”