“There’s no need to involve you, Giulia,” Leonello pointed out the previous night when he was brushing my hair for me, as had become his nightly habit. Even after so short a time, we had our traditions! All the hovering maids and nuns had finally been dismissed, but I’d complained of a headache and demanded that my dwarf stay behind to read to me. If he’d been a tall handsome man there would have been talk, but when was there ever talk when a lady was alone with a dwarf? I thought we could manage our lives very handily around that blithe assumption.

“Truly.” My lion frowned at me in the glass, stroking a comb through my hair with those clever hands of his. “You think I cannot intimidate a prioress all on my own? I have Bartolomeo to lurk and loom for me, after all. There’s no need to drag you into it as well.”

“It will all look more convincing if you have me pouting in attendance,” I promised, putting down the glass. “Don’t you want to see me pout?”

“You do have an enchanting pout,” he admitted with that grin that looked far better without its usual cynical tilt. He pressed a wave of my hair back behind my ear, adding, “You also have enchanting earlobes.”

“That’s absurd. How can anybody have enchanting earlobes?”

“I’ve no idea, but you manage it. When we get to Carbognano, I shall write a sonnet about them.” His thumb traced the outer edge of my ear in the way that gave me such happy shivers. “You’re wasted on me, you know.”

“What do you mean?” I turned away from my glass, taking the comb from him.

“The most beautiful woman in Rome, bestowed first on a coward, then on a corrupt old man, and finally on a dwarf?” Leonello’s eyes crinkled. “Hardly fair.”

“Tell me something, Leonello.” I put chin in hand, looking up at him from my stool. “Did you love me from first sight, the way Orsino and Rodrigo told me they did?”

“No.” He was very certain. “At first sight, I thought you a giddy girl who was very pleasant to look at, and probably even more pleasant to look at unclothed.”

“So it wasn’t all this”—I made a gesture at the hair, the breasts, all the things men usually stared at—“that made you love me.”

“I didn’t notice any of it”—making the same gesture—“after the first few months. A pretty face is like a fresco on a wall: you admire it for a time, and then you don’t even see it anymore because it’s always there.”

“How very ungallant!” But I beamed. “What changed? When did you start to love me?”