I tasted flakes of salt on his lips from the fried golden disks we’d shared, tasted pepper and Parmesan and the good olive oil from Apulia. His lips parted mine hungrily, one hand sliding up into my hair and the other gripping my waist, and I didn’t pull away as fast as I should have because he tasted so good. Cooks were better for kissing than anyone else. Cooks had sweet breath from chewing mint rather than drinking rotgut beer; cooks smelled of rosemary and nutmeg rather than sweat and smoke; cooks were hard-bodied from hauling kegs and carcasses all day rather than soft-gutted from sitting about a barracks or a shop counter. A guardsman or a clerk gripped you in hairy arms, but a cook’s skin was smooth to the touch because his arms were singed hairless by hot ovens . . .

My lips parted under his before I could think of moving away. A mistake, because he lifted me to the edge of the trestle table, one hand smoothing my hip through my shift, the other still twined in my hair.

“Stop,” I managed to mutter then, though his hand moving from my hip down the outside of my thigh burned me. “Stop, we can’t—I can’t—”

“Why?” His mouth had moved to my neck, and he was drinking the skin of my shoulder where my shift had slipped down. “Why not?”

“Because—” Because he was my apprentice, because he was eighteen, because I had a position to maintain in this household, and the respect that had to be maintained with it—because—

I should have pulled away. I should have pulled away at once, but he had ambushed me as neatly as the French army, my apprentice boy who had somehow stopped being a boy when I wasn’t looking. I wound my hands into his bright hair—to pull his head back, to shake some sense into him—but my bed had been empty such a long time, and now I had a pair of smooth hard-muscled arms about me again, and a kiss that tasted as good as those fried golden things. I was lonely and hungry and cold, and my apprentice smelled of wild thyme and his flesh was warm as a kettle on rolling boil. “Bartolomeo—” I managed to say.

“Mouths shut,” he murmured against my lips, “and hands moving.”

His big kitchen-scarred hand slipped up to span my breasts, and my whole body juddered at the touch. It was all he needed. He scooped me up so my legs wrapped his waist and it was only a few short steps to his tiny cubbyhole beside the wine cellars. If it had been farther, if he’d put me down to walk—if we’d had to stop and fumble with boots and ties, apron knots and a gown’s laces—but my shift billowed to the floor half a heartbeat after he kicked the door shut with one bare foot, and his breeches followed another heartbeat later, and there was no time to think, no time to think and no desire to think either. Just hunger, a ravenous tearing hunger as though the flesh had been starved instead of the belly, and on the narrow straw-stuffed apprentice’s pallet on the floor we flung our bodies down like feasts and tore at each other, savored each other, ate and drank each other, until there was nothing left but crumbs.