“You’ve gone mad!” I had a handsome young man before me proposing marriage in all seriousness—was the world just laughing at me? What woman has to dodge marriage proposals after becoming a nun? He doesn’t know that, I thought disjointedly, and you certainly can’t tell him, so find some other way to dodge it.

I made myself plant a stern hand on Bartolomeo’s hard chest, pushing him back, but that might have been a mistake because I could feel his heartbeat speed up under my touch. Maybe mine too, but that was just more panic. “Bartolomeo, this has all been a mistake.” I spoke calmly, reasonably. “A very great mistake, and I do apologize for that. I am maestra di cucina, and you are an apprentice. I am seven years older than you, and I should never have—”

“And I’ve wanted you since I was fourteen.” His eyes burned me, bright as cinnamon. “When you threw me my apprentice apron for the first time. When you let me make smelt in green sauce for Madonna Giulia. When you put your head on my shoulder after we were captured by the French, and let me put my arm around you—sweet Christ, I nearly kissed you right then.” His voice bubbled faster, a torrent of words like wine out of a breached cask. “I get weak in the knees just watching you beat eggs—when you’re slinging spoons at me just because I’m the only one in these kitchens brave enough to tell you that your recipe’s wrong—”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” I wrenched away, feeling a film of his sweat on my fingertips from his broad freckled chest. Bad enough to handle an apprentice in lust; boys were always in lust. But an apprentice in love? How can he be in love with me? a small inner voice thought in wondering astonishment. I don’t do anything but shout at him!

Never mind how it started, I thought harshly. Squelch it. For his own good, just squelch it. “This is just silly moon-eyed calf love,” I told him. “All boys go a little soft for their first girl. It means nothing.”

“You didn’t think I was such a boy down there.” He jerked his chin at the rumpled pallet, grinning. “And as a matter of fact, you aren’t my first girl.”

I seized on that. “Then go marry her, if you’re not the kind of lad who’d bed a girl and then leave her!”

“I did offer to marry her. She laughed at me. Nicely, though, and then she kissed me and said I was a lovely boy but if she married all the boys she broke in, she’d have enough husbands for an army. I liked her, but not the way I love you, though, so all in all I was very relieved—”

Sounds like Pantisilea, I couldn’t help thinking, but shoved the thought away. This whole argument was slipping out of my hands. “Well, I can’t marry you. You work in my kitchens”—I groped—“and you are under me, and—”