“It’s not Maestro Santini,” I said at last. “It’s a vow I made—to myself.” I wished I had a shawl to cover my thin shift. His eyes were still devouring me, making my skin prickle, and I folded my arms across my breasts instead. “I don’t need any husband. I’ve a good trade and a good position in this palazzo—” I was talking too much, too fast. Does a cook bother to explain his decisions to his subordinates when explaining a menu? A proposal of marriage should be no different. “I do not wish to marry,” I concluded with as much finality as I could muster. “Not Maestro Santini, and certainly not you.”

“But you get lonely.” Bartolomeo reached out and touched a curl of my hair, winding it around his finger. “I can always tell. It shows in your tourtes first, those marzipan ones you make for Madonna Giulia. They get sweeter, and you add more ground almonds. And it takes you half the time to whip up egg whites, because you get vicious when you’re sad, and you take it out on the eggs—”

He bent his head to kiss me again, surely one of the few men in the palazzo tall enough to do it, not that he was really a man; he was a boy and he was seven years younger than I and sweet Santa Marta, how did I get into this mess and why was I kissing him again and why wouldn’t he just put some clothes on before I did something else stupid?

“Enough!” I pushed him away, sweeping back my hair where he’d twined it about his hand. “I will forget this, Bartolomeo,” I said sternly as he opened his mouth. “But not if I hear one more word about it, from you or anyone else, so don’t even think about boasting to the other apprentices.” Dear God, I knew how fast gossip could spread through a kitchen. A cocky boy who has just made a conquest always wants to boast to his friends, but a cocky boy I might have been able to silence. A lovelorn moon-calf of a boy who had just been rejected in his first heart-felt marriage proposal? Had I been too busy worrying about Bartolomeo’s future to worry about mine?

All he had to do was burst out bitterly to the first friend he saw in the scullery, or the first pretty serving maid who took him to bed and consoled him with what a coldhearted bitch I was. And after that, the whole household would know how a kitchen apprentice had seduced the maestra di cucina, and I’d have not a single crumb of authority left. The maids and the pot-boys would all be giggling behind my back, and once it got up to Madonna Adriana . . . maids in this household were dismissed if they gained reputations as whores. Pantisilea was our resident harlot, and as much as everyone liked her, she would have been packed out years ago if Madonna Giulia had not intervened. And a maestra di cucina would be held to an even higher standard—if she could not keep order among her underlings, she was worth nothing. How my underlings would love whispering about Carmelina, the inviolable Madonna of the kitchens, revealed as no better than Pantisilea.