He considered me a long moment. Then he walked around me, leisurely, and the skin of my neck prickled where I could feel his warm breath. “My dear girl,” he said, and his fingers at my back began slowly unlacing my gown. “I don’t care in the slightest.”

My voice came out in a squeak. “You—you don’t?”

“Virginity is a vastly overrated thing.” My bodice loosened, he began on my sleeves. “It’s pleasure I want to give you”—one sleeve slid off my arm to the floor—“and most virgins get precious little of that.” The other sleeve joined it. He put his hands to my shoulders and slid my red dress away, down to the floor in a ripple of scarlet silk. His hands glided back up my arms, the backs of his fingers barely brushing my skin through the thin shift, and I forgot how to breathe.

“So to answer your question,” he said conversationally, easing the shift off my naked shoulders, “yes, I still want you. I want you more than any woman I have ever met in my life, Giulia Farnese. I want you more than the Pope’s throne.”

He set his lips against my bare shoulder for a long moment, and then he turned me so we stood face-to-face again. I stood naked and quivering, but he didn’t look at my body; he looked into my eyes. “Do you believe me?”

For answer, I yanked the pearled net from the nape of my neck and shook my hair down around me in a billow of gold. I’d wanted to give myself to Orsino like this on our wedding night but I’d been bundled into a sheeted bed in a dark chamber instead, and hadn’t had the courage to get out of it because a wife above all things must be modest. But modesty wasn’t required in a mistress, so I faced my lover in nothing but a cloak of loose hair and a pearl.

His eyes were full of me. He held out a hand and said something in Spanish I didn’t understand.

I reached out, linking my fingers with his. “What does that mean?”

His free hand slid around the smooth skin of my waist, up to my breast. “‘Come to me,’” he whispered, and he lifted me up and carried me back through the empty, echoing rooms. I was too breathless to reply, but not too breathless to look around as he laid me down on a carved bed with a striped cover of black and white velvet. The same bed I’d lain in alone on my wedding night, now moved out of its chamber for dismantling, and I had a fleeting moment of wonder. Just what had I done?

Then he was kissing me again, mixing Italian and Spanish with every other word as he pulled me to the velvet bed beneath him.

“Rodrigo,” I whispered. And let it happen.