I didn’t like asking for favors, really. Rodrigo might shower me with gifts in his easy, open-handed way, and my family too, but I never requested any of it. I wasn’t a whore, no matter what the people of Rome called me—and they did call me that, alongside the prettier names like the Venus of the Vatican. It still distressed me sometimes. I was a girl of noble birth and good rearing, raised to adorn a man’s household and bear his children, and sometimes I had to wonder just how I’d come so far from that.

And sometimes I wondered if I’d really come very far from it at all. I did adorn a man’s household, after all, and I had borne his child, and all in all the days I spent tending my baby and getting fitted for dresses and going to Mass and presiding over the family cena in the evenings weren’t so very different from the life I’d expected to have after marriage.

It had all gotten very muddled.

I sighed, and Rodrigo lifted my chin on the point of one finger. “Come to me,” he whispered.

“Yes, Your Holiness,” I whispered back, and he pulled me against him.

When Rodrigo had first made love to me, I had not the faintest idea what he was doing. From everything I’d heard whispered by my mother and her various pious, bawdy, or downright ghoulish maidservants, I knew the whole process of lovemaking was at first painful, and after that it could be either pleasant or boring, but it would be brief. Men took their pleasure, and it was a straightforward business. Rodrigo was neither straightforward nor brief. “What are you doing?” I’d asked, flushing pink and crossing my arms over my breasts as he gazed at me that first time.

“Appreciating,” he said, taking my hands away. And not just appreciating the parts of me everyone seemed to notice—my hair and my breasts and the obvious bits. “The skin just inside your wrist is like satin,” he might announce one night, and slowly thumb the pulse there until it was beating like a fall of fast spring rain. “And do you know you have dimples in your knees?” Tracing them all around. “And in your elbows?” His touch sliding up the line of my ribs, around the point of one shoulder and down to my elbows. “And one more dimple at the very base of your spine . . .” I’d feel his mouth there, moving my hair aside unhurriedly as he appreciated his way up the whole length of my back, and my entire body would be thrumming, happy to be appreciated all night long.