The Lion and the Rose by Kate Quinn Page A

serious as they looked at me. “Does Orsino still write to you, Giulia?”
    “He does,” I said.
    “What does he write?”
    Still a note of anxiety in my Pope’s deep voice. “Nothing very much,” I said, kneading my thumbs into the arch of his right foot. “Read the letters any time you wish.”
    “Oh, I trust
you
. It’s Monoculus I don’t trust. He wants you back.”
    “Always,” I admitted. It had been a bargain my husband had made, or his mother Adriana da Mila had advised him to make: Take little Giulia Farnese for a wife, let Rodrigo Borgia have her for a concubine, and he will advance your career, my dear boy! Orsino had regretted that bargain since the day he saw me at our wedding, but he still took the rewards, didn’t he? A
condotta
to give him soldiers, a hefty annuity, a
castello
in Carbognano and governorship over the town to go with it . . .
    My husband had been everything a girl could dream of: handsome, young, and he even said he loved me. I didn’t know if I believed that, really—he didn’t even know me. But he said he’d loved me since the moment he’d laid eyes on me, and he certainly had his heart in his eyes whenever he looked at me, and that would be enough for most girls. But it
wasn’t
enough. What no one bothers to tell dreaming girls is that a handsome and adoring young husband isn’t any use if he’s gutless.
    Still, a gutless husband is better than a brutal one. I’d have to go back to him someday, when either my Pope died or his passion for me did, and I gave a little sigh at the thought. Hopefully the first of those fates wouldn’t happen for many, many years—and maybe the second wouldn’t happen at all.
    “That’s enough about Monoculus, eh?” Rodrigo ran a hand over my shoulder, the edge of my shift sliding down my arm. “My children too. It’s making you morose.”
    “That batch of quarreling pups you fathered would make anybody morose!” I said lightly, and Rodrigo brightened just as I’d intended.
    “I’ll have you know my children are perfect.” He pulled me up into his arms. “Shall we make another? A Borgia prince this time, a brother for Laura.”
    “Juan won’t be very happy about that,” I murmured between kisses. “He went into such a sulk when I was carrying Laura . . .” Worried any child of mine would supplant him as the Pope’s favorite. In truth Rodrigo had always been just a trifle veiled in his affection for Laura. She
was
his daughter, of that I was perfectly certain—you had only to look at the nose (though I did hope she wouldn’t grow up with his bull shoulders). But she’d been christened under my husband’s name, and in truth when I counted backward from nine months there
had
been a time when I was trying to persuade Orsino to show just a little courage, enough to fight for his wife if he truly wanted to keep her . . .
    But I couldn’t think of Orsino, not with Rodrigo bending his dark head to plant unhurried kisses across my naked shoulders. “Come to me,” he whispered in his Catalan Spanish, and I threaded my arms around his neck and slid myself over him, making my hair into a candlelit curtain shutting out the world.
    When I was a foolish virgin girl, I’d prayed very earnestly not to be married off to an old man as so many of my friends were. I dreamed of lean cavaliers and dashing poets, and what girl doesn’t? But girls are fools. Poets aren’t much good when it comes to love play, when you really think about it—all Dante ever managed to do after years of mooning after Beatrice was fantasize that she might one day give him a guided tour of Paradise. And as for lean cavaliers, well, Orsino was the picture of a dashing young suitor, and our coupling had been awkward, clumsy, embarrassing, and brief. And afterward, he had stood back and given me away.
    My Pope
savored
me every time he took me in his arms, tasted my skin and inhaled my hair, kissed me and cradled me and found something new in me every