The rolling hills of Sonoma were child’s play by comparison.
He squinted at the night, but could see no answers.
Shit! He couldn’t even see the questions.
Chapter 4
“Let’s go exploring!”
She’d managed to tiptoe past Ridley’s room, only to find him waiting in the café wearing a foam smile from his cappuccino. Resigned to her fate, though it didn’t seem a particularly evil one, Erica joined him at the table close by Snoop’s dog bed and a window overlooking the vertically-stepped vineyards.
Snoop gave an excited whimper, so she scratched his head and he thumped his fluffy tail against the bed.
Ridley gave an excited whimper and leaned his head forward.
She considered dumping his hot coffee in his lap. Her smile must have given her away because he desisted, then answered her grin.
Yesterday they had run the gamut of Corniglia, which wasn’t saying much as it was a tiny hamlet with five streets. But it was geared for tourists and, with Ridley’s prodding, they’d investigated it all, with far less timidity than she would have. He blustered into shops, chatted with the postman in pidgin English and Italian even lamer than her own. She wouldn’t have spoken until she was sure she had the vocabulary and pronunciation at least somewhat accurate. He plunged in and was greeted with warm welcomes everywhere he went—and not only by the women.
His charm was about more than sexual attraction. There was an openness, an innate kindness that Ridley Claremont III wore as easily as his tight t-shirt—which fit him very well. Others sensed that openness (and the women surely paid attention to the chest revealed by that clingy black covering) and everyone responded. What did those same people think of her? Perhaps she didn’t want to know.
They’d poked their noses into the combined city hall-school-post office, and found quiet trails leading into the vineyards that surrounded the town in every direction not bounded by a cliff.
“Well…” she hesitated a little to torture him and was touched by his pained expression. “I suppose you can come along with me, if you really want to.”
He went from pained to eager faster than the gods’ messenger Mercury, though he tried to hide it.
“If her ladyship doesn’t feel that I’ll be in the way…” he drawled out.
“Oh,” she waited until he had taken a big bite of his flaky brioche. “Every princess’ court needs a fool.” She’d thought to say jester, but changed it at the last second, surprising herself. Fool was funnier.
He sputtered out a laugh, inhaled a mouthful of flaky pastry, and spent the next several minutes coughing and trying quick sips of his coffee, which appeared to also be burning his mouth. She did her best to behave as daintily as a princess just descended from her tower and ignore the antics of her fool, but it was very hard not to laugh in his face.
Hal served her hot chocolate and a chocolate cornetto. His tie was bright blue, covered with the black outlines of different types of train cars and engines. He winked at her, then whisked off to other tasks.
“So, Fool,” she could feel the blush, but couldn’t do anything to stop it. “Where are we off to today?”
* * *
Ridley knew that was his cue, but was having trouble answering it.
Saying “Fool” would have been funny. Saying it with the blush said just how sweet a woman Erica Barnett really was. He’d never dated sweet. If he’d ever even met a sweet girl, he probably hadn’t noticed her.
Yet he couldn’t stop noticing Erica. She never smiled without it reaching her eyes. Her laugh was as rare as it was musical. And his fingertips itched to brush at the freckles across the bridge of her nose.
Even so, there was a brittle untouchability to her that befit a princess—at least he supposed so, not that he’d met more than a couple. Bibi’s parties had attracted all sorts; invitations to her Claremont Manor events had become one of the hot “gets” of the valley’s social whirl. She’d been smart: mixing celebrities, chefs, and restaurateurs in a way that had also enhanced Claremont Family Wines’ profile nicely.
He could almost picture Erica at one of those parties, off by herself in the library that had consumed Bibi and held so little interest for him. His mom would have liked Erica, he was sure of it.
“Where are we off to?” He repeated the question aloud to remind himself of what was actually going on here. Tossing an imaginary coin in the air, he watched it flip and spin, then snatched it and whacked it onto his wrist.
A quick peek.
A thoughtful “Hmmm” sound.
She answered with a single arched eyebrow closely followed by that killer smile.
Before he lost all ability to think, he peeked under his palm again.
“Vernazza.”
“Perché?”
“Perch? Like the fish?” It was one of the words they’d both learned yesterday but he couldn’t resist playing a little stupid.
“Perché? Like why.” Not even a glimmer that he’d been joking. It was pronounced “per-kay” but spelled like the fish with an extra e.
Then her eyes went even wider than normal as she figured out he was teasing.
“Gudgeon here,” she admitted.
“Okay, that one I don’t know.”
“Gudgeon is a type of fish, a particularly gullible fish. It will apparently bite a dry hook as happily as a baited one. Second evil stepsister Sally joined the Navy. I guess it’s a Navy saying and apparently my photo is in the US Naval Academy dictionary as the prime known example. I always fall for the straight line.”
“I’ll have to remember that.” Actually instead of his usual, remembering that to tease her with it, he realized he needed to remember not to do it too much.
The grimace told him that it had been used on her far too much. He’d really have to be vigilant.
“So, perch Vernazza?” Of course, he couldn’t totally resist.
“Sì. Perché Vernazza?”
“Next town that away,” he pointed straight out to sea.
“That would be Gibraltar, but I get the idea.”
“So, you’re not a total gudgeon?”
“Not anymore. I think that finally got beaten out of me.”
He wasn’t aware of the rage that washed over him until she rested a hand on his clenched fist.
“Not that way. He never hit me. Just about everything else, I suppose, but not that.”
And the sadness in her eyes was as deep and pure as the joy when she smiled. He hated seeing it there, as if it was a spot of Powdery Mildew or Grey Mold on the grapes that needed intensive treatment to be eradicated before it infected half the vineyard.
“Good. It saves me having to kill him. Is it okay if I just despise him?”
“I suppose someone should. The memories just make me sad.”
Ridley tried to think of what to do with that. And maybe he understood Bibi’s attitude toward her past just a little better. Maybe it really was best left in the past.
He held out a hand palm up as he rose from the table. She accepted the assistance to gain her feet. He hadn’t appreciated how she looked earlier. Slender jeans that revealed slim legs and stopped short of ankles as fine as her hands. Today’s blouse was short-sleeved and the shawl had been replaced with a brightly colored scarf of fabric too thin to do more than look nice.
Ridley tucked her hand about his elbow, suspecting that her hand wouldn’t stay in his long no matter how nice it felt, and led her out the door.
“I knew a very wise woman once. She had a thing or two to say about the past.”
“What was that?” Erica voice remained soft and sad.
“She said ‘Who gives a shit?’”
“I suppose I do,” she answered it matter-of-factly rather than laughing as he’d intended. They stepped out of the carruggio and onto the busy street—busy in relative terms. A small bus waited in the tiny square. He was fairly sure that it was the shuttle to the train station at the foot of the cliff. Even as he approa
ched to ask, an equally small garbage truck backed up, square into its back end. There was a crunch of glass as a taillight and a back window shattered.
They were almost to the windshield at that point and could plainly see the driver. He’d been lounging in his seat reading the sports section of a newspaper, but was nearly jolted out of his seat. He tossed the paper down on the dashboard, slammed open the door, and descended to confront the garbage truck driver, who had also climbed down to see the damage.
The bus driver gave a “You-idiot!” shrug, holding both hands aloft, gripping the air, then they started yelling at each other. Clearly the garbage driver thought the bus should be parked ten feet over, closer to the tourist street. The bus driver was holding two fingers in front of his own eyes asking if the garbage driver was blind. With the broad gesticulations all Italians used, it was fairly easy to follow the argument.
“I don’t think the bus is leaving any time soon.” He couldn’t tell if Erica was being dryly humorous or simply realistic. Knowing her, probably the latter.
“That leaves the stairs for us,” he turned her about. They’d discovered them yesterday.
When he’d remarked on there being 382 steps down from the town to the station, Erica, of course, had more information.
“One guide book said 388 and another states 365, one for each day of the year. It makes me feel sad for leap years. Why is it that the outliers always get left out? I’ll have to count them for myself one of these days. Though if it turns out to be 365, it will always make me feel a little sad, so maybe I shouldn’t.”
She’d said it all as if such trains of thought were perfectly normal. Maybe they were for her. There was a fascinating mixture of the concrete and the fanciful. Ridley had merely thought, “Wow! That’s a lot of steps,” and been content with that.
“A year of steps it is,” she waved him to lead the way. Others were making the same decision. They headed up the road in a loose band that gave the day a slightly festive feel. As they walked up the road to the head of the steps, her silence let him think back to her earlier remark.
“So, you suppose that you give a shit about the past?” If she was going to open up, even a sliver, he wasn’t going to let the opportunity drop.
“I seem to.” She didn’t sound happy about it.
“Perch.”
“Perch? Oh, Perché? See, I warned you I was a gudgeon.”
“Just answer the question, Erica.”
“Why?” She murmured it more to herself than to him.
They reached the long stairway of red brick. It was wide, well-built, clearly meant for tourists. It wound its way down the face of the cliff in switchbacks rarely more than fifteen or twenty steps along. Unlike the carruggio with its uneven stone surface, the brick was laid flat and solid without a single wiggle. Nice, modern craftsmanship. And he took a bet with himself that the carruggio would still be standing five hundred years after these steps had slid into the sea.
But a man felt safe escorting a lady down such steps, as if he was helping her descend from her throne. He wanted to laugh and share the image with her, but when he glanced over. She appeared deep in thought, so he kept his silence.
The “Fool” escorting the princess? How many times had he been the fool, escorting some woman around because they looked good together or because she was fun. Never thinking one bit deeper. A quick review suggested that he walked as thoughtlessly out of relationships as he walked into them. He never failed to deliver on his promises…by never promising.
So he wasn’t deep. Sue me!
But Erica was deep; deep like an unplumbed well. So deep that he half wondered what would happen to him if he fell in?
* * *
Why did she give a darn about the past?
No, that wasn’t the question.
Why did she give a shit about the past?
Not a harsh bone in your pretty, little body, Dwayne used to tease her.
Well, maybe with his help, she was finally developing some.
So why did she give a shit? Dwayne had been all about himself. It was always about him. She’d learned to ask about his day, his worries. He’d complimented her ideas on how to run the business, but always proposed them as his own. That had been fine—she was just the business manager; he was the boss. It’s the way it was supposed to be.
Wasn’t it?
That niggling sensation that she’d long since learned to deeply respect poked at her for the first time since…since she couldn’t recall. All the way back to her babysitting days—when a client’s husband tried to take her for more of a ride than a trip home—that voice had been with her. Thankfully so had the can of mace that Stephen had purchased and insisted that she carry.
She’d learned to listen to those tiny warnings. She’d taken to calling it the quiet voice of her inner brain.
So where were you during the Dwayne years? Huh?
No answer. Not that there’d ever been one when she asked something directly.
But now it was telling her that her role in Dwayne’s business was yet another thing she’d misread. He’d taken her ideas as his own because it was just the kind of manipulative—she took a breath—bastard! that he was.
So why did she give a shit about Dwayne? Why did she care one little…
“I need a better swear word.”
“What’s the context?”
“Huh?” She looked up at Ridley in surprise. They were standing among a loose crowd on a long train platform. He held a pair of passes that she hadn’t noticed him purchasing. She’d been in plenty of train stations, and not a one of them had been like this. Corniglia perched atop the cliff high above them. To the right and left, train tunnels punched into the cliffs like black fists. The tracks themselves lay out in the open air mere feet above the crashing sea.
“Wow!” was all she could unimaginatively manage. Apparently exclamations today were as elusive as appropriate curses. Maybe she should take a course on swearing and exemplary exclamations of wonder and surprise. Perhaps there was an online course.
“You need a context for a good swear word. Swearing with the standard seven really doesn’t cut it.”
“The standard seven?”
“Old George Carlin routine. He actually updated it to eleven. You gotta watch the video. He was hilarious.”
“Okay, I need something besides the standard seven or eleven or whatever to describe how little I care about what someone in my past thinks.”
“Scatological version: squat—with all the implications of what you do while squatting over a toilet. Direct version: shit.”
“Already used that one.”
“Lower life form: rat’s ass. Complex:—”
“No. No. Stop! That’s perfect! I don’t give a rat’s ass about Dwayne. Talk about a lower life form. No, let’s not talk about him. Whoever told you not to give a rat’s ass about the past at all was a very wise woman.”
“My mom.”
“Wish I could have met her.”
She stretched up on her toes and kissed his check as the train roared into the station. It blew her hair into his face, burying him in Erica’s warm scent. His mind tried to label, categorize, and evaluate. No hint of lemon or lime so indicative of the Cinque Terre wines he’d had so far. No earthy tones. Not nut or fruit. Neither woody nor mineral. He couldn’t pin it down. It was like a whole new array of scents he’d never encountered before in all his years.
It only lasted an instant, then she was back on her heels with the top of her head barely reaching his chin.
As the last of the clatter of the wheels rattled down the track, the sorrows of the past had moved from her to him. If only Bibi was still alive to meet Erica.
Chapter 5
Vernazza unfolded like a miracle.
The train shot in and out of tunnels. The Mediterranean flashed into being and disappeared again like a strobe light. Inside, the car echoed with rattles, metallic wheezes, and dozens of conversations. Most were Italian, adding l
ayers upon Cinque Terre layers. But there was a cosmopolitan air that somehow even San Francisco and Boston lacked. German ground past French and wound around something that she guessed was middle European. For a few, the ride was mundane; for most, it was adventure.
It wasn’t rebirth. She definitely wasn’t there. The Fairy Godmother’s wand-bop on the nose was still totally MIA. But there was a…lightness. Yes, a lightness that hadn’t been with her in a long time. Perhaps even lighter than when she’d believed herself safely in love with Dwa— Yes, with him.
They ascended from the Vernazza train station on the Via Roma and she dragged Ridley into the first gelato shop. She could see two more further down the street, but this one was first and somehow that, too, mattered.
Yesterday she’d opted for chocolate for her afternoon gelato, feeling a little guilty at indulging twice in one day. Ridley had laughed at her lack of adventure, but she’d wanted to build slowly, layering on the experience.
“What’s the flavor to start the day?”
Ridley missed her joke about planning to have gelato twice in one day again. Surely that was the very essence of being on vacation?
“Ridley? Erica to Ridley?”
“Um,” he blinked in surprise as if he didn’t know where he was.
“Gelato. Flavor. Important decisions here.”
“You go first.” It was like he’d been out of focus and was only partway back.
She turned to the long glassed-in display. Despite it only being midmorning, they were already doing a brisk business. She had to peek in between and among other patrons to see the flavors. It took some doing. A good gelato shop in Boston, where they were few and far between, boasted perhaps a dozen flavors. There must be thirty or more here and each a different color just begging to be tried. Every one raked into elegant swirls making each look more sumptuous than the one before.
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