Last of the Summer Vines
Page 5
But Luca took no notice of Tommaso’s rudeness. With a cheerful wave, he headed into his office building, and Tommaso climbed into the car beside me. The interior suddenly felt three times smaller with him in it.
As he eased out into the street and down the hill, taking the winding corners a little too fast for my comfort, I faced him. If there’d been any space in the small car, I would have set my arms on my hips. ‘You don’t have to act like a dog with a bone. It was just lunch, not a conspiracy to steal away your precious vineyard.’
‘It’s not the vineyard I’m worried about.’ Tommaso’s voice was almost a growl. ‘Don’t put too much faith in Luciano Fioravanti.’
‘John must have trusted him since he chose Luca as his executor. Or are you suggesting my father wasn’t a particularly good judge of character?’
Tommaso pressed his lips together. ‘Luca might have to abide by a code of ethics as a lawyer, but he’s still a lawyer, and he’s still a Fioravanti.’
What did that mean? I crossed my arms over my chest and turned away to look out the window. Tommaso was just jealous because Luca was everything he wasn’t: personable, charming, easy-going.
The roar of the 1960s engine was hardly conducive to conversation, or at least that was my excuse for maintaining radio silence the rest of the way back to the castello. That and Tommaso’s grim expression.
He parked in the back yard, carried my bags of groceries into the kitchen, then took off along the dusty drive that circled behind the house.
‘And goodbye to you too,’ I shouted after the little blue car as it shot off towards the wine cellar in a cloud of dust.
With a sigh, I returned to the kitchen and looked around. If I was going to be staying here a while longer, I needed a usable kitchen – a clean kitchen, with uncluttered surfaces and clean utensils – so I set to work, starting with the walls, the windows, the floor. It was well into the afternoon before I moved onto the pots and pans hanging from racks on the walls.
I left the ancient wood stove for last. On hands and knees, I scrubbed away years of accumulated grime, unable to suppress a pang for the beautiful, modern cooker in the house I shared with Cleo and Moira, another of our uni friends.
It took a couple of hours of elbow grease to get the stove clean, but beneath the layers of dirt, it was a thing of beauty, its green and ivory porcelain undamaged. It would make some antique dealer very happy.
The hard labour, while not as therapeutic as yoga or meditation, or whatever other faddy hobby Cleo had in mind for me, at least kept my thoughts occupied, and by the time the shadows through the tall windows started lengthening, the kitchen looked almost cheerful.
In the overgrown patch behind the house that had once been Elisa’s herb garden, I rescued some terracotta pots, re-planted into them a few of the smaller rosemary, basil and arugula plants which hadn’t yet grown woody, and set them on the kitchen window so their aroma could fill the room. I found a bright blue and yellow cloth that might once have been a rug, and once I’d beaten the dust from it, and washed it, it made the perfect tablecloth to brighten up the room.
The kitchen might not pass a food hygiene inspection, but it was liveable. And I’d hardly thought about work all day. Well, okay, two or three times, but considering my Saturdays were usually spent at the office, that was an achievement worth celebrating.
Not that there was anyone to celebrate with. I sat alone at the kitchen table to eat a simple dinner of grilled cheese sandwiches and tea, and wondered where Cleo and Moira were right now. Down at the pub? Out at the movies? On dates?
The castello was deathly quiet once again, and I hadn’t heard the car return. Tommaso couldn’t still be working at the cellar, could he?
I was tempted to knock on the cottage door to see if he was in, just to have company, but then I remembered his forbidding expression. An empty and echoing castello was infinitely preferable to re-opening hostilities.
It was only as I lazed in the big, ugly avocado-coloured plastic bath tub, up to my chin in water which had gurgled so slowly out of the pipes I’d managed to make another cup of tea while waiting for the tub to fill, that I allowed myself to remember the Tommy I’d known and played with so long ago.
Like me, he’d been a serious child, shy, and too much on his own, yet he’d smiled a lot too. He’d had a dry sense of humour, and we’d laughed a lot together. Not only had he been a Buffy fan, but he’d collected trivia, which probably made him a nerd back in school, just like me. He’d been Xander to my Willow. These days, though, he was more like the brooding vampire Angel. Did that make me Buffy? I didn’t feel particularly kickass right now.
Somehow the two pictures, the one of the laughing boy and the other of the grim man, would not fit together. What had happened to replace his laughter with that furrowed brow and brooding expression? And was my old friend still buried beneath all those layers, or was he gone forever?
Chapter 5
Siccome la casa brucia, riscaldiamoci
(Since the house is on fire, let us warm ourselves)
I woke with the soft pink light of dawn filtering into the room, rolled over in bed, and reached for my watch on the nightstand. It was early still, the usual time I’d be waking to check my emails. There weren’t any. Damn signal.
Rubbing my eyes, I rose and moved to open the French doors, letting in a warm rush of air. The doors opened onto a narrow, wrought iron balcony. Leaning on the railing, I looked out over the valley, at the cross-hatched patterns of the fields of vines.
The morning air was still cool, and without the sun’s heat to draw out the usual heavy fragrance of the garden, the air smelled clean and fresh. The dawn sky was streaked with lilac and pink, and to the south, where the blue hills met the paler blue of the sky, I could just make out the russet and ochre rooftops of a village, catching the early morning light as a thin mist burned away. Across the valley, the nearest hills were furred with the dark green of forest, dipping down into the brighter green of rows and rows of vines in full leaf. The public road that served the farms snaked through this valley and away into the next, striped by the early morning light falling between the double row of dark cypresses marking its path.
Closer, among the rows of vines washed green and gold by the early morning sun, a red tractor chugged, kicking up white dust. I shaded my eyes against the sun. It might have been Tommaso, but I couldn’t tell from this distance.
I breathed in another lungful of warm, heavy air, enjoying this strange sensation of being in a foreign place. After a childhood of constant movement and change, I wasn’t a frequent traveller, preferring to enjoy my own back yard, but looking out at this view I could almost understand the allure travel held for Geraldine. There was something about being in a new place, in strange surroundings, that gave the illusion of sweeping away one’s troubles. I turned my back to the view. The one thing Geraldine hadn’t learnt was that you couldn’t run away from your troubles. They would still be waiting at home when you returned.
Having learnt from my experience the day before, I pulled on a lightweight silk dressing gown over my sleep shorts and camisole, and headed downstairs for coffee and breakfast. The gown was one of the last gifts Kevin gave me. Jade to match your eyes, he’d said, unexpectedly poetic for a statistician. Then he’d stripped it off me to kiss his way down my body. Barely a week later he’d been kissing down someone’s else’s body … I shut down that thought so quickly my head spun.
To keep both my hands and my thoughts occupied, I catalogued the contents of the restocked pantry. Flour, sugar, eggs, milk, olive oil, and the oranges I’d bought on a whim at the co-op because they looked so fresh and appealing. Out of practice as I was, I hadn’t thought to buy yeast or baking powder, but there was baking soda and I’d seen lemons on the tree in the back yard…
It might be rather pleasant to try my hand at baking again. Like riding a bike, right?
Squeezing out a couple of lemons, I made a paste with the baking soda, then mixed i
n the flour, sugar and oil, grated in the orange zest and juice, and finally beat in the eggs. There was something so satisfying, so deliciously primal, about being elbow deep in a bowl, with dough squelching between my fingers. It was every bit as satisfying as I remembered.
Once I’d beaten the mix into a smooth consistency, I spooned it into a rectangular baking dish, then covered it with a checkered tea towel.
Now what? I had the perfect batter for schiacciata alla Fiorentina, the traditional Florentine orange flat-cake Nonna had taught me to bake, but no way to bake it except in the terrifying wood oven. It might be clean and gleaming now, but I didn’t have the faintest clue how to even get the wretched thing started.
How hard could it be to start a fire and get it warm enough to bake the cake? What was the worst that could happen – that the oven would either heat too fast or not enough? I might end up with a cake that was either burnt or undercooked, but so what? Who would know but me that for once in my life I’d created something less than perfect?
There was a wood pile in the back yard. I hefted a few of the smaller logs into the kitchen and piled them inside the stove’s firebox, then set them alight with the gas lighter I found in the pantry. Instead of bursting into the kind of merry blaze Nonna used to make, the wood began to smoke. Perhaps there was too much air?
I hurriedly shut the firebox door, but that only made the smoke billow thicker. It oozed around the edges of the door, slowly filling the room with an eye-burning fog.
So I opened the door again. Oh no. That was even worse. Now, clouds of smoke pumped back into the kitchen. I choked on the smoke, covering my nose and mouth with the crook of my arm. My eyes watered from the burn as I ran for the half-full electric kettle, grabbed it off its heating pad, and returned to the oven. Hastily pouring the water from the kettle over the meagre flames, I stood back, throat burning, eyes burning. The logs sizzled, belching out even more acrid smoke, and the fire inside the stove died.
That didn’t stop the smoke, though. It poured down still from the chimney. Oh heavens – had I somehow set the chimney on fire? I had no clue how chimneys worked.
Half-blinded and coughing, I was doubled up, and struggling for breath. The kitchen, vast as it had seemed before, was now so filled with smoke I could barely see a foot around me. Only the brighter patch of the door was visible, so I stumbled towards it, and straight into a wall of human. Hard, male human.
Strong arms gathered me up, sweeping me off my feet, and I was carried out into blinding sunlight. While my eyes still streamed, he sat, cradling me in his lap, one large hand rubbing soothing circles on my back while with the other he wiped away the stinging tears from my eyes.
‘There’s no point burning the house down,’ Tommaso said. ‘It’s way under-insured.’
His voice was hard and unsympathetic, completely at odds with the gentle hand stroking circles on my back.
‘I wasn’t trying to burn the house down!’ The protest was weak, my voice scratchy and still choked from the smoke.
Now that my eyes had stopped streaming, I could see we sat on the low stone wall edging Nonna’s herb garden, and he’d used the hem of his T-shirt to mop my eyes. Where the shirt lifted, tanned hard muscle was visible. A six-pack. An honest-to-goodness six-pack. I’d never been within groping distance of one of those before.
I swallowed. The arms that had held me and carried me were well muscled too, and the chest I leaned against…
I should get out of his lap. I really should.
Yet somehow my body refused to obey.
‘I wanted to bake,’ I said weakly, ending on a hiccoughing cough.
‘The stove hasn’t been used in years. It needs a good cleaning.’ His face wasn’t any more sympathetic than before, but his voice was a little gentler.
‘I cleaned it out yesterday.’
‘The chimney too?’
That was a real thing?
‘If there’s a build-up of creosote inside the chimney, you could have started a serious chimney fire. What wood did you use?’
I glanced towards the sheltered wood pile stacked up against the yard wall.
‘That figures! That’s the wood I’m seasoning for winter. It’s still very green, which means it creates more smoke than fire. And if the flue is blocked, you’d just make it worse.’
And I was just as green. Mortification swept through me, swift and furious. I hated being at a disadvantage, never let anyone suspect I was anything less than competent and in control, and yet I’d given Tommaso ringside seats to my ignorance.
That made twice in less than a week. First, the Delta Corporation, and now this. My eyes burned, and it wasn’t just the after effects of the smoke, but anger at myself for failing. I never failed at anything I set my mind to. I didn’t know how to cope with failure.
Tommaso pushed back the hair falling loose from the chignon I’d tied it up into. ‘You’re welcome to use my oven until we can check out the chimney.’
At the sound of an engine, we both turned to look as a familiar silver sports car appeared around the corner of the house and pulled up in the yard. Luca Fioravanti.
And though I was a little more dressed than yesterday, I most certainly wasn’t dressed for visitors. If I hadn’t been aware before of how the silk gown only reached mid-thigh, or the proximity of Tommaso’s body, I certainly was now. A furious blush burned my face and I wriggled to get out of his lap. But he held me fast.
This was turning into one of those scenes in a really bad farce.
‘Making house calls on a Sunday?’ Tommaso called out as Luca stepped from the car.
With an extra hard shove at his chest, I scrambled out of his lap, burningly aware that not only was I scantily clad and dishevelled, but I no doubt also reeked of smoke. While Luca looked impeccably, impossibly perfect. Not a hair mussed, shoes polished, trousers crisply pressed, as if he had indeed just stepped from the pages of GQ. Exactly the kind of man I would choose if ever I were in the market for one.
He held a bouquet of pink roses. My stomach did a strange somersault thing.
‘I brought the partnership agreement for you to sign.’ Luca smiled his usual smooth, charming grin. ‘I hope I’m not interrupting anything?’
My blush deepened. ‘No, of course not.’ Sure, I always entertained sexy men at home on a Sunday morning in my pyjamas. Not. ‘Would you like to come inside?’
Luca looked at Tommaso, and though his polite expression held steady, it no longer seemed amused or friendly. ‘I think perhaps not. I have a pen, and you can sign right here.’
He whipped out a pen from his lightweight summer jacket and held it out to Tommaso. It almost seemed like a challenge. We signed the agreement on the hood of the car, first Tommaso then me, then Luca turned his smile up a notch for me. ‘I also came to invite you to lunch.’
This was no business invitation. It was definitely a date.
No holiday romance, no holiday romance.
But as much as I chanted the mantra, my body was shouting ‘yes, please!’
As I opened my mouth to accept, Tommaso spoke for me. ‘That’s very kind of you, but we already have plans today. We’re going to lunch with the Rossis.’
I opened my mouth again, this time to protest, but Tommaso continued without pause. ‘Alberto Rossi was one of your father’s oldest friends. He’d be offended if you turned down his invitation.’
I pressed my lips tight, to stop myself from doing yet another fish impression, shot Tommaso a glance that threatened all sorts of retribution, then turned to Luca with a smile. ‘Thank you for the invitation. Another day, perhaps?’
‘Si, bella. Another day.’ He reached for my hand and gave it a gentle squeeze. I half-hoped he’d do that courtly knuckle kiss thing again. Though he didn’t need to for me to shiver at his touch. His dimpling smile flashed as he let go of my hand. ‘I will call you next time.’
He handed me the flowers and I cradled them to my chest, breathing in their sweet fragrance.
He merely shrugged. ‘Aren’t you pleased I came to tell you about the lunch invitation? If it weren’t for that, I wouldn’t have been here to rescue you.’
‘I don’t need rescuing. I am perfectly capable of rescuing myself.’ The fact that he had indeed rescued me only made me more irritable. I was no damsel in distress, and I didn’t ever plan to be. That was Geraldine’s game.
I stomped back into the house, with Tommaso’s amused voice trailing after. ‘It was my pleasure!’
There were vases in the pantry. I filled a crystal vase at the tap and set the roses into it. They were as perfect as Luca himself; pale pink, duskier at the tips of the petals, and so breathtakingly sweet.
The kitchen was less smoky now, reassuring me that the fire was indeed out, and I hadn’t set the house alight after all. Though burning the place to the ground might not be a bad place to start, even if it was under-insured.
I threw open all the windows, and the smoke began to dissipate. No harm done, except to my bruised ego.
But I was going to need Tommaso’s oven. If we were invited to lunch, I didn’t plan to go empty-handed. And I needed more clothes on. Especially if I was having lunch with some old friend of John’s rather than a sexy lawyer who was the first man to show an interest in me in way too long.
No holiday romance, I reminded myself. But I was smiling.
Chapter 6
Una cena senza vino è come un giorno senza sole
(A meal without wine is a day without sunshine)
Our destination wasn’t a house, as I’d expected, but a trattoria up on a hill, reached along a winding dirt road edged by trees. As Tommaso parked in the lot behind the restaurant, I cast a mortified glance down at the plastic container in my lap, containing the schiacciata cake I’d finally managed to bake in his far more modern oven. ‘I thought we were having lunch at their home?’