Chapter Seven Guinevere #2
“Oh,” I said with a little laugh as I caught the dark-haired boy around the shoulders. “Stai attento, piccolo.”
Watch out, little one.
He dropped his head back between his shoulders and smiled a gap-toothed smile at me. “I speak English good!” he practically shouted.
Carlotta swept into the room looking harried but gorgeous. All Raffa’s family was beautiful, which wasn’t surprising given how stunning he was, but still. It seemed vaguely unfair that they should have genes this good.
Carlotta dashed a stray lock of golden-brown hair escaping her ponytail behind one ear and shot me an exasperated look. “Zacheo, Maxi, and Nico are all too young for school. I am afraid you will have to put up with them all day every day, just like the rest of us.”
I chuckled, tentatively stroking a hand down the boy’s messy locks. “I don’t mind at all. I babysat all through my teens, and I . . .” I cleared my throat. “I lost my sister over a year ago, so it’s nice to be around family.”
“You will regret saying that,” Carmine said as he came into the hall from the kitchen, chomping into an apple. “Now they’ll have you as the live-in nanny.”
Carlotta shoved him into the wall as he passed. “Ignore him. There is so much gel in his hair it makes him stupid.”
I laughed at their camaraderie, feeling, for the first time in two months, like I wasn’t alone.
“Come on, Zacheo,” Carlotta urged. “Let Guinevere go have some breakfast.”
“Do you like Nutella?” he asked me, still clinging to my legs. He had his mother’s wide-set dark-brown eyes.
“Everyone likes Nutella,” I replied.
If possible, his grin widened. “Me too,” he shrieked, twisting to grab my hand and tug me down the hallway out the open French doors to the flagstone patio off the kitchen.
The same enormous wood table we had eaten at the night before was laid for breakfast with ceramic pitchers of juice, a platter of whole fruit and another of fruit salad, and others piled with breakfast pastries.
From its place on top of a hill, you could see over the entire valley from the villa in a 360-degree view that included vineyards, olive groves, and weaving roads lined with cypress trees.
It was so perfect it didn’t seem real, even as I paused to absorb the view.
Carmine and Ludo sat at one end of the table, the former reading the Corriere della Sera newspaper and the latter doing something on his tablet. The only other people at the table were Stacci and her baby, Nico, in her lap being fed yogurt.
“Buongiorno, Guinevere,” the adults called almost simultaneously as Zacheo dragged me to the table and pushed me down onto the bench.
I laughed when he immediately crawled up beside me and then half into my lap, already reaching for the enormous jar of chocolate-hazelnut spread.
“Zach, you have already had enough Nutella this morning,” Carlotta reminded him as she came out to grab some of the discarded plates to take inside.
The little boy stared at her with huge eyes, blinking innocently. “It’s for her!” he corrected, swinging the mini spatula from the jar in a wide arc so chocolate lashed out across the table. “She loves it, Mamma.”
Carlotta bit back the edge of her smile, but the rest of the adults laughed. “All right, if Guinevere says it’s okay, then you can help make her some Nutella toast.”
On my lap, Zacheo wriggled with delight, reaching for a cornetto.
“You’ll have to get used to lack of personal boundaries, I’m afraid,” Stacci explained with a soft expression on her face as she watched Zacheo rip open the pastry and spread an obscene amount of Nutella on it. “With five boys under nine years old in the house, it’s pretty chaotic.”
“I don’t mind,” I said, which was the truth.
How could I take umbrage at such a warm reception?
The way the family instantly enveloped me into their ranks.
Emiliano had offered to teach me how to shoot so that he could take me hunting, and in the meantime he and Stacci had told me they would take me out hunting for truffles with their pig, Tonio, who was apparently named after Leo’s father.
Carlotta and Angela had offered to teach me to cook some regional dishes, and Lando had proposed to take me on a tour of local churches through Tuscany and Umbria some weekend when he was off work.
Two of Raffa’s soldati who lived on the property had also introduced themselves as Michele and Philippe, brothers who ran security for the villa under Leo.
When I’d mentioned taking a jog around the property, they’d both nearly fallen over themselves to illustrate the best routes on a map for me.
I didn’t know what Raffa had told them about me, but it was obvious I had not arrived a perfect stranger.
Only, their lovely reception brought with it an ache, that bitter edge of knowing they seemed utterly genuine and almost perfect on the surface, but that they were, in fact, a family of criminals. Or if not criminals themselves, then complicit in the activities of their patriarch.
Did sweet Carlotta with the messy hair and soft smile know that her brother didn’t flinch when he shot someone in the head?
Had he ever killed someone for Stacci, who was beautiful enough to draw all kinds of attention?
Had he ever kidnapped Delfina “for her own good”?
It was hard to accept kindness now. I was always looking for the catch, and in this instance, it was an obvious one.
They were Raffa’s family.
And if I fell in love with them, how hard would it be to keep my distance from the mafioso who had unfairly stolen my heart?
But as Zacheo offered me a Nutella-laden piece of cornetto, insisting on shoving it into my mouth himself, I already knew it was a losing battle.
“So these are our last days of freedom before the harvest starts,” Stacci said, wiping Nico’s messy mouth. “What do you say we go into town and grab something you might have left behind? Have you been to Greve? It is touristic but still cute.”
“That sounds wonderful, thanks. What are you harvesting? The olives?”
“No, it is too early for those. Because we are Northern, Lando will not begin the harvest until later in November, even early December. We begin la vendemmia on Sunday. You won’t see Delfina much for the next couple of weeks because she runs operations at Tenuta Romano.
The whole family goes out for the first few days to help.
It’s a kind of a . . . community ritual. ”
“Everyone nearby comes out too,” Carmine added, looking at me over the top of his newspaper with a wry grin. “You can meet the locals and get a sense for the flavor of true Toscana. The countryside is very different from Firenze.”
“Less cold,” Stacci agreed.
“Less civilized,” Carmine countered.
It was worth noting that even sitting in a villa, eating breakfast in the country, Carmine was wearing a bespoke three-piece suit. Before I’d grown to know him, I might have thought him haughty for doing so, but I knew it was part of his identity—his mask.
I realized now that Raffa and his soldati all had them in various ways.
Raffa most of all.
The expensive suits, the carefully tamed waves pushed away from his handsome face, the pose he commanded all the time, arms crossed, feet braced like those of a general at attention. There was not one cultivated ounce of him that did not command respect.
Only a select few got to see him as he had been last night at dinner, sitting back casually in his chair with his thighs spread, a nephew on one knee, tucked to his chest as he dozed off against his uncle.
His hair had fallen over his forehead, his stubble overgrown and a direct contrast to the ruddy softness of his mouth.
He’d laughed once or twice, that rich belly laugh that made my skin break out in goose bumps.
Only a select few, and I was one of them.
Love is not something that recognizes just the good in someone.
It sees the bad and ugly. It acknowledges the dark because it accepts every part of who a person is.
I am not all good. I am not even divided wholly in half.
But whatever good I am I would give to you.
All I ask for in return is that you love me for who I am.
His words from last night echoed in my head like a song stuck on repeat.
Because he was right.
I had finished reading Dante’s Divine Comedy when I returned to Michigan, as if Dante’s words could keep me connected to Italy, a last lifeline I wasn’t willing to relinquish. There were dozens of quotes I’d annotated with red pen, but one stood out more than most.
“The day that man allows true love to appear, those things which are well made will fall into confusion and will overturn everything we believe to be right and true.”
The truth of those words was a mirror held before my face, impossible to ignore.
Loving Raffa had turned my world upside down not once but twice.
Here I was back in his country, in his stronghold, held against my will in order to ensure my safety in a contradiction that embodied the nature of our entire relationship.
He wanted to keep me safe, but he was the danger.
He wanted to love me, but he did not trust me.
My soul called out for the beauty of his even as my mind turned away from the horrible things I knew he’d done.
My body was a battlefield between rationality and passion, and Raffa was right—eventually there had to be a winner. Not just for my sake, but also for his.
I just wasn’t sure which side would win out.
Even if I loved him enough to accept his darkness, I didn’t know if I was brave enough to harness mine.
Zacheo finished eating the rest of my chocolate-covered cornetto and then smacked a sticky hand on my cheek, smiling so bright he took my breath away. For one brutally vivid moment, sharp and bright as a diamond, I imagined that my children with Raffa might look something like Zacheo.
“Che buono!” he exclaimed.
“Delizioso,” I agreed, giving in to the urge to rub my nose against his.
He giggled, squirming to get away from me even as he kept his hand on my cheek.
“Will you go to the festival with Mamma and me this weekend?” he asked, moving his dirty fingers to the gold chain around my throat and flicking the cornicello lucky charm back and forth. “There’s dancing.”
“It is the Grape Festival in Impruneta,” Carlotta told me as she came back outside and sat with a sigh of exhaustion on the bench beside me. “We take the little ones every year.”
“We can all go together,” Ludo grunted, then shrugged at me when I shot him a surprised look. “They give out free wine.”
“You can walk on the grapes with your toes,” Zacheo shouted into my face, smacking my cheek to emphasize his excitement.
“Lower your voice,” Stacci and Carlotta reprimanded at the same time.
“You can walk on the grapes with your toes,” Zacheo repeated quietly. “Want to come?”
“Definitely,” I agreed, ready to let this family distract me from reality, at least until Raffa returned.