6. Elio
Elio went through the motions of making dinner even though he wasn’t remotely hungry. Marc had been right. He needed to at least be decent to this woman while she was here. He already had enough people talking badly about him; adding one more to the mix wasn’t exactly a bright idea.
The very least he could do was make her some dinner. Maybe he could even get some more details out of her about the lawsuit, something said offhand by the olive-eating idiot and his lawyer. It couldn’t hurt to try, even though Kayla seemed far too smart to let details like that just slip out of her mouth unnoticed. Either way, forcing her to stay in her room seemed, at best, unethical. With all of the house staff safely on the mainland, Elio was left to fend for himself in the kitchen, so dinner consisted of pasta and tomato sauce with a bunch of random herbs thrown on top for good measure. If it tasted bad, he really couldn’t find it in himself to care.
He knocked on the door to the guest suite, and Kayla opened up almost immediately. Despite himself, Elio had to take a moment to take in how pretty she really was. Her eyes, of course, grabbed his attention every time she looked at him, but now her hair was unraveled from its braid and hung to her waist in a mass of wild blond curls. He’d never really seen anyone quite like her before. But for all of Kayla’s earlier zest and irreverence, she seemed more cautious now as she peeked out and looked up at Elio as he stood there. Maybe the reality of them being stuck together was starting to hit home because it certainly was for Elio. The whole thing was ridiculous.
“Uh, dinner is served,” he said. He’d been aiming for civil and instead came out sounding far too formal like this was a meal that he wanted to take part in. She seemed to feel the same way at least, offering him a tight-lipped smile and following him through the villa until they came to the dining room, where he’d set down two plates filled with pasta as well as some water and wine. There was no way he was going to attempt to get through this without at least some alcohol within reach. He wasn’t superhuman.
“Thanks,” Kayla said as she sat down opposite him, the width of the smooth oak table stretching out between them. As soon as Elio sat and took a sip of wine, she followed suit, putting her glass to her lips. At least he wasn’t the only one that needed a drink.
“That’s really good,” she said, putting the glass back down.
Despite himself, Elio preened under the praise. “Thank you. I made it.”
“What, like you went out and squished grapes with your feet?”
Elio choked back a sigh. “No. As in, I run the company that makes it.”
“Does anyone still do the whole pressing out the juice with their feet thing, anyway?”
“Not if they want FDA approval, they don’t.”
“Fair. I can imagine there’d be some health concerns with feet coming into contact with wine.”
“Can you maybe stop talking about feet during dinner?” Elio asked, abandoning his mission to be civil and glaring at her across the table. But, of course, she looked triumphant at having gotten under his skin.
“Sure,” she said, taking another pointed sip before tucking into her dinner.
As Kayla ate, she looked around the room like she’d never seen anything like it before, as if a dining room was that interesting. Maybe to her it was. Elio had no idea what was going on in this woman’s head.
“So,” she said, and Elio looked up from his plate to see her staring at him instead of the decor. “You make wine? Or your company does, at least?”
“I thought you would have already known that.”
“Why? Are you supposed to be famous?”
Elio turned his attention to his food to keep from rolling his eyes at her. “I figured you would have looked into me, considering your rather elaborate setup to serve me legal papers. Didn’t you want to know who you were chasing down?”
“Believe it or not, you’re not that interesting.”
“Are you trying to be insulting?”
“No, honest, I’m not. I must be doing it accidentally.”
Civil, Elio reminded himself sternly. For your own sake, try and be civil. Unfortunately, Kayla seemed entirely incapable of keeping her mouth shut.
“The pasta is good as well,” she said, making her way through her meal.
“Thank you.” He watched her carefully as she failed to say anything else.
“What?” she asked, wriggling under his scrutiny.
“That’s it? Just a compliment? No other smart remarks?”
“Well, I was just trying to be nice, but I’m sure I can come up with some insults if that’s your thing.”
“Forget I said anything.”
“That’s a very hard thing to forget.”
Elio was certain she was going to give him a migraine before the meal was over, but before he could open his mouth to keep squabbling, an outrageously loud crack of thunder hit right above them and for a second, the lights flickered off and on again.
Neither of them had anything to say for a few minutes after that, with Kayla constantly sneaking glances up to the ceiling as if it were going to cave in on them. When Elio started talking again, it had less to do with picking a fight and more to do with turning his attention away from the storm swirling violently around them.
“You weren’t actually serious about swimming back to the mainland, were you?”
Kayla shrugged and swallowed her mouthful. “It seemed like as good a plan as any at the time. Getting stuck here with you while you were so angry seemed… not ideal.”
“Neither is drowning off the coast of Italy. You would single-handedly tank the tourism industry, at least temporarily.”
“Yeah, I’m sure my ghost would feel really bad about that.”
“And what about after this?” he asked. “Any more CEOs that need to be tricked into taking their papers with your dramatic skills?”
Kayla made a face, screwing up her nose. “No, not if I can help it.”
“What do you mean? Only going after the lower classes from now on?”
“I mean, I’ve quit. This is my last job. I never want to serve another court case ever again, thanks very much, even if they offer to take me on a full European tour.”
Elio was a bit stunned. Especially by the tone of her voice; how tired she sounded. He’d assumed she’d taken pride in her work, considering the lengths she went to in order to get the papers in his hands.
“You maybe could have quit a little sooner, then,” he said. “You know, as a favor to me.”
God, what was wrong with him? He was supposed to be making a good impression, and here he was, already cringing at how much of an ass he was still sounding like despite a failed attempt at being funny. But Kayla laughed. Actually laughed, like she’d gotten the joke. Which not many people did.
“Well, if I ever come across a time machine,” she said, “I’ll go back and quit a little sooner, just for your sake.”
“I’d appreciate it.”
Kayla raised her glass to him and took a sip, and now Elio was in an entirely different sort of spin.
“I didn’t expect you to hate your job,” he said, pushing his food around the plate.
“Why not?”
“Because you seem to be very good at it.”
She shrugged again, as if hiring some random fisherman in a foreign country to get her onto someone’s private island and to knock on their door with a straight face wasn’t remotely impressive.
“Being good at something and enjoying something aren’t necessarily related.”
“That’s fair.”
“It’s draining,” she said, making it sound like an admission of guilt. “Going to work knowing that you’re about to make someone’s day a whole lot worse. And they’re never afraid to tell you that, you know, how you’ve ruined everything, even if I am just giving them the paperwork.”
Elio thought back on how he’d reacted to her at the door, marching her down the dock and wanting her off the property. All for just handing him the paperwork, like she said. No wonder she wasn’t fazed by anything. If she was, she would have crumbled in a second. Now she was here having dinner with him. She either had the courage of a lioness or she was really, really stupid. But the second option seemed less and less likely the more time he spent talking with her.
“Thanks, by the way,” she said, snapping Elio out of his reverie.
“For what?”
“For not throwing me into the ocean.”
“I wasn’t actually going to.”
Kayla shrugged. “I’m used to having things thrown at me, so I wouldn’t have held it against you.”
“What? Who throws things at you?”
Kayla looked at him wide-eyed like he was a bit stupid, and maybe he was because Elio was struggling to think of a scenario where he would actually throw something at a woman on his doorstep and was coming up blank.
“People I serve papers to,” she said slowly, as if it was obvious. “They’re usually pretty mad about me being there. I’m sure you can relate.”
“What do they throw at you?”
“Whatever’s closest to the front door, so mostly it’s vases. Once, it was a full-length coat stand launched at me like a javelin, which was honestly kind of impressive.”
Elio stared at her with his mouth open, and he must have looked appropriately horrified because Kayla stopped with her fork halfway to her mouth.
“It’s not that bad,” she said, and Elio just shook his head.
“Please quit,” he said. “Go do something where people won’t throw literal pieces of furniture at you.”
“Well, I mean, you’re getting sued over an olive,” she said with a good-humored shrug. “And you’re a proper CEO, so it seems nowhere is safe.”
“True.” Elio sighed.
He ate another bite of pasta, hungrier than he’d realized. They ate in silence for a little bit, the atmosphere strange around them now that the hostility seemed to have been drained away. Now, it was just kind of awkward. Not only that, but Elio was violently curious about her. But how do you start asking someone questions in earnest when hours ago you were throwing them off your property?
“I’d give you more information if I could,” Kayla said, breaking the tension. “About the court case and stuff, but that’s not really my domain.”
“Thanks,” Elio said, surprised that she had been so… sweet. If you could call her sweet. But she seemed genuine enough. “Didn’t think you’d be on my side in the whole thing, honestly.”
“A lot of the time, it’s the defendant who’s in the right, you know,” she said, sounding philosophical. “You can’t judge if a person is actually good or not by which side of the lawsuit they fall into. Even winning a lawsuit doesn’t tell you whether they’re the good guy. You’ve got to look at a person’s whole life. For the context. And besides, people are too complicated to just shoehorn them into good or bad anyways.”
She continued eating as if she hadn’t just revealed a deeply profound worldview out of nowhere, and Elio had to take a second to reevaluate everything he thought about her. Maybe she wasn’t just all snark and no substance, not after that little speech. And maybe that was why she was happily sitting down to dinner with him after their less-than-ideal introduction, because she was waiting for more context to see if he was a good guy or not. Elio was overcome with embarrassment with how immature and reactive he’d been about all of this. Not to mention taking it all out on this woman who was now trapped here with nothing but the clothes on her back… Oh, God.
“You have a phone, right?” he asked, feeling smaller by the minute for only asking these things now. His self-preservation tunnel vision had a habit of kicking in hard. Only later, after the event was done and dusted, would he think to ask people if they were all right, if they needed help, or if they’d been upset. It hadn’t earned him a whole lot of friends over the years. Kayla didn’t seem to mind the delay, though, nodding happily as she pulled a cell phone out of her pocket like a trophy.
“Got a phone, and I managed to get through to the hotel on the mainland. They’re going to keep my luggage for me until I can get back. I might need to be a pain and borrow a charger cord, if that’s okay… I wasn’t really planning on staying.”
She grimaced at having to ask another favor of him, which was something new to Elio as well. Usually, people leapt at the chance to ask him for favors, for introductions, for discounts, for money. And here Kayla was asking if she could borrow a phone charger. He hadn’t even thought about her lack of supplies until just now, either. She’d turned up at his door with nothing but a cardboard box and the clothes on her back. And Elio had been hoping for the weather to clear quickly, but he’d seen storms like this before and that hope was fading fast.
“I can lend you some clothes,” he offered, feeling a little silly saying it but also wary of the ghost of his mother getting ready to smack him if he didn’t at least offer.
Kayla looked surprised, and Elio felt even more ridiculous as he rushed to fill the once again awkward silence.
“I mean, there’s a laundry if you need it, but I can lend you a shirt and some trousers. You’re not too much shorter than me, so I’m sure you’ll be okay if you roll the cuffs up a couple times.”
“Thanks,” Kayla said, a sweet smile lighting up her face and doing nothing to help Elio’s flustered state.
“I don’t know if you need pajamas, maybe—” he said.
“That’s fine. I can just sleep naked.”
Elio choked on his pasta, a bit of tomato lodging itself in his throat. Thumping himself on the chest, with tears stinging his eyes, he was finally able to look up to see Kayla trying to smother hysterical laughter behind a hand pressed over her mouth.
“Sorry,” she said, between heaves of her shoulders.
“Funny,” said Elio when he could breathe again. “You’ve got a future as a comedian. Who knew?”
Kayla hid her face in her hands, her wild hair providing an extra curtain, clearly embarrassed with herself, but not embarrassed enough to stop laughing.
He was starting to think getting the upper hand, let alone getting at least an equal footing, was going to be impossible with this woman.