18. Valentina
Chapter 18
Valentina
“Y ou weren’t gone long , amore! Ah!” Mamma cries as I step into the foyer. “Why are you soaking wet again!” She tightens the belt on her red silk robe. “Don’t tell me there was another fountain to fall into!”
“No fountains.” I tell her. “The fire alarm and sprinkler system went off.”
Mamma’s well-groomed eyebrows rise. She covers her mouth with her hand and shakes her head before murmuring, “ Dio mio . Don’t tell Elio.”
Elio’s got issues with fire. Can’t really blame him, after the fire that ripped through his childhood home in Sicily. It killed his mamma – my aunt Florencia – nearly killed Curse, and gave him all those painful scars.
“It’s fine, Mamma.” It’s not fine. “There wasn’t a real fire. Someone just pulled the alarm.”
Someone. Me.
“This does not sound like a good place for you to be going,” she frets, following me into the kitchen as I open the fridge and grab a bottle of sparkling water. No more booze for me tonight. That vanilla vodka was enough. Apparently just that small amount was enough to completely fuck up my capacity for decision making. At least around him.
Spitting in Darragh Gowan’s face. What the hell was I thinking?
And what the hell was he thinking, kissing me like that?
For the second time, apparently.
I press the glass bottle of water to my throat, trying to cool my feverish skin. Trying to forget the spine-searing heat of Darragh’s mouth. The demanding drag of his hands on my body, where his rough touches echo even now.
He tasted like whiskey and blood.
“I don’t want you going there again,” Mamma says, leaning her hip against the marble island.
“Ha! Yeah, that’s fine, Mamma,” I agree instantly. “You don’t have to tell me twice.”
I’m not willingly stepping foot anywhere that Darragh’s going to be, let alone a place he owns. Luckily, Lucia, Giulia, and Mateo were easy to convince of the same thing when I finally tracked them down outside after Darragh let me go.
“Holy shit, Darragh Gowan owns this building?” Giulia asked in shock.
“How did you find out?” Lucia asked, looking at me closely.
“Just… heard it through the grapevine in there,” I lied. Again.
They dropped me off here at home right after. With our clothes and shoes all wet and our hair and makeup ruined, no one was really in the mood to find another place to party.
“Go have a shower or a bath and then get dried off,” Mamma says. “And stop putting that cold glass on your neck! You’re all wet standing here in the air conditioning! You’re going to get sick!”
“You worry too much,” I tell her, even though a shower does sound like a good idea.
Mamma snorts, then gives me a look that’s half tender, half bitter.
“With a daughter like mine?” she says with a slight shake of her head. “You have no idea.”
* * *
The next morning, after breakfast and coffees and all the dawdling we can justify, Mamma and I leave for the cottage. We don’t take one of Papà’s many sportscars. I think she might legitimately have a panic attack if she tried to drive one. Plus, as she points out to me, “We don’t need to draw attention.” Instead, we take a big, bland, reliable SUV, the kind you’d see a family of five filling up with camping gear.
We don’t have any camping gear, but we do have our bathing suits, clothes, shoes, cosmetics, and enough wine to sustain a small nation.
Mamma white-knuckles it out of the city, flinching and swearing under her breath every time someone cuts her off or drifts into her lane. She’s not much better on the highway heading north. Her shoulders are all the way up to her ears by the time we stop for gas and coffee in Barrie more than an hour later. I can tell by the amount of anxiety I see in her right now that it’s going to be a two-bottles-of-wine sort of night, and that’s only including what she’ll drink.
After that, though, it’s pretty smooth sailing. Winding country roads and two-lane highways cut through rolling farmland and small, quiet towns. It’s all very idyllic. Buttery sunlight, quaint buildings, and sprawling landscapes that look like something out of a painting.
Maybe I’d be able to appreciate it more if we hadn’t basically been ordered to come out here.
And if last night hadn’t happened.
No matter how bright the sun, how beautiful the scenes rolling by my window as I sit in the front passenger seat, whenever I close my eyes or let my focus drift, all I see is him.
That soaked hair falling into his eyes. The possessive storm of his gaze as it sweeps over my body, my face. Dark brown on his right, hazel-green on his left. The greenish eye has a dark splotch of black at the bottom of the iris. Like his pupil got punctured somehow, and is spilling ink out into the rest of his eye. The way my own saliva glistened on his skin. His finger in my mouth.
And then his tongue.
I squeeze my legs together, as if to deny the corresponding throb I feel between them.
Mamma and I make one more stop in Thornbury for groceries, including a bunch of fancy cheese from the cheese shop downtown, olives, meat, and other stuff for charcuterie. I guess calories don’t count at the cottage, because she also gets a selection of local ice cream in pretty, lavender-coloured tubs. We continue on through one more municipality, Meaford, then more farmland.
And then, there’s the water. Wide and choppy as a little sea unto itself, Georgian Bay stretches itself outside my window like rolling, ripped blue silk. Sun shatters on each wave as the water crashes itself onto the rocky shores.
Our cottage is right on the water, and we’re on the beach road now, snaking through thick forest that leaves the gravel ahead dappled with light. We follow the single-lane, private beach road at a crawl of 15 kilometres an hour, passing neighbouring cottages until, near the very end, we reach our own. There is only one more cottage on the road beyond ours. From what I can see from the road, no one is there. No cars are parked in the drive that leads down towards the house and water.
The cottage on the other side of ours, though, is another story. There are three vehicles parked there, and when Mamma and I get out of our SUV, music from a speaker somewhere on that property catches my ear.
I ignore the music and grab my bags, helping Mamma haul all the food into the large blue and white building that is our cottage. We haven’t been here all summer, but Papà must have a gardener come by semi-regularly, because the lawn area between the house and the trees is lush and trimmed, and the flowers along the driveway and path leading to the door are in full bloom.
Inside, we put away all the food, and I go upstairs to dump my bag in my bedroom. I check my phone, but service has always been spotty out here, and I barely have enough bars to check my email let alone load a webpage. With a sigh, I toss the phone down on top of the bag.
There’s a huge window in my room, and I go to it. It looks out over the back of the house, which is what faces the water. There’s another stretch of grass below, which leads to an incline of big boulders that were installed decades ago to help with erosion from the bay. There’s no smooth beach here with sand to wiggle your toes in. Just the jutting bulk of rocks and one long line of a dock that leads into water deep enough to dive into. Apart from a couple of boats, tiny as toys in the distance, I don’t see anyone.
Maybe it’s good Papà sent us here. Maybe I really did need to get out of the city.
And away from Darragh.
But even here, hours from Toronto, I don’t feel like I’ve escaped him. I can hear Darragh’s voice in my head. Feel the claim of his hands on my flesh. Feel the confused mixture of anger, fear, and arousal that descends on my mind, on my body, like blanketing fog whenever he is near.
Nearly two hundred kilometres between us and he might as well be in this very room.
Screw this. I’m not going to sit around here and let him take up this much space inside me. If he wants to live in such a permanent place in my mind, then he better start paying me some rent for the privilege.
Pushing Darragh – his tongue and his tattoos, his voice and fingers and eyes – to the back of my brain, I rip open my bag, grab a swimsuit, and stomp back down the stairs.