Come Take Me Now—Enzo
A Preview
“Damn, the peaches aren’t ready yet,” Appa says after inspecting a premature peach. The branch snaps back into place as she releases her grip on the fruit.
“You can take the girl out of Georgia,” I tease.
“Oh, hush, you.” She turns to me and raises her eyebrow. “You’re quiet today.”
“I’m always quiet. You have a sleeping baby strapped to you.”
She rolls her eyes and goes back to plucking cherries off the trees. “There’s something you’re not telling me,” she says in a singsong voice. She tosses her handful of cherries into the wicker basket I’m holding for her.
Dammit, she’s right.
The general manager of Tenuta Valenti should have better things to do on a Tuesday morning, but this time of year, the grapes are barely forming on their vines.
The bottles of white are about to be bottled, and I have last year’s reds to sample.
There’s always something for me to do, but whenever I see her glossy red Escalade drive through the gate, I stop what I’m doing.
She had been homebound for two months following Vegas’ birth and was finally on her feet again, and over the past five years, she’s become my best friend.
The little sister I never had. She draws people in with her sunlight, and I’m not immune to her effects.
But honestly, if she were single, she wouldn’t have been my type. She was too short, too petite…
I would have split her in half like a twig.
Today, when I met her outside by her car, she immediately informed me she wanted to walk around and get some fresh air before it got hot, but that’s Appa.
She wanted to snag some cherries and apricots if they were ready, too, and I was happy to tag along and see how she was doing.
Ember ran straight for her Nonna’s house, leaving Appa to manage Luca, or Vegas, as I like to call him.
I helped unbuckle him from his car seat, and at two months old, he was very Valenti. Warm and heavy in my arms.
My younger brothers have kids now, but watching Robby become a devoted husband and father made me realize how much I wanted it for myself. Appa let me hold him while she got her baby wrap on, and I could hardly believe a stupid piece of fabric could support him.
“What aren’t you telling me, Enz?” she asks again, tossing more cherries in the basket.
I blink to focus my eyes back on the present. “I, uh, I met someone. Yesterday.”
Appa’s arms stop reaching midair as she looks back. “Really?” One of her big signature smiles graces her face. “Who is she?”
“She’s just here for the summer. It’s not even worth getting worked up about,” I say.
But I already Tilly’s track stats from both high school and college, including her fastest mile, what her major was at UC, what the license plate number on her shitty car was, and her phone number and email addresses, including her university email.
I also knew where her deadbeat entrepreneur turned sellout father lived in Napa and where her mom and stepfather lived in Sacramento.
And that they refinanced their house a few years ago for a better rate.
Just the basics.
I can’t get her alluringly confident yet shy voice out of my head. It still rings in my ears. And the citrus scent she left on my passenger seat in my truck lingered this morning.
I don’t tell Appa any of that, though. She’d call me crazy.
As much as I love Robby, he’s the romantic lover boy.
I need to know everything about Tilly before I get too invested, but so far, she checks all the boxes.
Something no other girl has ever done. I don’t even care that she’s eleven years younger than me; she’s fucking perfect.
When Tilly becomes mine, her dad won’t have shit to say because he’s married to some twenty-eight-year-old from Reno…a year younger than Appa, and I know her dad is more than eleven years older than Tilly’s ‘stepmother’.
“You never know, Enzo. She might stay here for you,” Appa adds.
If I have my way, she will.
And I always get my way.
“She’s supposed to go back to Sacramento for grad school in August.” That was one of the many things she said while I drove her to the mechanic’s shop yesterday.
Appa pauses again and looks me in the eye, lifting an eyebrow. “Grad school? How old is she?”
I let out a nervous laugh. “Twenty-one. She just graduated from college.”
Appa’s jaw drops open. “E, that’s—”
“I know, eleven years. But she’s perfect. So goddamn perfect.”
“You can’t stop her from following her dreams. If grad school is what she wants, you have to respect it.”
Appa’s feminist side means well, but in the context of Tilly, it makes my palm twitch. If Tilly said something like that to me, I’d have her bent over my knee in an instant. Appa might have a point, but I saw the way Tilly looked at me. The same way all women, old or young, look at me.
Adrianna, our only female cousin who lives in San Diego, once told me I was a chick magnet, and her friends were all thirsting for my number after I went to her college graduation party a few years ago.
“And I will,” I lie.
“So, what’s she like?” Appa asks.
Mm, sexy.
“Tall like a supermodel, beautiful thighs from her track days—”
Appa interrupts me. “Wait, you did not just talk about her thighs?” she asks with a laugh.
“She was wearing tiny biker shorts. They were hard to miss, and she was tan as hell.” Do I sound defensive? Probably. “Anyway, she has a rich dad she barely knows who lives up here, but she’s from Sacramento.”
“What makes her so different?”
Long brown hair flowing down to her waist, thick muscular thighs, hazel-green eyes… The way I made her nervous, given away by her shifting eyes. The tiny heart tattoo on the front of her shoulder that I want to suck on.
“Ask Robby what made you different,” I brush off.
I never understood his obsession with Appa before they were together, or his need to move back to LA after he summered here following graduation, but Tilly put that all into perspective as soon as she got out of her car yesterday.
I understood it now…the blind, irrational need for a girl, and I was afraid for her that I’d be worse than Robby ever was with Appa.
I have to claim her.
“Wow, bold statement, homie,” Appa teases, but she turns serious. “But I don’t want to see you get hurt. As much as you should settle down, because how the hell are you still single?” I laugh. “But you might have to accept that it could just be a summer fling. Don’t get ahead of yourself.”
I can guarantee this won’t just be a fling. Not on my Rolex. She’ll be the next Valenti woman if she can survive what I have planned for her.