Chapter 6 #2
“Who cares about making themselves easier for other people?” she asks, taking the cup of cider from me. “Make them work for it, son.” She gives me a wicked smirk. “Bianca will make you work for it. She just got done telling us you gave her the worst kiss she ever had.”
Giovanni looks like she gut-punched him.
Groaning, I say, “Come on. I didn’t mean anything by it. It was just a first kiss. All first kisses are bad. We were only kids.”
He doesn’t look appeased. “I didn’t think it was that bad.”
“You’ve done it now, Luanne,” Emily says. She’s smiling, though, enjoying the show.
I’m not. Because Giovanni’s staring at me with those puppy dog eyes, fringed with long, dark lashes. They’re the kind of eyes that could get a woman to do just about anything if she’s not careful.
“I could do a whole lot better now,” he finally says, his voice throaty.
My pulse starts racing. “You don’t actually expect me to let you kiss me to prove you have more game than you did as a teenager?”
He shrugs one shoulder, his eyes fixed on me. “The fair thing would be to let me prove myself.”
“Are you looking for a judge?” a customer asks. “I judged a pie-eating contest once.”
I glance over to see a middle-aged woman holding a pumpkin.
She’s a few steps away, watching us with an interest that suggests she’s overheard everything, not that it would be hard, given who I’m conversing with.
Luanne and her husband, who passed on years ago, ran the best diner in town—The Clean Plate Club—but she also starred in almost every community theater production for more than forty years. She doesn’t have an “inside” voice.
“Aren’t pie-eating contests judged by the number of pies eaten, not the quality of the experience?” I ask.
“I could kiss you a lot of times,” Giovanni says in a teasing tone.
“I’m not kissing you,” I object, feeling sweat form at the back of my neck. Because a very stupid, very horny part of me would like to see how an adult Giovanni kisses.
He holds up both hands. “Okay, okay. I’m not going to push it. But if you change your mind, I’d like a chance to prove myself. I don’t want everyone in Apple Ridge thinking I’m a bad kisser.”
“Fair warning,” Emily says with a smile.
“Luanne has no vault for secrets. Everyone’s finding out.
It’ll probably be on the town whiteboard before the end of the week.
You’ll have women showing up here hoping you’ll be as generous with your kisses as the prince was with Cinderella’s slipper, wanting to see if they’re the one you’ll kiss just right. ”
Luanne starts laughing uncontrollably, and everything that happens next seems to be at warp speed.
Luanne spills her full cup of warm cider all over her lap.
It’s not boiling hot—it’s probably somewhere between warm and tepid—but Giovanni glances around wildly, completely missing the big roll of brown paper towels on the refreshments table, and strips his black henley shirt clear off, taking his ball cap with it. He pushes the shirt into Luanne’s hand.
“You can shove it under your clothes so the heat won’t burn you,” he says urgently.
She takes the shirt and starts rubbing at the splashes of liquid on her person, but she doesn’t say a word. None of us do.
We’re all too busy staring at Giovanni Cafiero’s abs.
They’re chiseled and tanned, and his chest has the perfect amount of hair.
The tourist who likes pie points at him with a choked gasp, her finger quivering in the air. “The North Star.”
I don’t know that I’d go that far, but then I notice the little distinctive starburst over his ribs. A birthmark. For half a second, I have the unhinged desire to run my fingertips over it, but I latch onto what little sanity I have left and shove my hand deep into the pocket of my dress.
Emily is the first to do something sensible. She pulls paper towels off the roll and starts patting Luanne’s sweater.
Giovanni flinches, obviously embarrassed that he stripped for no reason. “Oh. Oh my God, I’m sorry. I thought…I didn’t—”
I touch his arm. “You were trying to help.”
He reaches out to Luanne, presumably for his shirt, but she tightens her grip on it.
“It’s hers now,” I tell him. “You’d best accept that. I can grab you an Evergreens & Apples shirt from the barn.”
The woman who was pointing at his chest seconds ago drops the pumpkin she was carrying. Just drops it. It was a big one—at least a twenty-pounder—and it spews its guts across the floor.
“You broke it, you bought it,” I say. “That’s a firm rule.”
But she’s not listening to me. She’s scrambling into her pocket for something. Moments later, she pulls out a phone and snaps several photos of Giovanni’s naked chest before my brain catches up.
“Excuse me?” I step between them without a second thought, my blood pumping hot. “No harassing the staff. You delete those, now.”
“He’s staff?” she asks in disbelief. Looking beyond me, her gaze on Giovanni, she adds, “Is this some kind of prank?”
“No, ma’am,” I hear him say, but his tone is different now. Some of his confidence has leaked out. He’s not happy with this turn of events.
“Then…did you get amnesia, like in one of those movies?” Her eyes light up with the thought.
“Did you wake up without any idea of who you were, and these people told you you’re some basic guy named John who works at their pumpkin patch?
” She leans in closer and hisses, “Is that woman with the dark hair telling you she’s your fiancée? ”
“I don’t know what kind of movies you’re watching, but Bianca’s not some crazy supervillain,” Emily says, stepping up beside me. “And what do you think you’re doing taking photos of this man without his permission?”
The woman scoffs and presses a button on her phone before lifting it up and training it on her face. “Friends, you’re never gonna believe this. I’m at this crappy farm in Apple Ridge—”
“Hey, now,” I say, properly pissed off. This farm may be crappy, but it belongs to my family, and only we can call it that. “What exactly do you think you’re doing?”
“And you won’t believe who I found,” the woman continues. “I, Eva St. Claire, have just solved a mystery.”
“Please don’t,” Giovanni says, but he doesn’t attempt to step out from behind me.
Probably because he’s still completely exposed and doesn’t want his glorious abs on this crazy woman’s video.
But I noticed a note of resignation and sadness in his voice.
Which is why I do the deeply inadvisable thing I do next.
I grab the phone straight out of the lady’s hand.
She gasps. “You can’t do that!”
“Watch me.”
She reaches for it, trying to snatch it out of my hand, and I lift it out of reach.
Or try to.
I’ve always thought I’m taller than I am. Miles says it’s because I shared the eight months of my short gestation with a man.
Miles, it must be understood, is an idiot.
The lady gets a grip on the phone, and we start a tug-of-war with it.
I’m pretty sure I’ve got the better shot—I grew up on a farm, after all—but then two strong hands wrap around my waist. The next thing I know, Giovanni is lifting me off my feet as if I weigh no more than a pumpkin.
I feel my fingers giving, even though I do not, as a rule, allow myself to lose. It’s the feeling of his hands wrapped around me that does me in. And the sensation of his warm, very naked chest pressed to the fabric of my cardigan.
The woman practically shrieks with delight as she frees the phone and waves the screen at us. “Did you see that?” she asks. “Did you see what she did to me? She kidnapped him, and now she’s trying to cover it up!”
I can hear her crazy ranting, of course—people on space probably can—but it almost feels like she’s underwater, or maybe I am. My head is swimming, my body a mass of sensation, focused entirely on Giovanni pressed against my back, his big, hard body unyielding…
“It wasn’t recording,” the woman says slowly. “Can we repeat that?”