Chapter 28
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
BIANCA
I stare at my brother and Giovanni in amazement—Theo, because he usually avoids social activities like the plague, and Giovanni because he’s worked miracles today, and he’s done it like it’s easy.
He’s been here for less than a month, but I’m already used to having him around.
I wake up looking forward to seeing his face every morning.
To laughing with him. To finding the nonnas with their heads bent together as they plot world domination or, more likely, my marriage to Giovanni.
They probably think it’s a done deal after he danced me around the kitchen earlier.
I shouldn’t be letting myself get used to his presence, and yet here I go, starting to rely on him. It doesn’t help that he’s taken up the cause of The Rotten Apple too.
Giovanni turns to me with a slow grin. “Let’s bring our guy up to the judging table, what do you say? Do the honors with me?”
He obviously knows I want to see the look on Rhett’s face when he sees the scarecrow and realizes we made a facsimile of him for the crows to shit on.
“Of course,” I say, my voice hoarse and a bit unfamiliar. I take one side, and he takes the other, and we carry our straw child up front, setting it down directly in front of Rhett.
“We’re all done,” Giovanni announces. “As you can see, we designed our scarecrow to honor the fearless leader of Apple Ridge. We’ll be putting it up to protect the last of the farm’s apples. Mr. Mayor, you’ll be the hero of our Pink Ladies.”
Rhett’s jaw hardens, but I can see the battle waging on his face—if he acts like he’s tickled by this “honor,” he can write it off as a sign of respect. If he shows he’s annoyed by it, he’ll be a poor sport.
He forces a smile. “How…special. We’ll take it from here.”
“Can we have a photo of you two side by side?” Giovanni asks.
“Oh, that would be great,” adds Christopher the Mustache, who’s really growing on me. “It would add some local flavor to the piece.”
“Of course,” Rhett says with unconvincing grace.
He poses next to the straw figure, whose hair and outfit is nearly identical to his, and Giovanni and Christopher both take photos.
“Why don’t you give the straw man a kiss?
” urges one of the judges, Rosie, who owns and operates a cidery in town with her four sons.
She ran for mayor against Rhett, and everyone thinks she still holds a grudge.
She smiles at him, her dimples popping out.
“We all know you love yourself best of all, honey.”
Yup, definite grudge. I mentally high-five Rosie.
Rhett ignores her and returns to his seat at the table as soon as Christopher lowers his camera. Rhett’s still smiling, but it’s the smile of someone who intends malice.
Maybe we shouldn’t have provoked him like this. Rhett isn’t going to let this go. Then again…
He was never going to let anything go.
He’s not the kind of man who gets backed into a corner without biting. It doesn’t matter that Giovanni has a mutually beneficial arrangement with him. He’s going to find a way to retaliate.
But I haven’t forgotten what Giovanni said to me earlier: I’m furious that he spoke that way to you, and I have no intention of letting it go.
Maybe we’re not the ones who have to be worried.
Maybe he should be worried.
After we leave the scarecrow tent, Theo breaks off to check on the nonnas, telling us he’ll meet us at the top of the hill for the bonfire and s’mores competition, scheduled for just before sundown.
“What do you want to do?” Giovanni asks, taking my hand and swinging it, his thumb rubbing the center of my palm.
A sudden need wells inside of me. I want him to touch me, to hold me, to make me feel. But I’m scared of the way my emotions seem to have boarded a roller coaster over the last week.
I clear my throat, trying to stuff all of it down. “We should see if there are any apples left in the orchard.”
The one in the park. Small and free and accessible to everyone. I grew up wandering around this park, picking up fallen apples and horrifying my mother by showing her the worms wriggling inside.
“Surely there won’t be,” Giovanni says softly. “Not with this many people roaming around.”
“There’s only one way to find out.”
I nod in the direction of the little orchard, to the left of the tent, and he walks with me, still holding my hand. We stroll through the picked-over trees, passing other couples and a few kids playing with a deflated ball.
“Tell me about your family,” I say. “Tell me about your siblings.”
And he does. He fills me in on Enzo and his fiancée, who just launched a major healthcare app, Nico, who’s been running the store in his absence, and Aria, who is having the time of her life in Greece.
I can hear the longing lacing his words.
He loves them. His family is his everything, just like my family has always been everything to me.
He pauses before turning down another alley of trees. We walk slowly, like sap running down a tree in winter. “There’s something I’d like to ask,” he says, “but I hope I won’t offend you.”
I laugh. “Not a promising start.”
“When you went away to nursing school, Miles thought you’d get a job in Hendersonville or maybe Asheville. Why’d you come back?”
“You’ve seen the magic of this place,” I say, smiling up at him. “It’s here all around us—” I gesture to the trees, the leaves a rainbow of colors on their sculpted branches, the clouds kissing above our heads, pressing against the Carolina blue sky.
“I love this town,” I continue. “It’s my home.
I’ve never wanted anything else. But if you’re asking why I still live with Nonna, I didn’t plan on that.
My grandfather died a couple of years after I finished nursing school, and then there was Miles’s accident.
Nonna was sad, and even though Uncle Ted lived close, I could tell she felt so alone. ”
“You take care of people,” he says, his eyes impossibly deep and full of a sadness I don’t fully understand.
“I guess I do, yes. But it’s not some awful burden. I like taking care of people. It’s my calling.”
“I can tell.” He leans in close, brushing hair behind my ear, and his fingers curl around it, warm and gentle. “But who takes care of you?”
A gasp escapes me, and suddenly my heart is beating too hard.
“I’d like to take care of you while I’m here, Bianca. If you’ll let me.”
My lips part further, inviting words that refuse to come. Finally I say the one thing I can manage to say. “You have been. You already have been.”
Even on those first days, when I was unkind to him, he made food for all of us. Food is love, my nonna has always said, and it’s definitely Giovanni’s way of showing affection.
He lowers his face and kisses me softly, and I lean up and into him, wanting to accept what he’s giving me.
Daring to want more. I know he’s going to leave—he told me so.
Besides, everyone has always left me, while I’ve stood still in the house time doesn’t change.
My father, my mother, Miles, and patient after patient after patient.
It wasn’t my patients’ fault, obviously.
They left because they had no choice. Each of their lives had reached the end of its cycle.
They were in autumn when I met them, fading inevitably into winter, but each time it hurt.
Each time, I burrowed a little deeper into myself, forgetting that life could be fun and vibrant.
Forgetting that you can be surrounded by people but still alone if you don’t let anyone get close enough to touch your soul.
I kiss Giovanni with all I have, letting him all the way down to my guarded, tired heart.
Because even though he’ll be leaving me too, he’s here now, and I want that to be enough.
It’s when he breaks away that I see it, nestled high in the branches of one of the overgrown trees, which aren’t as carefully pruned as the ones on our farm because they rely on volunteers to keep them from turning wild.
“The final apple,” I say, my voice shaky, and point to it. “Kitty always said the final apple is special.”
It might not be the last one. There could be dozens of them, tucked away on those hard-to-reach branches, hidden from prying hands. But finding this apple feels significant in a way I can’t pinpoint, kind of like Emily and I finding those zinnia sprouts by the bench last weekend.
“Then it’s ours,” Giovanni whispers into my ear as another couple turns the corner. “Don’t look at it too closely and give them any ideas.”
The couple smiles at us and then continues to stroll along, chatting.
As soon as they’re a few trees ahead, I start to take off my shoes, and Giovanni stops me, laughing. “What are you doing?”
“I’m going to climb the tree. These shoes are all wrong for it.”
“Climb me,” he says.
Heat washes through me, even as he crouches down, giving me his back. I climb onto it, and he shakes his head, his hair brushing me. “Climb onto my shoulders. It’s the only way you’ll get high enough.”
I climb onto his shoulders, laughing. Utterly embarrassed, because I’m turned on by the feeling of his strong muscled shoulders beneath my legs, and the confident, easy way he gets to his feet, his hands securely locking my thighs into place once he’s standing.
“Pluck it, Bianca. Pluck it good.”
I reach into the nest of leaves, sure I’m never going to be able to get to the pink treat within them. It’s at least a few centimeters from my grasp, unattainable no matter how hard I try.
But suddenly I feel his large hands spanning my waist, lifting me off his shoulders, and then the apple is wrapped inside my hand. I feel the stem snap, and I gasp as I pull it away.
“I got it.”
“Of course you did.”
Giovanni lowers me onto his shoulders again and then kneels down so I can slide down his back—which I do, pressing my body against him as I descend.
He groans as he turns to me, still crouching on the orchard floor. “That was a dirty trick, Bianca.”
I grin at him. “I’m a dirty girl.”
He answers with a deliciously wicked smile. “Are you going to let me bite your apple?”
Holding his gaze, I say, “Before you do, you should know that Kitty told me if you pick the last apple in an orchard with a man and eat it with him, you’ll be bound together for eternity.
” I gesture at the slightly feral trees, the fallen leaves.
“There may be dozens of apples still hidden in here, and the story is obviously bullshit, but—”
He picks up my hand, which is still wrapped around the apple, and bites down on its crisp flesh.