Chapter 12 Naomi
NAOMI
Tuscany rises like a promise outside the SUV window.
The hills undulate soft as feminine shoulders. Ranks of cypress spearing the sky and fields quilted in olive and gold.
Late-morning heat clings to the furrows and lifts in silvery threads, and the road unfurls in lazy curves that make it clear like we’re being led somewhere special on purpose rather than merely conveyed.
Il Vecchio’s lavish estate sits on the crown of one such hill, a sun-warmed ocher villa with green shutters and a loggia that throws long, elegant shadows.
An hour after we leave the airport, gravel drive bites beneath the tires; beyond the low stone walls, vines march in perfect military rows, their leaves a hundred shades of chlorophyll, their trunks twisted as old hands.
There’s a bell tower in the distance, a church that looks painted rather than built, and the scent—Lord, the exquisite scent—is a mingling of crushed thyme, earth, and the faint, wine-sour sweetness of last night’s must.
Vasso’s hand rests loose on his knee, his fingers tapping an easy, hypnotic rhythm, each one evoking a bracing reminder of how they felt on my skin.
I can tell he’s pleased without looking at his face. It’s something in the way he breathes when things are going exactly as he wishes them to.
When the SUV rolls to a stop and the driver kills the engine, quiet rushes in, then follows the whirr of cicadas, the far bark of a dog, the clink of glass from somewhere behind the house.
We’re barely out of the car before a man in his eighties strides across the gravel with the vigor of someone who refuses to let the century bully him.
Crisp cream linen suit. Sun-browned skin mapped with a life lived outside.
Snow-white hair combed like he’s still trying to impress someone, which, as it turns out, he is.
He stops, plants his cane like punctuation, and looks me up and down as if evaluating a horse he may or may not bet on.
“Finalmente,” he declares, voice tobacco-rough, eyes glinting wickedly. “I meet the girl who made a devil put on a ring.”
His English is fluent, Italian thick in the vowels. I like him immediately.
Vasso smiles, all teeth and diplomacy. “Vecchio, thank you for having us.”
“Pah.” He waves the cane. “Do not thank me yet. I am not easy to have.” He steps in, kisses my cheeks with surprisingly soft lips, then grips my arms and leans back to study my face.
“You are prettier in the papers. In real life, you are… more breathtaking, more substance…dangerous.” His eyes crinkle. “Bene. I prefer dangerous. Very much.”
“Careful,” Vasso murmurs, and it reads as a tease, but his palm finds the small of my back with proprietary warmth and unmistakable pressure. I allow it because the game has begun and because the octogenarian who holds one of our…his futures is watching like an amused god.
My smile stays in place but I don’t stop incoming frown. “Vecchio…doesn’t that mean…?”
“Old?” he chuckles. “Si. I’m Enzo Marcelli if you insist on using my real name, though around here everyone just calls me Vecchio. It saves time and flatters nobody.”
He turns as a stunning woman glides in, all legs and diamonds and killer white teeth. Enzo tips her a look, then adds, “And God knows my vines and wives prefer it. A way they think to put me in my place when I…how you say it…my boots get too big?”
When she stops beside Il Vecchio, I see she’s eye-wateringly younger than her husband by several decades. She’s poured into a white sundress that treats modesty as a suggestion.
Blonde in the bright, blowout way, eyes a swimming-pool blue. Her diamond is the size of a quail egg and sits triumphantly next to a tattoo of a peach on her wrist.
“This is Lulu,” he says with gruff affection, as if presenting both a prize and a punchline. “My wife.”
Number seven, I don’t say.
“Hi!” Lulu chirps, grabbing my hands with both of hers, bracelets chiming like a slot machine. “I’m so excited you’re here. I devoured all your pictures. The galas! The dresses!” She sends Vasso a lingering look. “The kiss at the gala. So cute.”
“Thank you,” I say, because the only alternative is rush in with a nothing to see there, which is a bare-faced lie. “We aim to please.”
She releases me and swings toward Vasso, already leaning into his space like a plant bends toward sun. And immediately something tightens inside me.
“And you,” she breathes, squeezing his forearm and not letting go. “You are even more handsome than the magazines.”
“Lulu,” Il Vecchio warns without heat.
“What?” She widens those blue eyes at him. “I’m married, not blind.”
Vasso takes it with a charm that would put saints at ease. “You flatter me.”
“She flirts with everybody,” the old man tells me, aside, in a tone of tired pride.
“Mostly me.” He turns, cane thumping, and gestures toward the loggia.
“Come. We drink, we talk, then I send you with the tour guide I pay too much money for—this one—” he jabs his cane at Lulu, who beams “—and I take a mid-morning nap so my heart continues to beat and the doctors stay off my culo.”
Welcome drinks are set under the loggia where vines lash the pergola in green arabesques.
Glasses sweat on a linen-draped table; a sweating bottle of Vernaccia holds court beside a dish of glossy green olives and a plate of paper-thin finocchiona that smells like fennel and salt.
The view rolls out and keeps rolling; if the world had a stage, it would look like this.
“To newlyweds,” Il Vecchio says, lifting his wine and eyeing us as if we might flinch. “And to men who finally learn that wives are cheaper than mistakes.” He winks at me. “Don’t tell Lulu.”
She kisses his cheek, planting a lipstick flag he doesn’t bother to wipe away. “He says that but he treats me like a queen.”
It’s way too early to be drinking but clearly not for Vecchio and his wife. And I can hardly object.
We cheers and sip.
The wine is cold and clean with a citrus edge. Lulu takes the opportunity to point out the view and to stand a little too close to Vasso, one hand on his tricep, thumb stroking muscle in what I’m sure she thinks is a subtle way.
He lets it happen, a study in polite immobility, and meets my eyes over her shining head with the blandest expression I’ve ever seen.
An alien simmering joins the tightening in my midriff but I force my emotions off my face and I murder the smile, praying it passes muster.
“Now,” the old man says, lowering into a chair like a ship docking at his favorite port. “Business is not business if it is only numbers. Tell me why I should give you my money and my friendship.” He points the cane between us, back and forth. “Talk to me like I am not deaf.”
“Straight into business, Vecchio?”
He shrugs. “No point pissing around the bushes, eh? But don’t be fooled. It will not be as easy as one conversation and done. This is merely the aperitivo.”
I feel Vasso shift beside me, the slight gather of muscles that says he’s ready to drop the pitch he road-tested in boardrooms from Manhattan to Milan. Instead, he pauses. Looks at me. Raises a dark eyebrow.
It’s a choice, and it surprises me—pleases me—terrifies me a little. Because it might also be a test. One I need to ace.
“Mr.—” I begin.
He snorts. “If you call me Mister again, I take my money and buy vineyards and more dogs. Vecchio, Enzo, old bastard if I do not listen. Choose one.”
“Vecchio,” I try out, and he nods, satisfied.
“You already know what Dillinger Island is as an asset,” I go on.
“The deed, the valuations. But what you don’t see on a spreadsheet is what it feels like to arrive there.
My grandfather says places have heartbeats.
So does your vineyard. The trick is designing experiences that let people hear it. ”
He goes very still. Vasso does, too.
“Go on,” Vecchio says.
“I trained in hospitality and experiential design,” I admit, the words dry in my mouth because they’ve lived in the attic of my life for too long.
“We can build an emotional moat—moments no one can buy anywhere else. On the island, that’s sunrise lighthouse elopements where couples ring the bell after their vows and the foghorn answers them.
Nighttime bioluminescence kayaking with a naturalist who’s funny enough to get invited to Christmas.
Chef residencies that start with foraging on the cliffs and end with a single-table dinner in the old boathouse, candles down the center like a runway.
A conservation sabbatical for high-net-worths who want to do more than write a check.
And I want to pilot a partners’ exchange: we send our best guests here for truffle harvest week; you send your sommeliers to the island to teach a ‘salt and wine’ pairing under the lighthouse.
We braid your story with ours so when the trust votes and when your peers sniff at Vasso’s reforms, the narrative’s already written by people who lived it. ”
Wind moves through the pergola leaves and makes a sound like a murmur. The old man watches me as if I’ve become a new varietal no one knew would grow here.
“You are not merely decoration,” he says at last, sounding pleased.
“Good. I have no patience for decoration.” He shifts, appetite for the idea sharpening.
“The lighthouse bell after vows—bellissimo. The rich like to pretend they are priests. And the exchange—my sommeliers are lazy when they stay home. Salt and wine. Hah.” He thumps the cane, delighted.
“Rosaria will fatten you with pasta for that alone.”
I feel Vasso’s attention like a hand at the base of my skull. The pitch wasn’t complicated. It was mine. For once, I didn’t filter it through strategy or optics. I just told the truth about a place and what I could do with it.