Chapter 20
The day is warm and sunny, filled with the scent of living things, of the lake and the lush green grass and gnarled olive trees.
Everything is still and yet so alive. Side by side, Nicolo and I gaze down the hillside through the olive groves to the lake winking blue below.
It’s peaceful up here under the sun-dappled olive branches, beneath the gnarled trunks with just the dry whisper of the breeze through the leaves. I’d forgotten how quiet it is.
“Isn’t it late to be pruning?” I ask. If I remember right, the trees are usually pruned in the spring.
Nicolo shrugs. “A little late this year, but I was not free to help Lorenzo until now. So he waited.”
“Do you help out around here a lot?” It’s something I’ve been wondering about.
Nicolo unscrews the cap on the bottle of caffellatte.
“Lorenzo is getting older. He can use an extra pair of hands to help him, not that he’ll admit it.
” He chuckles and takes a drink of his caffellatte, then offers the bottle to me.
I hesitate, but it’s hot and I’m thirsty.
I accept the bottle and take a sip, aware that his lips have just been where mine now are.
The intimacy of it gives me a little thrill.
“Thanks.” I hand the bottle back. “That’s really nice of you to help him,” I say, wondering why Nicolo is spending time aiding a rival olive farm and not on his own farm.
Doesn’t he have enough to do on his own family’s property?
It’s so much bigger than ours. They grow a few different types of olives over there.
No Casalivas, but a few other varieties, like Leccino and Pendolino.
“I don’t mind,” Nicolo says, taking another drink and wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Bruna and Lorenzo have been good to me. Now it’s my turn to help them.
Besides, we have workers, hired hands, to help at the villa.
I oversee things there, but much of the work is done by others.
Here it’s just Lorenzo trying to manage this whole farm.
It’s too much for one man, even a much younger man. ”
I frown at his words. Is this why everything is looking a little run-down and shabby? Is it just too much for Zio Lorenzo and Nonna to handle now? That makes sense. Running this place must take a lot of work.
Nicolo interrupts my thoughts. “When Bruna told me you were coming back, I didn’t quite believe it.
” He looks at me with open curiosity. “So tell me, Juliana Costa, famous Internet cook, what brings you back to Italy?” His tone is light, almost playful, but I catch the fact that he knows about my show.
Has he been keeping tabs on me? More likely Nonna has been filling him in.
She loves to brag about her granddaughters.
“I’m here babysitting my teenage half sister and trying to save my cooking show,” I tell him baldly.
I surprise myself with how readily I volunteer that information.
There’s a familiarity I feel with Nicolo that is disarming.
We have such a shared history it doesn’t feel right to try to put on a pretense.
I feel I can be honest with him, that I should be honest with him.
After all, no other boy has ever shared a first kiss with me. A first everything.
“How is your visit going so far?” he asks, unwrapping the package and selecting two biscotti.
His eyes are steady as he watches me and crunches a cookie.
His mouth is turned up in a warm half smile, but those lively dark eyes are sharp, missing nothing.
I feel strangely comfortable with him and at the same time a little unnerved.
I feel like he sees me, really sees me, maybe more than I even want him to.
I want him to see me as all grown-up, successful and poised and in control, but I think he might be able to see beneath that facade to the real me, the messy, scared parts.
The girl who has no idea what she’s doing.
“It’s good to be back,” I say honestly. “But things in my life are a little complicated. What about you? What are you doing back here? I lost track of you after…after you got sent to Genoa.”
“Ah, Genoa,” he murmurs. His tone is gently ironic. He offers me the package and I choose two biscotti. They’re small and Nonna packed lots.
“So what happened when you were sent away?” I ask, biting off the end of a crunchy cookie and trying to put out of my mind the memory of what we’d been doing together that got him sent to Genoa in the first place.
Focus, Jules, focus , I scold silently, willing myself not to glance at his mouth.
Too late. Now I’m totally ogling him. It’s that full lower lip.
I’ve always been a sucker for it. It would look pouty on anyone else, but instead it gives him a hint of vulnerability beneath the self-controlled exterior.
He carries himself now as an adult with a mixture of duty and determination, as though he balances weighty responsibility easily on those broad shoulders.
I feel a little twinge of nostalgia looking at the full, firm mouth of this gorgeous man.
Where has that sad, sweet boy gone? What have the years held for him?
He rests his forearms on his knees, the half-full bottle of caffellatte clasped between his fingers.
“I finished high school in Genoa, and hated every minute of it,” he says frankly.
“I resented that we hadn’t even gotten to say goodbye, that Bruna and Nonna V.
had managed to keep us apart like that. And it haunted me when I heard about your dad’s passing.
For years I’ve wanted to say I’m sorry. Tony was a good man.
” He lifts his bottle in acknowledgment.
I drop my eyes and murmur my thanks. Grief spikes through my heart unexpectedly. Nicolo knew my father well, and in the aftermath of his death, it was doubly hard not to have his comfort as I struggled through the loss. “It was…a horrible time,” I admit, meeting his gaze.
He looks at me, dark eyes unexpectedly tender.
“I wanted to find you, Jules,” he tells me.
“For two years I planned to come after you when I was done with school. I was even saving money for a plane ticket, but then Bruna told me you had moved back to Seattle, that you were starting university and had a boyfriend. She told me you were happy, so I figured you had forgotten me. And I decided to try to forget you too.” He gives a little shrug of one shoulder.
“I didn’t forget you…” I tell him hastily. “I wanted to find you too. But no one would tell me where you were. I had no way to contact you. I tried a couple of times in the years after Dad died, but you weren’t on social media. I had no idea how to get in touch.”
Plus, if I am being honest, I was reluctant to come back to Italy. My grief and sense of guilt outweighed even my tender feelings for Nicolo. I feel ashamed to admit it, but it’s true.
“And now here we both are,” Nicolo says with a wry smile. “What a twist of fate.” He shakes his head in disbelief.
“What happened after Genoa?” I ask, curious about those years in between then and now.
“I went to university and law school in Rome, at Sapienza University.”
Sapienza University is an excellent school, sort of the Italian version of an Ivy League college. That’s impressive. “You’re an attorney?” I ask, surprised, trying to reconcile my vision of the young boy I knew with this self-assured, grown man sitting next to me.
“Is that so hard to believe?” He grins. “I spent seven years practicing law for international clients and living all over—Singapore, Switzerland, Australia.”
“Really?” So this tanned, work clothes–clad olive farmer next to me is actually an international lawyer? Curiouser and curiouser. What is a hotshot international attorney doing clambering around in our olive trees?
“What brought you back here?”
“What calls any Italian back home?” He spread his hands wide. “Family. The land. We come back because we are needed.”
“Did Violetta ask you to come home?” I’m surprised. Italians are family oriented, but still, leaving a successful career to farm olives is a huge sacrifice.
He chuckles dryly. “I doubt my grandmother would ask for help even if she had fallen down a well and it was her dying breath,” he admits ruefully.
“It was more what she didn’t say. My grandfather died about five years ago, and she’s been struggling ever since.
Running the farm is a big operation, and things had been let go for many years, even before his death.
I’m trying to get the farm back into shape, and then we will decide how to proceed.
I want to see if I can make it profitable enough to survive before we just give in and sell. ”
“Sell it? Really? Are you considering that?”
“It’s the reality for many small farmers in this region right now,” he explains with a grimace.
“Many are finding they cannot survive, and those that can are having to modernize, sometimes against the will of the older generations. It’s the nature of progress.
They have to adapt to the times if they want to keep their land.
” He frowns. “Your farm is no different than ours in that way,” he adds.
I pause. “What do you mean?”
He meets my eyes, his own serious. “You’ve been gone a long time, Jules. Bruna and Lorenzo are growing older. They’re strong, but they’re tired. I don’t know how long they can keep this place going.” He pauses. “I think they’re in more trouble than they let on.”
My heart constricts. Is this what Aurora was picking up on? “What sort of trouble?”
Nicolo’s gaze is compassionate and clear. “They don’t complain, but Lorenzo has told me a little. They aren’t making enough money to keep the farm solvent. I think they’ve just barely been scraping by for a while now. I think they’ve been waiting, hoping they can hold out long enough.”
“Long enough for what?” I ask with a twinge of apprehension.
Nicolo takes a long drink of caffellatte and looks at me frankly. “Long enough for you to come back.”