I don’t smile when no one’s watching.
It feels like a glitch in code I wrote too hastily.
I set the flutes down, kill the lights, and slide in behind her without waking her, one arm fitting under her neck, the otherover her waist, pulling her into the particular hollow of my body that seems to have been designed for this and nothing else.
She makes a quiet sound—a cat finding a sunspot—and nudges closer. I press my mouth to the back of her head and breathe her in: fig, honey, a whisper of soap, and the unmistakable note that is just Naomi.
Alarmed by the second smile I can feel trying to happen, I close my eyes and tell myself it’s jet lag. Or a successful meeting. Or the afterglow of a problem solved under a fig tree.
Tomorrow we’ll charm an old man, flirt with Nonna Rosaria’s rolling pin, perform our Vespa romance for the cameras, and sit beneath a pergola while the world tries to decide if we’re real. For now, I let my wife sleep and pretend dawn can be negotiated with like everything else.
I am still smiling when it wins.
14
NAOMI
By the time the sun slides behind the far ridge, the villa has traded its honeyed afternoon for an even softer glamour. Lanterns are strung along the pergola and between trees, candles pooling light on white linen, the vineyard a dark-green sea beneath a sky rinsed in violet. The air smells like rosemary, grilled stone fruit, and warm stone.
Cicadas keep their relentless chorus.
Somewhere, a cork pops and someone laughs the way only Italians laugh when dinner and pleasure are foregone conclusions.
Chef Nonna Rosaria presides over it all like a general in an apron.
She is not anyone’s idea of fragile.
The “Nonna” softens the edges for tourists, nervous financiers and TV screens. She’s everyone’s grandmother in the sense that she feeds you and says what she likes. But she is also legend—Vecchio’s cousin and Tuscany’s most stubborn culinary talent—small and square-shouldered, hair like a steel cloud rolled into a knot, eyes sharp as the mezzaluna she wields.
She kisses my cheeks, sniffs me for sincerity the way she’d check a melon for ripeness, and clucks at Vasso in rapid-fire Italian that makes him look unreasonably pleased.
“She’ll feed you,” Vasso murmurs to me, offering his arm as we’re shown to our seats beneath the tangled vines. “She’ll test you. And if she likes you, she’ll fatten us both and then tell the whole region we’re either in love or frauds.”
“She can tell all that from pici?” I whisper, smoothing the skirt of my dress as I sit.
“She can tell that from how you hold a fork.”
I glance down at the bracelet on my wrist, the new gift, presented to me by Vasso in our suite with a smile that still made my knees weak. It’s a slim line of diamond baguettes, delicate enough to be mistaken for light until it catches the real thing and throws it back.
He fastened it while I watched his hands and tried not to think about what else those hands had done an hour ago under a fig tree.
“Pretty,” Nonna Rosaria says, settling across from me and tapping my wrist once, approving but not fooled. “He knows jewelry. Does he know when to shut up and let you shine?”
“Sometimes,” I deadpan.
Vasso’s mouth curves.
Vecchio barks a laugh.
The table breathes around us, resplendent in pale linen, bone-white plates with a Hellenic blue runner that looks like the sea.
To my left, the view falls away through the pergola slats to the vines; to my right, Lulu drapes herself in a chair one seat down like a mermaid who traded her tail for an indecent dress. This evening’s offering is a blush-pink wrap dress that barely remembers it’s supposed to stay closed. Her perfume is a sticky amber that makes me crave water and some sort of fumigation.
Wine arrives, and with it, the first course. Crostini di fegatini—velvet chicken-liver mousse with a scandal of capers and anchovy and figs quartered and set over ricotta, drizzled with honey that tastes like sunlight. Vecchio insists we taste before talking and then ruins his own rule by talking anyway.
“So,” he says, waving his glass at the hills, at the food, at us, “the trust on the island—when do they vote the next piece?” He spears me with a look and turns it on Vasso like a laser. “And are we charming them in time if I were to come along on this…teatrowith you?”
“Next month,” Vasso answers, not giving away any hint that the old man has tipped his hat on the deal. Then he tips his chin to me. “And our lighthouse program and the exchange with your sommeliers will be on their docket, with your permission, of course.”
