Natalie wins just about every hand, even beating her older brother. Pane plays with a grim expression on his face. He’s angry about Natalie running off. But once we’re deep in the game, he asks her about school, who her friends are now, if William somebody is still pulling her hair every chance he gets. If so, Pane threatens to make William disappear.
At that, Natalie laughs.
I do, too, though I wonder if, deep down, Pane is serious.
He probably is.
Watching them together softens something in me. When Pane brings back empanadas and Natalie ends up with some on her cheek, my heart just about explodes when he dabs a napkin to her face and cleans it off.
After playing for an hour, Pane tells her that it’s time to go home. The plane has returned to New York, and his mom is arriving tomorrow to retrieve her.
“On a scale of one to ten, how mad is Mom?” she asks when we’re in the truck.
“She’s glad you’re safe,” he says.
“So that means she’s at an eleven on the anger scale.”
There’s a stretch of silence before Pane says, “You’re going to be grounded. You knew that would happen.”
“I hoped maybe we could skip that part.”
He sighs. “You disabled Greta’s phone so that no one could reach her. What did you think would happen?”
“That I would stay here with you for the next month. There’s a boarding school only an hour away.”
Pane taps his strong fingers against the steering wheel. “I’m not ...” He doesn’t finish his sentence, but I know what he’s going to say:I’m not going to stay here. Those are the words that almost slipped from his mouth.
But instead, he replies, “Mom would never let you leave New York. You know that.”
“One can always hope,” she says brightly. “And as for Greta, it’s her book club night. She always has her phone turned off anyway so that she and her friends can discuss their sex books.”
“Natalie,” Pane snaps. “What are you ... How do you know ... Never mind. Don’t say that word ever again.”
I can almost hear the grin in her voice. “You meansex?”
I bite the back of my hand to keep from laughing.
Pane, however, is not laughing. He looks like he’s about to have a heart attack. “You’re too young to use the word, let alone know what it means.”
“Please, Pane. I know all about how babies are made.”
“Can we please just end this conversation?”
Before either of them can embarrass themselves—or me, for that matter—I pipe up, “Oh, look. We’re here.”
“Thank God,” he mumbles.
I glance at him, but his gaze remains laser-beam focused on the road. His jaw flexes and unflexes, and it takes everything in me not to openly stare at the straight line. His entire profile, all of it, looks like it was painstakingly chiseled and then splashed with a golden glow.
My goodness, but he is gorgeous.
“Piggycorns,” Natalie squeals. “Stop the truck, Pane. I want to meet them.”
He stops just inside the gate. Natalie practically catapults from the cabin, racing to their enclosure. The piggies smell a new friend, and they stampede to meet her. They run in a pile, bumping and shoving, falling and sliding, until they reach the fence.
They stand on their back legs, noses up, openly begging to be pet. The piggies in back, the ones who were a bit slower, push forward, wedging themselves into all the nooks and crannies the others have left open, pawing until they find a spot and joining the whines of the ones who reached the fence first.
A dozen pigs paw and snort, each of them clambering for Natalie’s attention. She breaks into a fit of giggles.
