Last of the Summer Vines: Escape to Italy with this heartwarming, feel good summer read!. Romy Sommer
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a childhood of constant movement and change, I wasn’t a frequent traveller, preferring to enjoy my own back yard, but looking out at this view I could almost understand the allure travel held for Geraldine. There was something about being in a new place, in strange surroundings, that gave the illusion of sweeping away one’s troubles. I turned my back to the view. The one thing Geraldine hadn’t learnt was that you couldn’t run away from your troubles. They would still be waiting at home when you returned.
Having learnt from my experience the day before, I pulled on a lightweight silk dressing gown over my sleep shorts and camisole, and headed downstairs for coffee and breakfast. The gown was one of the last gifts Kevin gave me. Jade to match your eyes, he’d said, unexpectedly poetic for a statistician. Then he’d stripped it off me to kiss his way down my body. Barely a week later he’d been kissing down someone’s else’s body … I shut down that thought so quickly my head spun.
To keep both my hands and my thoughts occupied, I catalogued the contents of the restocked pantry. Flour, sugar, eggs, milk, olive oil, and the oranges I’d bought on a whim at the co-op because they looked so fresh and appealing. Out of practice as I was, I hadn’t thought to buy yeast or baking powder, but there was baking soda and I’d seen lemons on the tree in the back yard…
It might be rather pleasant to try my hand at baking again. Like riding a bike, right?
Squeezing out a couple of lemons, I made a paste with the baking soda, then mixed in the flour, sugar and oil, grated in the orange zest and juice, and finally beat in the eggs. There was something so satisfying, so deliciously primal, about being elbow deep in a bowl, with dough squelching between my fingers. It was every bit as satisfying as I remembered.
Once I’d beaten the mix into a smooth consistency, I spooned it into a rectangular baking dish, then covered it with a checkered tea towel.
Now what? I had the perfect batter for schiacciata alla Fiorentina, the traditional Florentine orange flat-cake Nonna had taught me to bake, but no way to bake it except in the terrifying wood oven. It might be clean and gleaming now, but I didn’t have the faintest clue how to even get the wretched thing started.
How hard could it be to start a fire and get it warm enough to bake the cake? What was the worst that could happen – that the oven would either heat too fast or not enough? I might end up with a cake that was either burnt or undercooked, but so what? Who would know but me that for once in my life I’d created something less than perfect?
There was a wood pile in the back yard. I hefted a few of the smaller logs into the kitchen and piled them inside the stove’s firebox, then set them alight with the gas lighter I found in the pantry. Instead of bursting into the kind of merry blaze Nonna used to make, the wood began to smoke. Perhaps there was too much air?
I hurriedly shut the firebox door, but that only made the smoke billow thicker. It oozed around the edges of the door, slowly filling the room with an eye-burning fog.
So I opened the door again. Oh no. That was even worse. Now, clouds of smoke pumped back into the kitchen. I choked on the smoke, covering my nose and mouth with the crook of my arm. My eyes watered from the burn as I ran for the half-full electric kettle, grabbed it off its heating pad, and returned to the oven. Hastily pouring the water from the kettle over the meagre flames, I stood back, throat burning, eyes burning. The logs sizzled, belching out even more acrid smoke, and the fire inside the stove died.
That didn’t stop the smoke, though. It poured down still from the chimney. Oh heavens – had I somehow set the chimney on fire? I had no clue how chimneys worked.
Half-blinded and coughing, I was doubled up, and struggling for breath. The kitchen, vast as it had seemed before, was now so filled with smoke I could barely see a foot around me. Only the brighter patch of the door was visible, so I stumbled towards it, and straight into a wall of human. Hard, male human.
Strong arms gathered me up, sweeping me off my feet, and I was carried out into blinding sunlight. While my eyes still streamed, he sat, cradling me in his lap, one large hand rubbing soothing circles on my back while with the other he wiped away the stinging tears from my eyes.
‘There’s no point burning the house down,’ Tommaso said. ‘It’s way under-insured.’
His voice was hard and unsympathetic, completely at odds with the gentle hand stroking circles on my back.
‘I wasn’t trying to burn the house down!’ The protest was weak, my voice scratchy and still choked from the smoke.
Now that my eyes had stopped streaming, I could see we sat on the low stone wall edging Nonna’s herb garden, and he’d used the hem of his T-shirt to mop my eyes. Where the shirt lifted, tanned hard muscle was visible. A six-pack. An honest-to-goodness six-pack. I’d never been within groping distance of one of those before.
I swallowed. The arms that had held me and carried me were well muscled too, and the chest I leaned against…
I should get out of his lap. I really should.
Yet somehow my body refused to obey.
‘I wanted to bake,’ I said weakly, ending on a hiccoughing cough.
‘The stove hasn’t been used in years. It needs a good cleaning.’ His face wasn’t any more sympathetic than before, but his voice was a little gentler.
‘I cleaned it out yesterday.’
‘The chimney too?’
That was a real thing?
‘If there’s a build-up of creosote inside the chimney, you could have started a serious chimney fire. What wood did you use?’
I glanced towards the sheltered wood pile stacked up against the yard wall.
‘That figures! That’s the wood I’m seasoning for winter. It’s still very green, which means it creates more smoke than fire. And if the flue is blocked, you’d just make it worse.’
And I was just as green. Mortification swept through me, swift and furious. I hated being at a disadvantage, never let anyone suspect I was anything less than competent and in control, and yet I’d given Tommaso ringside seats to my ignorance.
That made twice in less than a week. First, the Delta Corporation, and now this. My eyes burned, and it wasn’t just the after effects of the smoke, but anger at myself for failing. I never failed at anything I set my mind to. I didn’t know how to cope with failure.
Tommaso pushed back the hair falling loose from the chignon I’d tied it up into. ‘You’re welcome to use my oven until we can check out the chimney.’
At the sound of an engine, we both turned to look as a familiar silver sports car appeared around the corner of the house and pulled up in the yard. Luca Fioravanti.
And though I was a little more dressed than yesterday, I most certainly wasn’t dressed for visitors. If I hadn’t been aware before of how the silk gown only reached mid-thigh, or the proximity of Tommaso’s body, I certainly was now. A furious blush burned my face and I wriggled to get out of his lap. But he held me fast.
This was turning into one of those scenes in a really bad farce.
‘Making house calls on a Sunday?’ Tommaso called out as Luca stepped from the car.
With an extra hard shove at his chest, I scrambled out of his lap, burningly aware that not only was I scantily clad and dishevelled, but I no doubt also reeked of smoke. While Luca looked impeccably, impossibly perfect. Not a hair mussed, shoes polished, trousers crisply pressed, as if he had indeed just stepped from the pages of GQ. Exactly the kind of man I would choose if ever I were in the market for one.
He held a bouquet of pink roses. My stomach did a strange somersault thing.
‘I brought the partnership agreement for you to sign.’ Luca smiled his usual smooth, charming grin. ‘I hope I’m not interrupting anything?’
My blush deepened. ‘No, of course not.’ Sure, I always entertained sexy men