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“What are you doing up here?” I asked.
“I brought Fina home this morning. She fell asleep at my place. She’s a lightweight.”
“How old is she? She looked so young to be a cop.” And to be Giusy’s girlfriend, I thought but didn’t say.
“Twenty-one,” Luca said. “You can join when you are eighteen here. But she is a baby, yes. I often feel protective of her. I was going to the hotel to get her car keys. Do you have them?”
“I gave them to Giusy,” I said.
He paused and glanced away. “I also wanted to say how very sorry I am for what I did to you there in the ocean. I was playing, teasing. I thought you would think it was funny. You seemed so tough. I thought you might just think it was fun. I did not mean to scare you like that.”
A smile crept up on my lips. I wanted to ask him what made him think I was so tough, but I knew the answer. I knew what I looked like, how I carried myself. Philadelphia magazine had actually called me the leader of the city’s tough new breed of cool girls in the culinary world. It was because of my tattoos. It was easy to mistake a woman with visible tattoos as both interesting and unapproachable. Cool, even.
For a long time I was tough. I did hard things. I pushed myself. Before becoming a mother I took chances. I believed in myself. When had I allowed self-doubt to creep in? The constant uncertainty of keeping a small creature alive was the start. And then losing my restaurant destroyed my confidence and self-esteem. The last time I felt tough and strong was when I stood up to my investors and told them we had to keep paying our employees’ health insurance. They essentially told me to find a way to keep our profits in line with our stellar reviews, or else. How could we open another location, how could we franchise, if we didn’t make more money? The answer was that we couldn’t. Or I couldn’t. I accepted defeat. I closed the restaurant. I was tough and then I wasn’t. My strong body became a costume, a shell.
Luca was still mumbling in a fairly adorable way.
“I was surprised,” I told him. “No worries.”
“No worries,” he mimicked me in a bad American accent, cocking his head.
“It’s like tutto bene. All good. So if you brought Fina back, when did Giusy return?”
“Not long after you, actually. She hitched a ride up.” This was surprising, and concerning. Could she have been in the house when I was snooping? Watching me?
“What are you doing now?” Luca asked.
“Trying to figure out how to get a ride to Sciacca so I can catch a bus to Palermo.”
“I can drive you.”
“Oh no. I don’t want to be a burden. I was going to see if I could get Fina’s keys back maybe and take her car.”
“I know that she has plans to be out of town tonight for a meeting so she will need it. Just let me take you,” he insisted.
I needed a ride. The town’s single taxi was nowhere in sight. Luca was, without a doubt, the sexiest man I had ever seen in real life. Why was I saying no? “That would be great. The Palermo bus leaves Sciacca at four thirty.”
Luca stuffed his hands deep into his pockets. “I can take you all the way to Palermo. We aren’t open yet. The restaurant. It is still a couple of weeks before the season. I have things I can take care of in the city. I don’t mind a drive and I owe you an apology.”
“You already apologized.”
“A man can always apologize more, can’t he?”
“They can. And frankly most of the time they should. But they never do.”
“So I’ll take you. Are you ready?” he asked.
“As ready as I’ll ever be.”
“We go.”
As we headed to Luca’s car, the old man who had sketched my portrait when I arrived strolled out of a grand-looking marble door next to the bakery.
“Buongiorno, signore,” Luca addressed him.
“Buongiorno, Luca,” he replied, tipping the brim of his straw hat. I figured he wouldn’t remember me, but he turned his warm smile my way and studied my face the same way he did while he was sketching me. “The American Marsala.” He made me sound like a special on the menu at the Olive Garden.
A plump woman covered head to toe in white flour emerged from the pasticceria and thrust two pastries in Luca’s hands without a word before kissing both his cheeks and disappearing back into her shop. The old man said something I didn’t catch and pointed to me.
