by Karina Halle
I continue to tread water, hoping he can’t see my body clearly. To his credit, he’s not looking. He seems too shocked and borderline angry to do that.
“My name is Grace Harper,” I tell him, finding my voice. “I’m a guest of Jana Lee’s. This is her house.”
Isn’t it? Now I’m second guessing everything. I mean, that was Emilio at the airport, right? He had a sign with my name on it but he never actually said his name was Emilio. Oh lord.
The man watches me for a few moments, his brows drawn together, and I can’t figure out his game. Jana never said there would be any guests coming. Maybe he’s a friend of hers? Perhaps even a boyfriend, though he does seem a couple years younger. Then there’s the kid, who must be around ten years old, who is still facing the other way, though I catch him looking over his shoulder at me and frowning.
The kid rattles off something in Italian, and the only word I understand is “Papà,” so I guess this is the kid’s father.
“Non lo so,” the man says, and then glances at his son. He makes the gesture for the kid to turn around, which he does begrudgingly, huffing as he goes.
It’s while his focus isn’t on me that I’m able to get a better look at him. The man is tall, perhaps six feet, and with a slim but muscular physique, like an athlete. His skin is bronze in the sunshine, his hair black, shorter at the sides and longer on top so it sort of flops onto his forehead, and his face is strong and well-defined like a Roman sculpture.
He’s wearing dark jeans, a navy t-shirt and slip-on sneakers, with no socks. There’s a large gold watch on his wrist. He seems like the epitome of Italian fashion, like he should be advertising Armani cologne or something. He’s incredibly handsome, even though I push that realization to the back of my head because that’s the least important thing right now.
“So, who are you?” I ask. “Unless I’m in the wrong house.”
“Jana invited you?” the man asks, rubbing his jaw in frustration as he ignores my question again.
I nod. “Aye. Obviously. Or I wouldn’t be here. She said to come down for a month so I can finish my book. She’s my agent.”
He nods slowly, realization coming over his eyes, though he still looks pretty pissed off. “I see.”
I blink at him. “What do you see? You haven’t even told me who you are.”
“I’m Claudio Romano,” he says to me with a sigh. “This is my son Vanni.”
Vanni looks over his shoulder at me and says in perfect English, “And you are in our swimming pool.”
Three
Grace
I can’t help but stare, totally confused.
I shake my head and then swim to the edge of the pool, resting my arms on the grass. At least they can’t see my body this way. “I’m sorry, your what?”
“Our swimming pool,” Vanni says, louder this time, as if I couldn’t hear him. “You’re in our pool. This is our house. You’re a … a … intrusa.”
I don’t have to speak Italian to know he sees me as an intruder.
“Enough, Vanni,” Claudio says. He gestures at the house. “Why don’t you take your bag to your room? I’ll handle this.”
I don’t like the way he says handle this. What, he’s going to throw me out of the pool? Naked? I press my body even closer to the edge.
Vanni hesitates for a moment, then with sunken shoulders, walks off down the gravel path, throwing one more frowny glance at me.
“So Jana invited you,” Claudio says, sounding tired. “Funny, she never told me about it. Then again, I’m not surprised.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Jana is Vanni’s mother. She is my ex-wife.”
I’m doing an awful lot of blinking in shock these last five minutes.
“Your ex-wife?” I repeat. “She … she never told me she’s been married. She never told me she had a son! And she definitely said I would have the place to myself. Why on earth would she leave that out?”
He shrugs. “I don’t know. But Vanni and I weren’t supposed to be home until the end of the month. Our trip got cut short.”
“Well … fuck,” I swear. I stare at the rose garden, musing over how fast things can go from feeling free on the perfect summer day, to realizing you’re intruding in someone’s actual house. “I am so sorry,” I say, looking up at him. “I had no idea.”
“I know you didn’t,” he says. “Otherwise I’m sure you would have been wearing clothes.” A small smile curves his lips.
His lips.
My god, those are some pretty lips.
“Grace, was it?” he asks. I nod. “Grace, I’m going to take our bags inside. Take your time in the pool. We’ll be in the house where we can talk about this further.”
Then he turns and walks off, disappearing around the hedge, his footsteps crunching on the gravel path.
I wait until I’m sure he’s out of sight, then I swim across the pool and quickly haul myself out of the water. I slip my bathing suit back on, which isn’t easy when you’re wet, then wrap the towel around me, taking a few moments to gain my breath, waiting for both the feeling of shock and embarrassment to fade.
Unfortunately, they don’t. I feel like hiding out by the pool forever, stewing in my thoughts.
What’s going to happen to me now? I’m going to have to leave. I can’t stay here in someone else’s house. I’m going to fucking kill Jana. How could she not tell me that her ex-husband and her son live here? Her son! You think that would have come up at some point.
Now it all makes sense. The fact that I had to be out of here by a certain date, the lack of photos of herself, which I thought was odd because her office is full of pictures of her with authors and famous people. The sculptures, the art studio, the fact that the place felt fully lived in.
How could she do this to me? The whole reason I came here was for the peace and quiet to write, not just the weather and change of scenery to provide inspiration. I get that she probably thought her ex and son were gone, but even so, that was a ballsy move.
And now her ex and son have seen my whole arse and then some. Heat flushes my cheeks and I plop down on the lawn chair, my body refusing to move. I’m mortified on every level. I can’t imagine what it would feel like to come home and find someone else living in your house. In fact, I’m surprised they’re taking my word for it and not calling the cops.
Unless that’s what Mr. Romano went in there to do.
Shit.
Guess I better head inside and put clothes on before I’m hauled off somewhere.
I gather my towel tighter around me and slowly walk around the pool and down the gravel path, my flip flops slapping noisily. I had exited from the living room doors, so I head up the nearest outdoor staircase, pausing halfway to notice a shiny black vintage Ferrari in the driveway. Damn. The man has money and taste.
I step through the glass doors to the living room and hear a commotion from upstairs, basically Vanni yelling in Italian at his father, probably about the crazy naked lady who appeared in their pool.
I need to get changed, but I also don’t feel like going up to where the both of them are, so I head over to the mantel to look at the pictures again.
Now I’m looking at everything in a new light. The little lemon boy is obviously Vanni when he was younger, the black and white photos are probably of Claudio’s family. In fact, as I look a little closer, I think I see the family resemblance. Those sexy eyebrows.
The sound of a throat clearing makes me whirl around, my fingers gripping the towel tighter.
Claudio is standing at the bottom of the stairs, another bemused smile on his face.
Damn, damn, damn. Now that we’re inside and I don’t have the sun in my eyes and I’m not naked, I can get a better look at him and he’s somehow even more stunning than I thought.
“I certainly don’t mind if you stay in your bathing suit all day,” he says, his large hand palming the end of the railing. “Make yourself at home.”
I flush again. I may not be naked but I
’m in a small towel in his living room. At least I’m dry and not dripping onto the floor.
“I … uh,” I stammer. I gesture helplessly to the photos. “I was just looking at your photos.” Definitely not buying time because I thought I’d run into you upstairs and it would be awkward.
“Ah,” he says, walking over to me, sliding his hands in his pockets. He stops in front of the mantel and peers at it, as if he’s never seen the photos before. He nods at the one of the woman in the roses. “That’s my mother.”
“Really? She’s beautiful,” I tell him. I steal a glance at him, now seeing the resemblance. He’s so close that I can see his dark brown eyes are ringed with gold, seeming to glow beneath his thick black lashes.
He turns toward me, and I feel myself flush again. I didn’t want to run into him upstairs while in my towel, and yet this is much, much worse.
“I better go change,” I tell him quietly, quickly turning around and hurrying over to the stairs.
I head up, and just as I’m walking down the hallway, one of the doors opens across from me and Vanni pokes his head out.
“Hey,” he says to me.
I stop and eye him anxiously, pasting on a smile. “Yes?”
“Are you a writer?”
Oh man. I really don’t want to get in a conversation with this kid while a lot of me is still on display.
I nod and edge toward my door. “Yes.”
“I ask because you said you were one of my mother’s clients.” He’s like a miniature version of his father, although his eyes look like Jana’s, so when he narrows his eyes in suspicion, the resemblance really comes through. “I’ve never met one of her authors.”
“Oh, well.” I would raise my hand in greeting except my towel will fall down and I don’t need to traumatize this kid anymore. So I nod. “Nice to meet you.”
“Vanni!” Claudio yells from downstairs and then says something in Italian.
Vanni rolls his eyes and then steps back in his room, shutting the door. Pretty sure Claudio said something along the lines of “quit bugging your mother’s client and let her get changed.”
I quickly go into my room and close the door behind me, locking it for good measure, in case Vanni gets curious again and wants to ask more questions.
My heart sinks at the thought of having to leave so soon after I got here, especially after I put everything away last night, expecting to be here for a month. I’ll have to do that later though.
I take out a dress from the wardrobe, figuring it’s my last chance to wear one before I have to head back to gloomy Scotland with my tail between my legs. It’s a spicy orange red with spaghetti straps, fitted at the bodice enough so it compresses my girls and I don’t have to wear a bra, then flares out. I look myself over in the mirror, smoothing out the wrinkles, and then tie my wet hair back into a bun. I don’t have any makeup on my face but it doesn’t matter at this point.
I take in a deep breath but it does nothing to calm my heart, which has been oscillating between slow thumps full of dread and skips and hops fueled by anxiety. When I was young, I had a stuttering problem, which caused a lot of grief for me. Kids made fun of me, and I had no friends. I spent all my time alone, lost in books, reading or writing, creating my own little worlds. I did whatever I could not to speak up in class, where my nerves would get the best of me and the stuttering would get worse, but of course my teachers were dicks and always called on me.
That continued for a while until my father made me go to a speech therapist a few years after my parents’ divorce. While my mother said my impediment made me unique, my father, who at that point had left us in Ullapool, starting a new family in London, said I’d never get anywhere if I didn’t change things. As much as I wanted to fix it, I always thought that perhaps his love hinged on me being “normal.”
The speech therapist changed everything for the better, though. I came out of my shell, just a little, just enough to get through high school relatively unscathed, enough to have a friend or two. My father, well he didn’t change toward me at all. I’m still terrible at public speaking, which is why I relied so heavily on Robyn during our book events, and if I’m especially nervous or stressed, I tend to slip back into old ways.
And even though being here is not my fault, I still feel like I’m a burden to Jana’s ex-husband and kid.
I don’t know how long I sit on the edge of the bed, repeatedly smoothing out the wrinkles in my dress like it’s a nervous tic, wishing Robyn was here to take charge of the situation, but eventually I know I have to go downstairs and talk all this over with Claudio. At least no cops have shown up in the meantime.
I cautiously open the door and step out into the hall, and then quietly latch the door closed behind me. The door to Vanni’s room is shut. The last thing I want is to be asked more questions. He seems exceptionally bright and his English is perfect and his accent not as thick as his father’s, but even so I’m unsure how to act around my agent’s somewhat secret kid.
Is that what this is? I think to myself as I quietly go down the stairs, holding on to the railing as I go. Is Jana trying to keep Vanni and Claudio a secret? Why?
“There you are,” Claudio says.
He gets up from one of the couches and comes over to me. “I was getting worried. Here, have a seat. Did you want a coffee?”
I do want a coffee, badly, and I know he’d probably make one from the espresso machine, but I don’t want to be more of a bother than I already am so I just shake my head. “No, thank you.” And then I sit down on the couch.
He pauses by the staircase. “Are you sure? I’m making one for myself.”
Well, in that case. “Okay. Sure. If you’re having one. I don’t want to be a bother.”
He tilts his head as he studies me, and even from across the room I can feel the weight of his gaze. “You’re not a bother. You’re just a mysterious stranger I found in my pool. I’ll be a minute.”
He goes down the stairs to the kitchen, and I immediately exhale when he’s out of sight. Funny how a room can feel completely different depending on the circumstances. Yesterday I was marveling at this living room, the sculptures, the stenciled roses on the walls, feeling like a guest in a hotel given free rein. Now I feel like I’ve broken into someone’s home.
I hear the whir of the espresso machine from downstairs, and it’s not long before Claudio appears with two coffees in hand. He places both on the giant coffee table and I take an appreciative glance at his forearms and biceps, tanned and muscled in all the right ways. He must work out. A lot.
He sits down in a plush white armchair across from me.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t get the right amount of crema,” he says, gesturing to my coffee as he raises his to his lips. “The machine needs to be fixed.”
“It looks great,” I tell him, and it does look like the perfect espresso. I take a tentative sip and close my eyes in appreciation. I know the caffeine is going to make my poor heart skyrocket even more but it’ll be worth it. This is divine.
“Now, Ms. Harper,” he says, and I open my eyes to see him leaning back in his chair casually, dark eyes focused on me. “How about we start from the beginning?”
I clear my throat and get right to it. “Right. Okay. Well, as you know, I’m a writer. But more than that, I’m a writer on a deadline. There’s a difference between the two. It’s a pretty important book—the book that can make or break my career, and I signed with Jana because of this book. But it was only a proposal. I made the mistake of selling the idea and the outline before the book was done. Anyway, it’s a new genre for me and of course Jana is my new agent, and I just need everything to go right. I’ve been struggling with writer’s block for a while, and Jana suggested that maybe if I came here for a month I could get my writing mojo back. I’m from Edinburgh and the weather’s been awful and…” I’m lost in grief. “…I just needed a change of scenery.”
While I’ve been talking, Claudio has been listening intently, his brows
knitting together in thought.
“I see,” he says slowly and then breaks eye contact to have a sip of his coffee. It’s only when he’s looking away that I get a bit of my breath back. “So Jana said this place was unoccupied?”
“She just said she had a villa in Tuscany and I was welcome to use it. That’s all. I swear.”
He glances at me. “I believe you.”
Another soft smile curves his lips, and for the first time it hits me that, wow, Jana was really married to this guy? He does seem a bit younger than her, in his mid to late thirties, while she’s in her mid-forties. And not that Jana is bad looking or anything—she looks like Anne Heche with her sharp glasses and short blonde hair, but their personalities have to be the complete opposite, at least what I’ve seen so far.
“I’m used to Jana doing…” He gestures into the air with his hand. “Stuff like this, though not exactly like this. You should feel special. You’re the only author to have stepped foot in here.”
“None of her other clients have ever, erm, borrowed the house?”
He shakes his head, which does make me feel a wee bit special.
Then it makes me realize that she must have more riding on me than I know.
Or maybe no other author has ever struggled like you have, I think to myself.
“Vanni and I were supposed to be gone all month,” he explains. “We have family friends that we go on a trip with every year. This year we were going to sail to Sardinia. Have you ever been? Bella. It’s beautiful. Alas, my friend’s son broke his leg falling down the steps of the boat, and we had to cut the trip short. The boy will be okay, but Vanni is a little crushed that our annual trip got cancelled.”
“And I guess it didn’t help to find a stranger in his house.”
“Well, in his pool. But don’t worry about him, he’s nothing if not resilient.”
“You speak perfect English,” I can’t help but say. “The both of you.”
“Many Italians do,” he says, almost as if he took offense to that. “It helps that we travel so much, especially when we visit his mother in London.” He pauses. “So, she never told you she had a son?”
