Dolci di Love

by Sarah-Kate Lynch

  The barn doors were open when they pulled up outside his villa and she could see the gondola sitting there, shipwrecked in Tuscany. Her heart ached for the memories it held.

  Inside the villa she excused herself to put on fresh lipstick, check her hair (Eugenia had actually done a good job), and spray a little perfume on her wrists. It had been a long, long time since she had seduced anyone, but she figured men hadn’t changed that much in the past twenty years. And she had felt whatever was between her and Alessandro as plainly as if she could see it. Chemistry, possibility, heat; it was all there.

  The moment she walked into the kitchen where he was making coffee, Lily realised seduction was not going to be necessary. Alessandro was feeling all the same things, she was sure of it. The look in his eyes when he saw her, the slight tingle in the warm summer air, the little soupçon of electricity that flickered and sparked between them; she and Alessandro were going to fall together as easily as she and Daniel had fallen apart.

  She relaxed. Everything was going to be just fine.

  He took their coffees into the living room and put some music on—opera, something Lily had heard before but couldn’t name. He opened the doors out to the pool and the valley beyond, then stood there with his back to her as the sheer linen drapes on either side fluttered in the breeze.

  Finally, he turned, smiled his mournful smile, and Lily simply moved to him, dreamlike, could not keep herself from doing so. It seemed inevitable.

  Her arms ached to hold him, to push away his grief. She knew what it felt like, how lonely it was, how deep the hole inside could get when it had been emptied so thoroughly and nothing else seemed to fill it.

  She turned her face up to his and kissed him, tasting the salt on his lips, feeling the shudder that ran through his body at her touch.

  If he was surprised at her boldness, he didn’t show it. He dropped deep into that kiss and Lily dropped with him.

  He pulled her closer, one hand on the back of her head, the other on her hip, and kissed her neck, her ear, the collarbone he had admired the first day he met her.

  She threw her head back as she felt some of the pain melt out of him, heard a little groan of ecstasy, moved closer, her hips fused to his, an insatiable hunger burning its way from her toes all the way up through her body to her lips.

  When they again found Alessandro’s, waiting, desperate for more, Lily tasted salt once more, but this time, it was different. These tears, she realised, were her own.

  Chapter 39

  The League’s headquarters had never been so silent.

  Violetta blinked and waited for someone to say something. No one did. Although the widow Ciacci put the air freshener back on the mantelpiece.

  ‘I thought…all this time…it’s just…’ Violetta started to age before their very eyes, her face falling, her shoulders sinking, her glee evaporating into the thin, quiet air. ‘Love,’ she whispered. ‘I thought I knew. Luciana was so sure. How can this be?’

  It was Fiorella who came swiftly to her rescue. ‘Oh, for the sake of Santa Ana di Chisa,’ she said, eyes rolling, of course. ‘What does it really matter?’

  ‘What does it matter?’ breathed the widow Mazzetti. ‘Violetta’s our spiritual leader! We trusted her. We followed her!’

  ‘But isn’t the reason you do that so you can mend broken hearts?’ Fiorella charged her. ‘I just can’t for the life of me work out why it matters so much how. It’s great that you see signs that lead you to the people who most need your help, but actually, you don’t have to look far to find someone in that boat. Walk down the Corso and you can spot a half dozen broken hearts between here and the gelateria if you’re looking for them. They’re everywhere! A tingle here, an ache there, maybe that has had something to do with it, but the point is that most other people don’t give a rat’s butt. Bottom line, there are fewer broken hearts out there thanks to you noticing them in the first place, so can’t we just take that and move on?’

  ‘But poor Alessandro…’ started the widow Ciacci.

  ‘Oh, poor Alessandro, my elbow,’ pshawed Fiorella. ‘There’s no escaping he’s a looker, and a nice enough guy to boot, but there is the whole daughter issue.’

  The widows muttered that this had been much discussed and was considered to be a work in progress, therefore not an impediment to his candidacy for their assistance.

  ‘Well, what about the fact he’s been schtupping the pharmacist’s wife for the past eighteen months?’ asked Fiorella. ‘And while that doesn’t make him a total creep, he’s been slipping it to her sister in Montechiello as well, although not on such a regular basis owing to her husband not being hopped up on goofballs all the time—although he does drink lot. Alessandro? Clear conscience? I think not.’

  The widow Benedicti looked ready to explode, her face purple with rage as she pointed a shaking finger at Fiorella. This seemed to happen to her a lot.

  ‘That’s a lie!’ the widow Benedicti hissed. ‘That’s a bald-faced lie.’

  ‘Your boss sneaks off somewhere around three on Wednesdays and comes back smelling of Aquolina’s Pink Sugar perfume, am I right? It’s a little heavy on the musk if you ask me but it’s our most expensive scent—the guy’s not cheap, I’ll give him that.’

  ‘He’s mourning his wife, for heaven’s sake,’ the widow Benedicti insisted. ‘He is kind and generous and polite and good and, and, and…tall!’

  But she had noticed the smell of Pink Sugar wafting about him on a Wednesday evening. She knew it for sure because he’d given her a bottle of the stuff for her birthday. And there was the receipt for the slinky nightgown that she’d found in his pocket while doing the laundry. It was from a shop in Montechiello, as she recalled.

  ‘I have my suspicions about the woman pruning his olive trees, too,’ Fiorella said. ‘Usually when two people get mosquito bites that bad at the same time in the same place it’s a no-brainer, that’s all I’m saying.’

  The olive pruner had had her hooks into Alessandro from the moment she first clapped eyes on him, the widow Benedicti had seen that. And she’d seen her fair share of scratching soon after, but she’d just never put two and two together.

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ she said in a way that indicated she could perhaps believe it just a tiny bit.

  ‘Look, I’m not saying the guy’s a total waste of space,’ Fiorella said, ‘but he has issues. Sure he’s sad, he’s super sad, but the ladies love that, don’t they? I just don’t think he’s the guy for Lily.’

  ‘So you agree Lily is our calzino rotto?’ Violetta asked.

  ‘I think she’s as good as any other, and then there’s that little girl to think of. The one with the wings.’

  ‘The cheating husband’s love child?’ The widow Mazzetti was amazed. ‘Well, now I’ve heard everything. What does she have to do with it?’

  ‘Hello! She has everything to do with it. That kid needs a mother and our calzino needs a daughter. What more do you need to know? Hearts can be mended in a hundred different ways, you know. Maybe this hole is going to be darned with a different-coloured thread.’ She actually stopped to wink at Violetta. ‘It gets the job done every bit as well, just looks a bit peculiar from the outside.’

  ‘But that little girl already has a mother,’ said the widow Del Grasso.

  ‘A mother who isn’t all there.’

  ‘Yes, but…’

  ‘Yes, but nothing. She wants a month or six at the funny farm that one and—’

  ‘They’re not called funny farms anymore,’ the widow Mazzetti interjected. ‘That’s politically incorrect.’

  ‘We don’t have politically incorrect where I come from,’ Fiorella said.

  ‘And where is that?’

  ‘Italy! What are you, asleep?’

  ‘Now, now, ladies!’ Violetta had some of her old chutzpah back and called the group firmly to order. ‘Let Fiorella finish.’

  ‘All I’m suggesting is that blondie stays here in Montevedova and maybe helps the cheati
ng husband be a father to those children. They’re good people, those two, you can tell, despite the mistakes they’ve made. And who here hasn’t made a mistake? Oh, that youngest kid isn’t his, by the way. Anyone remember that Scandinavian hunk who came through a couple of years ago? Chlamydia, the stories it can tell. Anyway, how about this for a plan: Eugenia can go off to the politically correct institution of someone-in-a-better-position-to-decide’s choice and with a bit of TLC should come right, then she can come back and find true love with someone else, because she doesn’t love Lily’s husband and he doesn’t love her and when everybody’s done the math and worked it all out they should all end up in the right arms, plus in the meantime those kids are taken care of. Does it really matter who does it as long as it’s done?’

  The widows looked at each other. Most of them were a bit confused, but not Violetta—she was looking at Fiorella as if she was a giant gelato in her long-forgotten favourite flavour.

  ‘That’s a lot to ask of poor Lily, isn’t it?’ someone asked.

  ‘Any ninny can see she likes the kid, and do we care if she’s stuck here making heart-shaped cantucci until Eugenia gets her wits together? No, we do not.’

  ‘She made heart-shaped cantucci?’ asked Violetta.

  Fiorella wiped some crumbs off her dress. ‘We call it amorucci,’ she said. ‘You could whip some Borsolini butt with that stuff, let me tell you.’

  ‘It’s still a lot to ask of poor Lily,’ said the widow Del Grasso.

  ‘Well, nobody said it would be easy,’ Fiorella pointed out. ‘Love’s a messy business, after all. You must have worked that out by now.’

  ‘She just comes in here and tries to tell us what to do,’ the widow Mazzetti said to the room. ‘There are rules for this sort of—’

  ‘Oh, please!’ Fiorella threw her hands up. ‘Don’t give me rules. What do rules have to do with love? No, it’s not fair; yes, it’s complicated, but look at me: I was tricked into marrying a total dope and had to watch the man I loved die of a broken heart and I turned out all right.’

  ‘That’s a matter of opinion,’ the widow Mazzetti muttered quietly, but not quietly enough.

  ‘Well, let me tell you this, Signorina Rule Number Six, Clause B, Addendum Two Point Five,’ said Fiorella, turning on her. ‘I would go to Montevedova Hospital right now and have every limb removed and my eyes and my ears and my nose as well if it would give me just one day back with my Eduardo. I don’t care how hard that would make the rest of my life. If all I got was a minute, a single minute, of being with him again, it would be worth it. That is love, you nitwits. You’re supposed to be experts. You don’t remember how hard it is? Well, you are in the wrong game. Shame on you. Shame, shame, shame.’

  The essence of mass mortification filled the room, giving the air freshener a run for its money.

  ‘I would go to Montevedova Hospital and have my legs chopped off for another moment with my Antonio,’ sniffed the widow Del Grasso into the embarrassed quiet.

  ‘Me too,’ whispered the widow Benedicti.

  ‘And my ears,’ sobbed the widow Ciacci.

  ‘To be in my sweet one’s arms again? Oh! They could take everything!’ wept even the widow Mazzetti. ‘Everything!’

  Into the middle of these sniffling nonagenarians stepped the tiny Violetta.

  ‘I think Fiorella has reminded us all of why we are here and how precious our mission is,’ she said, but was interrupted almost immediately by the widow Pacini bustling in, her chest puffed with pride, and the rest of her quite puffed as well.

  ‘Success, success, success,’ she crowed. ‘Del Grasso, your grandson couldn’t get her into the gelateria and Ciacci, yours couldn’t get her into the wine shop, but right outside my alimentare over today’s freshly picked strawberries, our calzino rotto met his match!’

  ‘What happened?’ a chorus of voices asked.

  ‘They drove off into the sunset,’ the widow Pacini reported triumphantly before noticing something was amiss. ‘Why the long faces, isn’t this what we wanted?’

  ‘How long ago did this happen?’ asked Violetta.

  ‘A couple of hours ago, I suppose. Maybe longer.’

  ‘And you waited all this time to come and tell us?’

  ‘I had to close the alimentare and stop at Poliziano for a celebratory cannelloni or two. I know they’re Sicilian but they’re perfect for such an occasion. Why? What’s going on?’

  ‘There’s been a change of plan,’ said Fiorella. ‘We’re swapping horses.’

  ‘Swapping horses? Violetta, is this true?’ The widow Pacini was aghast. Violetta was the person least likely to swap horses, after all.

  ‘Yes, it is,’ Violetta confirmed. ‘It most certainly is.’

  Chapter 40

  Lily had forgotten the all-consuming drama of that first deep kiss.

  There was nothing else in the world quite like it—that moment of everything else in the universe, troublesome or otherwise, being swept away.

  The fine linen curtains billowed into the room on a theatrical gust as Alessandro moved Lily toward the plush sofa, graceful for such a big man, his hands on her so delicate she might have been a prized antique.

  He took his time, a practiced lover, slowly unbuttoning her shirt and admiring her body as it was gradually revealed. He spoke in Italian and she could have listened to him forever. With his hands on her neck, her breasts, her ribs, her stomach, her hips, her thighs, it was impossible to think of anything else other than the feel of him, the sound of him, the smell of him.

  Her lips burned where Alessandro’s touched them, her skin quivered, her hair fell out of its tidy knot. She felt free, impossibly free, as though she were soaring weightlessly in the blue Tuscan sky miles above the sordid wreckage of real life.

  It was bliss.

  Afterward, she didn’t plummet back down to earth with an immediate thud. She stayed floating in Alessandro’s arms as he told her how beautiful she was, how lucky for him he had met her, how sometimes destiny delivered the right souls into the right arms, and how he felt happier than he had in a long, long time.

  She wanted to stay there forever, suspended in the heavenly simplicity of it all: two wounded adults enjoying each other’s bodies, each other’s warmth, each other’s comfort. She tingled from head to toe in a way she could not remember ever tingling before.

  But destiny, as it turned out, did not want Lily to stay where she was. Destiny had other plans and they involved Alessandro’s aged housekeeper appearing in front of them, a look of horror contorting her reddened face. She was holding a metal bucket full of soapy water, which she promptly dropped to the floor with a clang.

  Lily, beyond mortified, although thankfully partly clothed by then, sprang away from the sofa, buttoning her shirt, swivelling her skirt around the right way, snatching at her underwear, which was sticking out from underneath a cushion.

  Alessandro, only recently re-trousered, looked in bewilderment as the clearly flustered Signora Benedicti then held aloft a feather duster like a weapon.

  ‘I am come to clean,’ she announced, and pushing Alessandro out of the way, she picked up the cashmere throw that had been cast on the floor and started to straighten the cushions where the lovers had just been lying.

  ‘Signora Benedicti, what are you doing here?’ Alessandro, remarkably calm under the circumstances, asked in Italian. ‘I thought you cleaned the house this morning.’

  ‘I am,’ she answered in English. ‘But is still very dusty. See?’ She brought the feather duster down on the nearby sideboard with such an almighty thwack that Lily, now at least appropriately buttoned and zipped, jumped with fright.

  ‘But I don’t understand. We said goodbye. I saw you leave.’

  ‘And does the dust take such close notice of this activities?’ the housekeeper answered. ‘If you would wish your lady friend to get the allergy and create a big nose and water eyes, I will not arrive, but to keep the beautiful face is necessary for my work to have done and
now.’

  ‘You know, I think I should be going,’ Lily said.

  ‘Not at all,’ said Alessandro. ‘I would be very sorry if you left now. Please, just give me a moment. If I’ve upset you, Signora Benedicti, I am sorry,’ Alessandro said, switching back to his native tongue, ‘but this is really none of your business.’

  ‘I don’t have a business,’ she answered, also in Italian. ‘Just a lot of dust to get rid of, your ironing to finish, the kitchen floor to mop, and something that smells very unpleasant to locate in your refrigerator and dispose of. I work very hard for you, Alessandro, much harder than that olive pruner you always make such a fuss about, but no matter how hard I work it never seems to satisfy you. Never!’

  Alessandro was astounded. Such an outburst was totally out of character.

  ‘Signora, are you feeling all right?’ he asked her.

  She looked at him for a moment or two—he really was a kind man, if overly randy—then said that actually she was feeling very poorly and could he please take her into the kitchen and make her a nice tall glass of fresh lemonade with a sprig of mint from the patch growing wild beneath the olive trees, the unpruned ones, out behind the barn a few hundred metres.

  ‘Please, Lily, I apologise but if you could just excuse us for a little longer,’ Alessandro said escorting the widow out to the kitchen.

  Lily stood there for a moment, trying to shake her embarrassment. The housekeeper and her soapy bucket and feather duster had certainly put her feet back on the ground. The dreamily fluttering linen drapes now made an annoying flapping sound, the open doors had welcomed a trio of buzzing flies, it was too hot. Her skin didn’t tingle anymore. She had the beginnings of a headache.

  She tried to recapture the floaty, free feeling, but it was gone.

  A photo on the sideboard that Signora Benedicti had just been dusting caught her eye. Half a dozen other framed pictures had been left lying facedown, but there was one left standing at the front. Lily picked it up. It was a younger Alessandro and his wife, she assumed, Elisabeta—a petite beauty who gazed up at him adoringly—but nestled between them was a teenage girl, the image of her mother, looking shyly into the camera.