A Court Gesture

by Jenny Gardiner

  He hadn’t even bothered to shower and shave before checking on her. As it was, it was bold of him to go out in his boxer briefs, at attention, as it were, as hopeful as he (and it) could be. Disappointed, he retreated to his room to shower and shave.

  Sandro greeted him at breakfast.

  “Buon giorno,” he said. Good morning. “I see you chose to stay the night after all.”

  “Yeah, well, after you killed the mood, my work was cut out for me,” Luca said. “I tried my damnedest, but it didn’t work. She was gone before I woke this morning.”

  “So you didn’t even get her in your bed?”

  “Closest I came was her eating off my—”

  “Oooh, that’s not a bad start, then.”

  “You didn’t let me finish,” Luca said. “Eating off my plate. I cooked her a meal. She loved it. If postprandial satiety was any sign of lust, I’d have been golden. She groaned in pleasure at my puttanesca.”

  Sandro nodded. “I’ve had your puttanesca,” he said. “It’s pretty good. Not good enough to get me in your bed, however.” He laughed. “You gotta use that thing to lure her in.” He swatted at Luca’s crotch.

  “That was the general idea,” he said. “Until you busted in on us. Mamma mia. I mean seriously, you couldn’t have just quietly tiptoed out of the room? We’d have never known you even came in there. In case you hadn’t noticed, we were kind of busy.”

  Sandro put his hands up in the air in apologetic surrender. “That was my bad. I owe you one, my friend. Whatever you want, it’s yours, if it can help you with her. Though I thought she was writing a story about you. I didn’t know it was about your dick.” He smirked.

  “That story would be so epic, no one could do it justice,” Luca said, jabbing Sandro in the chest. “You think your driver could get me back to the train station in Florence? I probably need to make an appearance at the palace. I’ve been gone all week.”

  “It’s the least I can do.”

  “The least you can do is set me up on a real date with the reporter so I can try for round two.”

  “Sorry, bro. That’s gonna be yours to figure out.”

  “That’s what I’m worried about. She’s going to be like climbing Mount Everest.”

  “Without oxygen.”

  “During a winter storm.”

  “You think it’s worth it?” Sandro said. “Sounds like a lot of needless suffering to me.”

  Luca shrugged. “It’s the craziest thing,” he said. “But yeah. For some reason, I think it is.”

  ~*~

  Crap crap crap crap crap. Larkin dreaded walking into the office and telling Piers she didn’t have a story. She knew he was going to implode if she did that. But what could she do? Lie? Tell him she had more research to do? Drag it out?

  Of course, it was a rainy, dismal day. On the heels of such a beautiful one spent in Chianti, the contrast of her experience then and now couldn’t be more apparent. And of course, a huge gust of wind flipped her umbrella inside out, so her hair was drenched. She closed up her mangled umbrella and entered the building. She shook her head as she mounted the stairs to the office a block away from the Campo de’ Fiori, a cheery open-air market where she often ate her lunch. Today, she couldn’t imagine drumming up the appetite for lunch, her nerves were so shot worrying about handling her boss.

  “Mallory,” he said with a bark. “In my office, now.”

  Larkin winced and skulked into his office, not even dropping her laptop or soaking wet coat at her desk.

  Piers stood, leaning across his desk, hands flat on the desktop. “What’ve you got for me?”

  Larkin swallowed. “Uh, it was a good, uh, start.”

  “Start?”

  “Yeah, it was more involved than I thought it would be.” Involving lips and tongues and hands and fingers and a whole lot of other unmentionable body parts.

  “What’s so involved about it? You sit down, you talk, you write a story.”

  Larkin hemmed and hawed for a minute. “Well, er, um, I have more interviewing to do.”

  He pursed his lips and raised his bushy right eyebrow while lowering the left. Quite a feat, really.

  “Wow,” Larkin said, trying for levity to distract him. “Did you have to work at perfecting that little party trick?” She pointed to his contortionist brows. She was kicking herself for not getting intel from Paolo before showing up this morning. Everything hinged on Piers’s mood, and she was driving blind in a hurricane with the man as it was.

  “Cut the crap,” he said. “When will you get me something?”

  Clearly, he wasn’t in a mood for idle chatter. “Soon,” she said. “Real soon.”

  “This is not like you, Mallory,” he said. “Normally, your stories are sitting in my inbox first thing in the morning on the day when they’re due. Why don’t you have this piece tied up with a shiny bow at this point?”

  Because I was too busy wishing I could strip naked, tie myself up in a shiny bow, and gift myself to Luca?

  “Because, well, he’s going to take me to the palace,” she said. “To meet the queen.”

  What a tangled web we weave. How the hell can I ever finagle that one? She gave herself a serious mental dope-slap. Meet the queen? Seriously?

  “You’ve landed yourself a meeting with the Queen of Monaforte?”

  “Well, I mean, I wouldn’t go quite that far,” she said. “I expect it’s more like I might get to walk by her office and if she’s there, well maybe she’ll say a quick hello, that sort of thing.”

  “But you just said he was taking you to the palace to meet the queen.”

  “Yes. Yes, I did,” she said, looking down at her nails with the chipped nail polish that hadn’t been repainted in two weeks. She just wasn’t a nail polish maintenance kinda gal. Nor was she any good at lying to her boss, but she was learning on the job. “I think I misrepresented that a bit. I guess what I meant to say was that is my hope. But what we wish for and what we get aren’t always the same thing.”

  Like, in my heart of hearts, I wish I could have let myself go and could have seen where things would go with me and Luca. I mean, good Lord, he’s gorgeous. And so sweet, thoughtful, intelligent. And I’m pretty sure I could learn a thing or two from the man because, wow. She fanned herself with her hand at the thought. Only to realize that she had just said “wow” out loud to her boss. Ugh.

  “Wow?”

  She continued fluttering her hand in front of her face. “Wow, it sure is hot in here,” she said.

  “It’s not even remotely hot in here,” he said. “The temperature outside has dropped like ten degrees with this storm system.”

  She squinted. “Maybe I’m just febrile. I felt as if I was coming down with something.”

  He held a hand up as if pushing her away. “Well, then don’t breathe on me. The last thing I need is your creeping crud.” He covered his mouth with a handkerchief. “But I want something by the end of next week. In the meantime, get me this.”

  He held out a photograph that accompanied Larkin’s interview with that fresh-faced, wholesome American model during Fashion Week.

  “Seriously? Her?” Larkin said. “Haven’t we sucked the teat of Fashion Week dry yet?”

  “Our readers love this stuff,” he said. “And beautiful, young models are what they want to know more about. This one, I hear she’s an up-and-coming superstar in the business. She has that wholesome corn-fed God-bless-America look that intrigues people. Much better than the heroin-chic that was popular for so long. I want you to get me more on her. A feature piece. Get to know her.”

  Ugh, really? At this point, she was ready to see if she could go be a janitor for the Pope, anything to have access to a meatier story than supermodels.

  “I’m sort of fashioned out, Piers,” she said, holding up her hand as if she was passing on a too-rich dessert. “Maybe Bettina can take on this story?”

  “Bettina?” he said with a growl. “You didn’t hear?”

  “No!
What?”

  “I fired her because she wouldn’t write the stories I wanted her to write. Last day was Friday.”

  Well, then, looked like Larkin had a fashion-filled agenda to look forward to. Like it or not.

  Chapter Seventeen

  “I’m super excited you reached out to me,” Taylor said as she settled her lithe frame into a seat on the tiny patio of Cantinetta dei Verrazzano, down a quiet side street in Florence. “I really thought we hit it off the last time and I just knew you’d take me up on my offer to help you.”

  Larkin knit her brows as she opened her laptop on the wrought iron table, preparing to conduct her coerced interview with the most beautiful person within a ten-mile radius. Taylor McFarland’s beauty shone so brightly it hurt; anyone in its path was in danger of securing a dangerous sunburn from it. Taylor modeled a lot for Ralph Lauren, and her good looks reflected that brand: classic, timeless, elegant, aspirational. Her delicate bone structure alone could launch a thousand poems, no doubt. Not to mention the ding of a million cash registers.

  Their handsome Italian waiter—scruffy, long brown hair; brown eyes; great butt, natch—brought them an antipasti plate with local prosciutto di cinta senese, a specialty meat from Tuscany, along with fresh local pecorino cheese. One of the happy side benefits of Larkin’s job was being able to partake of the best local food and drink specialties wherever she was, which meant she got to eat amazingly well throughout Europe—even better, sometimes on the paper’s tab. Their waiter then poured them each a glass of the Chianti Classico Sassello while staring at Christie—er, Taylor. Larkin felt certain he’d overflow their wineglasses, he was so glued to her face rather than the task at hand.

  Sigh... To have a man be so transfixed by your beauty that he forgets to do simple things? Unfathomable. She had to remind herself that the higher the climb, the harder the fall. If you rely so desperately on your looks to get ahead, what happens when those looks start to falter? You have no you, but rather an optical illusion of who you are, or were. She wasn’t sure if this was a risk she wanted to ever learn about. Not that that was an option. Larkin was plain ol’ Larkin, period. She wasn’t going to morph into Cinderella in this lifetime.

  “The thing is, my editor really liked what I wrote about you in that piece, so he wanted me to interview you in more detail, find out about your life, your aspirations, how you ended up modeling professionally, that sort of thing.”

  Taylor’s face fell ever so slightly. “Oh,” she said, her pert, cherubic supermodel lips bending into a tiny frown. “Okay. Sure,” she said quietly. “I guess I just thought you wanted to meet up with me for me. I didn’t know you had to do this for your job.”

  Larkin took a sip of her wine. “No. I mean, I did want to meet up with you,” she said. “It’s just that this is an added reason to get together.”

  Taylor grinned. “In that case, have you thought more about my helping you with a makeover?”

  Oh, boy, here comes the guilt response. Larkin could never feel good about herself if she didn’t give this chick some concessions.

  “Yes! I did! And I was thinking how much fun it would be for us to do that together.” Fun like how much fun it would probably be prepping for a colonoscopy. This would involve shopping and makeup and general primping: all three not in Larkin’s repertoire.

  “Fantastic,” Taylor said, squeezing her hand. “I’m so excited to make an American friend here in Italy.”

  And in some weird way, Larkin sort of agreed.

  ~*~

  “So this scarf works magic with your blue eyes,” Taylor said as she did one of those drapey things with a scarf that Larkin could have donned twenty times and never made it look so effortless. “And these earrings would be perfect since you’re not wearing a necklace.” She held up a pair of chunky gold hoops. “I like the gold with your hair—it really warms your face.”

  Larkin looked in the mirror and bizarrely couldn’t help but agree. They’d gone to what felt like twenty different stores over the past three days, with Taylor using her connections and deep, deep discounts at some places to help Larkin get several outfits she’d never have considered buying for herself in the past.

  “Let’s see how you look in this,” Taylor said, holding up a pair of the skinniest-looking skinny jeans she’d ever seen. “And how about this with it?” She held out a supple, gorgeous, chestnut leather biker jacket.

  “I can’t afford a leather jacket!”

  Taylor wagged her finger. “When in Florence, sweetie. Every girl needs a leather jacket from Firenze.”

  Larkin wondered if she could put this on the newspaper’s tab as well. She imagined how well that would go over with her beloved boss.

  By the time the shopping spree had ended, Larkin was loaded down with the aforementioned outfits, a cream-colored cable sweater, a dark V-neck T-shirt, a white T-shirt, a dark blue drawstring mini, another pair of skinny jeans in black, a black blazer, a messenger satchel, a gray suede skirt with coordinating V-neck cardigan, a pair of tassel suede ankle boots, a pair of leopard-print ballet flats, brown and black sunglasses, two scarves, and a skinny belt. Plus jewelry to accessorize.

  Every time she’d go to pay at a store, Taylor would just smile that sphinxlike smile and wave her hand. “Don’t worry about it. It’s on me.”

  Larkin knew that she had gotten amazing discounts on these clothes, but they were still way out of her budget. And there was no way she was going to take charity. Besides, it would be unethical to take them from a source. Again, not like she was a source, in the Deep Throat sense. But still. What was with her and the Deep Throat references? She needed to get her mind out of whatever gutter it might be traipsing through.

  She’d resolved that after this whole thing was over, she’d discreetly make her way back to each store and return the items. It would be embarrassing, but what could she do? She was living on a reporter’s budget, so she really couldn’t just pay up herself. And no doubt, Taylor wouldn’t even notice the returns on her credit card as they were probably a spit in the ocean when it came to her spending. It was going to be a little heartbreaking, though, because even Larkin could recognize the transformation that was taking place in her just with some fashion corrections.

  They tucked into a little restaurant in the Oltrarno called Trattoria La Casalinga. They each ordered, Taylor a bistecca alla fiorentina, the much-vaunted steak for which Florence was known, and Larkin, her favorite dish when in Toscano, cinghiale, a wild boar stew with pappardelle. They decided to split a spaghetti al pomodoro for a primi.

  “I’m so surprised to see you eat, well, actual food,” Larkin said. “Nothing personal, but you put away a lot of it, too.”

  Taylor laughed. “I know, everyone thinks of the model stereotype, the starvation, the bulimia even. I guess I just decided I wanted this but I wanted it on my terms. And that means I eat, and I enjoy what I eat. I don’t overdo it, and I favor proteins more so than carbs, but I mean, hey, I’m in Italy. What am I gonna do, not eat?” She twirled her pasta on her fork.

  “You’d have to kill me to make me not eat,” Larkin said through a mouthful of pasta, laughing. “I love food too much. Pasta especially. There is no better meal. I mean it’s practically got the four food groups all rolled into one.”

  “Yeah, tell that to Doctor Atkins, right?”

  Larkin held up her glass of wine. “I’d like to make a toast,” she said. “First, to the inventor of pasta, whoever that was.”

  They clinked their glasses together.

  “Cin cin,” Taylor said.

  “And more importantly to you,” Larkin said, again tipping her glass to her newfound friend. “I never would have guessed there was so much more to you than meets the eye. And you have to admit, a whole lot of you meets the eye, to be honest.”

  Taylor shrugged. “What is that stupid commercial—did you ever see it? ‘Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful’?”

  Larkin nodded. “Of course. I hated her because she was b
eautiful.”

  “Yeah, well, sometimes it’s a little bit of a burden to be born with good looks,” she said. “Not that I’m looking for pity or anything, but you get pegged as a certain type. Like you’re pretty so you’re stupid. And shallow. And spoiled.”

  Larkin thought about that for a minute. “I guess it’s true. I’ve never once been accused of being a dumb blonde.” She pulled on a chunk of her very blond hair to demonstrate.

  “But the thing is, there’s so much more to me,” Taylor said. “Did you know, for instance, I’ve been very involved with Operation Smile?”

  Larkin’s eyes opened wide. “Really? I had no idea.”

  “See?” she said. “No one hears about those stories. I’ve traveled all over the world to help raise money for Operation Smile so that children born with facial deformities can get a new lease on life with the amazing surgeries that are available nowadays.”

  Larkin was shamefully surprised by this revelation. “So this isn’t one of those celebrity endorsement things that has no teeth behind it?”

  “I can show you pictures,” she said, pulling out her phone. “This was in India last year. Look at this beautiful little girl.” She scanned through photos, pointing out some of the kids she worked with. “This little boy was in Bangladesh. He gave me so many hugs, I wanted to bring him home.”

  “Wow,” Larkin said, pulling out a notebook and jotting down some notes. “This is the Taylor McFarland story everyone should know about,” she said. “The supermodel with a heart.”

  “Oh, but don’t make me out to be some sort of savior,” she said. “I just like to help people feel good about themselves is all, remember?”

  Larkin did remember. She’d told her that the first time they met. When Larkin had predetermined her to be a ditzy, superficial beauty queen.

  “Wow,” Larkin said. “I apologize. I grossly underestimated you, and that was really lousy of me. I think you’re really quite amazing.”

  Taylor smiled, her bright white teeth lighting up the room. “I knew you’d come around, Larkin. I’m glad you were able to give me a chance.”