Caroselli's Accidental Heir

by Michelle Celmer

  Then they would deal with it. Whatever it was. “Like the doctor said, there’s no point worrying until there’s something to worry about.”

  “That’s easy for you to say.”

  “No,” he glanced over at her, “it’s not. I’m worried, too.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “That was unfair. Of course you are.”

  “You know what might make things easier?”

  “What?”

  “If you married me.”

  She shot him a look.

  That was a definite no. “No matter what it is, if it’s anything at all, we’ll deal with it. Together. Everything will be okay.”

  “You’re right,” she said, with a smile that was almost genuine. “I have to be positive.”

  He was glad she believed him. Now, if he could just manage to convince himself.

  * * *

  When Nonno said he would teach her to make the sauce, Lucy had assumed he would make it and she would watch. She was wrong. He claimed that doing all the work was part of the learning process. She sort of had the feeling his cook had the day off and Lucy was just a hapless replacement.

  Though she had still been apprehensive about coming here, it sure beat sitting home, twiddling her thumbs, wondering what was wrong with the baby. Or her. Or worse, both of them. Tony must have felt the same way, because instead of going back home after he dropped her at Nonno’s, he went into the office instead, even though he’d sworn he was taking the rest of the week off. Honestly, she couldn’t blame him.

  First, Nonno had her gather all the ingredients from the pantry and refrigerator, along with a big silver pot from the cupboard that had seen its fair share of time on an open flame.

  He sat on a stool at the kitchen island, taking her through the steps of the recipe, telling her to add a pinch of this and a touch of that. He never once had her use a measuring spoon.

  “This isn’t so hard,” she said, wiping her hands on the apron he’d given her to wear. She stirred the contents of the pot with a wooden spoon. “And it smells delicious.”

  “I think you’re a natural.”

  “It’s fun. Though I’m not sure I’ll remember all that.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll write it down for you.”

  “With actual measurements?”

  “Yes, yes, with measurements.”

  “I’ll add it to my journal so I’ll always have it.”

  “My Angelica kept a journal,” Nonno said. “I buried it with her. My children were not happy with me.”

  “They wanted to read it?”

  “Yes, but they were Angelica’s private thoughts, and no one else’s business. Including mine.”

  “My journal is online, so no one without a password can access it. It started out as a school project, but I liked it so much I kept writing.”

  He patted the stool beside him. “Come, sit with me.”

  She wondered if Tony had told him what the doctor said about her staying off her feet. After sitting idle for two days, it felt good to move around, to get out of the apartment. If the doctor were to ever put her on total bed rest, she would need a padded room within the first week.

  “Sit. Rest,” Nonno said. “Soon we’ll start the noodles.”

  Even she could boil noodles.

  She rinsed her hands at the sink then sat down beside him. “How did you learn to cook?”

  “My madre. She was a cook for a wealthy family in our village. She also made candy and sold it to the local merchants. I helped her.”

  “What did your father do?”

  “He was a merchant. But he died when I was very small.”

  “Was it just you and your mom?”

  “Yes, just the two of us. We had very little. Many nights we went to bed hungry.”

  That certainly was something they had in common.

  “You, too,” he said, and it wasn’t a question. He already knew.

  “Tony told you?”

  “I could see it in your eyes.” He laid a hand over hers and patted gently, and something about the gesture made her want to cry. He was being so kind to her. Despite who she was.

  “My mom and I didn’t have much, either,” she told him. “And it was just the two of us.”

  “I helped as much as a child could. When I was old enough, I sold our candy from a cart on the street, going door to door, every single day, until the cart was empty. That’s how I met my Angelica.”

  “Was it love at first sight?” she asked him.

  “It was for me. But she was from a wealthy family and her parents did not want a peddler for a son-in-law.”

  “Did you elope?”

  “We planned to, but her parents found out and took her away. To America.”

  Wow, talk about harsh. Moving their daughter halfway around the world to get him out of her life. “So what did you do?”

  “I followed her.”

  “Here? To Chicago.”

  He nodded, the memory making him smile, lighting his face with a youthful glow.

  Memories were powerful things.

  “She was the love of my life. My other half. I would move heaven and earth to be with her.”

  It sounded as if he had.

  “We began to meet in secret, but soon her father found out.”

  “What did he do?”

  “When he realized that I would not give up so easily, he made me a deal. I could have his daughter’s hand when I could provide for her in a manner he saw fit. No easy task for a young man selling chocolate, I assure you. The day I opened the doors to the first Caroselli Chocolate store in downtown Chicago, I asked again. This time he called me foolish and said I would fail. That I would never amount to anything, and I would never be good enough for his daughter. A year later I owned three stores and still couldn’t keep up with demand. So I asked him again.”

  “And?”

  Nonno smiled. “He gave us his blessing.”

  Lucy dropped her chin in her palm and sighed wistfully. “I think that’s the most romantic story I’ve ever heard.” Tony had told her that his grandfather came to this country with only twenty dollars in his pocket, but she hadn’t realized how poor he had actually been, and what hard work it must have taken to build his fortune.

  For some reason the idea made him seem a little less intimidating.

  “Could you imagine how different my life would have been if I had listened to him? If I had believed I wasn’t good enough. Instead, every time he doubted my worthiness, I worked that much harder to prove him wrong. I think he meant it to happen exactly that way. If not for my father-in-law, I would not be the success I am today.”

  He was lucky to have someone who saw his potential, someone who cared enough to push him in the right direction.

  “Now, for the noodles,” he said, rubbing his hands together in anticipation. “We’ll need flour and eggs.”

  Flour and eggs? Why would they need that to boil noodles?

  “And in the pantry on the top shelf you’ll find the pasta maker.”

  Wait a minute. Pasta maker? “Are we actually making the noodles? Like, from scratch?”

  “My mother’s recipe,” he said, tapping his temple. “It’s all up here.”

  Her first thought was, so much for this being easy. But then they got started and she realized it wasn’t really all that complicated. Nonno showed her how to make a crater in the center of the flour, then add the wet ingredients and fold it in on itself, over and over until it was thoroughly mixed. It was fun running the dough through the rollers, watching it grow thinner and thinner until it was ready to cut into strips, which they left to dry on racks.

  When they were finished she got up from the stool and gave the sauce a stir. It really did smell am
azing.

  Her stomach growled greedily. So loudly that Nonno heard it.

  “Ah,” he said with a smile, one that crinkled his eyes, and showed off teeth that may not have been perfect, but were his own. “You approve.”

  “I can’t wait to try it. Although I think we made enough to feed an army.”

  “We do have many people to feed tonight.”

  Her hand stopped mid-stir. Did he say tonight? As in tonight?

  “What people?”

  “The family, of course.”

  Eight

  “They come the last Friday of every month,” Nonno told Lucy.

  And it was indeed the last Friday of the month. Her heart sank. “So, I’m making dinner for your entire family?”

  Nonno nodded.

  Aw, hell. She knew Tony ate at his grandfather’s the last Friday of every month, but she hadn’t made the connection.

  Suddenly she wasn’t all that hungry anymore. Even worse, what food she did have in her stomach wanted to come back up for a visit.

  “I need to rest,” Nonno said, rising slowly from the stool, appearing a little unsteady on his feet. “When I wake up, we’ll do the salad.”

  Meaning he expected her to stay. Well, crap. What was she supposed to do now? He’d been so nice to her today. It would be rude not to stick around, but to meet the entire enormous family in one night? Why didn’t he just toss her into a cage with a pack of hungry wolves, or a tank of bloodthirsty piranha?

  Either way she would be ripped to shreds.

  “Walk with me,” Nonno said, taking her arm to steady himself. As they walked slowly through the kitchen to the elevator, she thought about his story, and the way he’d followed his beloved Angelica around the world. It tugged at her heartstrings, and at the same time made her inexplicably sad. She could only wish that someday someone would love her so completely that he would move heaven and earth to be with her.

  “You were right,” she said, the words coming out of her mouth before she had even decided to say them. “I left hoping that Tony would follow me. He didn’t.”

  It stung to admit that. To leave herself so vulnerable. For the first time in her life she had let herself wish for something. Something big. Unconditional love.

  She should have known better.

  Nonno gave her arm a reassuring squeeze as they stepped in the elevator and the doors rolled closed.

  “I wasn’t supposed to fall in love with him,” she said, feeling as if she should explain. So he would understand why someone like her would get her hopes up about a guy like his grandson. “I didn’t think I even knew how to love someone. Then bam, there it was. And he didn’t love me back. How’s that for irony.”

  “You told him this? That you love him?”

  “Absolutely not. It would be too humiliating.”

  He looked confused. “Because you assume that he doesn’t love you?”

  “It seems like a pretty safe bet.”

  “Ah, but mind reading is tricky business.”

  “Mind reading?”

  “Isn’t that what you’re doing? How can Tony know how you feel if you don’t tell him?”

  Because what she felt didn’t matter. “Didn’t Tony tell you that he and I are just friends with benefits? It doesn’t get much clearer than that. That’s all it ever was to him. All it was ever supposed to be. It’s not his fault that I blew it. That I broke the rules.”

  “But your feelings changed. Couldn’t they could have changed for him as well?”

  Why was he pushing so hard about this? “Did Tony say something to you?”

  A vague smile pulled at his tired eyes. “Tony says many things to me.”

  She wasn’t sure how to take that. The door opened and he let go of her arm to step off the elevator. She expected him to turn and say something else, but he walked into his room directly across the hall and closed the door.

  What the heck had he been trying to say to her?

  She took the stairs down, calling Tony to see if he could drive her home to change. In black leggings and a long sweater, she wasn’t exactly dressed for dinner. He didn’t answer, so she left a message. She hoped it was casual Friday.

  She stepped back into the kitchen, and was startled by the male figure hunched over the pot of sauce until she realized it was Tony. He had incredible timing.

  “Hey, I just called you,” she said.

  He turned, rising to his full height, and only then did she notice the gray feathered through the man’s dark hair.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, her cheeks flaming with embarrassment. “I thought you were Tony.”

  “Demitrio,” he said. “Tony’s uncle.”

  So this was the CEO of Caroselli Chocolate. She’d expected someone much more...something. Intimidating maybe. But in jeans and a polo shirt, he just seemed like a regular guy.

  “You must be Lucy,” he said.

  She accepted his outstretched hand. It was eerie how alike he and Tony not only looked but sounded. If she closed her eyes and listened to each of them, she might have a hard time telling them apart.

  She could only imagine the things going through his head at that moment, like, what was this stranger doing snooping around his father’s house? “You’re probably wondering what I’m doing here,” she said.

  He smiled. The same quirky, slightly lopsided grin that she had seen on Tony a bazillion times. “The tomato-stained apron sort of speaks for itself.”

  “Oh, right.” She’d forgotten she was wearing it. “Cooking lesson.”

  “I figured. Is Nonno around?”

  “He just laid down for a nap.”

  “My contribution to dinner,” Demitrio said, gesturing to a bakery bag stuffed with long thin loaves of unsliced bread that he’d left on the table. “I might be a little late tonight, so I thought it best to bring it by now.”

  “I’m sure he’ll appreciate that.”

  Demetrio flashed her a smile that was so Tony, it gave her a bizarre little shiver. She must have been looking at him funny, because he asked her, “Everything all right?”

  She shook the fog from her brain. She was making an even bigger fool of herself than usual. “Yes, sorry. I don’t mean to stare. It’s just that you and Tony look so much alike. You even sound alike.”

  His grin was a wry one. “It’s almost as if we’re related.”

  They had the same ironic sense of humor as well, and there was something about Demitrio that put her at ease. Just the way Tony had when they first met.

  That was three people in the family who didn’t seem to hate her guts. Four including Tony. Only a couple dozen to go.

  “Helloooo! Lucy?” someone called, and they both turned to see Tony’s mom glide into the room. She smiled when she saw Lucy standing there, but when she noticed Demitrio, she stopped abruptly and the smile disappeared. “Oh. Hello, Demitrio.”

  “Sarah,” he said, nodding cordially, his expression tight. “I was just on my way out.”

  Whoa, talk about tension. They were definitely not happy to see each other.

  “It was nice to meet you, Lucy,” Demitrio said.

  “You, too. I’ll see you later.”

  When he was gone, Sarah turned to her and smiled, but Lucy could see that she was shaken by the encounter. Of course she wondered why, but it was so not any of her business.

  “I came by to make sure Nonno wasn’t wearing you out,” Sarah said. “Tony told me what the doctor said about keeping off your feet.”

  “He did?” Hadn’t they agreed not to say anything to the family until they heard back about her test results?

  “For the record, Tony didn’t voluntarily tell me about the appointment. I had lunch with Gina yesterday and she mentioned that Nick and Terri saw
you two at Dr. Hannan’s office. I browbeat the details out of him.”

  “Gina?”

  “My sister-in-law. Nick’s mom. Who technically isn’t my sister-in-law since she divorced Leo, my brother-in-law. But they just set a date.”

  “Set a date?”

  “For their wedding.”

  “They’re getting married again?”

  She shrugged, as if she didn’t understand it, either. “I’ll believe it when I see it. I love Gina like a sister, but she’s always been a little...well, flaky. But who am I to pass judgment?”

  Weirder things had happened.

  “Enough about my crazy relatives,” she said, waving the subject away like a pesky insect. “How do you feel?”

  “Physically I feel fine. It’s hard to imagine that something could be wrong.”

  “So you haven’t heard from the doctor?”

  “Not yet. He said Friday at the latest.”

  “Well, try not to worry. My instincts are telling me that everything will be just fine. I have a sixth sense about these things.”

  She hoped Sarah was right. In Lucy’s experience, if something had the potential to go badly, it usually did. She just couldn’t seem to shake the feeling that something was terribly wrong with the baby. And it was her fault. She had never been particularly religious, but if there was a God, she hoped He would cut her a break this time.

  “Have you started making a list of the things you’ll need?” Sarah asked.

  “Things?”

  “For the baby. Three months probably seems like a long time, but take it from someone who’s been there, the days will fly by. It’s good to be prepared.”

  “I guess I need everything. But maybe we should wait until we hear from the doctor. I would hate to spend a lot of money on a bunch of baby stuff we’ll never use.”

  “Oh, Lucy,” Sarah said, and then she did something totally unexpected. She pulled Lucy into her arms and hugged her hard. Lucy was so stunned by the gesture, she wasn’t sure how to react. She couldn’t even recall her own mom ever holding her this way, much less a practical stranger. With so much compassion, and genuine affection.

  Something deep inside of Lucy urged her to pull away, to keep her distance, but she was so tired of being alone. So tired of constantly pushing everyone away. So she didn’t. She took a huge leap of faith, hugging Sarah back, dissolving into a sobbing, sniffling blob. And once she got started, she couldn’t seem to stop.”