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‘Actually, I hadn’t thought that news would travel through the restaurant at all.’ She tugged so hard on her ribbon that it came out in her hand. Scarlett compulsively threaded it through her fingers and decided it wasn’t fair that she had dressed for success and got through a big day, only to be startled by the strength of the gossip mill right at the end of it.
‘Your nose is scrunching,’ he said softly. This observation was followed by a frown that seemed self-repressive before he quickly turned his gaze away and headed for the door. ‘It’s less than five minutes’ walk to your bedsit. I’m sure you can deal with my company for that long, despite your efforts to avoid me today.’
‘I did not.’ She had, though, and why did a tingle go over Scarlett’s skin and her breath catch in her throat at the thought of him walking her home, for goodness’ sake? ‘As for moving to the bedsit, it’s not that I wasn’t happy at Mamma’s villa.’
‘Happy to the degree that you chose to move yourself into a bedsit after just two days there? And that was with your mother not even in residence in her home at the time.’ He shook his head. ‘You left her at age twelve, preferring to move to the other side of the world and live with your father, Scarlett. I haven’t forgotten that you told me that, or of your inability to feel close to her.’
He hesitated. ‘I also hear plenty about Lisa in terms of her ownership of Sorella. Your mother’s restaurant is our key rival for business here.’
‘Well, at least this way I avoid any conflict of interest.’ Scarlett dropped her guard a little. ‘I’m sure Mum would understand. Working for Luca, I couldn’t allow that. Really, I should have thought of it before I came over here.’
‘Certainly. I’m sure your mother should understand this.’ A twinkle in his eyes showed that he could see the strategy in Scarlett’s outlook. A moment later his smile faded to a more serious expression. ‘Scarlett, this morning I said things about you—’
‘It’s all right. You explained why you made me the ogre of the piece.’
He shook his head. ‘I could have thought of a better way to handle that. Realising Dante’s situation…threw me off. Enough that it took all my attention to not let him know what I’d worked out.’
‘You allowed him to keep his pride.’
‘Sometimes pride is all a man has left.’ The moment the words emerged, he clamped his lips together.
There were shadows in the backs of Lorenzo’s eyes as Scarlett searched them. But he quickly shielded those eyes with long silky lashes.
‘Will Dante be able to move into that boarding accommodation?’ She needed to focus on that, not on her rising consciousness of Lorenzo.
Anyway, it had to be a ‘workers co-operating for the better good’ kind of affinity that Scarlett was feeling. Anything else would be quite insane.
Lorenzo nodded. ‘He did so this morning.’
‘That’s good.’ Scarlett glanced behind her to make absolutely sure they truly were alone. ‘I can get alongside him; watch him for a while to make sure he’s okay. That that horrid man, whoever he is, isn’t still—’
‘You don’t have to worry about that. I’ll keep a close watch on Dante.’ Oh, his voice was so deep, so soft.
As was the expression in his eyes as he looked at her. Out of nowhere a sense of affinity rose between them. Scarlett opened her mouth and spoke straight out of that fellow feeling. ‘I trust you to do that.’
She realised that she did. Without any hesitation, she knew she could trust Lorenzo with that. He might have hurt her, let her down five years ago, but she just knew this.
He’s a good head chef, Scarlett. Isabella had said this.
When Luca discussed Lorenzo, he’d gone even further. I have great faith in him.
Maybe it was the faith of Isabella and Luca that gave Scarlett this belief in Lorenzo. Or maybe it was what she had seen of his work practices and ethics in the past two days. But they didn’t seem to compute with the ‘love rat’ image Scarlett had carried of him for the past five years.
As Scarlett really didn’t know how to address these thoughts, she turned her attention elsewhere. ‘You said this morning that Dante had taken a key that Luca kept as a spare? That Dante used that to let himself into the restaurant?’
‘Yes. Luca had a secret hiding place where he kept a spare key in case he ever lost his.’ Lorenzo drew a key chain from the pocket of his chef’s pants. There were two matching keys on it. ‘I knew about it, but I thought Isabella and I were the only ones aside from Luca who did. I should have thought better of that assumption.’
He shook his head. ‘In any case, that hiding place is no more. Would you like the second key?’
‘No, I have one from my uncle.’ Luca had run Rosa with a naive degree of trust in some respects. This became more and more clear to Scarlett the more she learned about the restaurant.
‘Then perhaps we should go.’ Lorenzo uttered the words quietly.
‘Yes.’ Scarlett glanced up. The expression in Lorenzo’s eyes made her breath catch in her throat.
Awareness, consciousness, memory. They were all there and for one brief moment they were all inside her, too. The feelings were so unexpected, and so opposite to what Scarlett had believed she felt towards him for five years, that she froze.
He drew a breath and stilled for a moment too before he blinked and got his feet moving and led the way to the kitchen doors. He pushed one open and stood back for her to precede him.
Somehow they made it outside and somehow she managed to say something about work as they headed across the square towards her bedsit. Her landlady had told her she travelled a lot, which suited Scarlett just fine. ‘I hope the staff will realise they’re not being given unreasonable conditions with the changes I’ve handed to them tonight.’
‘If you continue to make and implement all your decisions without informing me before you put them into action, you’ll make your job here harder than it needs to be.’ His words were a soft murmur as his gaze travelled once again over her face, her eyes, and dropped…to her mouth before he gave an almost imperceptible shake of his head.
Scarlett forced herself to breathe carefully and evenly and not allow herself the same examination he had just taken. ‘You feel that, as Head Chef and Manager, we should join our forces more?’
She had wished she could avoid him as much as she possibly could for the duration, but even Scarlett could admit that wasn’t very practical when he was her assistant, and the most pivotal employee of Rosa.
‘I don’t want to usurp your authority here, but, yes, I do feel we need to work together.’ His expression told her he wanted co-operation between them. ‘I believe your likelihood of success will be better if we combine our efforts.’
He held out one hand, palm up. ‘We would present a united front to the rest of the staff, if nothing else.’
‘It would make for smoother sailing, provided you can accept my—’ Authority? Her being further up the employment ladder than him? Scarlett didn’t quite know how to put it, and she’d never worried about that kind of thing before!
‘Provided I can accept your leadership in this workplace.’ He turned, just a little turn towards her, but it made the difference between two people talking from their safe distances as they faced forwards and walked, and something just that little bit more intimate.
Scarlett doubted he was even aware he’d done it, and she could have taken one step away from him in any direction to put an end to that feeling, but instead she continued to walk exactly as close as she was to him.
Scarlett shoved her ribbon into the pocket of her dress and told herself to get over it.
Whatever it was, exactly.
Well, she supposed ‘it’ was this strange feeling she had that felt like a combination of history and remembering and becoming conscious of Lorenzo all over again in ways she hadn’t anticipated and didn’t welcome.
Except that no matter how much you tell yourself you’re not, there’s a part of you that is aware of him.
‘I’m prepared to discuss things with you, but my decisions about the finances here are still final, no matter whether you agree with them or not.’ Even so saying, she felt the need to temper her statement. ‘I can see that two heads might be better than one with some of this. I suppose we can at least try.’
She had to do what was best for Rosa. If she felt this was best, such a decision didn’t have to feel dangerous to Scarlett, dangerous to her emotional well-being. She wasn’t about to fall in love with Lorenzo again, for crying out loud. They could work side by side for the betterment of Rosa. In fact, doing so would be really good for her because it would prove to her that she could remain completely emotionally distanced from him.
And physical attraction, Scarlett?
These few moments this evening of feeling a little too conscious of him, well, they were probably just a couple of old memories surfacing. They didn’t mean anything and would be long gone and forgotten by tomorrow morning when she met him again at work.
Scarlett drew a breath that filled her lungs with the blunted scent of his aftershave lotion and realised they were somehow walking even closer than they had been. Their shoulders were leaning towards each other. He smelled familiar and…she was far too tired for this right now. Her defences were not as strong as they should be.
‘Thank you. I want to help you, Scarlett, not get in the way of what you’re trying to do here.’ Lorenzo drew a deep breath.
They arrived at her bedsit and stepped into the lee of the door lintel.
‘Goodnight—’
‘Thank you for seeing me—’
He reached for her hand, perhaps to shake it.
Scarlett took a step towards the door as he did so, and they each stepped into the other’s path. Lorenzo’s hands came up to cup her elbows, perhaps to hold her still while he stepped around her.
Instead she glanced up. He glanced down into her eyes and a moment later, their lips met.
Chapter Four
‘GOODNIGHT. I—thank you for seeing me home.’ Scarlett uttered the words through lips that wanted to deny what had just happened.
Wanted to deny a kiss that had lasted less than a second, a mere brush of lips against lips before she and Lorenzo had both…broken away. They’d each stepped back as though they’d been burnt. ‘I have to—’
She couldn’t make calm words come out, couldn’t do anything to downplay something that shouldn’t even need to be downplayed and yet, to Scarlett, the entire world had stopped and then started up again and now it was spinning strangely and nothing felt quite right because of Lorenzo’s kiss…
Barely even a kiss, Scarlett.
Somehow she got her key straight into the lock, twisted it and got the door open. Her feet carried her through and she closed the door. She didn’t look back, and then through the closed door she heard his footsteps taking him away in a rapid stride that went, and then half missed a step, and then kept going.
He’d hesitated.
And as that happened Scarlett had leaned her shoulder against the closed door and shut her eyes and silently willed…What? For him to stop? Keep walking away?
She should have said something. Scarlett shouldn’t have allowed that kiss to happen in the first place. And that was the problem. Scarlett didn’t believe either one of them had anticipated the kiss happening. It hadn’t been planned or thought about. How could she protect against the possibility of something she simply hadn’t expected?
For one little blink in time, five years had dropped away and they’d simply reached for each other. That should not, even for a second, have seemed the natural thing to do.
This had shocked her.
Perhaps it had also shocked Lorenzo.
Then maybe you should ask yourself how it’s affected you now that it’s happened?
Scarlett shook her head and went to the wardrobe to pull out her workout clothes of knee-length fitted black pants and lime-green vest-top and trainers. She clipped on her iPod, turned the music to a mind-numbing set, and began her Pilates routine.
Forget being kissed by a man who had no right to kiss her, before they both realised the insanity of their actions, and stopped. Forget how it had happened or why it had happened or anything else about it.
Scarlett was here for Rosa and her family and she only wanted to think about those issues. She forced her brain to the tricky issue of pulling Rosa into an utterly profitable financial position, and kept her thoughts there as she stretched and twisted and limbered away the tensions of her day.
Over the next five days, Scarlett forced aside what she chose to refer to in her thoughts when she couldn’t avoid acknowledging it altogether, as ‘that regrettable moment’. And indeed for the most part, she did a very good job of forgetting/ignoring/not confronting the issue in a tizzy of busyness at the restaurant.
She worked hard, visited often with Isabella and sometimes with other family members. She also co-operated with Lorenzo in terms of the running of Rosa where that co-operation was needed, and he co-operated with her. Scarlett felt quite certain that Lorenzo also didn’t give the matter of that one, tiny, completely insignificant slip that had occurred outside her bedsit a single thought.
She frowned and dipped her hand through the cool, clear swimming pool water. Today was Monday and the restaurant was closed during the main part of the day while the town observed a partial religious holiday. For those so inclined there’d been church services earlier. Rosa would staff up at four p.m. and open for business for the evening.
For now, Scarlett, Isabella and Scarlett’s sister Jackie were lazing in this sheltered swimming pool that was available to townsfolk who belonged either as students or teachers to the study faculty that owned it. It was a hot day, and quiet and restful here. Getting away for this had been a very welcome idea.
Scarlett dipped her shoulders beneath the cool water. Her hair was up in an untidy knot on top of her head, secured with a hair band and a thick red ribbon that exactly matched her high-cut one-piece red suit. She was not obsessive-compulsive about her ribbons. Scarlett simply enjoyed finding new ones and matching them to her clothing.
Lorenzo has looked at each change of ribbon. His gaze goes often to your hair. He used to enjoy sifting it through his fingers…
Oh! Scarlett pinched her lips together. She was having a rest. Thinking about the head chef of Rosa was not on her agenda for right now. For at all! She turned to Jackie and forced a smile. ‘This is nice. Thanks for talking me into joining you and Izzie.’
‘You’ve been hard to pin down for any one-on-one time since you came back to Monta Correnti.’ Jackie’s words were not accusatory, simply honest. ‘When Romano said he needed to come out here, I thought why not make a little pool party of it?’
Had Jackie chosen an event where Isabella would be present to make this a little easier for her sister? Scarlett didn’t know what to say. Of all the family, Jackie was the one she found it most difficult to spend time with.
Her guilt over her sister’s loss of her daughter, Kate, for so many years ate at her. Scarlett…didn’t know how to deal with that. And she realised now, as she looked into Jackie’s eyes, that she had been avoiding her sister because of this issue.
Before Scarlett could speak, and she didn’t know what she would have said anyway, Jackie went on.
‘Romano had to come out here anyway for a meeting. He only teaches an evening class once a week, but now that he’s on the board of teachers things like that come up periodically.’ Her voice softened as she spoke of the man who’d been her teenage lover and also the father of the baby that Jackie had given up for adoption. ‘I figured we’d all be grateful for some time in the water, anyway.’
That was true. It was a hot day.
‘Do you suppose we should actually make some appearance of swimming, just so we look like we belong in here?’ Isabella asked the question without moving a muscle.
‘Oh, I think somnolent suits us fairly well, don’t you?’ Scarlett inserted this quip and was proud of her effort. She wanted…to feel closer to Jackie, and to feel comfortable with her sister overall. That would be nice, but it wasn’t going to happen while Scarlett kept putting off self-protective prickle vibes every time they were near each other.
Isabella seemed to have dealt with any guilt that she felt over Jackie’s loss. Why couldn’t Scarlett do the same and put all that behind her?
‘Well, I’m not moving an inch until Romano finishes his meeting with the others and comes to join us.’ Jackie laughed and settled her arms more firmly back against the edge of the pool.
Isabella raised her brows in Scarlett’s direction. ‘You never said what the phone call was about from your mother yesterday at the restaurant, Scarlett. Is it anything I should know about, or tell Papa? I know we’ve put you in charge but I wouldn’t want you to think you have to deal with everything all by yourself. If there are any issues with Sorella—’
‘No, it wasn’t about either of the restaurants.’ Her mother and her uncle Luca owned a restaurant each. Their rivalry when it came to those restaurants was long-standing, though from the viewpoint of the staff actually working at Rosa, at least, Scarlett wasn’t really picking up that vibe. They just wanted to get on with the job. It wouldn’t surprise her too much to learn that the staff at Sorella felt the same way.
‘As predicted, Izzie, Mamma wasn’t happy to know that I’d moved out of her home.’ Scarlett shrugged. ‘She wasn’t pleased initially to know that I was going to work at Rosa, either. I thought, when she invited me to stay at her villa while I was here, that she’d got over that.’
‘I wish she and my father could just get along.’ Isabella shook her head. ‘I hope her call didn’t upset you too much, Scarlett.’
‘No. That’s just Mamma. Her reaction just concreted it in for me that I’d made the right decision in moving out of her villa.’ Scarlett let her glance encompass Jackie. ‘As for my working at Rosa, that’s my decision. It’s got nothing to do with our mother.’
Jackie dipped her chin in acknowledgement. ‘That sounds very fair to me.’
It was. And Scarlett appreciated the support. ‘Mamma said that Elizabeth would never move out of her own mother’s home making the entire town assume that home wasn’t good enough for her.’
Jackie stared for a moment and then threw her head back and laughed.
Scarlett shook her head in bewilderment. ‘What?’
‘Lizzie might be the one of us who gets on the best with our mother, but Lizzie is also living in Australia! It’s not as though she’s right in Mamma’s pocket all the time to test the friendship, so to speak.’ Jackie’s smile widened. ‘It’s just that you’re the one who looks exactly like Mamma when you pull that intolerant, fed-up-to-the-gills expression.’
‘Oh, thanks very much!’ Scarlett flicked water at her sister and received the same treatment back.
Izzie, caught in the middle, squealed and ducked right under the water, which somewhat defeated the purpose if she’d been trying to avoid being splashed.
