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‘Gracie,’ Luca said, ‘this is Giovanni. Mila’s great-uncle. Giovanni, this is Gracie. She is from Australia, though she is half-Italian.’ He offered her a wink with his last comment and she could not help but smile.
The elder man blew Gracie an air-kiss and gabbled in Italian. She picked out enough words she recognised to know she was being favourably compared with Venus, the Roman goddess of love.
She tried to hide her snort of laughter behind a measured sip of the undemanding red wine, but Luca was too quick for her.
‘You understood that, I see. It seems your Italian is selective.’
‘Hmm,’ Gracie said as Giovanni left with their orders. ‘I did the Spanish Steps in my first week here, and I tell you, there I heard some things. The boys who trawl that place could make a packet writing Valentine’s Day cards. But, as compliments went, Giovanni’s was lovely.’
‘And yet not far off the mark,’ Luca insisted.
Gracie felt the same unusual warmth envelop her again.
‘Please,’ Gracie scoffed. She leant her chin on her palm. ‘You know what I think it is? Italian men are born with a flattering gene that missed Australian men altogether. Think Romeo. Think Rudy Valentino. Since landing in Rome, I have been approached and asked on a date at least once a day. It’s ridiculous. In my tatty old jacket and beanie hat, I am surprised they could even tell I was female!’
Luca’s eminently male mouth kicked up at one corner. ‘Ah, but that is the thing about we Italians—we have always been able to appreciate a work of art.’
Gracie knew from the twinkle in Luca’s eyes that he was baiting her, but her blush insisted on sticking around. ‘Please, stop it!’ she insisted. Then said, ‘But who am I kidding? I don’t think you could stop it if you tried. You are flirting machines.’
‘You are very pretty,’ Mila said to Gracie from out of the blue.
Luca laughed aloud, the sound deep and resonant and utterly infectious. ‘See!’ he said. ‘It’s an empirical reality.’
‘It’s a sickness,’ Gracie insisted.
Mila crawled over Luca’s lap, rounded the table and plopped herself onto Gracie’s lap, making sure the attention of the group was focused back where it belonged. Gracie was thankful; the constant compliments made the snug room feel airless.
Mila’s chubby fingers ran down the contours of Gracie’s face, the soft pads leaving a tickling trail across her forehead, her nose, her lips and her chin.
‘You look like me,’ Mila said.
‘Do you think so?’ Gracie asked, grinning over the young one’s head at her father. ‘But I have freckles on my nose and you do not.’
‘That is true,’ Mila said, her face serious as she studied the tiny dots scattered over Gracie’s nose. ‘I think that means I am prettier than you.’
Luca reached out to scold Mila, but Gracie shushed him with a blink and a small shake of her head. ‘You know what? I think you might be right.’
‘Will I look like Gracie when I am as big as her?’ Mila asked, bending over backwards to look at Luca. ‘Will I too have…freckles? Or will I look like my mother?’
Luca’s smile faltered, but only for a second, then it was back in place, extra-bright. He held out his arms and Mila readily scampered back into them, settling on his lap quite happily. ‘You will look just like your mother, I think.’
Mila looked Gracie over once more then nodded, seeming to find that answer satisfactory. ‘OK.’
‘She speaks English so well,’ Gracie said, aiming to swing the conversation to a less loaded subject.
‘We spent several months in England a couple of years ago and she learned to speak both languages at the same time. She spoke a strange hybrid language of her own for some time but it soon sorted itself out. In recent months I fear she has begun to lose the skill, since we have not encouraged it nearly enough at home.’
Luca seemed a million miles away as he ran a hand over his daughter’s curls. ‘So why have you come to our fair city?’ he asked, changing the subject again.
Gracie waited for the usual intense regret to stab through her at the question. But instead she felt a calmness come over her at the thought of confiding in him. Maybe because of the empty glass of wine on the table before her. Maybe because of the remembrance of the impossible smile on Neptune’s stone face. Or maybe because of the infinite kindness residing in Luca’s deep, dark eyes.
Whatever it was that gave her the courage, she sucked up her apprehension and said, ‘I have come to Rome to find my father.’
CHAPTER TWO
‘YOUR father is missing?’ Luca asked, leaning forward, his voice full of concern.
‘Not exactly,’ Gracie said. ‘I just decided it was time that he was found. He is the Italian part of my half-Italian heritage.’
‘And I take it you have not seen him in a long time.’
‘Actually never.’
‘No!’ he cried with that so very Italian fervour that always caught at her. ‘A daughter who has never known her father is a sad thing indeed.’
Something akin to wrenching pain slid across the man’s expressive eyes, a pain so sharp, so concerned, Gracie felt her own chest constrict in empathy.
Italians and their families were a total astonishment to her. Enzo, the thirty-year-old single guy who ran the hostel she was staying in, still lived with his parents. And his brother, who was long since married, lived in the house next door. Back home, in Melbourne, she went months without catching up with her closest family members but these people couldn’t bear to move further than next door. It was so far out of the realm of her experience that she found it hard to grasp. But she was in Italy to try. She had worn herself ragged, grasping with everything she had to discover that which these people took for granted.
‘Please, is there any way I can help?’ Luca asked.
Gracie was ready to say no. She had been independent for so long, and she had never been one to ask for help. But everything had felt hopeless only minutes before. Maybe, if there was a time to ask for help, this was it.
‘I am sure you are a busy man,’ she said, fumbling her way towards a decision.
He shrugged slightly. ‘At times. But today is Saturday and Mila and I have no set plans. Do we, Mila?’
Mila shook her head, her curls bouncing back and forth.
‘Tell me about it,’ he insisted gently.
Gracie baulked, the words help me just too unfamiliar to utter. But then she remembered the desperation behind her wish at the fountain, the last-ditch hope she had poured into that coin. What if Luca was the answer to her wish? What if he could lead her to her father? What if he was her last chance to find what she was searching for?
Either way, she had come too far, had burned too many bridges and had exhausted too much of her own spirit not to go the distance. Her mouth twitched with the need to at least try.
Gracie glanced at Mila, who was bouncing up and down in her seat, kicking rhythmically at the table leg.
Luca followed her gaze. ‘Mila, why don’t you go and see if Zio Giovanni needs a hand?’
Mila’s mouth turned down. ‘But I don’t want to.’
‘He might even have some tiramisu for you to nibble on, if you’re lucky.’
Mila’s eyes grew wide, then without another word she scrambled over her father and raced into the kitchen.
‘That’s bribery, Dad,’ Gracie said with a smile.
‘Sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do,’ Luca said in an impeccable New York mob accent. If possible, his eyes warmed even more when he smiled.
But there was no use encouraging him. Attraction was a nebulous thing. It was nothing to pin your hopes and dreams on. It came from nowhere and just as easily slid back there. She knew better than most, as she was the result of such an attraction.
‘Tell me about your father,’ Luca said, splintering the loaded silence.
‘All I really have is a name. I know he was about twenty years old and on holiday from law school when he met my mother in Rome twenty-five years ago.’
‘Well, there you go. If he is a lawyer, he will be registered.’
‘For whatever reason I have not been able to find him that way. Perhaps I have the spelling wrong, or he didn’t graduate. With the language barrier it makes it that much more difficult.’
‘And your mother cannot give you any more details?’ he asked, his voice soft and sensitive.
Gracie flinched as old screaming fights at her mother’s house came swimming back. Gracie demanding information and her mother calling her ungrateful and insensitive. Funny; she almost longed for those fights now.
‘My mother died several months ago,’ Gracie said, playing with the corner of her napkin and rolling her shoulders, holding at bay the incapacitating chill that shot through her every time she remembered. ‘But the truth is I never would have come looking for him while she was alive. His very existence was always a sore point for her.’
‘I see,’ Luca said, the words so loaded she thought he saw a great deal more than she had told him. ‘It seems that you are at a crossroads. Ensuring assistance from a local may make all the difference in your quest. So do tell me, what is your father’s name?’
The name reverberated around in her head several times before it tripped onto her tongue. She looked down at the table, where her hands rested, pale and cold, upon the chequered tablecloth. ‘His name is Antonio Graziano.’
While Gracie looked back up at Luca, her eyes beseeched him, glittering with desperate hope that perhaps he was the answer to her prayers. Something in her engaging face, in her tense body, made Luca truly wish that the name would mean something to him. But unfortunately it did not.
‘A good, strong name,’ he said, knowing his kind words did nothing to heal her disappointment. The anticipation leaked from her body as she shrank back into her chair.
Well, know the man or not, he still owed her. This woman had delivered his Mila back to him in one piece and he had to repay her with more than a hot lunch.
‘Like it or not, I am going to help you, Gracie Lane,’ he said. The smile that spread across her lovely face was so bright that it dazzled him. He felt it deep down in places that had not made themselves felt in a good long while. It surprised him. She surprised him.
She’d had her wallet stolen and she had laughed! Sarina would have ranted and raved and shouted the piazza down. Mila would have emulated. Bedlam would have ensued, and, as always, he would have had to save the day.
Yet this curiosity before him had laughed. Her day had not needed to be saved. She just went on regardless. And he had been utterly surprised.
Luca had had enough surprises in his life that he thought he had become immune to their effect, but apparently he had not. And he quite liked the fact that he was not so impervious after all.
He further surprised himself by pronouncing, ‘I…we are heading back home to my villa this afternoon. Why don’t you come with us? I have facilities there to help you in your search.’
‘No. Thank you but no.’ Gracie shook her head, her dark curls swishing about her ears. Then she shrugged. ‘Today is to be my last day in Rome.’
Luca finally understood the full measure of her hopelessness. He knew what hopelessness felt like. For the sake of his family he had beaten it down. But this girl had nobody near and dear to her to help her do that.
‘I assume you have an Italian passport, since your father was born here?’ His words came as a question.
‘I do.’
‘Then you can stay in Italy as long as it takes for you to find your father.’
She blinked at him several times. ‘Officially, yes. Practically, not a chance. This is it for me. No more time. No more money. No more chances.’
‘And if you had the means to stay?’
‘Then I would stick around for as long as it took to track him down.’ Her voice was measured, her gaze cautious and her top teeth bit down on her lower lip.
It was enough to distract from his burgeoning idea. ‘As I said earlier,’ he continued, dragging his eyes back to her guarded gaze, ‘Mila’s language skills have been neglected for far too long. I believe she could benefit from having a live-in English tutor and I would like you to take the position.’
Her mouth popped open and she remained speechless. Before she had the chance to say no, he spelt it out for her. ‘You can school Mila in English and in return I will help you find your father.’
There, he thought, that’s an offer she can’t refuse.
‘What are you?’ she asked. ‘My knight in shining armour?’
Luca remembered another time he had been called the same. Once, a few years before, by his younger brother. But where Gracie was looking at him with something akin to awe, his brother’s tone had been bitter and accusing. Luca blanked out the image, much preferring to focus on the much more agreeable image before him now.
‘Not at all,’ he insisted. ‘It seems a reasonable bargain to me.’
‘But I am not teacher material, Luca,’ she said with a hand on her heart. ‘I am a casino croupier by trade. I could teach Mila odds. I could teach her how to flip a coin. Heck, I could even teach her to count cards if that tickled your fancy. I have no experience teaching English as a second language.’
Luca was having none of it. She was a stubborn one so he had to try another tack. ‘The truth is, Mila has taken to you,’ he said.
Gracie flapped a hand in front of her face. ‘That’s nothing. Kids always gravitate to me. I’m the one who ends up keeping the kids entertained at weddings. Must be the fact that I know many naughty songs.’
Luca could not help but smile. ‘Nevertheless, Mila hasn’t taken to any strangers in a long while, especially those who threaten to steal my time. It is time for her to let someone new into her social circle, especially since she will be starting school next year. This arrangement would be good for all concerned. It’s not personal, Gracie. It’s strictly business.’
Gracie watched him with her head cocked on the side, her bright blue eyes clear and her expression open, and then she burst into laughter.
‘What’s so funny?’ Luca asked.
‘Do you mean to sound like a character from The Godfather, or is “it’s business, not personal” just another essentially Italian thing?’
Luca had no idea what she was talking about. ‘I’ve never seen the film, sorry.’
‘You’re kidding me?’
He shook his head and wondered if he had somehow blown it. But her smile only grew. Whatever he had accidentally said, it had worked.
‘OK. I’ll do it. Your Mila will be speaking like a little Aussie before you know it.’
He released a breath he hadn’t realised he was holding. ‘Wonderful,’ he said, surprised anew at how very much he had hoped she would agree. ‘I know I should have asked before even making the offer, but I’m sure you understand I will need some sort of résumé and references.’
Gracie dived into her backpack and after some squirrelling about pulled out a slightly crumpled two-page résumé. She handed it over with a shrug. ‘I had it with me today just in case. If I decided to slog it out for another couple of weeks, I would have had to get a job in a pub, or something…’
‘Well, Ms Lane,’ Luca said after making sure there were a couple of phone numbers he could call, ‘it seems that the possible pub has lost out to “or something”.’
‘Papa!’ Mila squealed as she bundled back to the table.
Luca grabbed her up as she raced towards them, plonking her onto his lap. He knew he was using her as some sort of shield, a promise to the woman before him that Mila was the only thing between them, though he had a mounting feeling that wasn’t entirely true. If he could reunite father and daughter, there was an undeniable symmetry in the idea that he could not ignore.
‘Papa, I ate tiramisu and cassata,’ his little girl gushed.
‘You never did!’ he exclaimed, his smile for his daughter easy and true. He gave her a big kiss on the cheek, knowing she would giggle and squeal and love every second of it. ‘No, I was mistaken. You taste extra, extra sweet. You must have eaten all those desserts.’
Mila licked her lips, checking how sweet she really was.
‘And I have some other good news. Gracie is coming home with us today. Wouldn’t you love to introduce her to your gran-nonna?’
He watched his daughter carefully for her reaction. Mila looked at him for a few moments as she weighed up the information and he prepared himself for the crying fit that would surely come. She surprised him mightily when she bounced up and down and clapped with all her might.
‘Yay! She can meet Pino,’ Mila said.
‘Your great-grandmother’s name is Pino?’ Gracie asked, with a twinkle in her eye.
‘No!’ Mila said with one hand splayed across her mouth in shock. ‘My great-grandmother’s name is Gran-nonna. Pino is my horse.’
‘Ooh. I see. Well, then, I look forward to meeting both your great-grandmother and your horse. Equally.’
Giovanni arrived back at the table with a tray of fresh pasta and she was surprised at how hungry she was. Famished. But she had been living on pizza and cappuccinos for weeks.
By the time she had finished her generous portion, Luca was barely halfway through his.
‘You like pasta, I see,’ he said, watching her over his fork.
‘You can tell?’
‘Aren’t there any Italian restaurants in Australia?’
‘Tons. Especially in Melbourne. Many even make great pasta but you have to search to find one that makes the pasta fresh and cooks it al dente. The food here is unbelievable!’ she finished, hoping that would go some way to make up for her ravenous behaviour.
‘Good unbelievable, by the looks of your plate. It is so clean you could serve food from it.’
Feeling sassy, Gracie poked out her tongue.
Mila gasped in shock. ‘Papa! Did you see what she did?’
Gracie covered her wayward mouth with her napkin.
‘I did see,’ Luca said, watching Gracie from the corner of his eye.
Great, she thought. Excellent start. Now he’s going to know I wasn’t kidding when I said I had no idea how to teach a kid anything except how to mess about.
Though she had tried to talk Luca out of the arrangement, it genuinely appealed. The chance to stay in Italy alone would have made her day. The chance to do so in a proper house, with proper food, with a bathroom not shared by twenty others and with twenty-four-hour access to a telephone, was beyond her wildest dreams. She just hoped she hadn’t blown it with her big mouth and her bad manners.
‘What should we do to punish her?’ Luca asked Mila, and Gracie held her breath.
‘No dessert for Gracie,’ Mila suggested without delay.
‘Sounds fair to me,’ Luca said, and Gracie felt great relief, until Giovanni came out with three plates of dessert and her mouth watered in appreciation of the mounds of multicoloured gelato.
‘How about I only have one flavour?’ Gracie suggested. ‘Then you could eat the rest of mine.’
Mila’s mouth twisted sideways as she considered the fact that she could come out even further ahead in this new scenario. ‘I think that’s fair,’ she said, nodding sagely. ‘As long as you only eat the lemon flavour.’
‘Done.’
Mila looked to her father for backing and Gracie did the same. She expected to find him watching Mila with that same rapt amazement that came over him whenever she spoke, but even though he still held his little girl on his lap, his gaze was all on Gracie.
When the guy chose to bestow his attention upon her, he didn’t disappoint. Even with a youngster squirming on his lap, he had the ability to make Gracie feel as though she was the only one who held his immediate interest.
Under Luca’s encouraging gaze she felt vulnerable, quiet, soft. He had met her at her very worst—her eyes darkened by tired smudges, her hair a mess of ungroomed curls, her spirits downtrodden—and yet he made her feel safe and protected and liked despite it all. So liked she had even eaten a whole bowl of pasta in front of him in two minutes flat!
As though he knew where her thoughts travelled, his perfect sculptured mouth kicked up at the corners and his dark eyes glimmered against his smooth olive skin. Her heart gave a little lurch sideways and she smiled back before delving into her lemon gelato.
Only once Mila had finished both desserts did Luca call for his driver. Gracie felt profoundly sad that their delightful meal was over so soon.
‘I asked him to meet us at your hostel. I thought we could walk off our lunch first.’
And then Gracie remembered that this meal was just the beginning. She was staying in Italy and could keep looking for her father. The thought took hold. Warming her. Infusing her with hope. Because in finding her father, she had placed a massive amount of hope in finding herself. Only now she had some willing help. She shoved her hands in her pockets to stop herself from reaching out and giving Luca a great big hug.
They said their goodbyes to the effusive Giovanni, and each of the grown-ups took one of Mila’s hands. Their pace was slow as they ambled through the winding back streets of Rome. Mila sang and giggled and pointed at interesting things with an outstretched foot, as she was unwilling to let go of either hand.
All evidence of the spring shower had evaporated and the sun seemed to shine more brightly than it had during the rest of her stay. The tourists milling about did not get in her way as she walked by, they seemed excited, enthralled, bewitched.
As Gracie’s gaze swept to her right, she took the opportunity to have a good look at the man at her side, the stranger in whom she had placed the remnants of her hope. He could be a psycho killer luring her off to his secluded villa. To torture her before his daughter, his grandmother and horse named Pino? She didn’t think so.
‘What are you smiling at?’ Luca asked.
Gracie looked away, disgusted with herself for having been caught staring. ‘Nothing I would dare repeat for fear of being thought a numbskull,’ she said.
‘Che cosa è un…numbskull?’ Mila asked.
‘Someone who smiles for no good reason at all,’ Gracie said.
Once they reached the hostel, Luca and Mila waited outside while Gracie said her goodbyes to Enzo and packed her minimal belongings. Once downstairs she was surprised to see a beautiful black car awaiting her, what with the multitude of tiny dented cars and daredevil motor scooters that trawled the streets of Rome with frightening pace and oblivious to road rules.
The window rolled down and Mila popped out her head. ‘Venuto, Gracie! It’s time to go home!’
Home, Gracie thought, taking one last look around the warm stuccoed buildings and cobbled stone streets that championed the history and beauty of Rome, her home for the past few weeks, and she realised that she did not really know what the word home meant any more.
Before leaving Melbourne, she had quit her job and sublet her apartment. She was a woman without a home. A woman without a country. A woman without full-blood kin. A woman with her future laid out before her like the paved road below the car, and with her past twinkling back at her like a star just beyond reach of her fingertips. And all she could do to join the two was to take this sudden divergence in her journey.
She took in a deep breath and hopped in the car. They took off, Luca, Mila and she in the back, a driver hidden behind a dark petition. Gracie watched city roads turn into country roads as Rome gave way to the green, undulating Tuscan landscape, with its scattered farmhouses and hilltop villages, and for the first time in a long time she felt as if it could all really happen to her. All she could do was go with the flow and wait and see.
CHAPTER THREE
IT WAS early evening when they reached Luca’s Tuscan villa, and it was like something out of a postcard. A long driveway lined with tall, tapered cedars wound up a gently surging hillside covered on the front side by a small private vineyard. At the top of the hill, a sprawling two-storeyed stuccoed farmhouse with an orange tiled roof and an adjacent matching cottage glowed a deep yellow as it soaked in the warmth and light of the setting sun.