The Brides of Bella Rosa: Beauty and the Reclusive Prince

CHAPTER FOUR

“WELL,” Susa said the next morning as she began to mix the dough for the large cake pans that sat waiting. “How’s the prince?”

Isabella turned bright red and had to pretend to be looking for something in the huge wall refrigerator in order to hide that fact until things cooled.

“What prince?” she chirped, biding her time.

Susa’s laugh sounded more like a cackle. “The one who punched you in the eye,” she said, elbow-deep in flour. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Isabella whirled and faced the older woman, wondering why she’d never noticed before how annoying she could be. “No one punched me. I…I fell.”

“Ah.” Susa nodded wisely, a mischievous gleam in her gray eyes. “So he pushed you, did he?”

“No!”

Isabella groaned with exasperation and escaped into the pantry to assemble the ingredients for the basic tomato sauce that was the foundation of all the Casali family cuisine. Let Susa cackle if she felt like it. Isabella wasn’t going to tell her anything at all about what had happened. Pressing her lips together firmly, she set about making the sauce and pretended she didn’t know what the older woman was talking about.

She couldn’t discuss it yet. Not with anyone. She wasn’t even sure herself what exactly had happened. Looking back, it seemed like a dream. When she tried to remember what she’d said or what he’d done, it didn’t seem real. So she washed the clothes the prince’s sister had loaned her, sent them back to the palazzo, and heard nothing in return. She had to put it behind her.

Besides, she had other problems, big problems, to deal with. She’d been putting off thinking about them because she’d assumed she would go to collect the Monta Rosa Basil and all would be well—or at least in abeyance. Without the basil, she was finally facing the fact that the restaurant was in big trouble.

Luca, her father and founder of Rosa, had gone into a panic when she had told him a sketchy version of what had happened and then tentatively speculated what life—and the menu—might be like without the herb.

“What are you talking about?” he demanded, looking a bit wild. A tall, rather elegant-looking man, in Isabella’s eyes, he radiated integrity. Despite the demands he tended to put on her, she loved him to pieces.

“The old prince said I could come any time.”

That was news to Isabella. She’d had no idea there was any sort of permission granted, and she had to wonder if it wasn’t just a convenient memory her father had embellished a bit.

“Well, the new prince says ‘no’.”

“The new prince?” He stared at her. “You’ve talked to him?”

“Yes. A little.”

He frowned. “No, Isabella. Stay away from the royalty. It’s no good to mix with them. They think they can walk all over us and they do it every time.”

“But, Papa, if I’m going to try to get permission to—”

“You don’t need permission.”

She sighed. There was no way she was going to make him understand that the circumstances had changed.

“I’ll go myself,” he muttered. He tried to rise from his chair and she hurried to coax him back down.

“Father, you will not go anywhere,” she said fretfully.

“Don’t you understand how important this is? The Basil is our family’s trademark, our sign of distinction. Without it we are just like all the others, not special at all. It’s who we are, the heart and soul of our cuisine and of our identity. We have to have it.”

She was feeling even worse about this than before. “But, Papa, if I can’t get it any longer…”

He shook his head, unable to understand what the difficulty was. “But you can get it. Of course you can.” His tired blue eyes searched hers. “I’ve never had any trouble. I go in right at sunrise. I go quietly, squeezing through the chink in the wall, right where I’ve entered the grounds since I was a young man. A short hike past the river and up the hill, and there it is, green leaves waving in the breeze, reaching up to kiss the morning sun.” He kissed his fingertips in a salute to the wonderful plants that were the making of his reputation.

Then he frowned at her fiercely. “If you can’t manage to do such a simple thing, I’ll do it myself, even if I have to crawl up that hill. I’ve never failed yet.”

That was it. She was a failure. She sighed. “The dogs never came after you?” she asked him, feeling almost wistful about it.

“The dogs are only out at night.”

“Not anymore,” she said sadly.

She left him pounding his walking stick on the tile floor and grumbling about incompetence, knowing she couldn’t let him attempt the task. The climb up the hill would kill him in his current condition. She had to find a way.

Everyone knew there was a problem. The situation was getting desperate. Her father had let things go too long. They were losing customers and had been bleeding money even before this latest problem. To make matters worse, there was some nonsense about a permit her father had never bothered to get. Fredo Cavelli, an old friend of her father’s and now on the local planning commission, had come by a few times, threatening dire consequences if the paperwork for a permit wasn’t cleared up. The trouble was, she wasn’t sure what Fredo was talking about and her father tended to do nothing but foam at the mouth and accuse Fredo of jealousy and double-dealing instead of taking care of the problem as he should.

It seemed to Isabella that control was slipping away. Without the special ingredient that set their sauce apart, there would be very little reason for anyone to choose their restaurant, Rosa, over the others operating nearby. She was desperate to get a handle on all these problems and get things back on an even keel.

Something had to be done.

She knew what it was. She had to go back there.

Just thinking about it made her shiver. She couldn’t go back. The prince had explicitly ordered her to stay away. And for once in her life, she was not really ready to challenge that.

Odd as it seemed, he was so different, so separate from her way of life, that he threw her off balance in a way no other man had ever done. She was used to being the feisty one, the girl who didn’t accept any nonsense from men, the one who could take it, deal with it, and serve it right back. A handsome face didn’t bowl her over. Charm made her suspicious. The tough-guy act completely turned her off.

Isabella was a hard sell on every level. Life had made her that way. Though she looked happy and carefree to most who knew her casually, there was a thread of dread and unease in her soul that she’d come by naturally.

Her mother had died when she was three years old, leaving her the only female in the family. Her father and her two brothers immediately turned to her for everything. At the age of five she was already taking care of everyone else, in the family home, in the play yard, and even in the restaurant. People in the village called her “little Mama” as she scurried past on one errand or another. She was always in such a hurry to make things right for her little brothers, it seemed she never had time to have a childhood of her own.

But her unease and wistfulness were born of more than just too many responsibilities too early. There were uncertainties in her family background, half-remembered scenes from childhood, secrets and lies. Her mother’s death, her father’s sometimes mysterious background, the reason her baby brother Valentino carried his daredevil act too far, the reason her brother Cristiano felt he had to jump off cliffs to save lives—all these things and more created a shaky foundation for a calm, peaceful life.

Isabella had a recurring nightmare where her family restaurant began to sag, first on one side, then the other. Going outside, she would realize the building had been sitting on a sand dune and the sand was beginning to drain away. Frantically, she tried to shore it up with her hands, pushing the sand back, working faster and faster. But it was no use. The building sank into the sand as though it were water. Inside she could see her father and her brothers trying to get out. She tried to call for help, but she couldn’t make a sound. Helpless, she watched them disappear beneath the surface. And that was when she woke.

“You’ve obviously got a savior complex,” Susa told her the one time she’d confided in the older woman. “Get over it. You can’t save these people. We are each our own worst enemy.”

Susa’s words weren’t very comforting. In fact, they weren’t even very helpful. So she never told anyone about her dreams again. But she thought of them now as she tried to analyze what had happened last night.

As much as the dream unnerved her, misty memories of her night at the castle unsettled her even more. Had he really kissed her forehead or had she just wished so hard that she’d dreamed it? Had she really told him she’d thought he was a vampire for a few shattering seconds? Had she really reached out and stroked his scar as though she had a right to touch him? It didn’t seem credible and it made her blush all over again.

She hadn’t been herself last night. And that was one reason she hesitated to try to go back. What would he cause her to act like if she actually got in to see him again?

Meanwhile she had to deal with losing customers, losing money, and Fredo Cavelli coming by to threaten that he would have Rosa’s closed down for good if her father didn’t come up with some obscure piece of paper.

“He thinks he can order me around because he bribed the mayor to put him on the planning commission,” Luca would scoff whenever she tried to talk to him about it. “I’m in compliance in every way. He can’t run me out of town. He’s just jealous because the little ice cream store he tried to run fell apart in a month. I won’t give in to his rubbish.”

She shook her head and walked away, unsure of how threatening this business really was. She had more problems than she had time for, so she let it go. Meanwhile, several times a day, her gaze wandered toward the hills, searching out the mist-shrouded tower of the castle, just barely visible toward evening, and she wondered what Max was doing in his lonely sanctuary. Was he out riding again? Did he ever think of her? Or had he been so glad to be rid of her, he’d erased her from his mind?

Max was on horseback, surveying the river in the twilight magic that hovered over his land, just after sunset. His sister had gone home, his cousin was about to leave for Milan, and his life was about to get back to normal. Boring, monotonous normal. Still, it was a relief.

This was his favorite time of day, and the only time he found he could come to the river without feeling unbearably sick inside. And he had to come to the river, if only as an homage to Laura. For the first few years after her death, he hadn’t been able to come here without tears flowing freely.

“I’m sorry,” he would cry into the wind, brokenhearted and in agony. “I’m so sorry.”

And he was convinced that Laura had been here then. She’d heard him. Later, he would often talk to her for hours, and she responded with a breeze, or a leaf that might sail over his head. He could hear her laughter in the river as the water bubbled over the rocks. She’d felt so close, he could almost touch her.

As the years went by the talking began to fade away, but he still came. And now, he didn’t talk anymore. He didn’t feel her here as he had before. Maybe she’d lost interest. Maybe she’d forgotten him. Or maybe his emotions just weren’t strong enough to break through the barriers any longer. He didn’t know what it was that had silenced their conversation. He only knew it felt stilted and awkward to try to talk to her now. But he came anyway. She deserved that much, at the very least.

Tonight he was here in part out of a guilty conscience. His head had been full of the Casali girl for days and he couldn’t seem to shake the thoughts away. He needed to fill his soul with his wife’s image again.

He looked into the swirling water of the river, very near where that water had taken her from him.

“Laura,” he said aloud, passion behind every word. “I miss you so.”

He listened hard. He tried to let himself join the flow of the evening breeze. He tried to feel whatever was in the atmosphere and draw it in. But it was all a failure. She wasn’t there. Heartsick, he turned his horse and headed back home.

Isabella had tried to figure out somehow to handle the declining basil supply problem in other ways, but the harder she tried, the more the answer seemed to elude her. As far as she knew, the prince’s estate was the only site where the herb could be found. If she wasn’t allowed to enter his gates, how was she going to get the supply she needed?

She spent hours poring over the Internet, trying to find where else the herb might grow, and, when that didn’t yield fruit, trying to find a substitution. She tried a few candidates in a couple of dishes. People noticed.

“There’s something different about this Fruta di Mare,” an old friend of the family asked right away, frowning as though she’d found a bug in her meal. “Have you changed your recipe?”

“What are you doing that’s different?” another asked, face twisted with displeasure.

And then she overheard a pair of regular customers whispering to each other. The phrases she caught included, “This place used to be so good, it’s really gone downhill lately,” and she knew she was in big trouble.

There was no choice. She had to go back.

But how?

She was still agonizing over that a day later when a surprise visitor came through the doors of the café. The late afternoon sun made a radiating halo around him and for just a moment she was sure it was the prince himself. Her heart began to pound in her chest. She’d never felt such a lurch to her system before. The room tilted and for a beat or two she was sure she would pass out. But in those same seconds she realized it wasn’t the prince at all, but his cousin, Marcello, and the pounding began to fade.

It took a minute for her to catch her breath. Even as she greeted him warmly she was clutching her heart and wondering what on earth was the matter with her. She really couldn’t imagine. The prince was just a man. Nothing special. Particularly. She’d known men before and even liked a few of them. Not many, but a few. She quickly steadied herself and managed to smile at Marcello.

“Welcome. I’m so glad you decided to come try us. Please sit right here and let me bring you some wine.”

She pulled out a chair at the table best situated with a view of the square in one direction and the distant mountains in the other.

“Order whatever you like,” she said cheerfully. “It will be our pleasure to—”

“Whoa, slow down,” he said with a laugh, raising both hands as though to defend himself from the onslaught. “I didn’t come for free food. I’m on my way home to Milan, but I wanted to come by to see how my patient is doing.”

“Patient?” And then she realized he meant her. “Oh, I’m fine. As you can see, I still have a black eye, but I’ve been told I look better this way, so it’s not a problem.”

He made a face at her lame joke, but went on. “And your stitches?”

“Oh.”

“I’d like to take a look and see how they are healing.”

She glanced around the restaurant. It wasn’t packed by any means but half the tables were filled with people she’d known all her life. Every one of them was watching with rapt attention.

“Too public?” he asked as he followed her train of thought. She threw another quick look at the audience, then turned with a toss of her head.

“Let them talk,” she said blithely. “TV is mostly reruns this week. They need some fresh entertainment.”

He laughed and followed her to the storeroom where he looked her over and quickly pronounced her healing nicely. They chatted in the kitchen for a few minutes. She enjoyed being with him, but wasn’t sure how to deal with that. He was so good-looking, but it was as if there was a special ingredient missing—just like the Rosa sauce without the Monta Rosa Basil. The prince had an element of fire in him that she found lacking in his cousin. There was no doubt about it—something about the Rossi prince appealed to her like no other man she’d ever seen.

“I want to ask you a question about your cousin,” she told him at one point, a little hesitant. She knew it was going to be a touchy subject.

“Shoot,” he said casually, cradling the glass of golden wine she’d poured for him.

“It’s about his scars. I understand he was badly injured in a car accident. Is that true?”

Marcello nodded.

She frowned. “Why doesn’t anyone seem to know anything about it here in the village?”

He shrugged. “People like the Rossi family have ways of keeping things quiet,” he said. “And there were certain elements about that accident they didn’t want the world to know about.”

She drew her breath in. “Like what?” she asked.

He smiled. “Sorry, Isabella. That is not something I’m at liberty to talk about.”

She leaned back, disappointed but intrigued. What could it possibly be?

But she had a more important question. How could she get his cousin to let her back on the royal property?

“If I could just talk to him,” she said, searching Marcello’s eyes for ideas. “If I could just explain how important this is.”

He shrugged, draining the last drop of golden liquid from his glass. “Go on over and confront the lion in his lair,” he suggested with a casual gesture appealing to the fates.

She scrunched up her face, a picture of doubt. “I don’t think I’d better do that. I don’t think that would really work. Besides, how would I get in?”

He shrugged again and straightened from his place at the counter. “Your call.”

She sighed and gave him a significant look. “If only I had the number for his mobile.”

“Ah.” He bit back a grin, his eyes sparkling with laughter. “You’re not the first to hint around for that number.”

She leaned closer, trying to look persuasive but not sure how to do that with a man like this. “I’m sure you know what it is.”

He nodded, looking her over with barely leashed pity. “I do. And I’m sworn to secrecy, just as you’d expect.”

“Oh.” She straightened and frowned, her heart sinking.

“I’m not allowed to tell anyone.”

She nodded, feeling tragic and hopeless. “I was afraid of that.”

He looked as tragic as she felt. “I’m sorry. It would be a betrayal of trust for me to tell you what it is.”

She nodded again, leaning against the tall counter with her chin in her hand. “I understand,” she said sadly.

He reached past her to take a pencil from a cup full of them. “It’s a fairly easy number to remember,” he said as he pulled a piece of paper from a stack of them on the counter. “I think I could probably recreate it right now, just doodling here.” And he began to do just that. “But I would never tell you what it is.”

Her eyes widened. Had he just done what she thought he’d done? “Of course not,” she said faintly, hope rekindled.