Читать книгу Sister Swap - Lilian Darcy - Страница 11

In her room at midnight that night, Rox very much wanted to call Rowie and Mom to report, like a covert operative, that she’d achieved successful and undetected insertion into the target zone. She’d managed to greet Maria, the housekeeper, as if the two of them had met before. She’d correctly matched the three gardeners’ names with the descriptions of them that Row had given her. She’d used the sketchy map of the palazzo’s interior to navigate her way to her bedroom, and had only gotten lost once.

But Rowie and Mom were on the plane to Florida, so she couldn’t.

At least, she really hoped they were on the plane to Florida. What if Row couldn’t bring herself to leave the hotel, even when she had Mom with her every step of the way?

How much of the difference in their personalities came down to the fact that Rox had been born first and heaviest and healthiest and easiest? It had always seemed to her like such a random quirk of fate. She’d held the winning ticket in that particular lottery, and she wasn’t going to let her sister suffer for it.

Since she couldn’t call Mom and Rowie, she called Dad instead. “You haven’t heard from them?”

“No, which means they must be safely on the plane.” He sounded relieved about it, also.

“That’s great! Tell Rowie as soon as you see her that everything is going fine here, no problems, and she’s not to worry about a thing. She’s to focus on herself, on getting the right therapist and the right treatment, and getting better.”

“Will do, honey.”

“Talk to you soon.”

“Thanks for doing this for your sister.”

“Oh, it’s a walk in the park, it’s a breeze,” Rox lied. “It’s going to be fun. Make sure she really knows she doesn’t have to worry about me.”

Roxanna didn’t feel sleepy, since her body was still set on New Jersey time. When Gino had taken his still-wide-awake and protesting daughter up to bed an hour ago, Rox had almost blurted out something about jet lag and understanding how Pia felt. She’d shut her treacherous mouth just in time.

You weren’t supposed to get jet lag going from London to Italy, since their time zones were only an hour apart, so she’d put on a fake yawn, said good-night, and hidden her raring-to-go energy levels in this gorgeous, high-ceilinged, powder-blue-painted room, with adjoining bathroom, that Francesco had assigned to her sister.

It was no coincidence, Roxanna knew, that the room was situated just along the corridor from where Francesco had slept. She wondered whether Rowie might have been able to hold herself together here in Italy, enough to complete the garden project, if she hadn’t faced Francesco’s constant and seductive attempts to sleep with her.

Water under the bridge now.

Rox had other, more urgent things to think about.

She would have to study Rowena’s plant lists, work schedules, delivery dates and garden bed layouts for a few hours until she really got sleepy. And there was no alarm clock in the room, so she’d have to leave the painted wooden shutters open and trust to the morning light to wake her at an hour that wasn’t suspiciously late.

Considering that she didn’t feel tired, Rox found it hard to concentrate on the pages of notes Rowena had given her in London, or on the bundle of stuff she’d sneaked up to her room from the sunny and spacious office Rowena had been given downstairs. She loved flowers and shrubs and gardens, sure, but not the way Rowie did, not on the same level of detail. She loved beautiful vistas, dramatic groupings of color, and sweet, heady scents…

But did she really need to know exactly what quantity of Souvenir de la Malmaison, Belle de Crecy, Eglantine, Celsiana and a dozen other varieties of rose Row had ordered for the Pink Walk? Did she need to know that crested moss was also known as Chapeau de Napoleon?

Cram, cram, cram.

Exam tomorrow.

Concentrate, Rox!

Instead, her mind kept straying to Gino and his daughter. They made such a gorgeous pair, with their dark coloring, their lashes as thick as sable paintbrushes, their satin-smooth olive skin, their impeccable bone structure.

You could have photographed them at a pavement café or in a cobbled town square for one of those evocative postcards of Italian street life that looked like a black-and-white movie still from the era of the young Sophia Loren…if you could have gotten arrogant, supersuccessful Gino to stop frowning at Pia and looking so totally at sea about his daughter.

The little girl had been difficult tonight, Rox had to admit. Pia wouldn’t sit properly at the big dining room table to eat—Roxanna had thought the food was fabulous—but had just wanted to run around and play. Afterward, she seemed bored with her fancy, pristine dolls. She darted into some vast, echoing formal sitting room—the salone, they seemed to call it—lifted the lid on the grand piano and started to tinkle the keys. When she got into trouble for it, instead of stopping she pounded them harder and harder.

Had a great sense of rhythm, actually.

She had been physically removed from the instrument and then from the room, and she had started to kick and scream. Gino had looked embarrassed, upset and at the end of his rope. His vulnerability called forth an odd connection to him that Roxanna didn’t think she could have felt with a man like that in any other situation. She didn’t like the commanding type, and she ought to know, since she’d been married to one for six years.

As the tantrum had unravelled, Maria the housekeeper clearly hadn’t known whether to step in or say nothing. Rox had felt seriously out of place. She had mumbled something about going for a walk, even though it was dark outside by that time.

Back and forth along a terrace she had gone, then round and round a beautiful old fountain that hadn’t yet been restored. The place was fabulous with its air of age-tarnished grandeur and luxury. Inside, she had still been able to hear Pia letting loose. When silence finally had descended and she had ventured back indoors, she had found the little girl up at the polished rosewood table where she should have been an hour earlier, face sticky with ice cream, screaming forgotten, mood utterly content.

Oh, so we never give in to Pia’s tantrums, do we?

Not very fair of her to gloat over it like that, when Gino looked as if he’d aged ten years in the process.

She didn’t usually gloat.

Harlan hadn’t even mentioned it on his list.

And now, here in her big, silent bedroom, she couldn’t stop thinking about Gino, wondering how he’d dug himself into such a hole, wishing too strongly that she could help, knowing that she never could. A man like that wouldn’t let her.

She didn’t get to sleep until after four.

Was Dr. Madison ever going to wake up?

Gino had passed a sleepless night himself, but he’d risen at eight. Now it was ten and there was still no sign of her. He’d scheduled a part of the morning for touring the garden together, with her plans in hand, but if she didn’t appear soon, the morning would be gone. He didn’t feel comfortable about rapping on her door to waken her since they hadn’t agreed on a starting time, but he was getting annoyed.

Meanwhile, he tried to get some work done, but that wasn’t much of a success.

He’d naively imagined that he could put on a DVD for Pia, which she would watch quietly in the background while he made business calls, sent e-mails and worked on his laptop. But Pia had seen the DVD movie before.

“Sixteen times!” she said.

And she certainly seemed to know the songs in it by heart.

He tried to settle her with a book instead, but she wanted him to read it with her. “Because I can’t read.”

“Can’t you look at the pictures?”

“I want to read the words. With you.”

He read the words with her.

Actually, she almost could read on her own. She knew all of her letters, and when there was an easy word like boo or cat—it was a book in English—she could sound it out with his help. He felt a stirring of pride, found an Italian book and tried that with her, and she did just as well. He must ask Miss Cassidy how much time she’d spent on this sort of thing with Pia.

All the same, both books together only occupied twenty minutes, and when they were finished, she was bored again. He began to follow her from room to room, hoping she’d settle on something and racking his brain about a new strategy.

Should he hire a temporary nanny? He could easily go through an agency and have someone in place by the beginning of next week. But wouldn’t that defeat his whole purpose of getting to understand Pia better? He’d been frustrated in recent months by Miss Cassidy’s staged, formal and prearranged sessions of father-daughter time, with Pia always freshly bathed and fed, and outfitted like the window display at a Parisian fashion boutique.

Anyhow, here was Dr. Madison at last, dressed in her garden clothes—khaki stretch pants and a fleecy zippered top in a slightly lighter shade. The zipper was only pulled halfway up, showing a white T-shirt that looked a little too tight—the kind of tight that no man would ever complain about. Beneath it, her very nice breasts bounced as she hurried down the stairs.

“Good morning, uh, Rowena,” he said. He’d asked her weeks ago to call him Gino, and she did, but for some reason he found it hard to reciprocate with her first name today, and kept thinking of her by her formal title of Dr. Madison, instead.

“Good morning… Oh, but I am so sorry!” she gasped, radiating remorse like electrical energy. “I don’t know what can have made me sleep in like that! If it’s possible for me to have an alarm clock in the room, I would appreciate it, because I really do not want this to happen again!”

Her cheeks were flushed. Her hair was damp at the ends. If she’d brushed it just now, she hadn’t done a very good job, because it was all over the place, like the hair of a woman caught in bed with her lover.

“That’s fine,” Gino answered. “I’ve been reading with Pia. The alarm clock is a good idea, however.”

He couldn’t find the right tone. He was annoyed, yes, but at the same time he had an image of those rounded, bouncing breasts in his mind, wondering if they were a big part of the attraction for Francesco. He’d begun to understand that Dr. Madison did have some good…uh…features, surprisingly.

He also wanted to grin in sheer appreciation of the energy she gave off. He hadn’t noticed that, the other times they’d met. She’d been so focused on her scrupulously researched lists of rose varieties and their history. She’d seemed to direct too much of her energy inward and had been a little colorless to his eye.

“Would you like some breakfast before we start?” he offered.

“Um, if it’s not too much trouble.”

It was.

Far too much trouble.

Another delay in his already shattered morning.

But he couldn’t ask her to tramp around the gardens with him on an empty stomach, so…

“I’ll call Maria, and you can tell her what you would like. There may still be coffee on the sideboard in the dining room. Will you excuse me while I make some phone calls? Come along, Pia.”

“If they’re business calls, why don’t I keep Pia with me?” Dr. Madison suggested quickly. “Pia, you can pour my juice and tell me what breakfast foods are called in Italian. You can be my teacher. Would that be nice?”

Gino held his breath, waiting for No, I wanna go with Papa, and wondering whether his saying Okay, come with me, then would count as immediate capitulation to a tantrum that hadn’t quite happened yet but surely would if he insisted she was to go with Dr. Madison.

“Yes! It would be delightful!” Pia said and reeled off several breakfast words in Italian.

“You might have to go a little slower than that, Your Majesty, and you might have to get quite strict with me when I make silly mistakes. I think I’m going to be a very bad student!”

Pia laughed. She was already halfway to the dining room, her hand stretched out to take Dr. Madison’s, which was reaching back to her, open and inviting. The horticultural expert looked across at Gino, raised her eyebrows and grinned at him as if to say, “Didn’t I handle that well!”

He grinned back, too surprised not to, even though the grin felt…rusty.

Yes, I have to admit, you handled it well.

Then he let the grin drop and went to get some work done.

It was well after eleven when he surfaced from negotiating an unexpected problem in the Paris office and realized that even if Dr. Madison had ordered a full American breakfast, she must have finished eating it by now and must have learned by heart every Italian breakfast word Pia could think of to teach her. He went in search of them, clued in to their whereabouts by the sound of the piano that Pia had gotten into so much trouble over last night.

Dr. Madison had taught Pia to play “Chopsticks.”

As a duet.

With the doctor herself improvising some impressive, wild-fingered variations in the bass.

“Now we’re going to do it sad, Pia,” Gino heard her say. He paused in the doorway. “Listen, stop for a minute, can you hear me slowing down? Can you hear me changing the notes?” She went into a minor key. “Does it sound sadder to you now? Can you play it sad with me? Oh, boohoo, our chopsticks are bro-o-o-ken. Oh, it’s tragic, it’s terrible, we’re so, so sad, our notes are going so slowly, our fingers are so heavy on the keys, boohoo.”

He came farther into the room and she caught sight of him, nodded to show that she understood he was ready for their tour.

“Pia, someone’s fixed our chopsticks!” she said. “We’re happy again. We can get fast. Our fingers are moving so fast we can’t see them. I’m chasing you. Can you play as fast as me? I’m catching up, go faster, Pia. Faster, faster!”

Pia’s playing collapsed into laughter and fractured rhythm and thumping keys, and Dr. Madison sank sideways against her little shoulder in an exaggerated parody of breathlessness and exhaustion after a race.

“There! Whew! Fabulous! Thank you! It’s not nearly as much fun playing ‘Chopsticks’ on my own. Do you remember what this note is called, Pia?” She touched a key, and the sound of a single note vibrated from the instrument.

“Middle C,” Pia said.

“That’s right. Now if I shut the piano lid and open it again, can you still find Middle C?” She did as she’d described, and Pia’s finger went straight to the right note. “Very good!” She stood up, closed the lid once more, and turned to Gino. “We’re ready. I’m sorry, I felt I should—”

“No, that’s fine. You’re right. You needed to finish properly. Pia, Dr. Madison is going to show us her plans for the garden, now.”

Crunch time, Roxanna thought.

She’d decided to wing it without Rowena’s written and sketched-out plans, because she knew that her sister would have had the whole thing locked down in her memory the way Rox had locked down the lyrics and music to all her favorite songs. Without those comforting scrolls of paper clutched in her hands, however, she felt like an actress caught without a vital prop.

Gino was dressed down today, in a white Polo shirt that showed off the natural tan on his arms and on that very nicely shaped column of neck appearing from inside the Polo collar. He wore his hair short at the back, but not too short; just the right length for a woman’s fingers to run through—not too prickly, not too soft.

Rox happened to be an authority on exactly what this length was, because she’d never convinced Harlan to let his hair grow to it. He’d always kept it as short as cornfield stubble.

After she’d retrieved some of Rowie’s notes from the office, Gino led the way outside, and asked her about what she’d been doing with Pia. “Was it a lesson, or just fun?”

And that was a much safer subject than either garden restoration or the best length for a man’s hair, so she snatched it up.

With too much enthusiasm, as usual.

“Lessons and fun should be the same thing for a four-year-old, I think, especially with something like music, if you don’t want to put them off for life. So it was both, really. And she was very responsive. She was great!”

“Really?” He sounded skeptical, as if he didn’t dare to hope for too much where his daughter was concerned. And that was just ridiculous!

“Gino, she’s a very bright, creative little girl, hungry to learn. She latched on to what we were doing incredibly fast, and she loved it. I think you should consider music lessons for her.”

He thought about it for a minute, then shook his head. “When she’s older.”

Oh, okay, right.

Older.

You mean, when she’s snowed under with schoolwork. When that great big spark of joy and curiosity has been completely snuffed out by gray dresses and repressive tantrum control. When you can hit her with endless scales and finger exercises, and toss poor old Beethoven’s trampled-on “Fur Elise” at her like tossing a bone.

Makes total sense.

But, as we discussed yesterday, it’s none of my business, so I’ll keep my trap shut.

“You’re very talented at music, by the way,” he added, distracting her.

“Oh…not half as talented as I’d like to be. I love it, but, no, I’m coming to realize—”

That Harlan is probably right about my voice.

Oops, and that Harlan has nothing to do with any of this, because I’m pretending to be my twin sister.

“Gardens are my real love, of course,” she quickly added.

“Talk me through the whole plan,” he invited her.

Examination time.

Half an hour later, she was pretty confident she’d earned a passing grade. When you had to do all your exam preparation the night before, jet lag did have its advantages. Walking around the extensive and beautiful but dilapidated and overgrown old gardens, only part of which had yet been cleared under Rowena’s supervision, they managed the odd snatch of polite but slightly more personal conversation, also, which made Rox relax more than she’d expected to.

She asked Gino whether he had any kind of a garden in Rome, and he told her, “Only the one in the oil painting on my wall. It’s from the French Impressionist school. Not by a world-famous artist, but pretty.” He asked her why she’d chosen to go into a field like this. The combination of dry historical research and outdoor work was unusual, wasn’t it?

And since Roxanna knew her twin sister so well, she could find an answer that was true for Row and true for herself, as well. Something about how you can appreciate and enjoy something more when there’s more than one layer to it. A seven-foot-high Harrison’s Yellow rosebush in full bloom is beautiful all on its own when you’re standing in front of it on a gorgeous day, but when you also know that pioneers on the Oregon Trail packed the same rose in their wagons to plant out west… Well, that adds something, doesn’t it?

She didn’t express it very well. Rambled on a sentence or two too long, no doubt. Reasons Number One and Two, by the way: “You’re always so (expletive deleted) enthusiastic,” and “You never know when to stop talking.”

But this morning she was supposed to talk, so she did, and Gino listened, while Pia played in sunshine that definitely felt as if it were part of spring today.

“Impressive,” Gino said, when Rox had finished.

Was that an A grade?

Sounded like an A.

She relaxed a little too much, and that mouth of hers opened right up and she said, “Of course, if it were me, I’d do it the other way around.”

Gino looked at her blankly. “But it is you.”

“I mean, if it were my garden, if I weren’t working for you, the client. Fulfilling your—”

Help, help, help!

Why did I say it?

“Tell me what you’re talking about.” He frowned, sounded impatient. “The other way around?”

They stood at the end of a long, south-facing wall that marched along the side of the formal part of the garden, edged by a gravel track and overlooking a sloping field of vines that were just showing the first hints of green growth. Pia was throwing bits of gravel toward the vines. It was a very pretty spot, but since they were on the far side of the wall, it wasn’t visible from the main garden, the terrace or the house.

Rox had just finished dutifully describing to Gino how she—i.e. Rowena, as per Rowena’s plans—envisaged a single line of roses growing all along the wall, chosen not for their heritage value, like those in the main garden, but for other features, such as color and scent. And now, instead of leaving it at that, Rox had gone and blurted out her own opinion.

Harlan’s Reason Number Three: “You have an opinion about everything.”

“Well…” she said cautiously. Was there a way she could get out of this? Backtrack? Fob Gino off? No. She’d already put one foot in it. She had no choice now but to jump in with both. “I just mean that, even though, historically, the antique roses would obviously have been a part of the main garden, I think it could work better to have them along this wall instead.”

“Yes?” Gino said, indicating that she should please continue to insert her feet even deeper.

“Um, you see, initially, conforming to…uh…what I thought the family wanted, I attempted to combine the…uh…botanical-historical dimension of the main garden with the…uh…aesthetic dimension, but in some ways this may well mean that neither goal is effectively fulfilled. Whereas—”

She took a breath.

A very large, shuddery and somewhat desperate breath.

“—if we were to treat this wall as a kind of time line, we could create quite a fascinating walking history lesson on the development of rose species, dating from sixteenth-century varieties such as Eglantine and Austrian Copper and—and—” Yikes! “—Maiden’s Blush…” Whew! “…through to the hybrid teas cultivated since, um, 1867—” Was that date right? “—going from one end of the wall to the other. And that would mean we could leave the main garden as an exercise in pure drama.” She stopped channeling Rowie for a minute and dropped right into Rox. “And I love drama in a garden, don’t you?”

Harlan’s Reason Number Four: “You always think other people will agree with you.”

“Color and scent and big, showy effects,” she went on, knowing it was too late to stop now, so she might as well sell the idea as best she could. “A garden you can really breathe and see and feel and be passionate about.”

Gino looked blank again.

He was good at that.

Blank, arrogant shock at the fact that other people were so much slower to grasp things than he was. “Then why didn’t you plan it that way in the first place?” he said.

Rox’s turn at doing the blank look. “You mean you like the idea?”

“Yes. Very much. You’re right. We should keep the history and the drama separate. Why haven’t you suggested this before?”

“I—I thought—at the meeting—you wanted—”

“I don’t remember saying so.”

“Well, Francesco…”

“Hmm, possibly Francesco might have, but I doubt he gave it much thought. Look, is it too late to do it this new way? The other way around, as you put it? Would it drastically change which roses you’ve ordered, and how many, and your timetable for planting?”

Yikes, again.

How should I know?

“I—I’d have to check my notes.”

And call Row.

Even if it is, what, around six in the morning in Florida.

“Do that, then, and get back to me with your answer as soon as possible. I like the new idea better.”

He was already moving toward the house, calling Pia’s name over his shoulder as he went. Pia didn’t come. She was still throwing bits of gravel. “Pia, it’s time to come in now,” he said more sternly. “And I will not have any nonsense about it!”

The pale gravel looked like fallen blossom on the brown earth beside the vines. Pia picked up another piece, scowling just like her daddy.

“Go in,” Gino told Rox. His mouth had gone tight. “I’ll handle this.”

Back at the palazzo, from which Pia’s frustrated screams could barely be heard, the housekeeper told Roxanna that there was a phone message waiting for her.

Whew! In Florida, Rowie was up early. Rox could call her right back and learn just how deep a hole she’d dug herself into.

“From Francesco,” Maria said.

“I’ll, uh, phone him from my room.”

Once I’ve thumbed frantically through Rowena’s notes to find his number in Rome. I know she wrote it down for me somewhere…

“Hi-i-i, Francesco!”

“You’re back? It’s so good to hear your voice.” His breath swept heavily into her ear through the earpiece of the phone. “I left you alone while you were in London, I knew you needed time. But I’ve missed you, the way a thirsty flower misses rain. Have you missed me, sweetheart?”

“I’ve been thinking about you…” True, but not the way he thought.

“And have you made a decision?”

“About…” Rox let the word hang, hoping he’d fill in the blank for her, even though she was pretty sure what decision he was talking about.

And it didn’t involve roses.

Instead, he took her hesitation as an answer he didn’t want. “Haven’t I given you long enough? More than long enough? Let me tell you, my darling little American, there comes a point where a woman’s holding back stops increasing a man’s interest and becomes only annoying.”

Annoying?

Annoying?

Roxanna thought about the long, tearful session she’d had with Rowie in London, when they should have been talking detail on the Di Bartoli garden. She thought about all of Row’s doubt, her anguished questions about what she really felt and what Francesco really wanted. She unfortunately didn’t think about whether opening her mouth and speaking her mind might endanger the very contract she’d come here to protect.

Francesco had a fiancée, dang him. He’d said all these fervent, romantic, irresistible European-type things to Rowena, but did he love her? Really? Would he put his money where his mouth was and break it off with Marcellina? Did Rowena want him to?

“I just can’t, Rox,” Rowie had said in London. “I can’t give him what he wants. I—I don’t think he means any of it. N-not really. I’m so confused. I want him to mean it, but in my heart…”

And Francesco had no clue about the anxiety disorder, no clue about Row’s strong principles, her sweet, naive belief in a perfect happy-ever-after, her pretzel-like attempts to please everyone she cared about and her determination not to hurt his fiancée, a woman she hadn’t even met, and dismissed all of this as merely annoying?

“You want an answer right now?” Rox asked him.

“I am hungry for it! I am hungry for you. Marcellina means nothing to me. I will marry her, yes, of course, because, you understand, it is what I owe my family, but you will always be—”

“Okay, here’s my answer. Go take a flying leap! Is that enough of a decision for you?”

“Rowena…?”

“Go take a flying flip at the moon, Francesco Di Bartoli. Clear now?”

With a tingling, light-headed sense of satisfaction, Roxanna slammed down the phone.