Читать книгу Cinderella's Lucky Ticket - Melissa James - Страница 8

Trapani, Sicily, 1853

“Look at him, Patrizia,” one woman commented to her neighbor over coffee, pointing at the object of her disgust: a young man sauntering down the cobbled road with a group of his friends. “He walks—no, he swaggers. Like one who knows he will have all the girls clamoring for his attention tonight. He thinks he is the most handsome, charming young man in all of Sicily.”

“Well, perhaps he has reason, Anna.” Patrizia smiled with indulgent patience, watching the man-child strutting down the road as if he were a conquering emperor. “He looks like a statue of Apollo I saw once in Rome, when I was a girl. Those Capriati boys are too handsome and charming for their own good! I remember his father at that age…ah, for Vincenzo, my heart would flutter…”

“Yes,” Anna muttered, her voice dark, “Enzo was a handsome devil, and just as bigheaded. They are all alike, these Capriatis. But one day, their arrogance and their careless ways with the local girls will come back to haunt them, mark my words.”

A shadow crossed the sun at that moment, though no clouds littered the afternoon sky. “Alleluia,” both women muttered with a shudder, crossing themselves.

“Giovanni Capriati!” The strident cry rang across the street clear to the public square at one end, which was filled with flowers and bright-colored banners for tonight’s May Day dance for the young people. “Giovanni Capriati!”

The women gasped. That fiery voice could not be mistaken—it was Sophia Morelli, the local witch. Her heart’s treasure, her silly, pretty teenage daughter Giulia stood half-crouched behind her, sobbing.

So Anna’s prophecy was having an immediate fulfillment…and this time, not only Anna and Patrizia crossed themselves.

Yet the Capriati boy did not so much as turn his head, but he continued strutting down the road, laughing with his friends.

“Giovanni Capriati, you will stop! You will listen to me!”

With the little, careless shrug that only a Capriati could accomplish the boy turned, his dark, so-handsome-it-was-almost-pretty face bored. “Yes, Signorina Morelli? May I assist you?”

“You broke my daughter’s heart!” the famed wisewoman cried, her face scorched with the heat of livid fury. “Do you deny you met her in secret, kissed her, promised her your love and then moved on to the next girl?”

“I only kissed her! What’s the harm in that? I promised Giulia nothing, woman,” Giovanni retorted, his head high, eyes bland. “I have never done so with any girl. I am not an idiot, to make promises to a witch’s get,” he muttered to his friends. The boys laughed, nudging each other.

“I heard that, ragazzo!” Sophia’s voice rang to the rafters of each house. Within moments the windows filled with avid faces, enjoying the rare sight of someone standing up to Sophia, who knew herb lore and was rumored to have poisoned her first husband when he was unfaithful. “Now, you will pay for crossing me!”

A teary whimper came from behind her. “No, Mama, no…do not kill him! Do not hurt him! Think what you do!”

Sophia’s face, still holding a haughty loveliness at fifty, smiled at her distraught daughter. “I think of you, and the boy’s papa who broke my sister’s heart. The arrogant Capriati men need a lesson…” Her eyes flashed with magnificent fury as she threw down a little sack of herbs and flowers at the boy’s feet. “Listen, people of Trapani! You are my witnesses. I curse the Capriati men! From this day they will fall in love with women who are their complete opposites and would have nothing to do with them. For all their charm, they will discover what it is to fight for love!” She chuckled. “And they will not suspect they have met their Fate until it is too late….”

Giovanni looked around at his squirming friends with a careless grin. “This is a curse? Woman, you’re losing your touch. I thought you capable of better. As if any girl would refuse me!”

Sophia smiled and turned her daughter away from the boy the girl still adored. “You will see, arrogant bambino,” she chuckled softly. “Arrivederci to your heart, young fool. You will see.”