Roman Crazy (32 page)

I looked around, uncertain. “What?”

“Nothing,” he said, turning me slowly before dipping me, the blanket falling to the grass behind us. He dropped light kisses across my forehead and cheeks, then my lips, while whispering
tesoro
over and over.

We stopped kissing in time to see the children running over the hill toward us. They'd multiplied and I wondered just how many people were here for the weekend.

Smoothing my hair back, I tried to unrumple my dress. What was I thinking wearing linen around his roaming Roman
hands? He scooped up the blanket and laid it around my shoulders.

“I am sorry for your chest.” He laughed, and when I looked down, there weren't just pink scruff marks littered across my breast. A hickey was forming.

“I'm going to kill you,” I said, running after him through the grass.

He let me catch him when we got to a clearing that had massive wooden steps built into the hill.

“You didn't tell me that your family made wine,” I said, catching my breath and walking closer to the hill's edge to get a better look.

“Not wine, olives,” he said, brushing my hair away from my shoulder to place a kiss there. He rested his chin where his lips had just been and we watched the brilliant orange sun setting behind the grove.

“Bianchis have been making it for generations. I learned how to pick them as soon as I could walk,” he said, and I pictured a small Marcello weaving in and out of the field laughing like his nephews were earlier.

“I love to sleep out here. On a blanket under the moon. Maybe naked,” he said, pulling me into his arms. “We'll have to try it when the house gets too noisy.” He kissed my neck lightly. “Out here we could be noisy.”

“I look forward to it.”

“I'll show you after dinner. It's magical at night. I'll give you a tour and kiss you under the stars, but Mamma wants to meet you first.”

Mamma.

My stomach bottomed out, body tensed, heart thundered, and my ears were ringing. My track record with moms wasn't
exactly noteworthy, and she was arguably the most important that I'd ever meet.

Taking my now-sweaty hand, he led me up the hill.

Marcello's family home may have only been two stories, but it was expansive, spread out into a U shape with a large stone courtyard in the center. The home was covered in light-colored brick and each window was framed with weathered royal blue shutters.

The grounds were scattered with various colored clay pots filled to the brim and spilling over with vibrant flowers and fragrant fruit trees, similar to what he had at his house in Rome.

“Is there a side door that I can sneak into so that I could change?”

Nodding, he led us around the back of the house away from the crowd of people.

“Cello!” a woman yelled, and he squeezed my hand.

“I'm sorry,
tesoro,
” he said, turning us around to see a young woman, about our age, coming toward us with a round belly.

She took one look at me, kissed stupid and wrinkled, and laughed, grimacing at him. “Why you do this to her?”

“I did nothing to her,” he said, holding up his hands in surrender. “Avery, this is my oldest sister, Allegra.”

“How many are there?” I asked.

“I am the youngest of five.”

“Why you have to say oldest, you couldn't just say my sister?” She slapped at his shoulder, throwing a few choice curses at him. “It is nice to meet you.”

“It's great to meet you, too. We'll join you in a bit,” I began, but she took my hand.

“No time to change, I afraid. You look good.” She grinned knowingly.

Still, she gave me the thin sweater from around her shoulders. It covered the mess a bit better than the blanket and I looked
slightly
less like a homeless person.

The three of us followed the chatter around the sprawling grounds and into the beautiful courtyard. Marcello took my hand in his and kissed my cheek.

What drew my eye away from Marcello was the endless wooden table and the cheery, boisterous family seated at it, watching us intently.

“I've never seen a table that big,” I said, counting his family. It was as expansive as the table.

“My father built it when I was a teenager,” he said, a reassuring hand on the small of my back. “It's a bunch of separate pieces so it can be put together or taken apart depending on how many of us are around it. When the kids started having kids—well, you can see it got bigger. Add in aunts, uncles, cousins . . .”

“
And
I'm officially nervous.”

We stopped abruptly, him scrunching down so our eyes met. He took my hands in his, bringing them both to his lips, and whispered, “Don't be nervous. They will love you,” against them.

“Let's skip dinner,” I told him, and I was serious. Before I could whisk him away to an olive grove to have my wicked way with him, a woman carrying a pitcher called out to him.

“Are you ready?”

I squeezed his hand and said a silent prayer.

An older man sat at the head of the table, his hand wrapped around the woman's hand to his right. He was handsome, tan with a thick head of salt-and-pepper hair. I could have seen him anywhere in the world and known he was Marcello's father.

As we approached, he kissed the woman's hand and stood slowly, rubbing a spot on his hip. One of the few differences between
him and his son was their height. Marcello towered over him to the point of it being almost comical.

“The height comes from my mother's side,” he joked just as his father pulled him into a crushing hug.

“
Ciao, bella!
” he said, dropping a light kiss on each of my cheeks. In the most delightful broken English he introduced himself as Angelo Bianchi and he was, “
so happy that you are here.
”

He pulled me away from his son by wrapping my arm in his.

His father took the time to introduce me to his parents, then it was on to Marcello's three brothers, the in-laws, and all of twelve kids before we got to aunts and uncles, cousins, and second cousins. I'm pretty sure some of these people were random strangers they invited to dinner, because who has a family this big?

The one I was dreading was Marcello's mother. You hear stories about Italian mothers and how inherently disapproving and overprotective they are, especially to a foreigner who is sleeping with her youngest son. Susanna Bianchi was a diminutive woman with a shock of inky black hair and a bright smile that could rival her son's. She was wearing an apron and had an honest-to-God wooden spoon tucked into one of the pockets. I watched her chase the grandchildren and give her husband a quick kiss before she came over to us.

“Sweetheart,” she said, before pulling her son down to her eye level.

“Mamma.” He squatted down and picked her up to kiss her cheeks. “I missed you.”

Setting her down, he took her hand and turned to me. “This is Avery.”

I expected the sizing-up once-over. I even expected the knowing look when she saw Marcello's hand wrapped protectively around mine.

What I didn't anticipate was her pulling me into the sweetest hug this side of my own mother's arms and dropping two quick pecks on my cheeks.

Bitsy only wanted the dainty handshake or air kisses. I wasn't sure if she ever actually hugged Daniel. I'd been scared of Marcello's mother for no reason at all.

“Come, you sit by me,” she insisted, pulling me along to an empty chair. “Marcello, he no bring anyone home, he tell you that?”

“Oh, Mamma, no,” he protested, laughing when his brothers began to tease him in Italian.

“I heard something like that, yes,” I answered, sitting in the chair I was directed to.

“My son, he a romantic,
si
?”

I blushed, but nodded.

“So okay. He bring you here, you must be good girl,
si
?”

“Yes,” Marcello answered, and getting the frown of the century from his mother for answering for me.

“My son bring you here, I think you a good girl. Now, you hungry,
si
?”

I watched as the biggest bowl of ravioli I'd ever seen was placed on the center of the table in front of me, waves of tomato-scented incredible wafting toward me. “Oh my yes, hungry.”

And with that, everyone tucked in. Marcello's mother and two of his sister-in-laws hovered nearby, never sitting, just making sure that everyone had what they needed. Most of the people around the table spoke Italian only, but a few words of broken
English filtered through and I surprised myself when I could pick out more of the Italian than I thought I would. I mainly focused on the food . . . and Marcello.

Watching him with his family was fascinating. His mother hovered over everyone certainly, but seemed to linger a little longer behind him. A hand on the shoulder, an extra meatball or two, it was clear that the son who had left for the big city was revered when he came home.

“You okay so far?” he asked when his mother and sisters brought out another round of food. Pastas, veggies, salads, meats—it was a veritable smorgasbord.

Family dinners in Boston were quiet, reserved affairs where we spoke in low voices and never yelled across the table, let alone down the length across twenty other people.

This was boisterous, energetic, and physical at times when Marcello's sister and brothers would poke and prod him. The sense of family was so strong here, so connected, that even though I didn't understand half of what was being said I never felt like an outsider.

When dinner was over, everyone pitched in to clean up and watched the kids chase the animals through the grass.

“Was this a good day?” he said, taking my hand and leading me away from little prying eyes.

“It was the best day,” I answered.

W
HEN I WOKE,
the bedroom was filled with the scent of an Italian breakfast. I didn't know what treats were made, but I couldn't wait to find out. Marcello was oblivious to it, snoring softly behind me, his arm wrapped around my middle. Rolling over carefully, I smoothed my fingers over his forehead and down his arm, loving the wake of goose bumps that formed. I spent a few minutes staring at him, memorizing his face in the morning light. Suddenly, all thoughts of a hearty meal weren't as important.

I wondered if I'd ever lose that giddy feeling that I got last night when he told me he loved me. It was something that we'd never said the first go around, but we knew it. I felt it in every fiber of me then and now. Maybe it was the universe throwing us back together as part of some cosmic plot, or perhaps I was just the luckiest person alive, but I was hell-bent on not making the same mistakes I did the first time.

“What are you thinking about?” he asked sleepily. His eyes remained closed, lips fighting back a grin. Leaning forward, I kissed the tip of his nose before pressing my lips to his.

“I'm wondering if it's possible to love you more than I do right now.”

His hand slid down my back, over my rear, and squeezed. “That sounds like a challenge.”

“Your family is in the house,” I admonished, throwing my head back when his lips traced a path down my neck.

“Then you must be very quiet,
tesoro
 . . .”

AFTER OUR SURPRISE MORNING TANGLE,
he'd tried to get me to sneak into the shower with him. I'd firmly put my foot down on that one, already feeling guilty about doing the naughty in his family's home. So while he showered, I explored the room I'd be staying in for the weekend.

I'd thought—in fact prepared myself ahead of time—that we wouldn't be sharing a bedroom while we stayed with his family. Old Italian mother, severely Catholic—it didn't take a genius to figure out that boy/girl cohabitation wasn't going to fly. But that's the thing about preconceived notions, you just never know when you're going to be surprised. Marcello's parents were very forward thinking—
hip
was the word his mother had used when she ushered us down the long central hall and into a large guest room after dinner.
“You two, you sleep together here, si?”
she'd said.

Blushing, I'd nodded, standing just behind and almost out of sight of Marcello, mortified that she knew what we'd likely be up to under her roof. Marcello laughed out loud as I stammered my good night to his mother, in my best broken Italian accent. Once she headed back down the hall, I'd yanked him inside and buried my red face in the nearest corner of the room.

When Marcello took advantage of this angle by standing directly behind me and wrapping his arms around me while placing
wet, openmouthed kisses along the back of my neck, I'd quickly forgotten my embarrassment and let him pull me down into the mess of pillows.

Now, with a clearer head and Marcello and his roving hands safely half a house away in the shower, I looked around a bit. It was a beautiful room.