A Mother for His Daughter. Ally Blake
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.
‘You like?’ Luca asked.
‘How could I not?’ Gracie said on a sigh.
‘It’s isolated,’ he said, and Gracie thought she heard a tinge of…something in his voice.
She pulled her head in from the window and faced him but his gaze remained on the house. ‘Rubbish,’ she scoffed, and he spun to face her, just as she had intended. ‘You know nothing about being isolated. To get here from Melbourne I had to take two separate planes, and was in the air for a total of twenty-four hours. A two-hour drive from Rome is nothing, buddy.’
She had desired to see him relax and she succeeded, though she could have done without the tummy turn that came from one dose of those crinkling eyes.
‘I see your point,’ he said.
‘Besides, the world gets smaller every day. What with the internet and cable TV, nowhere is really isolated any more.’
His dark eyes looked through her, trying to determine if she was teasing him. ‘So they tell me,’ he finally said, a cheek crease adding impact to the yummy eye crinkles.
Flushed and flustered by her responses to the man’s charming smiles, Gracie stuck her head back out the window, drinking in the cool fresh air. The villa looked quaint, and particular to the region. She would not have been surprised if Luca informed her they still sent post via messengers on horseback.
‘You may have access to all means of communication I have at my disposal while you are here, Gracie. Mi casa, su casa,’ he assured her, and she found it disconcerting but at the same time kind of fabulous that he seemed able to read her thoughts.
Once in front of the house, the tyres crunched to a halt on the gravel. They were met by a number of household staff and a huge black dog tumbled from the large front door and down the ten steps to the driveway.
The humans babbled in Italian over the top of one another, and the big black dog bundled straight up to Luca, throwing itself at him until his paws rested on his chest. Luca ruffled him about the ears yet didn’t break conversational stride with his staff for a moment.
Gracie half expected Mila to be bundled up in the arms of a nanny but none came. She remained resolutely attached to her father’s side, rubbing the dog’s tummy.
Finally, Gracie’s host turned to her. He made quite a picture with his pretty daughter standing silently at one side and his large black dog sitting on the other.
‘My staff have been apprised as to your role here. I will let you acquaint yourself with them as you go. And this,’ Luca ruffled the massive dog’s ear, ‘is Caesar.’
Caesar greeted Gracie with a loud woof that she felt from head to toe. She waved back, happy to keep her distance, her only real experience with dogs being her friend Kelly’s cuddle-sized Maltese terrier.
‘What is he?’ she asked.
‘He’s a Newfoundland.’
‘Are you sure? I could have sworn he was a bear.’
Mila giggled. ‘There are no bears in Tuscany. There are wild boars. But no bears.’
‘Great,’ Gracie said, suddenly wishing herself back in Australia, where one could find the deadliest snakes and spiders in the world but where the chances of meeting a wild boar in your back yard were slim to none.
‘And where is Gran-nonna?’ Gracie asked, her voice thin.
Luca cut a glance to the cottage, which stood several metres to the right of the house. ‘She lives next door. I am sure you will meet her soon.’ He held out an arm. ‘For now, please, follow Cat; she will show you to your room.’
Gracie nodded. Amongst the gaggle of staff, a young woman bowed her head and Gracie figured she was Cat.
‘Venuto,’ the girl said. ‘Come.’
Gracie’s backpack was already being moved off in another direction by one of the men so she had little choice but to venuto as ordered.
Inside the house was even more beautiful than on the outside. It was elegant yet comfortable, though it did not show any of the usual evidence that a four-year-old was in residence. Gracie remembered when her half-brother and half-sister were young; their house had been strewn with toy trucks and dolls, with board-game tokens taking up pride of place on side-tables alongside the more adult bric-à-brac. Luca’s grounds, with their sprawling vineyard, had promised a working home, but the inside looked more like something out of Architectural Digest.
Gracie followed Cat up a large staircase to her room, which turned out to be a small suite with a queen-sized canopy bed, a sitting room by curtained French windows and an en suite. The room smelt like freshly laundered sheets and was twice the size of her room in her hostel, which had slept eight snoring backpackers who were mostly into double-figure days of wearing the same unwashed clothes.
She whistled a steady stream of air. ‘Jeepers creepers.’
Cat looked to her in confusion but Gracie just smiled and gave her two-thumbs-up, the international sign that all was good. Cat looked relieved and sent Gracie her own tentative two-thumbs-up to show she understood, and then she left, closing the door behind her.
Gracie sat on her bed and waited, having no idea what