The Love Scam - MaryJanice Davidson Page 0,52
six months.
You’re getting it bad, Rake.
Yup.
When you get your money back, you can hire a platoon of private investigators and track some of these assholes down.
Definitely.
Thirty
It was hard to remember how much he wanted to sleep with Delaney when she woke him up
(“It’s so early I don’t know what time it is.”
“It’s four-forty-five A.M., ya big baby.”
“I’ve only been up this early when I haven’t gone to bed yet.”
“Shut up.”)
and shooed him from his uncomfortable sofa bed to work at San Basso, which once was a church but was deconsecrated and turned into, respectively, (a) a haunted house, (b) a post office, and now (c) a charity. Why Sofia and Delaney thought he would find this at all interesting at any time, never mind the wee hours, was a mystery.
And Lillith was a morning person. Ye gods.
“So, what?” he asked, yawning. He made noises of gratitude when Elena handed him a cup of coffee, Lillith a cup of hot chocolate (at least he hoped it was), then hiked up her navy blue skirt (the hem was a prudent two inches below her knee; Elena scolded and dressed like a fifties housewife) and climbed into the van’s driver’s seat. “Meals on Wheels? What? And the reason we couldn’t start at noon is…”
“Colomba di Pasqua,” Delaney replied, “and lots of it.”
“Dunno what that is.”
“And we do not start at noon because we are not lazy Americans,” came Teresa’s pert reply.
“Whoa! Too early for generalizing!”
Delaney ignored that, all of it, his yelp and Teresa’s cruelty. “While you’re doing that—”
“Doing what?”
“—Elena and I will work on inventory and then have a meeting with the chairman.” Sofia, he had been told on the drive over, had spent the night at Teresa’s shelter and was keeping an eye on the kids, as she often did. She was the youngest of Delaney’s little group, and Rake had assumed her days on the street weren’t as far behind her as the others’ were. Teresa’s third in command had also been plucked from the streets, and helped run the place. If he’d known baby-sitting might have let him sleep in, he would have—no. Not if it meant doing charity without Delaney. And Lillith assured him between slurps of cocoa that she’d help him do whatever it was. “Okay?”
“’Kay. Thanks for letting me finish charging my phone. When we get back tonight, I’ll try to reach out to Blake again.”
“Great!”
“That sounded suspiciously cheerful. So eager to get rid of me?” he teased. Please don’t say yes.
“No. I sort of can’t wait to see what Blake sends you next,” she admitted with a guilty smile.
“That makes one of us.” Rake drank more coffee and groaned. “He’d better be sane this time, that’s all I have to say about it. Um, Teresa, not to look a gift barista in the mouth, but why are there five tablespoons of sugar in my cappuccino?”
“Whoa,” from Lillith, who now had a tiny chocolate mustache, which was so friggin’ adorable, he wasn’t going to tell her.
“Aw, man.” Delaney shook her head.
Elena turned around to scold Teresa, finishing with “You will succumb to diabetes!” which, for some reason, Teresa found hilarious.
“Sono fiducioso di morte violenta sarà la mia fine. Diabete? Ha!”
Rake said nothing; he had noticed that Europeans tended to (rightly) assume most tourists weren’t fluent. Even though the other women knew he could speak Italian, they kept forgetting. And so he didn’t comment when Teresa explained that she knew she’d die a violent death, something sudden, violent, and unrelated to diabetes. Given how the others (except Delaney, who was bent over her laptop, and Lillith, who didn’t comment) agreed, he assumed they all shared the same outlook.
She drove the van right up to the former church, which, like every other building in Venice, looked like it had been built in the eleventh century, remodeled in the fifteenth, then benignly neglected ever since. It was near the St. Mark’s clock tower which, when it wasn’t so early, he appreciated as a beautiful sight. The area was mostly deserted, because Venetians were a clever and resourceful people who understood that 5:00 A.M. is still bedtime. And the tourists didn’t have a clue about anything, so they were still in bed, too. (Lucky bastards.)
He walked past three pillars to the entrance, Delaney and the others leading the way, and then they led him straight to the depths of hell: the kitchen of San Basso.
* * *
Colomba di Pasqua was a terrible fruitcakesque confection people were forced to eat at