An Offer He Cant Refuse - By Christie Ridgway Page 0,89
of her, she cradled his head in her palms. "I'll move in a second," he promised.
She murmured something that sounded already half-asleep.
They dozed.
Johnny came awake in a rush. There was a fragrant pillow...
Tea. He smiled to himself and gathered her close, two spoons in the cozy drawer of his bed.
"Johnny?"
"Shh. Go back to sleep."
Her arm shifted against the one he had tucked beneath her breasts. The movement must have pressed the backlight button on her watch, because the businesslike face blinked on. It was 3:12:37.
For the first time in months, he'd slept through the witching hour.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
"I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face" Johnny Mathis Warm (1957)
Rachele danced around the kitchen, preparing the evening meal for herself and her father. Over the weekend, she'd made a big pan of lasagna and then frozen it in individual squares. Two were warming in the microwave. A little bread, a little salad, and her father would sit down to one of his favorite dinners.
Little did he know it was eggplant that gave the pasta dish its heartiness. The tomato sauce was purely vegetarian as well, with grated carrots, honey, and the juice of a fresh lemon to balance the flavors. Her traditional Italian papa didn't know how untraditional the Ciriglianos could be.
She caught sight of her reflection in the stainless steel toaster and grimaced. You'd think one look at her dark makeup and nose and eyebrow piercings would drive the point home, but no.
A few minutes later, with a full, fragrant plate in front of him, her father didn't even appear to notice when she seated herself across from him. It didn't wipe the smile off her face. It couldn't.
"Why are you humming?" her father asked, his attention still focused on his lasagna.
Humming? "I am?" She had been, she realized. One of Dean Martin's signature songs, "On an Evening in Roma."
You could put Usher in an Italian girl's iPod, but you couldn't take Dino out of an Italian girl's mental music files. "It was a good day at work, I guess," she said.
Her father grunted what might pass for an, "Oh, yeah?"
She decided to accept it as such. "First, Tea - "
"How's her mother?"
"Fine, I guess."
His head came up, his gaze fixing somewhere over her left shoulder. "When's the last time you saw her?"
Rachele frowned. "Let me think... last week? She stopped by with a new product for Tea to try. She's been moaning that her hair refuses to stay straight."
"Bianca has been moaning?"
"No, Tea. Her mother seems just fine."
"Fine?"
Rachele sighed. "Just fine."
'That's good. That's very good." Her father's head dipped back toward his food.
Rachele frowned at the top of his head. Did he really have the jones for Tea's mother or was the suspicion just a hangover from the bubbly atmosphere that had been floating around the design office in recent days?
'Tea's got a boyfriend," she blurted out.
Her father's fork paused between his plate and his mouth. He appeared to study the bite of lasagna.
Maybe he was noticing the eggplant for the first time in seven years. But then he shoveled it into his mouth without comment.
"As long as I've been working for her, she's only dated these fuddy-duddy fix-up guys, but this time she found a man all on her own." And Rachele couldn't have been more surprised if her father had commented upon the midnight-black shade of her fingernail polish. "She's been coming into the office ...later"
Her father grunted again, so Rachele felt obliged to tell the whole truth.
"Well, it was only once and she blamed it on a blow-dryer malfunction." Since Tea's hair had been a wiggly mass of waves lately, it was sort of hard not to believe her. But there'd been something that looked an awful lot like a case of beard burn on the underside of her chin. Rachele smiled to herself and rubbed a finger along her own jaw. Cal kept a close shave, but there was the teeniest rough edge to his skin that made his kisses only that much more exciting.
"Who's this man?"
"Cal..." Rachele started, then caught herself. "You mean Tea's... uh, man? His name is Johnny. Johnny Magee." And when he came into the design office, sometimes he'd hang in the reception area and lean against the wall, looking Rat Pack-cool if you didn't take into account the way he gazed through Tea's office doorway and just watched her working at her desk.
As if she was a present he'd never asked for and didn't deserve, but that he wouldn't ever, ever give back.