In a coastal town like this, I knew locals were used to eating fish, oysters, and mussels for breakfast, but that had never been my schtick. I just couldn’t stomach seafood first thing in the morning. Whatever the man had cooking there smelled like just the ticket.
The only problem was…I didn’t speak Croatian.
From past experience, I knew that some Croatian people did speak Ukrainian. Before going to England for secondary school and university, I learned a bit of the language while I was in primary school in Russia.
Technically, I was originally from Siberia. The harshest region of Russia, by far. But I’d made it a point over the years to avoid all reminders of where I came from.
Primarily because I almost died there.
I pointed at the paper bags of baked confections on the man’s cart. “What is this?” I asked in broken Ukrainian, hoping he at least knew a few words.
My heart sank when he frowned. Then he looked to his left where a curly-headed girl with freckles that looked to be around ten years old stood smiling at me. I hadn’t even noticed her hiding back there.
The man said something to the girl, and she nodded. “You speak English?” she asked with a marked accent.
I beamed at her, relieved. “Yes.”
“This is called fritule,” she explained in English. “It is like…what do you call it…a…do-nut? But the part in the middle.”
“A doughnut hole?”
She nodded enthusiastically. “Yes. Doughnut…hole. It is baked, with powdered sugar on top. Inside is rum and raisin.”
I handed over my kuna. “I’ll take two, please.”
Best. Breakfast. Ever.
What the hell is she doing now?
I’d been following Lexi through the streets of Rovinj for the last hour or so, only to discover that her actions were completely erratic. She was all over the place, moving from one merchant cart to the next, stopping to take selfies at every scenic overlook she passed, and breezing into storefronts where she spoke to any local who approached her.
Through it all, her smile never left her face.
Even as the little girl from the first cart—where she’d bought some kind of food that she’d ended up licking off her fingers—trailed closely in her wake. Lexi never seemed to mind the child’s presence. In fact, she was pointing things out to her, asking questions, making her giggle. She’d even bought her a bracelet from one of several artisan carts they’d passed.
The business brunch appointment I’d had scheduled that morning had to be pushed back to a dinner meeting, due to my associate missing his connecting flight in Berlin. I’d gone straight back to the villa after receiving that phone call to find the house empty and Lexi gone. And the stack of cash I’d left for her in the same spot on the kitchen counter.
So, she was using her own personal money to buy all that stuff?
Not that she was dropping loads of cash on Dolce purses or anything. Those bracelets and snacks were far from expensive. But why hadn’t she taken the cash? I thought she would have been thrilled to divest me of the money she assumed I was so obsessed with. The money I’d given her every reason to think I was obsessed with.
I approached a cart that Lexi and the girl had just purchased matching hair clips at before skipping off down the street together.
“Parli Italiano?” I asked the aging woman standing behind the cart. Do you speak Italian?
She inclined her head. “A little,” she answered in the same language.
There was a small portion of the Croatian population that spoke Italian, enough for me to get by and conduct business every time I visited the country.
I nodded my head in Lexi’s direction. “The blonde woman,” I said in Italian. “What language were you speaking with her?”
Because while Lexi and the little girl spoke English to each other—I’d heard it clear enough from where I watched them—she had spoken to this woman in a different language.
“The lady speaking Ukrainian,” the woman replied. “My Ukrainian better than my Italian.”
Ukrainian? I guess that wasn’t a huge surprise, since she was obviously fluent in Russian. But her English was so good and her Russian accent so slight, I knew she had to have been educated elsewhere.
“And she very generous,” the woman added before I could walk away. She waved down at her handmade hair accessories, and what looked like coin purses, on her cart, smiling brightly. “She only buy two clips but pay for ten. She a gentle soul,