“I certainly don’t mind if you stay in your bathing suit all day,” he says, his large hand palming the end of the railing. “Make yourself at home.”
I flush again. I may not be naked but I’m in a small towel in his living room. At least I’m dry and not dripping onto the floor.
“I … uh,” I stammer. I gesture helplessly to the photos. “I was just looking at your photos.” Definitely not buying time because I thought I’d run into you upstairs and it would be awkward.
“Ah,” he says, walking over to me, sliding his hands in his pockets. He stops in front of the mantel and peers at it, as if he’s never seen the photos before. He nods at the one of the woman in the roses. “That’s my mother.”
“Really? She’s beautiful,” I tell him. I steal a glance at him, now seeing the resemblance. He’s so close that I can see his dark brown eyes are ringed with gold, seeming to glow beneath his thick black lashes.
He turns toward me, and I feel myself flush again. I didn’t want to run into him upstairs while in my towel, and yet this is much, much worse.
“I better go change,” I tell him quietly, quickly turning around and hurrying over to the stairs.
I head up, and just as I’m walking down the hallway, one of the doors opens across from me and Vanni pokes his head out.
“Hey,” he says to me.
I stop and eye him anxiously, pasting on a smile. “Yes?”
“Are you a writer?”
Oh man. I really don’t want to get in a conversation with this kid while a lot of me is still on display.
I nod and edge toward my door. “Yes.”
“I ask because you said you were one of my mother’s clients.” He’s like a miniature version of his father, although his eyes look like Jana’s, so when he narrows his eyes in suspicion, the resemblance really comes through. “I’ve never met one of her authors.”
“Oh, well.” I would raise my hand in greeting except my towel will fall down and I don’t need to traumatize this kid anymore. So I nod. “Nice to meet you.”
“Vanni!” Claudio yells from downstairs and then says something in Italian.
Vanni rolls his eyes and then steps back in his room, shutting the door. Pretty sure Claudio said something along the lines of “quit bugging your mother’s client and let her get changed.”
I quickly go into my room and close the door behind me, locking it for good measure, in case Vanni gets curious again and wants to ask more questions.
My heart sinks at the thought of having to leave so soon after I got here, especially after I put everything away last night, expecting to be here for a month. I’ll have to do that later though.
I take out a dress from the wardrobe, figuring it’s my last chance to wear one before I have to head back to gloomy Scotland with my tail between my legs. It’s a spicy orange red with spaghetti straps, fitted at the bodice enough so it compresses my girls and I don’t have to wear a bra, then flares out. I look myself over in the mirror, smoothing out the wrinkles, and then tie my wet hair back into a bun. I don’t have any makeup on my face but it doesn’t matter at this point.
I take in a deep breath but it does nothing to calm my heart, which has been oscillating between slow thumps full of dread and skips and hops fueled by anxiety. When I was young, I had a stuttering problem, which caused a lot of grief for me. Kids made fun of me, and I had no friends. I spent all my time alone, lost in books, reading or writing, creating my own little worlds. I did whatever I could not to speak up in class, where my nerves would get the best of me and the stuttering would get worse, but of course my teachers were dicks and always called on me.
That continued for a while until my father made me go to a speech therapist a few years after my parents’ divorce. While my mother said my impediment made me unique, my father, who at that point had left us in Ullapool, starting a new family in London, said I’d never get anywhere if I didn’t change things. As much as I wanted to fix it, I always thought that perhaps his love hinged on