Sister Swap

“That’s a very good idea, isn’t it, Pia?” he said.

The little girl nodded and smiled and took the hand he held out. He looked relieved, and ready to flee the airport before something worse happened.

Another whew!

Lady Luck is soooo blowing things my way today, Rox thought. Rowie would be happy with me, but it can’t last.

It didn’t.

Walking toward the exit, Gino said, “You gave in to her.” It was an accusation, not a compliment.

“Gave in to her?”

“But at least we avoided the tantrum.”

Okay, so maybe that was kind of a compliment, but she couldn’t let the You gave in to her bit go by.

Harlan’s Reason Number Nine, incidentally. “You jump on every tiny thing.”

“I didn’t give in to her!” she said. “I made a positive suggestion that appealed to her, and deflected her feelings of frustration.”

“We have been having serious problems with Pia’s tantrums for a long time,” Gino said, in a tone that could have frosted a pond. “We have a clear policy in place for dealing with them, and that involves never giving in to her. I appreciate that this time, in a very public locale, you managed to avoid the tantrum, but please, in the future, once we’re at the family estate, I would ask you to stay within your own area of expertise.”

My own area of expertise…

Would you like your eggs easy over or sunny-side up? And with a side order of opera or cabaret?

“Sure,” Roxanna said, resisting the temptation to start mentally running through the list of antique rose varieties she’d been trying to memorize on the plane.

She noticed that Gino didn’t specify who we was. Himself and Mrs. Gino Di Bartoli, she assumed. No prizes for guessing who the chief architect of the tantrum policy was, however. Hint—someone who didn’t appear to understand bright, creative kids.

Someone who drove a Ferrari, she discovered a few minutes later.

A red Ferrari.

And who drove it fast.

Oh, it was wonderful! Rox didn’t feel scared for a second. Gino drove to suit the conditions, and she’d seen the careful way he’d strapped his daughter into a child seat in the back before they started. On curvy or traffic-filled streets, he didn’t attempt to weave between lanes or put his foot hard on the gas. Even the odd aggressive gesture or muttered curse were pretty restrained, compared to what Rox understood about Italian drivers.

When they hit the motorway heading to the north, however…

So cool.

She looked sideways at him, expecting to see a lazy grin of satisfaction, an enjoyment of the power and speed and sheer exhilaration, but no; his face still looked tight.

“Children grow out of tantrums,” she blurted out, feeling stupidly responsible for the tight look and stupidly eager to make it go away.

Bleahh! Reason Number Eight. “You never think before you speak.”

His mouth snapped open just far enough for speech. “They don’t grow out of them if they’ve learned that tantrums are the secret to getting their own way.”

“Does she ever get her own way?”

“No. As I said, we’ve been very strict about it. I should say, Miss Cassidy has been very strict about it, since she is the one who has spent the most time with Pia.”

Miss Cassidy.

Had to be the nanny.

Explained Pia’s perfect English, with its occasional scary overtones of deceased British royalty.

Gino pronounced the nanny’s name as Meess Cassidi, which was—so far—the only cute thing about him.

Once again failing to think before she spoke, Rox said, “I think sometimes a child needs to get her own way. She needs to know that people understand what’s important to her. And she needs to learn…oh…how to tell the difference between the things she really wants and should have, and the things that are just a passing whim or in conflict with what others need. Isn’t a blanket no just as bad as a blanket yes? Does anyone ever actually listen to her?”

Gino felt a steel band tighten around his head.

Had she made up her mind to sleep with Francesco? Did she think she was going to marry him? Was that why she’d suddenly shed her rabbity image and started offering opinions on issues that were none of her business? Did she think that they were her business now, because she was about to become a permanent part of the Di Bartoli family?

“I am not interested in discussing this with you any further, Dr. Madison.”

Short silence.

“No. Of course. I’m sorry.” She sounded more than sorry. She sounded chastened, as if she were really angry with herself. “I’ve been told before that I tend to do that.”

“To interfere in things that aren’t your business?”

“To speak first and think afterward. Foot-in-mouth disease.”

“What? A disease!”

She was diseased? He was bringing her into his home with his precious daughter and she was—

“No, no. Oh, gosh! Language barrier. American slang. It’s supposed to be funny. If you’re tactless, if you say things you shouldn’t have said, people say you’ve put your foot in your mouth. Foot-in-mouth disease. Get it?”

“Okay.” He couldn’t help grinning. Not so much at the allegedly humorous expression, but at her manic, anguished reaction to their misunderstanding.

“I’m so sorry if I gave you a heart attack there!” She was wincing and flapping her hands, clasping them together, begging him to understand, acting sincerely distressed. “I do that. I say things. And—oh my gosh! My blouse isn’t even done up right. You’re never going to beli—” She stopped, then fastened the slipped-through button that had caught his attention when she’d first come up to him in the terminal.

“Never going to what?” he asked.

He was curious.

And he’d started to have a theoretical inkling about what Francesco might have seen in her.

There was a beat of silence.

“Never going to forgive me,” she said.

“Don’t be ridiculous. It was a small misunderstanding.”

“No, um, I meant for my comments about the t-a-n-t-r-u-m thing.” She spelled out the critical word.

“I will forgive you if it’s not mentioned again.”

“Right. Okay. It won’t be.” She stopped flapping and clasping her hands, settled a little deeper into her seat and turned to look out of the window.

Glancing in the rearview mirror, Gino saw that Pia had fallen asleep. It was three-thirty in the afternoon. They’d be home in an hour and a half. If she slept until then, she’d be difficult to settle tonight, and he was essentially on his own. Miss Cassidy was taking a four-week paid break in England, at his request. It was the right thing, he was sure of it, yet he felt daunted.

Even utterly capable, immaculate, Paris-born Angele had been daunted by taking care of Pia. Gino and Angele had separated when Pia was just six months old, and of course she had gone with her mother—and with Miss Cassidy, whom they’d hired before their baby was even born. Miss Cassidy had been part of the divorce settlement, if you wanted to look at it that way, a live-in fixture at the spacious apartment Angele had rented in Rome.

During Angele’s illness two years ago…such an aggressive form of cancer… Gino hated to think about it…he’d moved Pia and Miss Cassidy back into his own apartment, but he hadn’t changed anything about their routine. He hadn’t felt it was his place. He had consulted with Angele’s older sister Lisette, also married to an Italian and based in Rome, and she had agreed.

“Of course, you must think of what my sister would have done and what she would have wanted!”

“I need you to help me with all of that, Lisette.”

“I’m here, Gino. You know I am.”

Pia had lost her mother. Miss Cassidy gave her continuity of care and affection. Gino himself had been very tied up with the acquisition of a rival company that year and with his complicated feelings about his ex-wife’s death. He worked long hours, and he traveled frequently.

“I’m not sure how much Francesco has told you about my situation,” he suddenly said, dragging Roxanna Madison’s rapt attention from the unfolding views of Tuscany in early spring.

As a horticultural expert, it made sense that she was enthralled. He should probably have left her in peace. But with Pia safely asleep and with the prospect of the three of them living under the same roof for several weeks, he wanted to make sure everything was clear. And he wanted it to come from him, not from Francesco over the phone, or from the staff employed at the Di Bartoli palazzo and surrounding tract of land.

“Um, not much,” she answered.

So he told her about Angele, Miss Cassidy, the apartment in Rome and his own growing belief, over the past few months, that he needed to get more involved with Pia, get more of an idea about the reason behind the tantrums. Was it because of her mother’s death? Was there some area in which her needs were not being met? He was her father. It was his duty to understand his little girl.

“Thank you for sharing that with me,” Roxanna said when he’d finished speaking, and he realized he’d gotten more personal and detailed than he’d intended and that he’d shown more vulnerability also.

It didn’t make sense. On top of the two narrow misses on major tantrums, those few moments of fearing that he’d lost Pia at the airport must have unsettled him more than he’d thought.

Still thinking about his daughter, he made the final turn into the graveled avenue that led to the estate, and the palazzo came into view, its terra-cotta-tiled roof softly washed by the thin late-afternoon March sunshine, and the first hints of spring green dusting the landscape all around.

“Ohhh, it’s beautiful!” Dr. Madison said beside him. “I mean, today. It looks particularly beautiful today. Compared to when I was last here, last week, when it was, when it was—”

“Probably raining,” he finished for her, not really thinking about it.

Pia was still asleep, and he wondered how disastrous the consequences would be later on tonight if he left her that way, parked safely in front of the palazzo with the car windows open. Or should he wake her up at once? He knew from recent experience that this would definitely make her cry.

Chapter Two

In her room at midnight that night, Rox very much wanted to call Rowie and Mom to report, like a covert operative, that she’d achieved successful and undetected insertion into the target zone. She’d managed to greet Maria, the housekeeper, as if the two of them had met before. She’d correctly matched the three gardeners’ names with the descriptions of them that Row had given her. She’d used the sketchy map of the palazzo’s interior to navigate her way to her bedroom, and had only gotten lost once.

But Rowie and Mom were on the plane to Florida, so she couldn’t.

At least, she really hoped they were on the plane to Florida. What if Row couldn’t bring herself to leave the hotel, even when she had Mom with her every step of the way?

How much of the difference in their personalities came down to the fact that Rox had been born first and heaviest and healthiest and easiest? It had always seemed to her like such a random quirk of fate. She’d held the winning ticket in that particular lottery, and she wasn’t going to let her sister suffer for it.

Since she couldn’t call Mom and Rowie, she called Dad instead. “You haven’t heard from them?”

“No, which means they must be safely on the plane.” He sounded relieved about it, also.

“That’s great! Tell Rowie as soon as you see her that everything is going fine here, no problems, and she’s not to worry about a thing. She’s to focus on herself, on getting the right therapist and the right treatment, and getting better.”

“Will do, honey.”

“Talk to you soon.”

“Thanks for doing this for your sister.”

“Oh, it’s a walk in the park, it’s a breeze,” Rox lied. “It’s going to be fun. Make sure she really knows she doesn’t have to worry about me.”

Roxanna didn’t feel sleepy, since her body was still set on New Jersey time. When Gino had taken his still-wide-awake and protesting daughter up to bed an hour ago, Rox had almost blurted out something about jet lag and understanding how Pia felt. She’d shut her treacherous mouth just in time.

You weren’t supposed to get jet lag going from London to Italy, since their time zones were only an hour apart, so she’d put on a fake yawn, said good-night, and hidden her raring-to-go energy levels in this gorgeous, high-ceilinged, powder-blue-painted room, with adjoining bathroom, that Francesco had assigned to her sister.

It was no coincidence, Roxanna knew, that the room was situated just along the corridor from where Francesco had slept. She wondered whether Rowie might have been able to hold herself together here in Italy, enough to complete the garden project, if she hadn’t faced Francesco’s constant and seductive attempts to sleep with her.

Water under the bridge now.

Rox had other, more urgent things to think about.

She would have to study Rowena’s plant lists, work schedules, delivery dates and garden bed layouts for a few hours until she really got sleepy. And there was no alarm clock in the room, so she’d have to leave the painted wooden shutters open and trust to the morning light to wake her at an hour that wasn’t suspiciously late.

Considering that she didn’t feel tired, Rox found it hard to concentrate on the pages of notes Rowena had given her in London, or on the bundle of stuff she’d sneaked up to her room from the sunny and spacious office Rowena had been given downstairs. She loved flowers and shrubs and gardens, sure, but not the way Rowie did, not on the same level of detail. She loved beautiful vistas, dramatic groupings of color, and sweet, heady scents…

But did she really need to know exactly what quantity of Souvenir de la Malmaison, Belle de Crecy, Eglantine, Celsiana and a dozen other varieties of rose Row had ordered for the Pink Walk? Did she need to know that crested moss was also known as Chapeau de Napoleon?

Cram, cram, cram.

Exam tomorrow.

Concentrate, Rox!

Instead, her mind kept straying to Gino and his daughter. They made such a gorgeous pair, with their dark coloring, their lashes as thick as sable paintbrushes, their satin-smooth olive skin, their impeccable bone structure.

You could have photographed them at a pavement café or in a cobbled town square for one of those evocative postcards of Italian street life that looked like a black-and-white movie still from the era of the young Sophia Loren…if you could have gotten arrogant, supersuccessful Gino to stop frowning at Pia and looking so totally at sea about his daughter.

The little girl had been difficult tonight, Rox had to admit. Pia wouldn’t sit properly at the big dining room table to eat—Roxanna had thought the food was fabulous—but had just wanted to run around and play. Afterward, she seemed bored with her fancy, pristine dolls. She darted into some vast, echoing formal sitting room—the salone, they seemed to call it—lifted the lid on the grand piano and started to tinkle the keys. When she got into trouble for it, instead of stopping she pounded them harder and harder.

Had a great sense of rhythm, actually.

She had been physically removed from the instrument and then from the room, and she had started to kick and scream. Gino had looked embarrassed, upset and at the end of his rope. His vulnerability called forth an odd connection to him that Roxanna didn’t think she could have felt with a man like that in any other situation. She didn’t like the commanding type, and she ought to know, since she’d been married to one for six years.

As the tantrum had unravelled, Maria the housekeeper clearly hadn’t known whether to step in or say nothing. Rox had felt seriously out of place. She had mumbled something about going for a walk, even though it was dark outside by that time.

Back and forth along a terrace she had gone, then round and round a beautiful old fountain that hadn’t yet been restored. The place was fabulous with its air of age-tarnished grandeur and luxury. Inside, she had still been able to hear Pia letting loose. When silence finally had descended and she had ventured back indoors, she had found the little girl up at the polished rosewood table where she should have been an hour earlier, face sticky with ice cream, screaming forgotten, mood utterly content.

Oh, so we never give in to Pia’s tantrums, do we?

Not very fair of her to gloat over it like that, when Gino looked as if he’d aged ten years in the process.

She didn’t usually gloat.

Harlan hadn’t even mentioned it on his list.

And now, here in her big, silent bedroom, she couldn’t stop thinking about Gino, wondering how he’d dug himself into such a hole, wishing too strongly that she could help, knowing that she never could. A man like that wouldn’t let her.

She didn’t get to sleep until after four.

Was Dr. Madison ever going to wake up?

Gino had passed a sleepless night himself, but he’d risen at eight. Now it was ten and there was still no sign of her. He’d scheduled a part of the morning for touring the garden together, with her plans in hand, but if she didn’t appear soon, the morning would be gone. He didn’t feel comfortable about rapping on her door to waken her since they hadn’t agreed on a starting time, but he was getting annoyed.

Meanwhile, he tried to get some work done, but that wasn’t much of a success.

He’d naively imagined that he could put on a DVD for Pia, which she would watch quietly in the background while he made business calls, sent e-mails and worked on his laptop. But Pia had seen the DVD movie before.

“Sixteen times!” she said.

And she certainly seemed to know the songs in it by heart.

He tried to settle her with a book instead, but she wanted him to read it with her. “Because I can’t read.”

“Can’t you look at the pictures?”

“I want to read the words. With you.”

He read the words with her.

Actually, she almost could read on her own. She knew all of her letters, and when there was an easy word like boo or cat—it was a book in English—she could sound it out with his help. He felt a stirring of pride, found an Italian book and tried that with her, and she did just as well. He must ask Miss Cassidy how much time she’d spent on this sort of thing with Pia.

All the same, both books together only occupied twenty minutes, and when they were finished, she was bored again. He began to follow her from room to room, hoping she’d settle on something and racking his brain about a new strategy.

Should he hire a temporary nanny? He could easily go through an agency and have someone in place by the beginning of next week. But wouldn’t that defeat his whole purpose of getting to understand Pia better? He’d been frustrated in recent months by Miss Cassidy’s staged, formal and prearranged sessions of father-daughter time, with Pia always freshly bathed and fed, and outfitted like the window display at a Parisian fashion boutique.

Anyhow, here was Dr. Madison at last, dressed in her garden clothes—khaki stretch pants and a fleecy zippered top in a slightly lighter shade. The zipper was only pulled halfway up, showing a white T-shirt that looked a little too tight—the kind of tight that no man would ever complain about. Beneath it, her very nice breasts bounced as she hurried down the stairs.

“Good morning, uh, Rowena,” he said. He’d asked her weeks ago to call him Gino, and she did, but for some reason he found it hard to reciprocate with her first name today, and kept thinking of her by her formal title of Dr. Madison, instead.

“Good morning… Oh, but I am so sorry!” she gasped, radiating remorse like electrical energy. “I don’t know what can have made me sleep in like that! If it’s possible for me to have an alarm clock in the room, I would appreciate it, because I really do not want this to happen again!”

Her cheeks were flushed. Her hair was damp at the ends. If she’d brushed it just now, she hadn’t done a very good job, because it was all over the place, like the hair of a woman caught in bed with her lover.

“That’s fine,” Gino answered. “I’ve been reading with Pia. The alarm clock is a good idea, however.”

He couldn’t find the right tone. He was annoyed, yes, but at the same time he had an image of those rounded, bouncing breasts in his mind, wondering if they were a big part of the attraction for Francesco. He’d begun to understand that Dr. Madison did have some good…uh…features, surprisingly.

He also wanted to grin in sheer appreciation of the energy she gave off. He hadn’t noticed that, the other times they’d met. She’d been so focused on her scrupulously researched lists of rose varieties and their history. She’d seemed to direct too much of her energy inward and had been a little colorless to his eye.

“Would you like some breakfast before we start?” he offered.

“Um, if it’s not too much trouble.”

It was.

Far too much trouble.

Another delay in his already shattered morning.

But he couldn’t ask her to tramp around the gardens with him on an empty stomach, so…

“I’ll call Maria, and you can tell her what you would like. There may still be coffee on the sideboard in the dining room. Will you excuse me while I make some phone calls? Come along, Pia.”

“If they’re business calls, why don’t I keep Pia with me?” Dr. Madison suggested quickly. “Pia, you can pour my juice and tell me what breakfast foods are called in Italian. You can be my teacher. Would that be nice?”

Gino held his breath, waiting for No, I wanna go with Papa, and wondering whether his saying Okay, come with me, then would count as immediate capitulation to a tantrum that hadn’t quite happened yet but surely would if he insisted she was to go with Dr. Madison.

“Yes! It would be delightful!” Pia said and reeled off several breakfast words in Italian.

“You might have to go a little slower than that, Your Majesty, and you might have to get quite strict with me when I make silly mistakes. I think I’m going to be a very bad student!”

Pia laughed. She was already halfway to the dining room, her hand stretched out to take Dr. Madison’s, which was reaching back to her, open and inviting. The horticultural expert looked across at Gino, raised her eyebrows and grinned at him as if to say, “Didn’t I handle that well!”

He grinned back, too surprised not to, even though the grin felt…rusty.

Yes, I have to admit, you handled it well.

Then he let the grin drop and went to get some work done.

It was well after eleven when he surfaced from negotiating an unexpected problem in the Paris office and realized that even if Dr. Madison had ordered a full American breakfast, she must have finished eating it by now and must have learned by heart every Italian breakfast word Pia could think of to teach her. He went in search of them, clued in to their whereabouts by the sound of the piano that Pia had gotten into so much trouble over last night.

Dr. Madison had taught Pia to play “Chopsticks.”

As a duet.

With the doctor herself improvising some impressive, wild-fingered variations in the bass.

“Now we’re going to do it sad, Pia,” Gino heard her say. He paused in the doorway. “Listen, stop for a minute, can you hear me slowing down? Can you hear me changing the notes?” She went into a minor key. “Does it sound sadder to you now? Can you play it sad with me? Oh, boohoo, our chopsticks are bro-o-o-ken. Oh, it’s tragic, it’s terrible, we’re so, so sad, our notes are going so slowly, our fingers are so heavy on the keys, boohoo.”

He came farther into the room and she caught sight of him, nodded to show that she understood he was ready for their tour.

“Pia, someone’s fixed our chopsticks!” she said. “We’re happy again. We can get fast. Our fingers are moving so fast we can’t see them. I’m chasing you. Can you play as fast as me? I’m catching up, go faster, Pia. Faster, faster!”