Page 27 of In Italy for Love

‘Please, eat your dinner. I don’t want to disturb you.’

‘You’re not. I’ve already eaten,’ he explained with an apologetic shrug. ‘I know you said you don’t need to eat here but cooking for one is… Allora, just have this omelette.’ He flipped it hurriedly onto a plate and set it at the table with the salad, drizzling a little olive oil on both. He held out her chair, belatedly realising that was definitely too much.

She took the seat, giving him an uncertain smile while Arco joyfully curled up again by the stove. ‘Thanks.’

‘I’m sorry about before,’ he blurted out when he couldn’t stand her doubtful glances at him.

‘It’s okay. It’s your house. You can be grumpy in it if you want.’

‘No, but it’s nothing to do with you,’ he assured her.

Drawing herself up straight, she eyed him where he stood leaning against the kitchen bench and said, ‘You don’t have to apologise, Alex, and I don’t want to eat your guilt food.’

‘Guilt food?’ he repeated.

‘You’re feeding me to make yourself feel better. Actually I am going to eat your guilt food because I am starving and this looks like the tastiest meal I have ever eaten.’ She cut a strip of omelette while he tried not to smile and eventually failed. ‘And I had those amazing sausages for lunch, so that’s saying something.’

‘It’s not guilt food,’ he insisted, although he was wondering if she was right. ‘You’re no use to Maddalena tired and hungry. We have to keep you healthy until the olive harvest. And there’s cheese in the omelette too. I know how much you like cheese.’

She stuffed the first bite into her mouth and sighed deeply, her shoulders drooping as she chewed. ‘God, this is perfect: the protein; the cheese; the fire – wow, thefire.’ Tipping her head back she slumped in her chair, visibly relaxing.

‘The fireplace is the heart of a Furlan’s house,’ he commented.

‘Well, thank you for inviting me into your…’ She wisely let that sentence go.

‘We have a special word – fogolâr – for the old open fireplaces,’ he continued, trying to cover her faux pas. ‘We don’t have fancy dining rooms for guests when the best place is here in the kitchen,’ he finished, averting his gaze from her soft, tired features.

‘Why does this omelette taste so good? What’s that zing in it?’

‘Forest garlic,’ he supplied. ‘We pick it in spring and freeze it for the rest of the year. There’s a patch at Maddalena’s and in the woods nearby.’

‘Forest garlic,’ she repeated, peering at her omelette before placing the next piece in her mouth. ‘I don’t even know what that is.’

‘We call it bear garlic too, but I don’t know the name in English.’

Glancing at him as she fumbled to cut another piece of omelette, she said, ‘Are you going to sit down or just talk to me from over there?’

Despite the awkward domesticity, the uncertain friendship, he couldn’t pull out the chair fast enough. Perhaps the guilt food was working.

12

Jules collapsed into bed as soon as she made it upstairs. Arco settled on his blanket and she thought, as she sank into drowsiness, that at least being bedraggled and smelling faintly of grass and nearly falling asleep at the table made kissing less of a temptation for both of them. It was only a shame that in return, he’d cooked her comfort food and stoked a fire that had felt like a hug. Except there hadn’t been any hugs. Only a horrified look when he’d seen the borrowed jacket and his obvious reluctance to share why.

She didn’t mind the guilt food thing. It was kind of sweet that he took care of her to make up for being less than hospitable, and she truly didn’t blame him for occasionally resenting his unwanted guest and being reluctant to tell his life story to a stranger. If only she hadn’t been so sleepy she could have looked into her passport application. Perhaps she’d wake up early and make a start.

But instead of waking refreshed with the first streaks of dawn sunlight, she roused in total darkness at some point in the night – freezing cold darkness. She’d forgotten to get Alex to look at the heating. The night-time temperature had dropped, andwhatever radiant warmth the stove in the kitchen had sent up the chimney breast in the corner of the room was long gone.

Paralysed in indecision for a moment, she eventually accepted that she was wide awake and needed to at least pull on another jumper. When she slid her legs to the floor, the edge of the bed was so cold it gave her a shock. The radiator wasn’t working at all.

Tugging out her thickest fleece and an extra pair of old, loose tracksuit bottoms, she padded downstairs to the bathroom, trailed by a curious Arco, and she imagined they both threw a longing glance at the kitchen door, even though that blessed fire in the stove wouldn’t be flickering any more.

On her way back upstairs, she heard the ghostly hum again and froze. It sounded like an accordion, but distant and eerie, as though heard through a portal in time. Even though she called herself all kinds of idiot for feeling spooked, the hairs on the back of her neck stood on end, and images of the twisted olive trees and Berengario with his scythe and Alex’s pale, stunned face when she came home in that jacket, mixed with the wheezy, breathy accordion soundtrack until her heart pounded.

A sliver of light shone under a door in the hallway she’d not taken note of before and with the vague sense that she was in a dream, she headed for it and gave it a sharp knock, turning the handle and peering inside.

‘Julia? Everything okay?’

It took her eyes a moment to adjust to the light and then… Oh dear, she needed to wake up from this dream. Alex wasn’t supposed to keep gettingmoreattractive the longer they lived together. He sat on a stool at a scratched and pockmarked table, a set of tools laid out – apparently for performing surgery on accordions, if the one flayed open in front of him was anything to go by. He held a tiny screwdriver in one hand and a complex-looking wooden frame in the other. His wavy hair was mussed,his old sweater looked soft and had a couple of inviting-looking holes. And he had a pair of wire-rimmed glasses perched on his nose.

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