Page 34 of In Italy for Love

Rubbing his chin in chagrin, he asked, ‘Contribute? Did you go to the greengrocer? The market! Did you go to the market this morning?’

‘I should do that one time, but no. I, uh…’ Biting her lip, she dug into one of the pockets and produced a handful of chestnuts. Colour spotted her cheeks. ‘There are quite a lot of them. I don’t really know what to do with them.’

Struggling against an amused smile, he said, ‘You’d better bring them into the kitchen then.’

There were indeed a lot of nuts. ‘This must have taken you a while,’ he commented mildly, running a few under the tap and then fetching the paring knife to score them.

‘Once I started, I couldn’t stop,’ she explained, watching him cut a cross into the skins with interest.

‘I know the feeling.’

She turned to him in surprise. ‘You do?’

‘It’s an instinct perhaps. And chestnuts are soul food.’

‘Soul food,’ she repeated softly. ‘Definitely.’ He got the impression she’d been thinking about her ex again. He would never actually punch someone, but joking about it was certainly one way to release the frustration he felt when she beat herself up about the relationship.

She turned on the tap to wash her hands and he frowned, grasping her wrist. ‘You didn’t wear gloves!’ He inspected the raw skin of her fingertips, dotted with tiny puncture marks. ‘Let me check that none of the spines broke off. It can get infected if you’re unlucky.’

Her gulp was audible as he swept his thumb carefully over each finger, wishing there was more he could do to ease the discomfort she must be feeling.

‘I’ll get you some salve after dinner, although it will be difficult on your fingertips.’ He glanced up to find her watching him, her eyes wide and wary. He blinked and then looked away in a hurry, placing her hand gently on the table.

In the silence that followed, where he wondered whether he should apologise for being short with her when she got home, her stomach rumbled loudly enough for Arco to lift his tired head where he was stretched out in front of the stove.

‘Thank you for cooking,’ she said softly.

‘Thank you for eating,’ he said in reply, his expression slipping when he realised how strange that sounded. ‘I mean,let’s eat. I’ll put a few of these in water and we can roast them after dinner.’

‘Really?’

He eyed her as he fetched a jug and filled it with water. ‘Yes. Did you want to hang them on the wall like a trophy?’

‘No, of course not!’ She gave him a chiding nudge. ‘But I didn’t expect I’d actually done something right in Italy.’

He dropped the handful of nuts into the water with a loud plop and leaned heavily on the bench, pausing before turning to her forcefully. ‘What?’

15

‘Chill out, Captain Cranky,’ Jules said, putting her hands in the air. ‘No need to get defensive.’

‘I’m not defensive,’ he snapped, pausing when her lips wobbled and he listened back to what he’d said. ‘Okay, that was defensive, but you’d better explain what you think you do wrong.’

He poured two glasses of wine and, as he’d hoped, she followed the wine to the table and sat down – with enough stifled groaning to suggest she’d been on her feet too long that day, again.

‘There’s no “think”. I wastoldoften enough that I was doing things wrong.’

‘Your ex-boyfriend,’ he said grimly as he fetched the risotto off the stove and set it onto the painted tile in the middle of the table.

‘And his mother, yes. If I ever hear the phrase “brutta figura” again, I will punch something. How was I supposed to know that yellow flowers are for jealousy and hanging the washing out in my old tracksuit wasn’t allowed?’

He stifled a grimace. ‘Okay, I’m starting to understand.’

‘It gets worse!’ she said, her mouth full of risotto. He was kind of touched that she felt so comfortable in his kitchen. ‘He said I had cheap taste,’ she said with a false laugh. ‘At first I thought he meant it fondly, but we were running a B&B together – or trying to – and he said I always bought the wrong things, inferior products that the guests would notice as cheap substitutes. To be honest, I wouldn’t know Maddalena’s fresh, organic olive oil from the supermarket own brand.’

‘Of course you would!’ he scoffed.

She paused shovelling the risotto in to give him a pained look. ‘I know nothing about olive oil.’

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