Page 36 of Ciao, Amore

That good Catholic girl shit wasn’t going to fly with these ladies. She really should have thought this part through. She was used to her own family and friends asking blunt questions, but she wasn’t expecting that one.

“Girl. Don’t tell me you didn’t give it up yet,” Vanessa interjected with a disbelieving laugh. Her teeth shone white against her deep ebony complexion. “Let me guess. You listen to those podcasts, don’t you?”

Dani laughed at the podcast remark. It was a save. “TheGet Wifed-Up Guru. Yeah.”

“Why are you listening to her? You’d better get in that room,” Vanessa urged, and Dani laughed again.

“Nico says you’ve been dating since June.” Tori picked up the interrogation again. When Dani nodded, she asked, “How did you guys meet?”

It was a simple story, one that she and Nico knew would be convincing and as close to the truth as possible. She pulled off her cover-up, folded and placed it in her canvas bag, and got her spray-on sunscreen out.

Spraying the cold, greasy film everywhere she could reach, she said, “Through my friend Jade. She was hanging out in the Bronx and met a guy she thought would be a good match for me.”

“Where did she meet Nico? At a party?” Merelys asked. Vanessa stared at her, listening intently.

Okay, getting slightly more complex questions.Dani was prepared.

“It wasn’t a party. She’s dating a guy in Nico’s neighborhood who was getting his hair cut, and she was along for the ride.”

“Yeah, Nico’s a great barber,” Tori said. “He’s the only one who can even touch Little Angelo’s head.”

“A great barber,” Merelys echoed. “He does Little Tommy’s hair too.”

“Yeah, my husband’s good too. He’s got the touch. But he’s gonna take over the restaurant when Pop is done,” Tori supplied.

“I thought I heard y’all met online,” Vanessa said, circling back to the “how they met” questions as if this barbershop tangent bored her.

Where would she have heard that? Dani opened her mouth to insist that rumor was untrue.

“We—”

“Oh, Nico going online? He would never,” Tori declared, turning her head from side to side on the lounger. “He meets all his girls in person, old-school. Like him and Tracy. His ex. She’s my cousin. I admit, that took me years of work trying to get him interested, but it finally happened. Nah, Nico would never go online.”

Dani’s eyes narrowed, but she only smiled, wondering why Tori had decided to bring up Nico dating her cousin. Hearing anything about Nico with another woman sent a jagged knife of jealousy slicing down her chest. She didn’t want to hear that shit. Didn’t need to imagine him with a Tori look-alike and wonder if that’s the type of woman he preferred when he wanted to get serious.

Merelys’s and Vanessa’s eyes got big, and they exchanged glances, obviously waiting to see if this was going to get tense. Maybe they’d liked Tracy, too, probably had hung out with her back in the Bronx. Now she had to wonder, with a tiny stone sinking in her stomach, if she’d wandered cluelessly into the Tracy Biaggi Fan Club.

Just as swiftly as the current of doubt had washed over her, Dani decided to shake off the insecurity. Nico’s past, his future…neither had anything to do with her. She wasn’t a real girlfriend hoping to fit into this family. It would be different if she had to deal with that shit indefinitely back in the real world, but once these women got on that plane to go back to New York, it would cease to be her problem.

Still, in case any of these chicks thought she was going to sit through two weeks of slick comments, they were dead wrong.

Facing it head-on, Dani turned to Tori and said, “Nico told me you and his ex are cousins. I hope you and I can get along despite what happened between them.” It was said matter-of-factly, no shade, no games.

Tori looked at her over her sunglasses with surprise, then she shrugged. “I’m totally fine with it. Yeah, it sucked for me when they broke up. We had our double dates, our kids were gonna be double cousins. Oh well. But she did have her reasons. Nico can be…”

“An asshole. Yeah, he warned me,” Dani said.

“And you didn’t run?” Tori looked back at the kids patting sand and flinging mud at each other, then at Lina, who scolded them.

“Tori, chill,” Vanessa said with a small smirk. “She wouldn’t be here if Nico wasn’t crazy about her, right?”

“Look, just saying, Nico is a great brother and a great uncle, but dating…” Tori made a whistling noise, followed by the sound of an explosion made with her lips. “I’ve been around for years of girlfriends before Tracy. But maybe you’re handling it right. Maybe you are better off makin’ him wait if you got this far.”

Too late. I already fucked him, and he loved it.

Keeping that thought to herself, Dani didn’t respond, putting on her shades and covering her eyes before they betrayed how unsettled she suddenly felt. She’d already figured Nico had dated a lot. He was gorgeous and funny, and obviously had experience in the bedroom. But hearing about it was another fucking story entirely.

Turning to her bag to dig out a fashion magazine and flipping it to the next page so hard it almost tore, she quietly fought the tight, hot sensation in her stomach about that whole conversation, about the look in Lina’s eyes whenever they landed on her.

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