noticed his hands first, the long fingers with the manicured nails that grabbed at the backs of the seats for balance as the plane hit a pocket of turbulence. She wondered what they would feel like against her skin—soft and smooth or rough with calluses?
She liked the way his deep-green sweater clung to his trim body. Liked the way it made his skin seem to glisten. She even liked the way he wore his hair, cropped short, almost old-Roman style, but with skinny sideburns.
A great look, she thought. Seductive.
Lucy continued to stare as he walked right past her without a word. Without so much as a nod of recognition, as though he had been smiling at air.
She sighed and turned toward the window. Bright blue. Miles and miles of bright blue. As if the plane wasn’t moving at all. As if she were caught in a blue capsule, suspended in the middle of forever. The thought made her stomach roll as she searched inside her purse for a tranquilizer.
AS IT TURNED OUT, the shoe leather settled nicely inside Vittorio’s stomach and the walk to the toilets cleared away any lingering nausea. Perhaps it wasn’t the walk at all, Vittorio thought, but the bella signorina staring up at him. The girl he had been sitting next to, wearing a beautiful white pant suit with her shoulders wrapped in a red scarf. Now that he had dared to get a good look at her, he never wanted to look at another. Que bella!
He could not leave the airplane without officially meeting her.
By the time he decided to turn around with his new mission, a serving cart blocked any hope he had of meeting the beauty in red.
Attendants busied themselves with morning liquids, forcing him to wait.
Vittorio had come from Italia to San Francisco to attend a culinary conference at the Masconi Convention Center. Ever since he was a young boy, he had wanted to see San Francisco. It was only in the last year, when his small restaurant in Napoli had become a hit, that he could afford the trip. La Bella Note was a huge success due to Vittorio’s scrumptious recipes.
The conference had proved to be disappointing for Vittorio. He’d thought he would learn something new, something exciting, but instead he had taught the teachers. One man, who called himself an Italian chef, tried to make a pistachio pesto with nuts that came from North Carolina.
Vittorio didn’t exactly know where North Carolina was located in the United States, but he did know it wasn’t anywhere near Sicily. Anyone who called himself an Italian chef would know there were no other pistachios in the entire world to compare with the flavor of the Sicilian pistachio. Its silky herbal oil, and its vibrant green color exuded an incomparable flavor experience. Vittorio had brought a bag with him and had remade the pesto sauce for the ricotta ravioli. The chef couldn’t believe the difference in taste and invited Vittorio to cook with him on his TV show the next time he came to America.
But it would probably never happen because Vittorio hated to fly. To him, it was like being trapped inside a moving tin can without any room for mingling.
It amazed him that people flew so often they actually accumulated enough miles to fly for free. A car was better, or a ship. At least he could meet people along the way, and meeting people, especially women, was something Vittorio made a career of, like the Madonna sitting alone in the last row of the plane.
“Can you believe this?” he asked the long-legged blonde reading a Dean Koontz thriller. “I pay all the money and I cannot sit in my own seat.”
“Please,” she said with a sultry, deep voice. “There are plenty of seats in this row. Be my guest.”
Vittorio smiled and sat down right next to his latest dream girl.
WHEN THE PLANE landed in Rome on Monday morning, Lucy let out a sigh of relief. She had been busy on her laptop writing memos and creating charts for work. She had also made up a list of last-minute wedding details she would e-mail her mother later. Now she genuinely looked forward to the three-hour drive to Naples. She would listen to some local music, drink in the atmosphere, and grab a sandwich somewhere along the way because she honestly hadn’t been able to eat another airplane omelette.
Lucy actually toyed with the idea of postponing the eleven-thirty meeting with Giovanni, the lead engineer at Subito, the satellite for B-Logic, her Silicon-Valley-based electronics company. What she wanted more than anything else at that precise moment was a hot bath in her sure-to-be-fabulous room at the Santa Maria, but the chip had to tape out in a week to come out of fabrication in time for a demo at the Design Automation Conference in August. B-Logic could not afford to miss the show. Perhaps if she made a beeline to the car-rental counter she could make up some time on the road and get that bath before the meeting. A girl can only hope, she thought.
But she still had one major problem to take care of…her mother. Lucy hadn’t had the courage to make the call on Friday afternoon when she’d first found out that her promotion depended on this last-minute trip to Italy. And on Saturday she was busy packing, and she most definitely couldn’t call on the freeway and SFO was just too hectic. The real reason she hadn’t called was pure terror. Her mother would probably pop a vein over this whole thing, and Lucy wanted to be as far away as possible. She flipped opened her cell phone and pressed 9.
It only rang once.
“It’s late. What’s wrong?” her mother demanded.
The woman had a sixth sense. “Is that any way to answer your phone?”
“I knew it was you. Something’s wrong. My feet are burning.”
“It’s a hot flash.”
“I don’t have those anymore. Not since I got on the hormones. My feet only burn when there’s something wrong with my daughter.”
“Go soak your feet. There’s nothing wrong.”
“You’re not telling me the truth.”
Lucy sighed and leaned up against a wall. “Okay, you’re right. I’m on my way to Naples for work.”
“Now you go to Italy? I could never get you to go to Italy and for work you can go a week before your own wedding?”
“Mom, calm down.”
“Where are you?”
“In Rome.”
“I knew there was something wrong all night with you. I kept dreaming about garlic. How’s what’s-his-name taking this?”
“His name is Seth. Shouldn’t you try to remember it if he’s going to be your son-in-law?”
“It’s a hard name to remember.”
“It’s four letters.”
“Not enough. If it were more, I could remember. Four is too few.”
“My name has four letters.”
“Lucia has five. It’s better.”
“Mom!” Lucy said, exasperated. Her mother had a way of making the simplest things into a major deal.
“You’re gonna miss the wedding. Your mother is gonna be ashamed because her only daughter is gonna miss her own wedding.
