giving a damn what anyone, except for a handful of family members, thought of him. It worried him that he was beginning to care that Penny Hayden continued to regard him with suspicion even now that she knew who he was. An unfamiliar desire to win her over made him irritable all over again.
Without another word, Sam led the way down the stairs without bothering to check to see if she had any difficulty keeping up with his long stride. If she did, she never complained.
And she was right there beside him when he reached Rosie’s, where the bouquet of garlic and tomatoes was more alluring than any expensive French perfume he’d ever encountered. He drew in a deep, satisfying breath and felt some of the tension ease out of him.
“Sammy!” Rosie cried when she spotted him. She enveloped him in an enthusiastic bear hug, then pinched his cheek. “You are too skinny. It has been too long since you have been by to see me. Do I have to be robbed to get you inside my restaurant?”
“I was here two weeks ago,” he protested.
“You expect my pasta to sustain you for that long? This is the food of life, caro. Pasta and red wine are meant to be eaten every night.”
“If I did that, pretty soon I wouldn’t be able to haul myself after the criminals. I’d be too fat and lazy.”
Rosie waved her hand dismissively. “Always the jokes. I know the truth. You have some other cook you adore. That’s it, isn’t it?”
“There is no other woman in my life. I swear it,” he told her emphatically.
Just then, though, Rosie spotted Penny. “And who is this, then? You pretend that she is not even here, when I can see for myself that she is.”
“Rosie, this is Penny Hayden. She has just moved here from Los Angeles. Penny, this is Rosa DiMartelli, who makes the best pasta this side of Rome.”
Rosie’s dark eyes scanned Penny from head to toe. A worrisome beam of approval spread across her face. Only one person in Sam’s life could match Brandon Halloran when it came to meddling and she was regarding Penny with a very speculative gleam in her eye.
“You live in the neighborhood, yes?” she said to Penny. “I have seen you at the produce stand next door.”
“I have an apartment a few blocks away,” Penny confirmed.
“Then you will come here often for dinner. That means I will see more of my Sammy.”
“Don’t go getting any ideas, Rosie,” Sam warned.
“What is the fun of life without ideas?” she retorted. “Besides, I can see these same ideas in your eyes.”
Sam started to deny it vehemently, but decided to save his breath. An argument would only lend too much weight to Rosie’s romantic observations. She grinned as if she’d guessed his thoughts.
“Now, come, sit,” she ordered. “I will bring you a bottle of my best wine and I think the ziti with vodka sauce. I will make it special for you, since it is your favorite.”
“I could sacrifice and have the lasagna,” Sam offered.
“Sacrifice!” She huffed. “Since when is it a struggle to eat any of my food?”
She was still muttering under her breath as she left them to place the order in the kitchen.
“Obviously you’re a favorite of hers,” Penny noted.
She sounded amazed that anyone could be genuinely fond of him. To his surprise, her astonishment cut. He tried to ignore how much it hurt. He shrugged. “I’m a challenge. She’s been trying to fatten me up and marry me off for several years now. The fact that she’s still batting zero on both counts makes her crazy.”
“I’m surprised you tolerate her interference.”
“Wait until you taste her pasta. It’s worth any price. Besides, Rosie and I go way back.”
“Oh?”
“She helped Dana and I foil the system by playing guardian whenever we needed an adult to keep the social workers at bay.”
“You mean, after your mother died?”
Sam nodded. “Dana was determined that the system wasn’t going to split us up, even though I was just a kid and she was barely into her teens.”
Penny looked fascinated. “Your sister must really be something. I’m looking forward to getting to know her better. We didn’t really have nearly enough time together at the christening and I haven’t been East since then. Grandfather adores her. He credits Dana with giving him the gumption to go after grandmother one last time when she was resisting all his attempts to get her to marry him.”
Sam vividly recalled Brandon’s depression during that time. The whole family had been worried sick about him. Dana had taken matters into her own hands.
“She could see how much your grandmother meant to him, even after all the years they were separated,” he told Penny. “Once Dana gets an idea in her head, she can move mountains, if that’s what it takes. All that determination still scares the dickens out of me. Fortunately, now that she has Jason, plus three kids of her own, plus her sweater design business, she doesn’t have much time left to waste on sticking her nose into my business.”
Penny sighed with such wistfulness that Sam was taken aback. “What’s wrong?”
“I guess I was just wondering what it would have been like to grow up in such a tight-knit family. We hardly ever see my older sisters. Mom and Aunt Kate are pretty close now, but for a while there was a lot of tension between them when they discovered they were only half sisters. I feel like I missed out on so much by not knowing about this extended family on the East Coast until Grandfather came after my grandmother to rekindle their old love affair. Maybe that’s why I ended up loving books and science. I could get so absorbed in them, I didn’t notice how lonely I was.”
“And here I was just thinking that you were the lucky one, growing up with two parents in a house filled with love and stability.”
“I guess we never truly appreciate what we have until we see it through other people’s eyes.”
The surprisingly philosophical and almost friendly conversation died the instant heaping plates of pasta arrived, along with steaming garlic bread and a dry red wine.
“Heaven,” Penny murmured a long time later.
Sam pushed away the last of his meal with a similar sigh of contentment. “Coffee?”
“Not another thing,” she said. “I should be getting home. I have to be at the lab by seven.”
“I thought you were here for grad school.”
“I am, but I’m doing a research project, too.”
She started to explain it, something about bacteria and virus that sounded pretty lethal to Sam. He was astounded by the glint of excitement in her eyes as she discussed her work. To a man who’d struggled through the bare minimum requirements in high school science, it was an eye-opening experience to discover
