“No? You don’t even have to win an argument?” she teased.
He let her know with a dismissive blink that he wasn’t biting on that less-than-subtle catch-22.
She grinned and kicked around the beach for a minute, bending to pick up a stone before saying, “Maybe I’m going through a belated teenaged rebellion. I mostly came to Italy so I wouldn’t buckle to my mother’s nagging and move back to Manitoba.”
In a desultory throw, she flicked a flat stone across the choppy water. It bounced twice on the uneven surface and sank.
“Mothers like their children nearby. That’s normal.” He found a flat stone and sent it spinning. Four bounces. A warm-up on rough water, but a terrible performance nonetheless.
“She wants me to sit in a chair and not move. She’s so high-strung.” Lauren sighed with fatalism, thumb working circles on another flat rock. “I try to understand how hard it was for her to be the only one in that conservative rural school who was illegitimate, her mother an exuberant, colorful hussy. But honestly? All I can think is how lucky she was to have a mother that was interesting.”
She sent her rock across the water. Five. Respectable. For a girl.
“So you feel you have some wild streak that’s been suppressed all your life and it’s time to let it out? That’s fine, cara, but not in my backyard.” His next rock made six ticks before it struck a wave, preventing it from going farther. He frowned.
“Yes, you’ve completely lost your competitive edge, haven’t you,” she said with a knowing smirk that she chinned toward the water. “I’m actually quite good at this. My record is sixteen on a flat pond. What’s yours?”
He stopped looking for a good rock. “I can’t remember. It’s been years since I’ve done this.” He pushed his hands into his pockets so he wouldn’t throw rocks until he’d surpassed twenty. It would eat him alive now she’d given him a number to beat. He silently cursed her.
She held out her hand. “Phone, please.”
“Lauren—”
“You win, Paolo. I won’t flaunt my loose morals all over Milan. I just want to use the map thingy to find a place to eat. You can drop me at a café and I’ll figure things out from there.”
That didn’t sound like a win. It sounded like he wouldn’t know where she was.
“Don’t be silly. The house is fully stocked. At least come inside for a look. I’ll make you something if you’re hungry.” He glanced at his watch, recalling that he had a cocktail party at his aunt’s tonight, but he had time.
Since he didn’t have to collect Isabella, he recalled with a scowl.
“Fine,” Lauren said with a short sigh of frustration as she began climbing the steps that led to the pool, planting her feet with little stomps. “But I want it on record that I hate acting like such a doormat.”#p#????#e#
“Accepting my invitation to cook for you is polite, not weak,” he stated.
“You weren’t serious, so that makes me weak. The minute someone with the least bit of assertiveness tells me what to do, I fold like a cheap lawn chair. ‘Lauren,’” she mocked, “‘you have to come to New York. No one else can afford it.’” She swung around at the top of the stairs, tapping her own chest. “I didn’t want to go, you know. I didn’t want to meet some military flyboy who saw me as a challenge. I certainly didn’t want to marry him. If I don’t start standing up for myself, I’m going to raise another wimp who trembles like a Chihuahua all her life like I do.”
He stood on the step one down from the top, trapped in the stairwell by her passionate speech. She was almost eye level with him and he couldn’t get past her without touching her. She had no idea the power she had over him right now. All he could think was that he only had to lean forward a few inches to kiss her. He was the one in danger of trembling and folding.
He kept his one hand locked on the cold rail and flattened the other on the damp stone wall, focusing instead on all that she’d said. Most specifically, I didn’t want to marry him. He’d been tortured by the vasectomy remark the whole way here, trying to dismiss it, but she’d sounded so bitter and convinced.
“You’re shivering like a toy poodle right now,” he noted to distract himself from his disturbing inner conflicts. “Go inside. The lock is coded to your birthday.”
That made her take a step back. “How do you know my birth date?”