“Never met the right girl, I guess,” I mused.
“I did meet the right girl.” He lifted my hand and dropped a kiss on the back of it. “Many years ago.”
Stunned silent, I sat back against my seat, mulling over what he’d just said. He’d never brought a girl home. Did that mean he’d never introduced anyone to his family, either? And if not, what did it mean that he was now? With me?
I was the lucky girl. A grin made its way across my face, so big and wide that it made my cheeks hurt as I contemplated how truly lucky I felt. He shot me a knowing smirk, clearly pleased that he’d pleased me so.
Speaking of pleasing . . .
I brought his hand to my lips now, kissing his knuckles as he’d done to mine, then dropping his hand back down onto my knee. He squeezed it lightly and kept time with the music, tapping his left hand on the steering wheel as I slowly, ever so slowly, began to drag his other hand higher and higher along my leg. I watched the countryside speed by on my side, innocently keeping my gaze away from my leg and his hand, now disappearing under the hem of my dress.
Inch by blessed inch, our hands rose. I felt the car sway slightly, saw that we’d crept across the center lane just a bit, and Marcello swerved us back onto our side. I finally turned back to him and found him staring at me, his eyes burning as I continued to move our hands still higher.
“Avery,” he warned, his voice strained. Just then, I slid his hand down along the inside of my thigh, pressing his fingers now between my legs directly over the silk of my panties.
“Do you remember that time,” I purred, my voice husky, even to my own ears, “when you had me outside that restaurant in Nerja?”
The car swerved again, his hand grasping the wheel tightly. I saw his jaw clench. Emboldened, I went on.
“All those people inside, and walking by just around the corner from where we were? And you were on your knees in front of me?”
“Yes,” he whispered, his right hand now moving on its own.
“And you pulled my panties aside with your teeth before your tongue—”
His eyes shot to the rearview mirror before he skidded the car to the side of the road, kicking up a plume of dust behind us. Throwing it into park next to a massive tree, he was out of the door and undoing his belt, watching me through the windshield as he stalked around the car.
“Holy shit,” I choked when he ripped open the passenger door and reached in for my legs.
“I cannot wait,” he said gruffly, shifting me so that my legs were out of the door, feet on the ground, and my rear was at the edge of the seat.
“Take them off,” he ordered, pulling his shaft out of his pants.
He watched me slip my hands beneath my dress, slide my panties down my legs, and leave them hanging around one ankle. His hand gripped his cock, smoothing over it once, twice, before dropping to his knees and pulling out a condom from his pocket. I imagined he was hard from the second I stepped out onto the porch.
“Hurry,” I pleaded, looking up the road and praying no one would drive past.
It was awkward, risky, wild, and the best fucking sex I could have asked for on the side of a deserted Italian road with the man I loved.
His knees were bleeding from the gravel, pants dirty, and my dress was rumpled where he had pulled it down to press his lips to my breasts.
But I wouldn’t have changed it for the world.
Afterward, sated and reasonably collected after our roadside romp, we headed back out in the direction of Pienza. Marcello was back to happily humming along with the radio, and I tried to take in as much as I could of the beautiful country. But it was becoming so relaxing, I could feel my eyes getting heavy from the steady vibration of the car.
Checking my watch, I yawned. “Are we close?” I asked, soothed by the gentle ride.
He slowed, turning onto a tree-lined road, a sign pointing up the large hill to Pienza. “Not far now.”
I nestled comfortably into the bucket seat. “Talk to me about something. Anything. I don’t want to fall asleep.”
Laughing, he turned off the radio and tapped his chin, thinking. “Ah yes, I will tell you about the year the festival was almost rained out and the cave holding all of the pecorino was almost flooded.”
There was something about his voice. Combined with the rocking sensation of the car, the pressure of his hand on mine and the fullness of my heart made my eyes fluttered closed.
“Mmm, I love pecorino.” I sighed dreamily.
* * *
A COOL BREEZE SLIPPED OVER me. I reached for Marcello, but I was greeted with a handful of cool leather. I was curled up in the passenger seat with a fuzzy blanket over me.
Sitting up, I wrapped the blanket around my shoulders and held the ends to my nose. It smelled faintly like Marcello. There was something about waking up without him that made everything feel off.
Looking around, I saw that we were parked in a wide circular driveway beside an expansive stone farmhouse. Voices carried from behind the house.
I stretched, my back tight from falling asleep crooked. Not at all from getting plowed on the side of the road . . .
I smiled faintly to myself, rolling my shoulders as I contemplated what to do. I didn’t want to wander around the grounds without Marcello, but I didn’t want to just sit here, either.
The air was perfumed with something I couldn’t quite identify. It was warm, earthy, and crisp. Whatever it was made my stomach rumble. There was more laughter, children playing, and soft music on the wind. The children were getting closer; I could hear them yelling back and forth.
“Zio, Zio!” they screamed, Italian for uncle, giggling as they ran over the hill toward me. Marcello was close behind them, carrying a giggling toddler on his shoulders.
A smile split my face so big it hurt my cheeks. Dark curly haired and olive-skinned children screeched to a halt when they saw me standing with the blanket around my shoulders.
When Marcello—and two goats—caught up to them, they latched on to his legs, hugging him tight.
“Oh good, you awake,” he said, stepping closer to give me a kiss on top of my head. His accent was thicker, his lack of contractions more pronounced.
“You changed,” I chirped, trying to smooth out my rumpled dress.
“You look perfect.”
“I’m a mess,” I whispered, finally noticing the enormous Marcello handprint on the bodice of my dress. I gasped. “I can’t meet your family like this, I look like I’ve been ravaged on the side of the road!”
He winked, whispering back, “You were ravaged on the side of the road.”
I tried to scowl, but the baby on his shoulders started laughing at the face I was making. The rest of the children giggled when he dropped down and kissed me again, holding their hands over their mouths in the sweetest way.
He pulled away, smiling and rosy cheeked himself. “These are my nieces and nephews.”
“This is my . . . Avery,” he said in Italian, and the little girls squealed in delight.
The boys, well they weren’t very interested in me; instead they took off after the goats. Honest-to-goodness goats.
“Nice to meet you,” I said to the kids in my best Italian. Practice for the big family members. They didn’t laugh, so I figured I did okay. He took my hand and tucked it into the crook of his arm as we walked toward the house. “I still can’t believe you didn’t wake me up.”
“You were sound asleep.”
“So you left me in the car while you got to change?”
“And snoring,” he added. He lowered the toddler from his shoulders and sent her off with the other little girls, the baby waddling unsurely across the grass.
As we watched them run off, I was able to finally step back and see the house and the grounds. We were standing atop a hill sandwiched between two larger ones, each with a deep-set lush green valley below.
Everything—from the family house behind me to all of the outer buildings that were dotted across the prop
erty—had been built to overlook the vineyard below. It stretched in pristine rows with hundreds of squatty trees filling the area. Between them, paths, nets, and large hip baskets were scattered throughout. In a word, it was breathtaking. Deep, rich greens and browns were set against a perfect cloudless sky.
I wanted to sit in the window of the barn and sketch the view. Or take a bath in the main house with a glass of wine and Marcello behind me and watch the sunset.
“Do you like it?” he asked, wrapping his arms around me. The children’s laughter faded, the music was different—a strumming mandolin now filled the calm.
“I love it. It suits you,” I said, leaning into his embrace.
“What does?” He kissed my cheek.
“This place. The country.” The kids.
Marcello looked different out of the city. His top buttons were undone, his hair was mussed, probably from playing with the children, and while still gorgeous he seemed . . . relaxed.
“You look comfortable out here. Not that you don’t in the city, but out here in the wide-open space, all fresh air and warm sun with no hustle and bustle and technology, surrounded by kids, you look . . . perfect.”
He remained quiet for a moment.
I looked around, uncertain. “What?”
“Nothing,” he said, turning me slowly before dipping me, the blanket falling to the grass behind us. He dropped light kisses across my forehead and cheeks, then my lips, while whispering tesoro over and over.
We stopped kissing in time to see the children running over the hill toward us. They’d multiplied and I wondered just how many people were here for the weekend.
Smoothing my hair back, I tried to unrumple my dress. What was I thinking wearing linen around his roaming Roman hands? He scooped up the blanket and laid it around my shoulders.
“I am sorry for your chest.” He laughed, and when I looked down, there weren’t just pink scruff marks littered across my breast. A hickey was forming.
“I’m going to kill you,” I said, running after him through the grass.
He let me catch him when we got to a clearing that had massive wooden steps built into the hill.
“You didn’t tell me that your family made wine,” I said, catching my breath and walking closer to the hill’s edge to get a better look.
“Not wine, olives,” he said, brushing my hair away from my shoulder to place a kiss there. He rested his chin where his lips had just been and we watched the brilliant orange sun setting behind the grove.
“Bianchis have been making it for generations. I learned how to pick them as soon as I could walk,” he said, and I pictured a small Marcello weaving in and out of the field laughing like his nephews were earlier.
“I love to sleep out here. On a blanket under the moon. Maybe naked,” he said, pulling me into his arms. “We’ll have to try it when the house gets too noisy.” He kissed my neck lightly. “Out here we could be noisy.”
“I look forward to it.”
“I’ll show you after dinner. It’s magical at night. I’ll give you a tour and kiss you under the stars, but Mamma wants to meet you first.”
Mamma.
My stomach bottomed out, body tensed, heart thundered, and my ears were ringing. My track record with moms wasn’t exactly noteworthy, and she was arguably the most important that I’d ever meet.
Taking my now-sweaty hand, he led me up the hill.
Marcello’s family home may have only been two stories, but it was expansive, spread out into a U shape with a large stone courtyard in the center. The home was covered in light-colored brick and each window was framed with weathered royal blue shutters.
The grounds were scattered with various colored clay pots filled to the brim and spilling over with vibrant flowers and fragrant fruit trees, similar to what he had at his house in Rome.
“Is there a side door that I can sneak into so that I could change?”
Nodding, he led us around the back of the house away from the crowd of people.
“Cello!” a woman yelled, and he squeezed my hand.
“I’m sorry, tesoro,” he said, turning us around to see a young woman, about our age, coming toward us with a round belly.
She took one look at me, kissed stupid and wrinkled, and laughed, grimacing at him. “Why you do this to her?”
“I did nothing to her,” he said, holding up his hands in surrender. “Avery, this is my oldest sister, Allegra.”
“How many are there?” I asked.
“I am the youngest of five.”
“Why you have to say oldest, you couldn’t just say my sister?” She slapped at his shoulder, throwing a few choice curses at him. “It is nice to meet you.”
“It’s great to meet you, too. We’ll join you in a bit,” I began, but she took my hand.
“No time to change, I afraid. You look good.” She grinned knowingly.
Still, she gave me the thin sweater from around her shoulders. It covered the mess a bit better than the blanket and I looked slightly less like a homeless person.
The three of us followed the chatter around the sprawling grounds and into the beautiful courtyard. Marcello took my hand in his and kissed my cheek.
What drew my eye away from Marcello was the endless wooden table and the cheery, boisterous family seated at it, watching us intently.
“I’ve never seen a table that big,” I said, counting his family. It was as expansive as the table.
“My father built it when I was a teenager,” he said, a reassuring hand on the small of my back. “It’s a bunch of separate pieces so it can be put together or taken apart depending on how many of us are around it. When the kids started having kids—well, you can see it got bigger. Add in aunts, uncles, cousins . . .”
“And I’m officially nervous.”
We stopped abruptly, him scrunching down so our eyes met. He took my hands in his, bringing them both to his lips, and whispered, “Don’t be nervous. They will love you,” against them.
“Let’s skip dinner,” I told him, and I was serious. Before I could whisk him away to an olive grove to have my wicked way with him, a woman carrying a pitcher called out to him.
“Are you ready?”
I squeezed his hand and said a silent prayer.
An older man sat at the head of the table, his hand wrapped around the woman’s hand to his right. He was handsome, tan with a thick head of salt-and-pepper hair. I could have seen him anywhere in the world and known he was Marcello’s father.
As we approached, he kissed the woman’s hand and stood slowly, rubbing a spot on his hip. One of the few differences between him and his son was their height. Marcello towered over him to the point of it being almost comical.
“The height comes from my mother’s side,” he joked just as his father pulled him into a crushing hug.
“Ciao, bella!” he said, dropping a light kiss on each of my cheeks. In the most delightful broken English he introduced himself as Angelo Bianchi and he was, “so happy that you are here.”
He pulled me away from his son by wrapping my arm in his.
His father took the time to introduce me to his parents, then it was on to Marcello’s three brothers, the in-laws, and all of twelve kids before we got to aunts and uncles, cousins, and second cousins. I’m pretty sure some of these people were random strangers they invited to dinner, because who has a family this big?
The one I was dreading was Marcello’s mother. You hear stories about Italian mothers and how inherently disapproving and overprotective they are, especially to a foreigner who is sleeping with her youngest son. Susanna Bianchi was a diminutive woman with a shock of inky black hair and a bright smile that could rival her son’s. She was wearing an apron and had an honest-to-God wooden spoon tucked into one of the pockets. I watched her chase the grandchildren and give her husband a quick kiss before she came over to us.
“Sweetheart,” she said, before pulling her son down to her eye level.
“Mamma.” He squatted down
and picked her up to kiss her cheeks. “I missed you.”
Setting her down, he took her hand and turned to me. “This is Avery.”
I expected the sizing-up once-over. I even expected the knowing look when she saw Marcello’s hand wrapped protectively around mine.
What I didn’t anticipate was her pulling me into the sweetest hug this side of my own mother’s arms and dropping two quick pecks on my cheeks.
Bitsy only wanted the dainty handshake or air kisses. I wasn’t sure if she ever actually hugged Daniel. I’d been scared of Marcello’s mother for no reason at all.
“Come, you sit by me,” she insisted, pulling me along to an empty chair. “Marcello, he no bring anyone home, he tell you that?”
“Oh, Mamma, no,” he protested, laughing when his brothers began to tease him in Italian.
“I heard something like that, yes,” I answered, sitting in the chair I was directed to.
“My son, he a romantic, si?”
I blushed, but nodded.
“So okay. He bring you here, you must be good girl, si?”
“Yes,” Marcello answered, and getting the frown of the century from his mother for answering for me.
“My son bring you here, I think you a good girl. Now, you hungry, si?”
I watched as the biggest bowl of ravioli I’d ever seen was placed on the center of the table in front of me, waves of tomato-scented incredible wafting toward me. “Oh my yes, hungry.”
And with that, everyone tucked in. Marcello’s mother and two of his sister-in-laws hovered nearby, never sitting, just making sure that everyone had what they needed. Most of the people around the table spoke Italian only, but a few words of broken English filtered through and I surprised myself when I could pick out more of the Italian than I thought I would. I mainly focused on the food . . . and Marcello.
Watching him with his family was fascinating. His mother hovered over everyone certainly, but seemed to linger a little longer behind him. A hand on the shoulder, an extra meatball or two, it was clear that the son who had left for the big city was revered when he came home.