Baking and Babies (Chocoholics #3)(5)

Rosa looks across the table at me and sticks out her tongue. I slyly flip her off without our mom seeing as we all take our seats. Even though it might not look like it, we really do love each other. We’re your typical loud, eating, breeding Italian family, although our mother likes to remind us on a daily basis that we aren’t doing our part in the breeding department. She met our father (God rest his soul) when they were sixteen years old, got married at eighteen, and popped out my oldest sister Contessa nine months later. Rosa followed a year after that, and I came screaming into the world a year after her.

“Alfanso, honey, say grace.”

My mother folds her hands in front of her and closes her eyes, thankfully before she can see the scowl on my face and the laughter my sisters are just barely holding in.

“Ma, how many times do I have to tell you not to call me that?” I complain, trying not to whine like a little girl.

I spent my entire childhood saddled with that name and constantly being teased—mostly from my sisters, and when I left middle school behind and started high school, I refused to let anyone call me by anything other than my middle name of Marco. Sadly, my mother continues to ignore my request.

“Alfanso is a strong, Italian name and you should be proud you share—”

“The same name as my mother’s father’s uncle’s brother from Sicily,” my sisters and I cut her off and finish in unison.

“And by Sicily, we mean the planet Melmac, Alf,” Tessa snorts, earning a one-eyed glare from my mother who still has her head bowed, eyes closed, and hands together in prayer.

I bow my head and close my eyes, refusing to take my sister’s bait when she uses the same, tired joke comparing my name to some furry creature on a TV show long before any of us were born.

“Rub-a-dub-dub, thanks for the grub. Yay God!”

Mom’s hand smacks me upside the head as soon as I finish and Tessa kicks my shin under the table. One of these days I should try not being an *, but it’s just too much fun.

We all start digging into our food and the only sounds that fill the room for a few minutes are forks scraping plates and ice cubes clinking in glasses. It reminds me of every single Sunday dinner we’ve ever had, even if it is surprisingly quiet for the time being. Regardless of my sisters and I being adults with our own lives and our own homes, it’s an unwritten rule that no matter where we are or what we’re doing, that we always come home for Sunday dinner.

“So, Alfanso, when are you going to bring a nice woman home to meet the family?” mom asks casually as she slathers butter on a slice of homemade bread.

“He doesn’t know any nice women; he only knows skanks.” Rosa laughs.

“Skanks with the I.Q. of a banana,” Tess adds.

I glare at both of them with my fork halfway to my mouth. “Hello? I’m sitting right here. They aren’t skanks and they aren’t stupid. I prefer to call them ‘scantily-clad ladies with limited vocabulary.’”

Mom sighs. “All of my friends have photos of grandchildren on their bookshelves. Do you want to know what I have on my bookshelves? I have porn.”

In a moment of insanity and a little bit of depression after my father passed away, I got the genius idea to write a cookbook, filled with my family’s favorite Italian dessert recipes. When the publishing house I sent it to told me it was too boring, instead of getting drunk and crying about it, I got drunk and added a bunch of tips for men on how they could get any woman they wanted just by making those recipes. It included the best recipe for Italian buttercream that wouldn’t leave grease stains on their sheets after they smeared it on their girl, as well as how to give a woman an orgasm using only cannoli filling and a spatula.

“Hey,” I bristle at her porn comment. “That’s a signed copy of Satisfaction and Sugar. If you announce on Facebook you have that, women will start clawing each other’s eyes out for it.”

I don’t mean to sound conceited, but it’s true. I get emails from a ton of women on a weekly basis, thanking me for spicing up their sex life while teaching their significant other how to bake and asking if I give in-home demonstrations. It’s really great for the ego and it’s made my popularity grow so much in the book world that the publisher has requested another cookbook from me.

Rosa snorts. “Try not to break your arm patting yourself on the back there, little brother.”

My family really is proud of my accomplishments, even if they don’t sound like it sometimes. They are my biggest supporters and always tell me how impressed they are of everything I’ve done at such a young age, but to them, I’m just Alfanso Marco Desoto. The son and brother who refuses to settle down, gets a cheap thrill out of teasing his older sisters, and had to grow up real fast when our father died suddenly of a heart attack three months before I was supposed to go to Paris to be the head pastry chef for one of the most popular restaurants in the city. I’ll never regret the decision to stick close to home to teach at my alma mater and take care of my family, but I’m not going to lie and say that I don’t still dream about Paris, although helping men all over the land get laid with desserts does take the sting out of things.

“What’s the deadline for your next cookbook? Do you still want me to edit?” Tessa asks, wiping her mouth with a napkin.

Tessa is a copy editor for our local newspaper. It’s nice to have someone in the family with editing skills that I can trust my cookbooks with, who won’t dry heave when I confirm that I try out every piece of advice I give before putting it in a book.