Frisk Me(31)

The flowers weren’t from Beth.

Joey, ingrained with reporter nosiness, craned his neck to read the card.

“Who’s Luc?”

Ava couldn’t stop the smile that burst over her face any more than she could the happy dance taking place in her stomach.

Luc Moretti had remembered her birthday.





CHAPTER TWELVE



If I let you live here, the least you can do is pick up your stupid bells.”

“Dumbbells, Nonna,” Luc said, not taking his eyes off the Yankees game. “They’re called dumbbells. And they’re Anthony’s, not mine.”

“Well they don’t belong in my living room,” his grandmother muttered. “I need room for my yoga mat.”

That got his attention.

He turned to see his eighty-two-year-old grandmother unsuccessfully try to lift his older brother’s makeshift gym out of the way. Luc set his beer aside and went to help, depositing the free weights and jump rope in his brother’s room.

Retrieving his beer, he watched as his tall, thin-as-a-rail grandmother very carefully unrolled a pink yoga mat on the floor.

This was new.

“Um, what’s goin’ on?” he asked as she pulled her chin-length white hair into a stubby ponytail.

“Gotta get my chi on.”

“Sorry?”

“Maybe that’s not right,” she mused. “Zen? Going to get my Zen on?”

But instead of actually moving onto the mat, she scowled down at it. “Maybe I should make some carbonara.”

“Thought you just ate with your latest boy toy.”

“Don’t you sass me, Luca Moretti. We’re Italian. Celebrating food’s a part of the culture.”

Luc smiled. It said a lot about his nonna that she scolded him for daring to question food, not for the boy toy comment. When it came to her love life and metabolism, she was eighty-two going on seventeen.

Plus, she wasn’t even Italian. Not by blood. But she insisted that fifty years of marriage made her Italian and dared anyone to say otherwise.

Nobody ever tried.

Carbonara wasn’t even a classic Italian dish, as Luc’s mother pointed out every chance she got. It was Nonna’s favorite only because she’d discovered it at one of the trendy new Italian restaurants that opened on the Upper West Side. Luc’s mom had a conniption fit every time Nonna tried to sneak it onto the family dinner menu. Though Luc would never take sides against his mother, when his mother wasn’t around, Luc really liked his grandma’s carbonara.

“We’ve missed you this past week,” he said, meaning it.

She sniffed as she went to the fridge and pulled out eggs and pancetta, apparently planning to make good on her carbonara threats. No complaints on his end.

“Sure you did. You and your brother love when I go babysit your parents. Allows you to bring hookers round here without me knowing.”

“Too true,” he said, taking the huge pasta pot out of her hands and filling it with water before putting it on the stove. “We actually have the system down pat by now. The second you’re out the door is the second this joint turns into a brothel. Hope you don’t mind we rent out your room.”

“Shameful way to speak to your nonna,” she said, taking a swat at him.

Luc grinned knowing that she didn’t mind one bit. With two cops as sons and four cops as grandsons, she was well used to their salty sense of humor. Which was a damn good thing, because it was the only way the living arrangement worked without the three of them killing each other.

It wasn’t quite a typical arrangement.

While it was standard for Italian elders to live with their children or grandchildren, things were a little bit backward when said elder had a rent-controlled apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

It was an address that neither Luc nor Anthony could dream of having on a cop’s salary, but Nonna had lived in the gorgeous three-bedroom apartment since the 1950s, back before rent for an address in the upper seventies on the West Side went sky-high.

God bless rent control.

Of course, more and more lately, Nonna had been spending time at Luc’s parents’ house on Staten Island. She liked to say it was because she wished to keep an eye on her daughter-in-law’s cooking and her son’s waistline, but Luc was pretty sure she did it to give Anthony and Luc their privacy.

Which Luc appreciated. There was something uncomfortable about bringing female company around for nighttime activities when your grandma was in the next room, just waiting to offer the woman biscotti the next morning.

Come to think of it, Luc should probably text his older brother and let him know that Nonna was in the house. It wasn’t unusual for Anthony to finish up his shift and come home with a female “friend” in tow.

Not long ago, it hadn’t been unusual for Luc either.

But recently he’d been in a bit of a rut. The whole “hero cop” thing had made him suspect all interested females of being groupies, and it had been too long since he’d felt genuinely intrigued by a woman.

Luc tipped back his beer bottle and tried very, very hard not to think of Ava Sims.

Nonna watched him out of the corner of her eye as she added salt to the pasta water, and then she turned and pointed a long finger at him. “I know that look.”