Rooted (Pagano Family #3)(52)
It was the perfect kind of scent for Carmen, even better than the rich spice of the perfume she’d worn. It was sweet but not flowery, sharp but not acrid, potent without demanding attention. He’d thought that night, while they rocked together, the water sloshing over the candles, that though her perfume was liquid sex, lavender would always mean love to him from that day forward.
He’d been half right. Love lost is what it truly meant.
Realizing that he’d set his glass down and his hands were moving over the keys, Theo stopped and looked at the screen. He’d typed three words: Lavender in Summer.
A title.
With a rush, he knew his words were back. He understood what it was he needed to write. Maggie was his past. She belonged in his past, and she knew it. He’d had no words because she wasn’t whispering memories in his ear any longer. She had released him.
He wasn’t writing a memoir about Maggie. That was the wrong book. He hoped Hunter wouldn’t want his grant money back, but if he did, that was a problem for later. Theo’s heart raced; words began to course through his blood and out his fingertips as they struck the keys. He knew what he needed to write.
Not the prequel to Orchids in Autumn. The sequel. Not the story of his youthful love of his wife, but the story of finding love again. And losing it.
oOo
When he closed the laptop hours later, too tired and drunk to focus his eyes or his mind any longer, he’d written nearly eight thousand new words. Keepers, he thought. They felt like keepers.
The bottle of bourbon was empty.
One problem at a time.
13
“Will you all stop fussing over me!” Carlo Sr. snatched the heart-shaped pillow out of Sabina’s hands and held it to his chest as Carmen helped him to his feet. “I’m not a cripple!”
When he tried to jerk his arm from Carmen’s grasp, she held tight. It wasn’t so hard to do—moving his arms moved his chest, and that still hurt him. “Pop. If you don’t take the help you need, you could end up crippled. Just chill and don’t be such a baby.”
“That’s the problem. You’re all treating me like a baby. There are too many damn women around.” Despite the grumbling, he stopped fighting her, and she led him out the kitchen door and onto the sun porch at Adele’s house. Which was his house, too, now. Carmen would never get used to that.
Elsa, Carlo and Sabina’s dog, who went back and forth between the houses at will, followed and plopped nearby with a groan. She liked to be where the people were.
Adele had gotten the chaise lounge out here set up for him, all his needs arrayed on a table at his side—his reading glasses, the latest editions of the Quiet Cove Clarion and the Providence Journal, a tall glass of decaffeinated iced tea, and his pill organizer. He held the pillow tightly to his chest, and Carmen locked her legs and helped him onto the lounge. From an iPod dock on a table next to the door, Rosa selected Holst’s The Planets Suite, one of his favorites. When ‘Mars’ started playing, she skipped to ‘Venus’—calmer. Carmen smiled over her shoulder at her sister.
“It sounds better on my record player,” their father groused, frowning darkly.
“Yeah, well, the rest of us don’t need it blaring all over the house so you can hear it back here. You’re stuck with digital today.” Rosa’s voice was lightly teasing. She went over and sat in a chair next to their father, her phone in her hand. Probably texting Eli. He was in Maine now, and Rosie was getting impatient being in the Cove without him.
She was going to fly the nest. Carmen could see it, and she was torn between the desire to give her a push toward freedom and the impulse to convince her to stay. Their father doted on his little princess. Right now, with all the other stresses, and his frail health, she didn’t know how he’d cope if his baby went away.
“You ready for some lunch, honey?”
Carlo Sr. turned his black look on his new wife, but then, before Carmen’s eyes, it softened, and he smiled a little. “Thanks, babe. But not right now. Could you get the afghan from the living room? The one Sabina made me?”
Adele nodded and went back into the house. As soon as the screen door closed, he turned to Carmen and Rosa. “Find a way to get me some decent food, girls. I need meat—the kind that bleeds. And gnocchi. God, I’d die to get my hands on some of that gnocchi from Conti’s—with the cheese all thick and dripping off. With a side of porterhouse.”
“Yeah, Pop. You’d die. Exactly. You can’t eat that stuff anymore. You just had quintuple bypass. And there’s scarring on your heart. You are a salad man now.”
He threw the heart pillow at her, then winced. “Without meat, bread, and cheese, I can’t live anyway.”
“Chin up, Pop.” Carmen patted his leg and went into the house. She passed Adele with the afghan. “I’ll put his lunch together.”
“Thanks, hon. There’s a grilled chicken breast in the fridge, and this morning I pulled some lettuce and cherry tomatoes from the garden. I was going to slice the chicken and a hard-boiled egg and toss it all together.”
Sounded deadly dull to Carmen, but she hadn’t recently had her chest cracked open. Not literally, anyway. “Okay. Any dressing?”
Adele shrugged. “Drizzle some balsamic over it? And a little pepper? I tried to make a dressing last night with nonfat yogurt, but he threw a fit.” She sighed and hugged the afghan. “I’m going to have to learn to cook in a new way. The poor man can’t eat lettuce for the rest of his days.”