Czytaj książkę: «Sister Swap»

Chapter One

“So, Mom, she’s been stuck in that hotel room for two days, until you could get there,” Roxanna said, “because she’s been too scared to leave it on her own?”

“This is going to ruin her career, Rox!” Roxanna’s mother answered, over the phone. She was calling from London, a hotel near Heathrow Airport, but she sounded clear enough to be in the next building—and clear enough that every bit of her distress came through.

“Mom, it’s going to ruin her life! She needs treatment. This is a major anxiety disorder, and it’s getting worse. She has to see that.”

“You have to fly to Italy and cover for her at the Di Bartoli family estate. This is a big project, and she needs it on her résumé. She can’t have it turn into a disaster, after all the work and study she’s done.”

“Oh, right! Cover for her, because I know everything there is to know about antique roses and historic garden restoration? You can’t be serious!”

Rox knew almost nothing about the subject, as Mom was well aware. She was a singer…well, a waitress with a music teaching degree she’d never used, but she didn’t want to examine that issue right now.

“Cover for her, because I’m one of the few people in the world who can tell the two of you apart,” Mom said.

“I weigh eight pounds more than she does, and I have way stronger lungs.”

“Nobody notices that. Especially if they don’t even know that Rowena has an identical twin sister.”

“True. She hasn’t mentioned my existence to the Di Bartoli family?”

“No, she says she definitely hasn’t. Honey, Rowie has promised that if you do this for her, she will get treatment. Yes, even she can see how much she needs it now.”

Rox closed her eyes, seeking inner guidance.

How could she say no? As Mom had just reminded her, she and Rowena were identical twins. Their bond was deep and life-long and complex, and it was important to both of them. They’d developed in such different ways, thanks to Rowena’s much greater frailty at birth and beyond, but the bond hadn’t lessened or changed.

Rowena, in particular, tugged on it a lot. This wouldn’t be the first time Roxanna had bailed her out when she’d been seized by one of her increasingly severe and increasingly frequent attacks of paralyzing anxiety. The one difference was that this time, thank heavens, Row had conceded she needed professional help.

Okay, there were a couple of other differences, too. Firstly, Rox had never been required to cross the Atlantic Ocean to impersonate her sister before. Secondly, her schedule was…um…unusually light right now, so she couldn’t plead a previous commitment.

She’d lost her job last Friday—her waitressing job—because her singing audition had run three hours late. Fortunately, this wasn’t going to send her into major debt, because her expenses were currently low. She’d moved into her parents’ house in northern New Jersey after her divorce late last year, taking care of it for them while they tried out a retirement move to Florida.

Footnote—she’d lost out at Friday’s audition, hadn’t even made the final cut, because the stress over the divorce was still affecting her voice.

Or maybe her voice just wasn’t good enough.

That had been listed as Reason Number Seventeen on the twenty-one-item list her ex-husband Harlan had given her as to why it was her fault, not his, that he’d started an affair and left her. “Your voice isn’t half as good as you think it is.”

“So you’ll fly Rowena back from London and find a therapist for her in Florida?” Rox asked her mother. There was no point in getting treatment for Rowie if they didn’t do it right. “You’ll take care of her until she’s made some progress? You’ll make sure she doesn’t run away from the therapy?”

“That seems like the best plan. The only plan. It was all her mixed-up feelings about Francesco Di Bartoli that triggered this panic attack, but it’s gone beyond anything rational, now. If she can’t even leave the hotel room on her own, she can’t possibly go back to Italy.”

“So what has she told the Di Bartoli family about all this?”

“That she’s been delayed in England, ordering the roses, but she should be back in Tuscany within a few days. Nothing about the underlying problem. So of course you’ll have to fly to Rome via London, so Signor Di Bartoli isn’t meeting you off a flight from the wrong continent.”

“I can’t pull this off, Mom. Surely Francesco will guess?”

“You can pull it off. You have to. He won’t guess. He doesn’t know you exist, and he hasn’t known Rowena for that long. As an impersonation, being your sister is not that big a stretch for you. Rowena is on her laptop right now, collating her notes for you and printing out every detail you’ll need, on top of all the books and notes still in Italy. And you can phone each other. You always left it till the last minute to cram for exams. This will be no different.”

Mom was probably right.

Harlan had mentioned it, too. Reason Number Twelve. “You always leave everything till the last minute.”

“Okay,” she told her mother. “But only because she’s promised to get treatment. I’ll call the airlines and get on the first flight I can.” Being someone who left things until the last minute, she was comfortable with traveling at short notice.

“Tonight?” Mom asked. It was currently Monday morning in New Jersey, Monday afternoon in Europe.

“I’ll try.”

“Call me back with the details. Then I can make plans for Rowie and me. We’ll need to connect with you in London on your way through, so she can give you the information on the garden project.”

Two days later, Roxanna touched down in Rome, wearing her twin sister’s neat, professional clothes but feeling totally like herself inside. Scatty (Reason Number Five), imperfectly groomed (Number Fourteen) and, as previously discussed in Reason Twelve, ill-prepared.

“Pia, stay close to Papa,” Gino said in Italian to his four-year-old daughter.

She strained at his hand, avid to explore the crowded airport terminal. He held her tighter, knowing only too well what would happen next, not having the slightest idea what to do about it.

I can’t deal with one of her tantrums here.

Pia pulled harder, her face getting its stubborn look, her lungs building up a full head of steam, ready to start screaming and kicking and throwing her compact little body about. Miss Cassidy, Pia’s English nanny, spent hours riding out the tantrums. She refused ever to give in, getting stricter and stricter the louder Pia screamed, until finally Pia would exhaust herself and fall asleep.

And I don’t have the time for that, or the patience, Gino knew. Lord help me, what is wrong with my child?

How could a woman as perfect as Angele—serene, cool, competent in everything she did—have given birth to such a difficult little girl?

Abruptly, with his decision made before he even knew it, he released his grip on his daughter and watched her dart between the spring coats and business suits of those waiting to meet the London flight. Passengers had begun to appear. As long as Rowena Madison wasn’t one of the last off the plane, he should be able to keep a rough eye on Pia’s whereabouts and not lose her.

He’d only met Rowena a few times, but he was confident he’d recognize her right away. Based in Rome and with a senior executive role in the Di Bartoli family’s multinational cosmetics corporation, he’d organized the initial interview with her regarding the garden restoration and had sat in on a couple of subsequent meetings to discuss her plans. The day-to-day liaison and supervision on the Di Bartoli estate itself he’d delegated to his thirty-three-year-old younger brother, Francesco.

Apparently Francesco had taken the liaison element way too seriously, however. Francesco had a perfectly charming and exceptionally suitable fiancée in Rome, and yet that hadn’t stopped him from begging Rowena for an affair in Tuscany. According to Francesco, Rowena’s trembling hesitation had only increased his desire.

Yes, well, so it would, Gino thought cynically. Francesco had always wanted something all the more when he found he couldn’t get it too easily. He wasted large chunks of his life this way.

And Gino wasn’t going to let him waste the prospect of a very good marriage on a stupid little affair with an American horticultural expert who didn’t seem to know whether she wanted him or not, even if she was entitled to call herself Dr. Madison, thanks to her doctoral dissertation on seventeenth-century European garden design.

Where was Pia?

His heart thudded suddenly and he looked around in a panic. He couldn’t see her. He should have dressed her in something brighter this morning. There weren’t many bright outfits in her closet, however. As Angele had, Miss Cassidy favored exquisitely made French children’s clothing in the same neutral colors—navy, gray and cream—that most of the adults in the airport were wearing. She was camouflaged as effectively as—

Ah. There she was. Safe. Intently watching a woman struggle with the jammed wheel of her suitcase.

And here was Rowena Madison.

She hadn’t seen him yet. She was scanning faces with her eyes narrowed, and her teeth scraping across her lower lip, as if anxious that he might not have come. She wasn’t to know how much he prided himself on his reliability.

He raised his hand and gestured, smiled and called her name. She saw him, and a strange series of expressions crossed her face, almost as if someone were trying out a series of different screen savers on a computer.

He had no idea what Francesco saw in her, despite how pretty she was with those deep blue eyes, the pale, creamy skin, the long dark hair loosely swept back. To Gino, she always seemed so prim and tame, like pasta cooked to mush instead of al dente—quite edible, yes, but not at all appetizing.

She pushed her way through the crowd toward him, a little breathless, with her wheeled and long-handled suitcase trundling behind her. She wore a neat beige pantsuit with a white silk blouse beneath. The blouse wasn’t as neat as the suit. One of the middle buttons had come unfastened, showing the lower part of a white lacy bra and a shadowed stretch of the skin between her ribs. “Francesco…?” It wasn’t quite a question.

“…couldn’t come,” Gino answered in his near-perfect English. He didn’t apologize on his brother’s behalf, since it wasn’t his brother’s fault.

He’d virtually ordered Francesco to stay in Rome to cool his head, while he himself took over the role of working with Rowena Madison on the garden. He could manage Di Bartoli business for a few weeks while based on the family’s Tuscan estate, and he desperately wanted to get Pia out of Rome.

To see if that made a difference to the tantrums.

To find out how she behaved without the presence of the English nanny whom Angele had always praised to the skies.

To get to know his child.

“Francesco couldn’t come,” Rowena echoed. Her voice sounded a little throaty, deeper and richer than he remembered, as if it had gotten strained by the poor-quality air during the flight. Or maybe she had a cold.

“Sorry,” he said, about Francesco’s absence.

He wasn’t sorry.

Was Dr. Madison? She did look a little shocked.

“Guess I’ll just have to make do with you, then…uh… Gino.” She threw him a dazzling, panicky grin.

The dazzle sent an odd jolt through him, and the panic made him curious. He’d already seen that she was somewhat an anxious, nervous type, but this seemed different. This wasn’t a cage bunny’s terror on being let out, but a wild hare’s panic on being shut in.

But where was Pia?

Another, different kind of jolt. He’d lost Pia’s mother, first through divorce and then through her untimely death. He wasn’t going to lose his only child, as well.

This time, he really couldn’t see her, and cursed her dove-gray dress again. Why not pink or bright lilac or something red with flowers? What sort of color was gray for a little girl?

“Is something wrong?” Roxanna asked Francesco’s older brother.

Sheesh, she’d had a narrow escape on that one!

Never having seen either man before, she’d actually called him Francesco, but he’d thought she was talking about Francesco, asking why he wasn’t here, so she’d gotten away with it. Then it had taken her three seconds too long to think of Gino’s name. That was the problem with cramming for an exam the night before. Vital facts flew out of your head at the worst moments.

“Yes,” he said, his dark eyes searching over Rox’s shoulder. He was dressed for business in a charcoal suit, a white shirt and a conservative dark tie. As she watched, he reached for the tie knot and loosened it, which gave him a rakish, Cary Grant sort of look. Rox could tell he didn’t even realize what he’d done. “I can’t see my daughter. She’s only four…”

And that was the problem with working from crib notes. Sometimes the vital facts just weren’t there. She’d had no idea that Gino Di Bartoli had a daughter.

Did he have a wife?

And had Rowena met the daughter?

Because if Row has, then I should help look for her, because I’ll supposedly know what she looks like. But I haven’t met her, so how can I? What’s her name?

“Pia!” Gino said, his voice rising. He spoke in Italian. “Pia, where are you?”

Whew! Again.

Pia, Pia, Pia. Remember that.

And luck was really running in Rox’s favor today, because as soon as she saw the little girl in the pretty gray dress, she knew this had to be the one. She looked soooo like her daddy! She had fabulous, intelligent, dark hazel-brown eyes, a stubborn, perfectly shaped mouth, an equally stubborn jaw and lustrous ebony hair.

Rox pushed past several people to where Pia stood scribbling on a travel poster with a blue pen she’d probably found on the terminal floor. Gino had arrowed off in the opposite direction and didn’t know yet that his daughter had been found, but Rox decided it would be better to actually collar Pia before alerting her papa. She looked like the kind of child who might disappear again at any moment.

“Pia, your papa is looking for you,” she said in English.

Did Pia speak English?

“I’m drawing,” she said, which answered the question.

Roxanna spoke a bit of Italian, majored in it at college eight years ago when she had—no surprises, here—crammed for her Italian exams the night before. She hoped Pia’s command of English was more extensive.

“Well, I think your papa would love to see your drawing,” she said, “but then we have to get in the car and go, so let’s stay right here until we see him.”

“Very well,” Pia said. Not okay Not even all right. Who the heck had taught her to say very well?

“Are you channeling Queen Victoria today, honey?” Rox murmured.

She grabbed a handful of Pia’s full-skirted dress so that the child would be safely tethered in one spot without realizing it, and looked around for Signor Di Bartoli, whom she knew from Row’s instructions she was supposed to call Gino.

Nice name.

Snappier than Francesco.

When she’d thought that he was Francesco, she’d had just enough time to decide it was no surprise that a man like this had triggered one of Rowie’s major anxiety episodes. Even to Rox herself—and she never had anxiety attacks—he seemed a little scary. The kind of man who didn’t put up with idiots or shirkers or cowards. The kind of man who demanded a lot from the people around him and got it. The kind of man who would kick Roxanna out of his palatial Tuscan estate the second he discovered she wasn’t her twin sister, the garden expert.

She saw him over the tangle of arrivals. Couples kissed, businessmen shook hands, but Gino was still searching in the wrong direction. She waved and yoo-hooed.

Nope.

Then she put her voice into gear and practically sang, “Signor Di Bartoli! Giii-nooo!” Oh, those wonderful, operatic Italian names! It might be fun to brush up on her language skills while she was in Italy. “She’s here. I’ve found her. We’re over here.”

A look of relief washed over his face like a tidal wave. It made Rox curious. Of course he cared about his little girl, but had he decided so fast that she was seriously lost?

Apparently, yes. When he reached her, he dropped low and gave her a huge hug, as if he hadn’t seen her for weeks. But then he didn’t really pay her drawing the proper attention, and that left Pia feeling way more lost than she’d felt while her papa was frantically looking for her.

Roxanna knew this because she knew how it felt when someone you cared about brushed your creativity aside. Harlan’s Reason Number Sixteen—“You always expect me to make such a big ******* deal out of your singing.” And she really could have done without the word he’d used between big and deal.

Uh-oh. What now?

Pia wanted to take the drawing with her. She’d already defaced a whole big corner of the travel poster. Actually removing it altogether would not look good for a thirty-five-year-old senior executive and principal shareholder in the renowned Di Bartoli Cosmetics Corporation.

“No, Pia,” her papa said, speaking down at her from the impressive height he’d risen to after letting go of the hug. His face tightened. With anger?

No.

With dread.

Dread of the screaming that he could obviously see was going to start at any moment.

Rox could see it, too.

“Because, Pia,” she said, quickly stepping close and bending down, “if we take it with us, everyone won’t be able to see it anymore. All these people. Why don’t we leave it here so it makes the airport prettier?”

She looked across the top of Pia’s thick, satiny black hair, seeking Gino’s approval. He looked startled. His mouth was shut hard—lips not too full, not too thin, she noticed. For a moment, she thought they were going to get the tantrum from him, instead. Then he gave a tight little nod.

“That’s a very good idea, isn’t it, Pia?” he said.

The little girl nodded and smiled and took the hand he held out. He looked relieved, and ready to flee the airport before something worse happened.

Another whew!

Lady Luck is soooo blowing things my way today, Rox thought. Rowie would be happy with me, but it can’t last.

It didn’t.

Walking toward the exit, Gino said, “You gave in to her.” It was an accusation, not a compliment.

“Gave in to her?”

“But at least we avoided the tantrum.”

Okay, so maybe that was kind of a compliment, but she couldn’t let the You gave in to her bit go by.

Harlan’s Reason Number Nine, incidentally. “You jump on every tiny thing.”

“I didn’t give in to her!” she said. “I made a positive suggestion that appealed to her, and deflected her feelings of frustration.”

“We have been having serious problems with Pia’s tantrums for a long time,” Gino said, in a tone that could have frosted a pond. “We have a clear policy in place for dealing with them, and that involves never giving in to her. I appreciate that this time, in a very public locale, you managed to avoid the tantrum, but please, in the future, once we’re at the family estate, I would ask you to stay within your own area of expertise.”

My own area of expertise…

Would you like your eggs easy over or sunny-side up? And with a side order of opera or cabaret?

“Sure,” Roxanna said, resisting the temptation to start mentally running through the list of antique rose varieties she’d been trying to memorize on the plane.

She noticed that Gino didn’t specify who we was. Himself and Mrs. Gino Di Bartoli, she assumed. No prizes for guessing who the chief architect of the tantrum policy was, however. Hint—someone who didn’t appear to understand bright, creative kids.

Someone who drove a Ferrari, she discovered a few minutes later.

A red Ferrari.

And who drove it fast.

Oh, it was wonderful! Rox didn’t feel scared for a second. Gino drove to suit the conditions, and she’d seen the careful way he’d strapped his daughter into a child seat in the back before they started. On curvy or traffic-filled streets, he didn’t attempt to weave between lanes or put his foot hard on the gas. Even the odd aggressive gesture or muttered curse were pretty restrained, compared to what Rox understood about Italian drivers.

When they hit the motorway heading to the north, however…

So cool.

She looked sideways at him, expecting to see a lazy grin of satisfaction, an enjoyment of the power and speed and sheer exhilaration, but no; his face still looked tight.

“Children grow out of tantrums,” she blurted out, feeling stupidly responsible for the tight look and stupidly eager to make it go away.

Bleahh! Reason Number Eight. “You never think before you speak.”

His mouth snapped open just far enough for speech. “They don’t grow out of them if they’ve learned that tantrums are the secret to getting their own way.”

“Does she ever get her own way?”

“No. As I said, we’ve been very strict about it. I should say, Miss Cassidy has been very strict about it, since she is the one who has spent the most time with Pia.”

Miss Cassidy.

Had to be the nanny.

Explained Pia’s perfect English, with its occasional scary overtones of deceased British royalty.

Gino pronounced the nanny’s name as Meess Cassidi, which was—so far—the only cute thing about him.

Once again failing to think before she spoke, Rox said, “I think sometimes a child needs to get her own way. She needs to know that people understand what’s important to her. And she needs to learn…oh…how to tell the difference between the things she really wants and should have, and the things that are just a passing whim or in conflict with what others need. Isn’t a blanket no just as bad as a blanket yes? Does anyone ever actually listen to her?”

Gino felt a steel band tighten around his head.

Had she made up her mind to sleep with Francesco? Did she think she was going to marry him? Was that why she’d suddenly shed her rabbity image and started offering opinions on issues that were none of her business? Did she think that they were her business now, because she was about to become a permanent part of the Di Bartoli family?

“I am not interested in discussing this with you any further, Dr. Madison.”

Short silence.

“No. Of course. I’m sorry.” She sounded more than sorry. She sounded chastened, as if she were really angry with herself. “I’ve been told before that I tend to do that.”

“To interfere in things that aren’t your business?”

“To speak first and think afterward. Foot-in-mouth disease.”

“What? A disease!”

She was diseased? He was bringing her into his home with his precious daughter and she was—

“No, no. Oh, gosh! Language barrier. American slang. It’s supposed to be funny. If you’re tactless, if you say things you shouldn’t have said, people say you’ve put your foot in your mouth. Foot-in-mouth disease. Get it?”

“Okay.” He couldn’t help grinning. Not so much at the allegedly humorous expression, but at her manic, anguished reaction to their misunderstanding.

“I’m so sorry if I gave you a heart attack there!” She was wincing and flapping her hands, clasping them together, begging him to understand, acting sincerely distressed. “I do that. I say things. And—oh my gosh! My blouse isn’t even done up right. You’re never going to beli—” She stopped, then fastened the slipped-through button that had caught his attention when she’d first come up to him in the terminal.

“Never going to what?” he asked.

He was curious.

And he’d started to have a theoretical inkling about what Francesco might have seen in her.

There was a beat of silence.

“Never going to forgive me,” she said.

“Don’t be ridiculous. It was a small misunderstanding.”

“No, um, I meant for my comments about the t-a-n-t-r-u-m thing.” She spelled out the critical word.

“I will forgive you if it’s not mentioned again.”