Sister Swap. Lilian Darcy

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      Chapter Two

      In her room at midnight that night, Rox very much wanted to call Rowie and Mom to report, like a covert operative, that she’d achieved successful and undetected insertion into the target zone. She’d managed to greet Maria, the housekeeper, as if the two of them had met before. She’d correctly matched the three gardeners’ names with the descriptions of them that Row had given her. She’d used the sketchy map of the palazzo’s interior to navigate her way to her bedroom, and had only gotten lost once.

      But Rowie and Mom were on the plane to Florida, so she couldn’t.

      At least, she really hoped they were on the plane to Florida. What if Row couldn’t bring herself to leave the hotel, even when she had Mom with her every step of the way?

      How much of the difference in their personalities came down to the fact that Rox had been born first and heaviest and healthiest and easiest? It had always seemed to her like such a random quirk of fate. She’d held the winning ticket in that particular lottery, and she wasn’t going to let her sister suffer for it.

      Since she couldn’t call Mom and Rowie, she called Dad instead. “You haven’t heard from them?”

      “No, which means they must be safely on the plane.” He sounded relieved about it, also.

      “That’s great! Tell Rowie as soon as you see her that everything is going fine here, no problems, and she’s not to worry about a thing. She’s to focus on herself, on getting the right therapist and the right treatment, and getting better.”

      “Will do, honey.”

      “Talk to you soon.”

      “Thanks for doing this for your sister.”

      “Oh, it’s a walk in the park, it’s a breeze,” Rox lied. “It’s going to be fun. Make sure she really knows she doesn’t have to worry about me.”

      Roxanna didn’t feel sleepy, since her body was still set on New Jersey time. When Gino had taken his still-wide-awake and protesting daughter up to bed an hour ago, Rox had almost blurted out something about jet lag and understanding how Pia felt. She’d shut her treacherous mouth just in time.

      You weren’t supposed to get jet lag going from London to Italy, since their time zones were only an hour apart, so she’d put on a fake yawn, said good-night, and hidden her raring-to-go energy levels in this gorgeous, high-ceilinged, powder-blue-painted room, with adjoining bathroom, that Francesco had assigned to her sister.

      It was no coincidence, Roxanna knew, that the room was situated just along the corridor from where Francesco had slept. She wondered whether Rowie might have been able to hold herself together here in Italy, enough to complete the garden project, if she hadn’t faced Francesco’s constant and seductive attempts to sleep with her.

      Water under the bridge now.

      Rox had other, more urgent things to think about.

      She would have to study Rowena’s plant lists, work schedules, delivery dates and garden bed layouts for a few hours until she really got sleepy. And there was no alarm clock in the room, so she’d have to leave the painted wooden shutters open and trust to the morning light to wake her at an hour that wasn’t suspiciously late.

      Considering that she didn’t feel tired, Rox found it hard to concentrate on the pages of notes Rowena had given her in London, or on the bundle of stuff she’d sneaked up to her room from the sunny and spacious office Rowena had been given downstairs. She loved flowers and shrubs and gardens, sure, but not the way Rowie did, not on the same level of detail. She loved beautiful vistas, dramatic groupings of color, and sweet, heady scents…

      But did she really need to know exactly what quantity of Souvenir de la Malmaison, Belle de Crecy, Eglantine, Celsiana and a dozen other varieties of rose Row had ordered for the Pink Walk? Did she need to know that crested moss was also known as Chapeau de Napoleon?

      Cram, cram, cram.

      Exam tomorrow.

      Concentrate, Rox!

      Instead, her mind kept straying to Gino and his daughter. They made such a gorgeous pair, with their dark coloring, their lashes as thick as sable paintbrushes, their satin-smooth olive skin, their impeccable bone structure.

      You could have photographed them at a pavement café or in a cobbled town square for one of those evocative postcards of Italian street life that looked like a black-and-white movie still from the era of the young Sophia Loren…if you could have gotten arrogant, supersuccessful Gino to stop frowning at Pia and looking so totally at sea about his daughter.

      The little girl had been difficult tonight, Rox had to admit. Pia wouldn’t sit properly at the big dining room table to eat—Roxanna had thought the food was fabulous—but had just wanted to run around and play. Afterward, she seemed bored with her fancy, pristine dolls. She darted into some vast, echoing formal sitting room—the salone, they seemed to call it—lifted the lid on the grand piano and started to tinkle the keys. When she got into trouble for it, instead of stopping she pounded them harder and harder.

      Had a great sense of rhythm, actually.

      She had been physically removed from the instrument and then from the room, and she had started to kick and scream. Gino had looked embarrassed, upset and at the end of his rope. His vulnerability called forth an odd connection to him that Roxanna didn’t think she could have felt with a man like that in any other situation. She didn’t like the commanding type, and she ought to know, since she’d been married to one for six years.

      As the tantrum had unravelled, Maria the housekeeper clearly hadn’t known whether to step in or say nothing. Rox had felt seriously out of place. She had mumbled something about going for a walk, even though it was dark outside by that time.

      Back and forth along a terrace she had gone, then round and round a beautiful old fountain that hadn’t yet been restored. The place was fabulous with its air of age-tarnished СКАЧАТЬ