Sister Swap

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 grandeur and luxury. Inside, she had still been able to hear Pia letting loose. When silence finally had descended and she had ventured back indoors, she had found the little girl up at the polished rosewood table where she should have been an hour earlier, face sticky with ice cream, screaming forgotten, mood utterly content.

Oh, so we never give in to Pia’s tantrums, do we?

Not very fair of her to gloat over it like that, when Gino looked as if he’d aged ten years in the process.

She didn’t usually gloat.

Harlan hadn’t even mentioned it on his list.

And now, here in her big, silent bedroom, she couldn’t stop thinking about Gino, wondering how he’d dug himself into such a hole, wishing too strongly that she could help, knowing that she never could. A man like that wouldn’t let her.

She didn’t get to sleep until after four.

Was Dr. Madison ever going to wake up?

Gino had passed a sleepless night himself, but he’d risen at eight. Now it was ten and there was still no sign of her. He’d scheduled a part of the morning for touring the garden together, with her plans in hand, but if she didn’t appear soon, the morning would be gone. He didn’t feel comfortable about rapping on her door to waken her since they hadn’t agreed on a starting time, but he was getting annoyed.

Meanwhile, he tried to get some work done, but that wasn’t much of a success.

He’d naively imagined that he could put on a DVD for Pia, which she would watch quietly in the background while he made business calls, sent e-mails and worked on his laptop. But Pia had seen the DVD movie before.

“Sixteen times!” she said.

And she certainly seemed to know the songs in it by heart.

He tried to settle her with a book instead, but she wanted him to read it with her. “Because I can’t read.”

“Can’t you look at the pictures?”

“I want to read the words. With you.”

He read the words with her.

Actually, she almost could read on her own. She knew all of her letters, and when there was an easy word like boo or cat—it was a book in English—she could sound it out with his help. He felt a stirring of pride, found an Italian book and tried that with her, and she did just as well. He must ask Miss Cassidy how much time she’d spent on this sort of thing with Pia.

All the same, both books together only occupied twenty minutes, and when they were finished, she was bored again. He began to follow her from room to room, hoping she’d settle on something and racking his brain about a new strategy.

Should he hire a temporary nanny? He could easily go through an agency and have someone in place by the beginning of next week. But wouldn’t that defeat his whole purpose of getting to understand Pia better? He’d been frustrated in recent months by Miss Cassidy’s staged, formal and prearranged sessions of father-daughter time, with Pia always freshly bathed and fed, and outfitted like the window display at a Parisian fashion boutique.

Anyhow, here was Dr. Madison at last, dressed in her garden clothes—khaki stretch pants and a fleecy zippered top in a slightly lighter shade. The zipper was only pulled halfway up, showing a white T-shirt that looked a little too tight—the kind of tight that no man would ever complain about. Beneath it, her very nice breasts bounced as she hurried down the stairs.

“Good morning, uh, Rowena,” he said. He’d asked her weeks ago to call him Gino, and she did, but for some reason he found it hard to reciprocate with her first name today, and kept thinking of her by her formal title of Dr. Madison, instead.

“Good morning… Oh, but I am so sorry!” she gasped, radiating remorse like electrical energy. “I don’t know what can have made me sleep in like that! If it’s possible for me to have an alarm clock in the room, I would appreciate it, because I really do not want this to happen again!”

Her cheeks were flushed. Her hair was damp at the ends. If she’d brushed it just now, she hadn’t done a very good job, because it was all over the place, like the hair of a woman caught in bed with her lover.

“That’s fine,” Gino answered. “I’ve been reading with Pia. The alarm clock is a good idea, however.”

He couldn’t find the right tone. He was annoyed, yes, but at the same time he had an image of those rounded, bouncing breasts in his mind, wondering if they were a big part of the attraction for Francesco. He’d begun to understand that Dr. Madison did have some good…uh…features, surprisingly.

He also wanted to grin in sheer appreciation of the energy she gave off. He hadn’t noticed that, the other times they’d met. She’d been so focused on her scrupulously researched lists of rose varieties and their history. She’d seemed to direct too much of her energy inward and had been a little colorless to his eye.

“Would you like some breakfast before we start?” he offered.

“Um, if it’s not too much trouble.”

It was.

Far too much trouble.

Another delay in his already shattered morning.

But he couldn’t ask her to tramp around the gardens with him on an empty stomach, so…

“I’ll call Maria, and you can tell her what you would like. There may still be coffee on the sideboard in the dining room. Will you excuse me while I make some phone calls? Come along, Pia.”

“If they’re business calls, why don’t I keep Pia with me?” Dr. Madison suggested quickly. “Pia, you can pour my juice and tell me what breakfast foods are called in Italian. You can be my teacher. Would that be nice?”

Gino held his breath, waiting for No, I wanna go with Papa, and wondering whether his saying Okay, come with me, then would count as immediate capitulation to a tantrum that hadn’t quite happened yet but surely would if he insisted she was to go with Dr. Madison.

“Yes! It would be delightful!” Pia said and reeled off several breakfast words in Italian.

“You might have to go a little slower than that, Your Majesty, and you might have to get quite strict with me when I make silly mistakes. I think I’m going to be a very bad student!”

Pia laughed. She was already halfway to the dining room, her hand stretched out to take Dr. Madison’s, which was reaching back to her, open and inviting. The horticultural expert looked across at Gino, raised her eyebrows and grinned at him as if to say, “Didn’t I handle that well!”

He grinned back, too surprised not to, even though the grin felt…rusty.

Yes, I have to admit, you handled it well.

Then he let the grin drop and went to get some work done.

It was well after eleven when he surfaced from negotiating an unexpected problem in the Paris office and realized that even if Dr. Madison had ordered a full American breakfast, she must have finished eating it by now and must have learned by heart every Italian breakfast word Pia could think of to teach her. He went in search of them, clued in to their whereabouts by the sound of the piano that Pia had gotten into so much trouble over last night.

Dr. Madison had taught Pia to play “Chopsticks.”

As a duet.

With the doctor herself improvising some impressive, wild-fingered variations in the bass.

“Now we’re going to do it sad, Pia,” Gino heard her say. He paused in the doorway. “Listen, stop for a minute, can you hear me slowing down? Can you hear me changing the notes?” She went into a minor key. “Does it sound sadder to you now? Can you play it sad with me? Oh, boohoo, our chopsticks are bro-o-o-ken. Oh, it’s tragic, it’s terrible, we’re so, so sad, our notes are going so slowly, our fingers are so heavy on the keys, boohoo.”

He came farther into the room and she caught sight of him, nodded to show that she understood he was ready for their tour.

“Pia, someone’s fixed our chopsticks!” she said. “We’re happy again. We can get fast. Our fingers are moving so fast we can’t see them. I’m chasing you. Can you play as fast as me? I’m catching up, go faster, Pia. Faster, faster!”