Page 38 of Cherry on Top

“Oh, oh,” Giana exclaimed, looking happy enough that she might burst.

“If you keep interfering, you might screw it up,” Enzo cautioned, shoving that hot burst of guilt down hard. He shouldn’t be feeling it, but he was anyway. He wasn’t lying to her, but apparently that didn’t matter to his conscience.

“I definitely do not want that. Neither of us do,” she agreed. “I knew the moment I met him he’d be perfect for you. And right here in Indigo Bay!”

“What a coincidence,” Enzo said dryly, turning to get his bagel because he wasn’t sure he could keep a straight face much longer.

“The very best kind.” Giana clapped her hands. “Are you going out again, soon? And not to his back room, with you sweaty and disheveled, Enzo, darling. He needs to see you at your best. You are very handsome. I’m sure he agrees.”

“So handsome you have to work hard to get me a date?” Enzo decided it was a positive development that he could at least joke about this now. Maybe Will had been right, and this had been the way to do this to begin with. After all, he genuinely liked the guy. How hard would it be to spend some extra time with him while he was here?

Not that hard.

Or really fucking hard.

“You know it was for you,” Giana reminded him after he’d buttered his bagel and sat across from her. “I just want you to be happy.”

“I know I keep saying this, but I am,” he said.

“Well, you are now,” Giana agreed, smiling.

Ugh. Enzo had never felt a kinship more viscerally than he did right now. Was this what women felt like, when they were constantly reduced to and defined by their relationship status?

“What are your plans today?” she asked. Enzo already knew she was forcibly returning the subject to the question he hadn’t answered yet. When is your next date with Will? When will you get married? How about that picket fence? And babies? Those big blond babies I want so badly?

Maybe it was unfair since she hadn’t specifically mentioned marriage and children—that had been Luca as, Enzo hoped, a joke—but he had a feeling it was only a matter of time.

“I’m working, Mom,” he said.

She made a frustrated noise as he sipped his coffee and ate his bagel. “I mean, your plans with Will.”

“I know I’m working, and he’s working.” He flashed her a conciliatory grin. “But good news, we’ll almost certainly see each other, as we’ll be basically in the same place.”

She relaxed then. “Oh, right. Yes, of course. Well, I trust that you know how to treat a man right.”

Enzo made a face and told himself she was not referring to his disaster of a date with Oliver, years before this.

“I do,” he countered and decided he was done with this assumption once and for all. He didn’t know when Will’s next free evening was, but he intended to take him out, very publicly, and make sure the whole town was aware of what a goddamn brilliant date-r he was now. That he was a catch. That men actually liked him.

Will likes you.

Well, he’d better, because Enzo intended to romance the hell out of him, in front of everyone.

“Of course you do,” Giana said. She gave him a small proud smile, and he couldn’t deny the delight in her eyes as she gazed at him. It made it hard for him to be too angry or frustrated with her. “You’re a fine man, Enzo. I don’t know how you managed it, because I’m afraid I was not the mother you needed, for far too long, but you did it. All by yourself.”

“Oh, I think you had something to do with it,” Enzo said softly. It was the truth, and he was handsomely rewarded for it with another of her beaming smiles.

“Thank you,” she said. “For being understanding even when you didn’t want to be.”

“It was always just us, against the world,” Enzo reminded her.

It had always been hard to be angry with her when she’d been loved and then abandoned, almost certainly in death, by Enzo’s father. They’d never found his body and Enzo had a feeling they never would, if his mom’s stories about his profession and associates were true.

It hadn’t been fair that the world had been cruel and left her saddled with a child and no way of making a living. He knew it had been harder on her than she’d ever let on.

“Always,” she agreed, and this time he didn’t see the shadow of bitterness, the fleeting sadness he usually saw cross her face whenever the past came up.

Maybe she’d finally made her peace with it. Enzo hoped so.

---