“Not if there’s a but you haven’t.”
Well, she’d tried. It had been thirteen years and she wasn’t angry at the world anymore. “But I’ll never be a fan of anyone who is motivated by the desire to have more. That’s what drove my parents—the need for more. More money, more things, more status, more success, more multigazillion-dollar deals.” She puffed out a disgusted breath. “They died to have more.”
He didn’t respond—how could he? He was a billionaire who no doubt worshiped at the altar of More Is Never Enough. But his gentle caress on her back felt like that of a kind, caring man, so she tried to forget that he was cut from the same cloth as her money-hungry parents and let him soothe away the old beast of bitter who reared his head more often since Nonno had died. So maybe it wasn’t bitterness that had her blue, maybe it was just a far too familiar sense that she had no one.
She closed her eyes and rested on his powerful shoulder, practically purring at how good he felt.
“I came here after it happened,” she finally said, not wanting to talk about her parents anymore. They weren’t why she wanted to hold on to this land. It was because of her savior, Nonno. “To live with my grandfather.”
“Was he your only relative?”
“No, my mother’s sister in Long Island also wanted me, but according to my parents’ will, I was supposed to live with Nonno. So I left a four-thousand-square-foot apartment on the Upper East Side and a private school, driver, and a life of pure luxury to move to a goat farm in the middle of a swamp island.”
It was his turn to back away and look at her incredulously. “That must have been horrible.”
She fought a smile. “I loved it.”
“Really?”
“Well, not immediately, no. I mean, it was a bit of a culture shock and I was a typical teenage brat full of denial and anger, but Nonno? Boy, he just loved me like I was another one of his darling does. He was just the most amazing, sweet, terrific guy in the whole world. My grandmother had died a few years earlier, and the farm was fading, but only because he needed a second pair of hands and he was too stubborn to ask for help. His middle name was stubborn,” she said, trying to make light of the character trait that had nearly cost her that last goodbye. “But once he started teaching me how to do things, I really, really loved the life.”
“You lived in this trailer?” he asked.
“Oh, no. We had a little ranch house, but it was messed up badly in a hurricane that hit the island a few years ago. He put this up temporarily.”
“I guess it was a great escape from the pain of what you’d gone through in New York,” he said.
Everyone thought that, and it made sense. “It didn’t seem like that to me at the time. I enjoyed the animals and loved Nonno and he loved me. Completely and wholly and unconditionally. Way more than my parents did, or at least than they acted like they did.”
“Like, he went to your teacher conferences instead of working?”
She laughed softly. “Even better. After the first year at Mimosa High, he yanked me out and homeschooled me because the teachers were all ‘from hunger,’ he used to say.”
“He educated you himself?”
She shrugged. “More or less. He certainly taught me how to milk goats and breed them, and how to make soap and cheese, and get a doe ready to give birth. But that’s not exactly what qualifies as an education in the state of Florida.”
Comfortable now, she tucked her legs under her and shimmied back to look at him. That was no hardship. His dark gaze was right on her, every word hitting his heart, she could tell.
“And that was a problem,” she added. “Enough of a problem that my Aunt Jenny swooped down from New York, went to war with the courts, and got me to go live with her in Roslyn Heights, Long Island, also known as living hell for me.”
Which was actually the understatement of all time. “My cousins were entitled, obnoxious, partying bitches, and my aunt and uncle were as money-obsessed as my parents. I don’t know how I survived there, but I did.”
“Then you came back here?” he guessed.
“I went to Florida State and got a degree in animal science and, of course, I stayed with Nonno on every break and in the summer. The more I learned, the more I had ideas for this place. It has so much potential to be a real money-making operation if he had only brought it into the twenty-first century. But Nonno didn’t like…the twenty-first century. He had a rotary phone here until the day he died.”
“So that’s what you want to do now? Make it a twenty-first-century goat farm?”
“No.” She pulled her legs up again, wrapping her arms around her jeans, not liking this part of her story any more than the part about her parents. “I made him a promise that I wouldn’t and, honestly, I lost interest in high-tech farming.”
“Why?”
“After college I…we…” She closed her eyes against the tears that welled. “We had a bad fight about modernizing this place. I’m telling you, there is no creature on earth as pigheaded and close-minded and obstinate as an old Italian man. I wanted to expand and install a whole milking and dairy system, and he just wanted to make soap and cheese and maybe have a little petting farm and retail storefront when he rebuilt the house. I was on fire with youth and ambition, and he was mellow with age and the simple joys in life. We fought pretty badly.” She managed a wry smile. “I may have inherited that stubborn streak.”
“Ya think?” Laughing softly, he brushed a strand of her hair off her face, the gesture so intimate it sent an unwanted rush through her, but also encouraging, so she kept talking.
“Anyway, after our big argument, I went to DC and got a really important job at the Department of Agriculture and Nonno…” Her voice hitched, and he reached for her hand, swallowing it in his much more sizable ones. “He had a stroke.”
“And you weren’t here.”
She looked at him, touched for some reason that he would understand just how horrible that was. “No, I wasn’t. And if I had been…”
“He still would have had a stroke.”
She shook her head vehemently. “But I might have gotten him to the hospital sooner or maybe I would have seen an early symptom.” Guilt wracked her voice and pinched her heart. “But I was in Washington…and…” She swallowed but forced herself to make the admission. “I was no better than my parents in being somewhere other than where I should have been, chasing success and big dreams and—”