On Any Given Sundae (2 page)

Uncle Siegfried gave her a fierce hug and
dropped the shop’s keys in her lap.

***

Rob Gabinarri was enjoying the sound of his
own voice in his latest battle of wits with Miguel, the style
consultant for his Chicago restaurant, when the phone rang.

“Rob Gabinarri, proprietor. The Playbook,” he
said into the receiver, feeling the usual pride at the words. He
never got tired of announcing his ownership of this place.

“Roberto!” his Uncle Pauly said.

Rob checked the date. It wasn’t his birthday.
It wasn’t Christmas. It wasn’t the NFL Playoffs or anytime close to
the Super Bowl. Something must be wrong with somebody.

“Uncle Pauly, how are you? Is everything all
right in Wilmington Bay?”

“Great, great.”

“Everyone in the family? Mama and Tony and
Maria-Louisa and the kids and—”

“Oh, they’re all fine. Just fine. But I need
your help.”

This stopped Rob cold. The last time his
independent uncle had asked for anybody’s help, big hair and
legwarmers had still been in fashion. No matter what, there was no
way Rob could decline. Family always came first.

“Of course. What do you need?”

“You’re the boss of that hotshot restaurant,
right?”

“Right,” Rob said, his pride wavering a bit
as apprehension seeped in.

“You make the rules and set the schedules,
right?”

“Right.”

“So, what you say is what goes, right?”

The last of his pride was now replaced by
full-fledged anxiety. “Uh, right.”

“So, you could take some time off now,
couldn’t you, Roberto?”

“I, well…sure. I guess so, but…”
Please,
please don’t tell me I need to leave the safety of downtown Chicago
and return to suffocating small-town Wilmington Bay. Please,
no.

“I need you to come back to Wilmington Bay
for a coupla weeks. Help us out here in the shop.”

Damn!
“I—well, I’m not so good with
sweets, Uncle Pauly. Is there anything I can do for you from here?
Anything I could send up? Supplies, maybe? I could hire a person
who could step in for a while and—”

“
Dire sciocchezze
. You’re talking
nonsense, boy. You’re great with sweets, and we need
you
.”

Rob stifled a heavy sigh. “Okay. When do you
need me?”

There was a pause on the line. “Is three
hours too soon?” his uncle asked, his brusque voice unusually
cheerful. “How about four?”

***

Elizabeth rarely swore aloud but, in her
mind, she was cursing not just a blue streak, but also a red,
orange, yellow and green streak. She was, in fact, well on her way
to a complete blasphemous rainbow, and Rob Gabinarri hadn’t even
arrived yet.

Of all people. She never thought she’d have
to make it through so much as a ten-minute soda pop break with
him
again. The boy who’d broken her heart and didn’t even
know it.

Or maybe he did know it.

She couldn’t decide which was the greater
tragedy.

A snazzy red Porsche convertible squealed to
a stop behind her sensible blue Toyota Camry, and the town’s Golden
Boy stepped out of the car and into the empty confectionary
shop.

“Hey, Lizzy. Long time, no see,” he said,
glancing around the shop in a frantic kind of way.

“E-Elizabeth,” she corrected
automatically.

“Oh, all right. Sorry.”

She stared at him, which of course he didn’t
notice because he was too busy looking at everything else in the
place besides her.

He walked into the backroom then out of it
again.

He peered into the washrooms.

He opened and shut a few closets.

He paced back and forth, sat down in a booth,
got back up and paced some more.

The guy was as tall and muscular and
breathtaking as he’d been a decade before when he used to saunter
through the unremarkable halls of Wilmington Bay High School,
oblivious to anyone and anything beyond the football field and his
bevy of admirers. If it were possible, he seemed even more youthful
and in command now than he did at age eighteen.

And she felt about as queasy as she’d felt
the last time they’d been face to face.

Finally, his pacing stopped. “Where is my
uncle?” he asked in a husky whisper, directing the query at a tray
of chocolate-dipped sugar cookies. “Uncle?” he called out. “Uncle
Pauly?”

She wanted to tell him, but the words were
lodged in her esophagus and, anyway, he wasn’t talking to her.

He strode into the backroom again, as if
convinced the elderly Italian man could be found hiding behind a
jar of candied cherries or a vat of butterscotch syrup. The long
black eyelashes blinked in confusion when he emerged into the main
shop once again, his gaze and those nutmeg-brown eyes directed at
her.

“Don’t tell me he left already.” This was
more a threat than a question. He shook his head at her as though
that gesture alone would discourage an affirmative reply.

She held her breath and nodded.

“
Where
is he?”

She pursed her lips, just as she’d learned in
her special speech tutorials so long ago, formed the first letter
and tried to push it out of her mouth. But she stuttered
anyway.

“L-Lufthansa. F-Fl-Flight four-oh-three.”

He cocked his gorgeous head to one side and
stared at her in the way she’d grown so accustomed to during her
miserable school years:
Poor Old Lizzy
, the look said.
What a geeky dweeb.

“What time is it scheduled to depart?” he
asked her with an affected gentleness that made her want to rip out
his vocal cords.

She tapped her watch and gathered her courage
for whatever might happen next. “T-Twenty m-m-minutes a-ago.”

“Oh, bloody hellfire!” Rob shouted, adding
several inventive phrases to his curse before pausing to take a
breath.

Elizabeth had managed to squeeze out a few
additional syllables of explanation, but Rob was quick to catch on
to the full meaning, she noticed, even when words were left
unspoken.

“Uncle Pauly said he’d be gone only a couple
of weeks.” He rubbed his palms against his eyes. “Not a freaking
month
. And he never mentioned
Europe
.” He pounded his
fist on the ice-cream-window part of the counter three times in
rapid succession. “He said everything would be explained when I got
up here.” He turned toward her. “Guess you were elected to supply
the details.”

If she’d been capable of it, she would’ve
laughed. Oh, yeah. Now that was a first. One for the record books.
Elizabeth Daniels: Verbal Disseminator of Information. Hee-hee.
Ha-ha.

“S-Sorry,” she said.

He paused. “I didn’t mean it like that. I’m
just…” But words must have defied him, too, because he left the
sentence uncompleted.

A jangling of bells broke the silence.

“Howdy, folks,” the chatty old florist from
down the block said. “Hey, Pauly, Siegfried,” he called. “Need to
get me a double scoop of Cherry-Almond S—” He stopped mid-speech
and surveyed Rob from the top of his dark Italian head right down
to his pricey black-and-white Nikes. “Holy Hydrangea. Is that
really Roberto Gabinarri standing in front of me?”

Rob grinned but a look of something other
than gratification (wariness, perhaps?) slid over his face like a
well-formed mask. “Good to see you again, sir. You’re looking fit
as ever.”

The gentleman shook his head as if
disbelieving the sight. “Been blazing a hot trail through Chicago,
I hear. But, we’ve all missed you in Wilmington Bay, son. Does your
uncle know you’re back?” He didn’t wait for Rob to answer. “Pauly!
Siegfried!” He raised his palms. “Where are they?”

She watched Rob inhale several slow breaths.
She could almost see him selecting his words with precision, the
way a pastry chef might chose just the right filling for a pie.

“They’re taking a much-deserved vacation,” he
said, nodding sagely at the older gentleman and motioning him
closer as if letting him in on a deep family secret. “And we
couldn’t let them close the shop now, could we? During June?”

The florist’s eyes grew large. “Oh, no.”

“Of course not. Especially since their best
customers were counting on them.” Rob winked at the man and grabbed
an ice cream scoop. “This cone’s on the house,” he said, digging
into the tub of Cherry-Almond Swirl and piling the sweet concoction
in massive, if inexpert, blobs atop a sugar cone. “Uncle Pauly’s
orders.”

So Rob was going to start bribing and
spin-doctoring, was he? Fine. She’d play along. In fact, she had to
hand it to him. Considering the look of bliss on the talkative
florist’s face, the gossip he’d inevitably spread about them could
only be in their favor. She clamped her mouth shut and did her part
by passing the man a paper napkin and shooting him a closed-lipped
smile.

“Why, thank you, dearie,” the florist said to
her. “Gotta get back to talking to my geraniums and begonias before
they start complaining.” He licked his cone and twinkled his
delight at her with his eyes.

She waved him off without uttering a sound, a
trick she’d perfected through years of social avoidance, then she
grabbed her notebook and ripped out the page she’d been working on.
She handed it to Rob.

“What’s this?” he said, slumping against the
counter.

With her pen, she pointed to the heading
she’d written in block letters.

“A schedule? For what? The shop?” He stared
at her as if this were the most foreign of concepts.

She nodded.

“For us? To divide up the opening and closing
times?”

Good. He could read. She nodded again.

“But who’s going to work the shifts in
between? Last time I talked with Uncle Pauly, he said he and
Siegfried were doing most of the serving themselves. Said they
didn’t trust many people and they’d only hire out part-time helpers
during really busy times or when one of them was sick.”

She knew this, which was why she’d have to
rely more heavily on Jacques, and why she’d called both Gretchen
and Nick and told them they absolutely
had
to come over
tomorrow to help her with this. She was desperate.

“M-M-My fr-friends will be w-working here,”
she said.

“Well, great,” he said, looking relieved.
“Hey, I mean, if you think you can handle all of the organizing,
get trustworthy people to take the over shifts and all, you can
count on me to chip in with other things. Funding their salaries
for the month. Doing all the stock ordering. Sending out publicity
notices. Anything you need, just so I can be back in Chicago
soon.”

She winced. She’d been especially dreading
relaying this part of Pauly’s parting message. Although she didn’t
know the precise reason, she sensed Rob wouldn’t like the news.
“Y-You can’t l-leave.”

“Why not?” he said, but the uneasiness in his
tone convinced her he wasn’t surprised there might be a
complication.

“P-Pauly called your m-m-mother. T-Told her
to expect you for Sunday d-d-dinner tonight. And every
n-night.”

“Oh, hell.”

She pushed her long, unruly hair out of her
eyes and blinked at him. Funny, she’d never before seen the Golden
Boy’s rugged olive complexion look quite so peaked.

“Lizzy,” he said, setting her carefully
constructed schedule back on the counter. “You’re looking at a dead
man.”

And with that, he collapsed into a six-foot
heap of hunky male onto the floor.

CHAPTER TWO

Rob lay on the ground after his pratfall,
eyes closed and enjoying the coolness of the parlor’s tiles against
his neck and his arms. Everywhere, actually, that the thick fabric
of his shirt couldn’t protect.

He might as well stay here.

With his uncle and his mother conspiring
together, he’d have a better chance of surviving a month in
Wisconsin if he were eyelevel with the native fauna. Badgers might
have a vicious streak, but they were good burrowers. They knew how
to hide when necessary.

He heard the sound of rapid footsteps
crossing the room and a worried “R-Rob?” coming from somewhere
above him.

He bit his lower lip.
Frizzy Lizzy.
Imagine seeing her again after all this time
. She looked
different, not like the quiet teen he remembered, but the aura she
projected was the same. Too damn competent. Women like that scared
the bejesus out of him. They always did.

Of course, her impressions of him couldn’t be
much to brag about. He opened his eyes to see her peering down at
him with a look of pure horror from above the countertop. She must
think he’d turned into a nutcase.

“I’m fine,” he told her. “Just resting.
Trying to gather my strength.” Which was the truth. He loved his
mother, but he knew he’d need more than familial affection to get
him through the next four weeks of The Matriarch Dinner
Inquisition. He’d need something he didn’t have and didn’t want: A
serious girlfriend.

“Oh, okay,” she said, her big green eyes
squinty with confusion. This was the first time she hadn’t
stuttered since he’d gotten there. Must be a sign that she wasn’t
scared of him anymore…just annoyed.

He pushed himself to his feet and faced her,
the barrier of the counter the only object between them. She was
fiddling with her schedule. He slid the paper aside and lightly
rested his hands atop hers, deciding that making amends was always
done best when done right away.

“Hey, I apologize,” he said. “I didn’t mean
to freak you out a minute ago or let my frustrations loose on you
when I got here. But this whole thing came as kind of a shock, and
I’m still trying to get readjusted. The schedule you did looks good
and—” He stopped. Her green eyes had grown so enormous they became
the only feature on her face he could see. “You okay, Lizzy?”