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more lives than a Hindu cat.”
    “Hardly.”
    “You’re walking on water, ’mano .”
    Lance glanced toward the bedroom. “If she didn’t need me at the inn, I’d be bottom feeding.”
    Rico laid a book on the table, and Lance caught the title. Beloved Sonnets ?
    Rico read his thoughts. “Star likes Shakespeare. I read to her in the park.”
    Lance dropped his jaw. “You can read?”
    “Funny.”
    “Still celibate?”
    Rico grinned.
    “Impossible.”
    He spread his hands. “I’m a new man.”
    Lance pictured Star just weeks ago with bruises from the boyfriend who “couldn’t let her go.” Moments later, she and Rico had started a chaste courtship unlike any of his others. There were issues, Star’s especially, but Rico didn’t seem to see them. He had taken the admonition not to mess with her as a holy decree, though Lance was just trying to get Star through a bad spot. He hadn’t expected Rico—who spent his life in two places, the drum set and the bedroom—to manage it indefinitely.
    But who was he to judge? Maybe it was just that Tony wasn’t there to do it. Here in the city Tony’s absence gaped. The towers had come down too long ago to still feel it so bad. But Lance would have liked to show his big brother the woman he’d brought home. He’d have liked to tell him, “This one won’t get me in trouble; she makes me better.” And that was a feat for anyone, given his propensity to mess up.
    His throat tightened as he imagined presenting her to Tony. No other introduction would have meant so much. He imagined Tony’s face, his ability to read a person’s character. He’d have seen it, that special quality in her that reached in and took hold.
    “This is it, Tony. I know it.”
    “Then don’t screw it up.”
    I won’t . A hard wave of desire hit him, not the kind that tempted, but the kind that put a hunger in his soul. As Rese and Star came out of the bedroom, he had to remind himself she had only agreed to a working relationship plus neck rubs. His family would assume more, that he wouldn’t have brought her unless she mattered. They would see who she was to him.
    And Rese would see who he was. So far she seemed shell-shocked. Though she’d grown up on the construction sites of her dad’s renovations and worked her way into partnership with him, they’d been high-class renovations, and Sausalito was not the Bronx.
    Star’s diaphanous dress clung and fluttered as she flitted over to the small refrigerator, moving through the place as though she’d been there longer than two and a half weeks. But then, she had made herself right at home in the Sonoma villa as well. She took out a soda. There wasn’t much else in there since they shopped the local markets and bakeries daily.
    He hated to think what all Momma had purchased for tonight. He’d been joking about Ferragosto, but Momma would be cooking something—a lot of something. Unfortunately, quantity had never satisfied his need for quality, as Sofie pointed out—one reason he’d preferred Nonna’s kitchen to any other.
    Not, as Momma thought, because he’d inherited Nonna’s scorn for anything south of Piemonte, but because cuisine from either region could be ruined, and, in their house, the Southern fare more frequently was. Momma was a beautiful dancer and a gifted instructor, but she attacked her kitchen like a member of a chain gang; heavyhanded on the seasonings, maybe to make up for the overthickened sauces, the gummy pastas, and gnocchi that could serve as cement shoes. She just couldn’t find the light touch in the kitchen that she perfected on the dance floor.
    If Nonna were herself, she’d have closed down the restaurant with a sign in the window: Family Only Tonight. Then she’d have filled the space with the finest aromas and welcomed Rese with copious servings of perfectly prepared coscia di aguello, leg of lamb brushed with garlic and olive oil using branches of rosemary tied together, and coniglio in