was a statement, not a question. She nodded.
‘Then think of the exam as just another day-to-day practical thing.’
‘That’s what my parents said about the driving test. It still took me four goes—and Suzy and the twins all passed theirs first time.’
‘Suzy and the twins?’ he asked.
She shifted in her seat. ‘I’m the eldest of four.’ Sort of.
‘The same as me.’ He smiled. ‘Now I know why you’re brilliantly organised. You’ve had years of practice, bossing your siblings about.’
‘They’re a trainee dentist, a PhD student and a forensic scientist. Bossing them about wouldn’t work,’ she said with a rueful smile. They were all academic and brilliant at exams, unlike her. They all excelled in sports, too, had always been picked for the school’s first team, whereas she’d been hopeless—in sixth form she’d opted to do voluntary work at the local old people’s home on Wednesday afternoons rather than sports.
She was the eldest. And most definitely the odd one out.
Probably because she didn’t share the same gene pool.
Marco took away their empty plates and returned with pizza and a bowl of salad. ‘Mama says panna cotta would take too long, but crème brûlée is on the specials board and she can do you some with raspberries.’
‘Fabulous.’ Gio smiled. ‘Tell her she’s the joint best mother in the world, along with mine.’
‘Tell her yourself. There are big hints in the kitchen that she hasn’t seen her favourite nephew for months.’
‘It hasn’t been anywhere near that long,’ Gio protested.
‘Eat your pizza. Then go see Mama, if you want pudding,’ Marco advised. ‘Fran, would you like pepper? Parmesan?’
‘I’m fine, thanks.’ She smiled back at him.
‘Bene. Enjoy,’ he said, and left them to it.
‘You have to try this,’ Gio insisted, and cut a small piece from his pizza. ‘Here.’ He offered her a forkful across the table; it felt oddly intimate, leaning across to take a bite, and when her gaze met his she felt a weird shifting in the region of her heart, as if it had just turned a somersault.
Oh, lord. Don’t say she was falling for Gio Mazetti, a man she barely knew and who was just about to become her boss?
‘Well?’ he asked. ‘So what do you think of avocado on pizza?’
‘It’s…different.’
He laughed. ‘That’s the diplomatic answer.’
She shifted the conversation back to business before it drifted on to personal ground. Dangerous ground. Because if she was going to work with Gio, any other sort of relationship was definitely out of the question. ‘You said you were thinking of expanding or franchising. How big is Giovanni’s?’
‘We have four outlets in London,’ he said. ‘So I’m at the stage where I need to decide what to do next. Well, I say “I”.’ He waved a dismissive hand. ‘Dad started the business.’
‘But you’re in charge now.’
He nodded. ‘Though I need to consider Dad’s feelings. Franchising’s a possibility, but I need to do some proper research into what it all means and whether it’s the right way for us to go. And at the moment I simply don’t have the time.’
The pizzeria was another of his family’s businesses, and his aunt was clearly still hands on. Gio’s father couldn’t be that much older than Annetta, surely; so why wasn’t he hands-on with the coffee shop? ‘You seem—well, pretty young to be heading a chain of coffee shops,’ she commented.
‘I’m twenty-eight. But I’ve worked in the business for half my life. And I learned how to make decent espresso at my father’s knee.’
‘And because you’re the eldest, you were groomed to take over from your dad?’
For a brief moment, his face was filled with bleakness. And then, before she had the chance to ask him what was wrong, he smiled. ‘Something like that.’
She was pretty sure there was something he wasn’t telling her. ‘Your nonna said that trust has to start somewhere,’ she reminded him softly. ‘So why don’t you fill me in on the story?’
He toyed with his pizza for a while before answering. ‘I planned to go to college, ten years ago. I was going to study music. I helped out in the business while I was at school—we all did, whether it was washing up or baristaing or clearing the tables for Dad and washing them down when the shop closed—but this one night I was meant to be working a late shift when I had a chance to play in a concert. A concert where I knew a scout for a record company was going to be in the audience. Dad said I had to follow my dreams, and he’d do my shift for me, even though he’d been working all day and it meant he’d be doing a double shift. I was eighteen. Head full of stars. So I went. I played. The scout had a word with me and my guitar teacher. And I came home by the coffee shop to tell Dad my news.’ He dragged in a breath. ‘Which was when I found him lying on the floor. He’d had a heart attack while he was shutting up the shop. The ambulance got there in time to save him, but no way was I going to make Dad cope with the stress of the business after that.’
‘So you gave up music to take over from him?’ she guessed.
He grimaced. ‘I probably wasn’t good enough to make it commercially anyway. There isn’t that much scope for a classical guitarist.’ He spread his hands. ‘A bit of session work, a bit of teaching, the occasional gig in some arts club. It’s a bits-and-pieces sort of life, whereas running Giovanni’s means I can do pretty much what I like, when I like. It wasn’t a hard choice.’
The momentary flicker in those blue, blue eyes told her that he was lying. That even now he wondered, what if? But it hadn’t stopped him making the decision. He’d given up his dreams for his family.
Fran realised with a pang that Gio was the kind of man who believed in commitment. Who believed in his family.
A belief she so wanted to have. Except she didn’t share his certainty in belonging, the way that he did. Even though her parents had told her years before that she was special, that they’d chosen her to be part of their family, she wasn’t sure she belonged. Because they’d chosen her when they didn’t think they could have their own children, and she’d always thought that they regretted their decision when it turned out to be not the case. It was an unspoken fear, but one that still surfaced from time to time. Like now, when she’d stopped fitting in at work and she’d been the one to be made redundant rather than the other office manager.
Gio came from a large family. One that teased and drove him crazy, but clearly loved him to bits. If she accepted his offer of a job, would she fit in to his world any better than she fitted into her family?
‘What was the news?’ she asked. ‘The news you called by to tell him?’
Gio took a sip of wine. ‘Nothing important.’
She didn’t quite believe him. Hadn’t he said that the scout had had a word with him? But she had a feeling that if she pushed, Gio would clam up completely.
‘Besides, I’ve enjoyed managing the coffee shop. Dad believed in me enough to let me run it without interference. The one on Charlotte Street is the original café, but he was fine about me expanding it.’ He looked at her. ‘I said earlier about trusting people. I also need to be honest with you. Right now, it’s not so much the business that’s at a crossroads, it’s me.’ He sighed. ‘I don’t know whether it’s because I’m heading towards thirty—a kind of early midlife crisis—but right now I feel in limbo. I don’t know what I want from life. And I need to find out while I’m still young enough to do something about it.’
That