Free The House in Amalfi by Elizabeth Adler Page B

Which is one thing you seem to have left out of your plan. Exactly
what
are you going to live on? After all, you’re not
exactly
used to roughing it.” Jammy pushed back her straw hat and glared at Lamour. “Sometimes you are such a silly bitch, Lamour, I don’t know how I put up with you.”
    Lamour’s face fell, but then she grinned. “The Amalfi house was Jon-Boy’s; now, it’s mine. It’ll cost me nothing to live there. Of course I know I’ll have to work; I’m not that stupid. But Jammy, I’ll get a smaller apartment so I can go back to Chicago to work on my commissions. I won’t give it up entirely, at least not until I’m sure I can make it out here.”
    Jammy slid the hat back over her face again. “What am I going to do with you, Lamour Harrington? Whatever am I going to do?”
    “You could at least
look
at the house before passing judgment,” Lamour said, sounding hopeful. “I admit it needs a touch of paint and I haven’t even seen what the inside’s like yet, but Mifune is leaving the key under the lemon pot outside the door. We could look at it tomorrow. Will you come with me, Jammy?
Please,
say you will.”
    Jammy’s sigh almost gusted the straw hat right off her face. “You know I will,” she said resignedly, hearing Lamour’s delighted laugh.

FOURTEEN

Lorenzo
    With his ugly white dog, Affare, in the seat next to him, Lorenzo Pirata flew the Bell helicopter low over the ink blue evening sea as though seeking that no-man’s-land, the line where the darkening western sky meets the sultry water. To his left, ropes of glittering lights lit the resorts along the Amalfi coast, highlighting the charming inlets and coves and the terraces of the hotels. He spotted the red beacon atop the Castello Pirata and the hazy yellow lights of the tiny coastal town of Pirata itself. With a small sigh of relief, he brought the helicopter in lower.
    Lorenzo’s family had been living here for three centuries and he knew every inch of his land. He knew every man, woman, and child in Pirata. He looked after them like a father. He was coming home, and for him there was no better place to be.
    The bird’s-eye view of the pale terra-cotta Castello Pirata as he hovered before landing never failed to thrill him with its odd beauty. The central square stone tower with its battlements looked like Hamlet’s castle in Denmark and was all that was left of the original Castello, built by an ancestor with good taste and a lot of money in the seventeenth century. The legend was that the ancestor had made his money by acts of piracy on the high seas, hence the name of Pirata, or “pirate,” but apart from the skull and crossbones on the familyflag and the fact that the family’s business was shipping, that was now mostly forgotten.
    Stuccoed wings and annexes had been added over the decades, as had the gardens. A grand terrace lined with tubs of lemon trees was fronted with a dozen massive sphinx heads, brought from Egypt in the early nineteen hundreds. Now they looked with disapproving expressions over the breathtaking panoramic view of the jagged Amalfi coastline.
    A deep-blue swimming pool graced with delicate stone arches rippled in the breeze from the helicopter’s rotors. The young woman swimming lazy lengths glanced up, then waved a hand in greeting, and Affare barked frantically. Lorenzo smiled, pleased. His twenty-one-year-old daughter, Aurora, was home unexpectedly for the weekend from her university in Grenoble.
    He set the helicopter gently on its pad, then sat for a moment in the sudden silence, letting his ears adjust to the stillness. There was only the sound of Affare’s panting, the hum of crickets, and the trickle of a fountain. The urban burden of his city life in Rome lifted from his shoulders and he was home again, in his own pocket of the world, in the place he loved.
    He strode from the helipad with Affare bounding ahead through a little maze of thyme-lined paths and took the broad sweeping