Free A Wedding on Ladybug Farm by Donna Ball Page A

later.  Love you all!
    Lori
    PS. Here is a picture I took this morning of the view from my window at the villa. Am I the luckiest girl in the world or what?  Send kitty pix!
     
    Lori scrolled through her pictures folder for one of the hundreds of photographs of the Tuscan hillside she had taken when she first arrived, made sure it wasn’t one she had already sent, and attached the file to the e-mail.  She turned her phone this way and that, searching for the optimal number of bars on the Wi-Fi.  The fat man shouted into his cell phone.  She felt the teenager’s arm slide down between their bodies, fingers rubbing up against the back of her jeaned thigh.  She ignored both until she found the signal and pushed Send.     
    Lori dropped the phone into her jacket pocket and zipped it up.  She’d learned to keep everything she valued in zippered pockets on her body shortly after she’d arrived.  Then she turned to the teenage groper and seized an inch of his skinny bicep between her thumb and forefinger.  She twisted until his eyes bulged out and he tried to jerk away.  She leaned in and twisted harder.  When he cried out and staggered to his feet, the man on the cell phone stopped shouting in her ear and stared at her.
    Lori released the teenager and growled into his face, “You’re lucky all I could reach was your arm.”
    She glared at the sweaty fat man and added fiercely, “You’re next.”
    She strode out of the lobby and into the street, showing the desk clerk her middle finger as she went.  He grinned in reply.  It had become their routine, and he would miss it when she was gone. 
     
     
    ~*~
     
    The office of Ladybug Farm was a repurposed sewing room located on the back side of the house in a space underneath the grand staircase.  Cici had built shelves and a nook for the desk, and Lindsay and Bridget had decorated it in bright yellows and reds. Here they accessed the Internet, paid bills, kept the household records, and coordinated all other aspects of Ladybug Farm not related to the winery.  But the most important thing they did was video chat, all too infrequently and always too briefly, with Private Noah Wright of the United States Marine Corps.
    Noah had first come into their lives as a fourteen -year-old runaway, the son of an alcoholic father and an absentee mother, who showed up one day to do odd jobs for them and was eventually found to be living in the abandoned folly on the edge of their property. Lindsay, the perennial teacher, had taken him under her wing and discovered that beneath that rough exterior there was not only an astonishingly acute mind, but an unexpected talent for art. After the death of both his parents two years later, Lindsay had officially adopted him, but he was in fact the child of everyone at Ladybug Farm.
    Charcoal sketche s of jeeps, guys in desert camo, bleak Middle Eastern landscapes and native children now adorned the walls of the Ladybug Farm office, edging out oil paintings of poppies and framed vacation photos. Noah confessed that he had become popular in his unit mostly because of his ability to send sketches home to wives and girlfriends, a skill he owed in great part to his teacher and his mother, Lindsay.  And even though it had broken Lindsay’s heart when he had chosen the military over college, not even she could deny a swell of pride to see the skinny, sullen teenage boy they once had known now transformed into the straight-shouldered, square-jawed young man with buzz cut dark hair whose face filled the computer screen.
    “I don’t know, Mom,” he said a little ruefully, “I don’t think they let you out of the Marines to go home for a wedding.”  And he frowned a little, looking more closely into the camera.  “What happened to your eye?”
    There was a slight time lag, and when Lindsay waved her hand in front of her face it appeared on camera as a series of jumpy staccato blurs.  “Nothing,” she said. “Bridget hit me with a