My Father Traded Me for the Don's Sister, So I Married the Don novel · Chapter 28 of 32

Chapter 28: The Boat

Raffaela's POV

My terms took only a few minutes, and Luca wrote them on the back of a seed packet with a pencil from his shirt.

One. I keep the books for the Villa Calabria myself, and nobody in that building answers to him before they answer to me.

Two. Gemma keeps her key, and no man of his goes within a block of her flat unless she calls him.

Three. On Sundays we eat at Rosalba's long table, all of us, and nobody sits at the head.

He read them back to me kneeling in the dirt, with the ring on my finger and a lemon sapling shining behind him.

"Four?" he said.

"There's no four."

"There is always a four."

I looked at him.

"You ask me my name every morning for the rest of your life."

"That's in the vows."

"Then it's twice as binding," I said.

He folded the seed packet and put it in his breast pocket, over his heart, and rolled his sleeves back down.

Then he stopped, and rolled them up again.

In April, the first day the wind dropped, he took us all out on the water.

I had not known he owned a boat.

I had not known he had bought one the week after the sit-down.

It was forty feet of white fiberglass with a blue stripe, tied up at the end of the pier that had been my father's.

The sign over the cold-storage yard still said COSTANZO.

A man on a ladder was painting it out in grey.

"It's a clean job," Silvio said, from the stern, with the thermos between his knees. "He'll finish by Friday."

"It's slow," said Gemma.

"It is a ladder."

"It is a very slow ladder," Gemma said.

"It's a man with a brush, signorina. The paint has to dry."

"You've had a face on you since the dock," Gemma said.

"This is my face."

"It's your boat face," Gemma said.

"It isn't my boat."

"It isn't anybody's boat," Gemma said, "because nobody named it."

"Well, you can't name it," Silvio said. "You called the lemon tree Your Excellency."

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