Rejected by the Heir, She Married the Don novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: A Very Nice Summer
Stefano tells forty guests, with a friend filming, that Elise was a lovely hobby. She walks the length of the terrace and asks his father to marry her, and Dario pulls out the empty chair at his right.
Stefano waited until forty people were holding champagne to tell them what I was to him.
It was his twentieth birthday dinner, on the back terrace of his father's house.
I stood by the kitchen door in the green dress he had picked for me.
At four o'clock that afternoon he had pulled me into the pantry and kissed me until I had to hold the shelf.
"Wear the green," he had said against my ear. "Tonight changes everything. Trust me."
I had trusted Stefano for most of my life.
My mother cooked for his family for eleven years, and when she died two years ago they let me keep the cottage behind the garage.
Now I kept the books for their restaurants, and I was eighteen, and I had never been anyone's girlfriend in front of a room.
His aunt had fixed the clasp of my necklace in the hallway an hour earlier.
"You look like you belong here," she had said, and squeezed my arm.
The long table ran the length of the terrace, and the whole family sat along it with their guests.
At its head sat his father, the Don, in a black suit with no tie.
He was forty and he never raised his voice, and the capos on either side of him leaned in when he spoke.
Behind his chair stood Luca Ferrante, the man who drove him, who watched the terrace and never the food.
The chair at his right hand was pulled out and empty, the way it was at every dinner.
Nobody sat in it, and nobody ever asked why.
Stefano stood up and tapped his glass with a fork.
His friend by the window lifted a phone and aimed it at him.
I noticed that, and I decided it was for photographs of the cake.
"Thank you all for coming," Stefano said. "I want to say a few words about my summer."
People laughed and turned their chairs.
"Some of you know I was seeing someone."
Every head swung toward me.
"Elise." He smiled across the terrace, warm and easy, the smile I knew. "Sweet Elise. The cook's daughter. Eighteen years old, and in five months she wouldn't let me do anything but kiss her."
Someone at the back whistled.
"I'm joking. Mostly." He waited for the second laugh. "She's a good girl. She does the books, she's very neat. But I'm not going to marry the help, and I'm not going to be bored for the rest of my life."
I did not move.
"So thank you, Elise, for a lovely summer," Stefano said. "You were a lovely little hobby."
The table broke.
Men banged the cloth with their hands, and a woman near him covered her mouth and laughed behind it.
The phone by the window stayed steady on my face.
His aunt Teresa had half risen from her seat, and she sat down again when she saw I had seen her.
Only two people at that table were not laughing.
Teresa was one.
The other was Don Dario Bertolini himself, at the head, who had set his glass down when Stefano said hobby and had not picked it up again.
He was looking at me.
He wasn't laughing, and he hadn't stopped his son either.
I put that away somewhere I could find it later.
Stefano raised his glass.
"To the end of summer."
I could have run through the kitchen door behind me.
Everyone in that house expected me to.
So I walked to his father.
I set my glass on the sideboard and went down the whole length of the terrace, past the capos and the cousins, past the phone.
Stefano caught up with me at the middle of the table and took my elbow.
"Elise," he said, low and pleasant, for my ear only. "Don't make a scene. You know what he is. He wouldn't look at you twice."
I looked at his hand until he let go.
"Happy birthday, Stefano," I said.
Then I kept walking.
The laughing thinned out behind me, one table at a time.
Dario stood up as I approached.
I had seen him all my life, across kitchens and driveways and the backs of cars, and never once close.
He was taller than I remembered, and his eyes were brown and very steady.
He did not say anything.
He held out his hand, palm up.
I put mine in it.
Mine was ice, and his was warm and dry and closed around it all at once, and his thumb settled on the inside of my wrist.
I felt my own pulse jump under it.
He felt it too.
I saw him feel it.
"Elise," he said.
That was all.
Behind me the terrace went so quiet I could hear the ice settle in the champagne buckets.
"Don Dario," I said. My voice came out level. "Your son just told your family what he thinks I'm worth."
"I heard him."
"Then I'd like to ask you something in front of the people who laughed."
"Ask."
"Marry me."
Nobody lifted a fork.
Dario looked at me for a long moment, and his thumb did not leave my wrist.
Then he looked past me, down the length of the table, at his son.
When he turned back, there was no surprise in his face at all.
He took his hand from mine, and I thought for one second I had made the worst mistake of my life.
He reached over and drew out the empty chair at his right.
"Sit," he said.
It was the chair nobody had touched in fourteen years.
Someone gasped.
I heard Teresa's fork hit her plate.
I sat.
Dario bent until his mouth was by my ear, and his voice was so quiet that no one else could have caught it.
"Midnight. My study. Come as you are."
Down the table, Stefano's champagne glass hit the stone and broke.
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