Oriana by Anastasia Rubis

Author:Anastasia Rubis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Delphinium Books
Published: 2024-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 23

The three-hundred-year-old country house was her oasis. Oriana managed to become almost serene in Casole. The rolling hills of Tuscany, carpeted with fir and cypress, the verdant vineyards that produced barrels of her own Chianti. She fell in sync with the seasons, bottling tomatoes in August, harvesting fat purple grapes in September with a kerchief tied around her hair. Finding a peace in the natural world that she never found in herself.

Casole was a sprinkling of houses tucked into the hills of Greve-in-Chianti, thirty kilometers south of Florence but another world. The countryside carried inside it the innocence of childhood, where her father had taken her hunting and her mother taught her to search out black truffles under tree roots in the forest, gathering them in her smudged apron. Oriana still remembered being allowed to use a special knife to shave truffle onto homemade tagliolini for supper, and the next morning onto poached eggs.

Her parents lived in the neighboring valley. She had bought them a farmhouse and installed an American washing machine that her mother never used. Her own house had three stories and a tower plus a more commanding view. The ivy crawling up the stone walls was fire-red in November. Her olives were ripe for picking, ready to be smashed by granite grinders and pressed into liquid gold. Casole was her perfect place, where she and Alekos could retreat from the world and be something unique. A couple.

They dropped their bags upstairs in her bedroom. It was simple but cozy and she had put her feminine stamp on it with a braided oval rug, rose coverlet, and collection of antique perfume bottles on the dresser. The moment Alekos set foot in the room, he altered the atmosphere, charging it with masculinity. It startled her, seeing him bounce on the double bed that had always contained her alone, testing it out with a grin. She liked him there.

On the train to Greve-in-Chianti, watching Alekos sleep, she had done battle with her doubts. Would he always have a target on his back, always be courting danger? Could they live together in her country? People weren’t perfect, but always she expected them to be. That would have to change. If she demanded perfection in her relationship, the way she did in her writing, she would sleep alone.

The specter of returning to her former existence, typewriter-tapes-cigarettes, cracked open a cavern of loneliness. She had dropped her guard with this man and didn’t know how to erect it back up again. My God, she was cooked. Alekos had become the person she sought all day long, his opinions, company, comfort. She had given herself to him, she was a fountain of giving: plane tickets, clothes, shelter. Now she gave him her hope.

“Tomorrow we’ll walk the property,” she said, immensely proud of being a landowner. Her house had twenty-three rooms, giving her the security she never had as a girl. Alekos followed her like a duckling, looking overwhelmed as she pulled sheets off furniture and threw open the green shutters for light to stream in.

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