Last of the Summer Vines: Escape to Italy with this heartwarming, feel good summer read!. Romy Sommer

the silver sports car.

      Luca wasn’t alone, though. He’d brought the real estate agent to value the house.

      The realtor was a woman – a curvy woman with lustrous dark hair swept up in a loose tumble of curls, and wearing a figure-hugging dress in fire engine red, and heels I wouldn’t be able to walk in.

      Beside the realtor, with floury hands stained pink with sticky strawberry juice, and dressed in the ridiculous floral apron I’d found in an upstairs closet, I felt woefully plain.

      The estate agent wandered from room to room, tut-tutting, and making copious notes on her clipboard. I trailed after them but, since they spoke mostly in Italian, I was only able to understand every other word. And Luca was no fun today. He was all business – no sidelong smiles, no casual touches, no flirting. I was pleased when the mobile in my apron pocket buzzed to warn me the tarts were done, giving me an excuse to escape back to the kitchen.

      Alone, I admitted my disappointment. What the hell are you thinking? No holiday romances, remember? This is for the best.

      Except it didn’t feel like it was for the best. This was why I hated dating. That up and down, ‘Does he like me? Doesn’t he like me?’ nonsense. My friends might have thought Kevin was dull, but at least I’d never had any doubt about his interest in me. Right up until I realised I wasn’t the only one he’d been interested in.

      Half an hour later, when the tarts were cooling on the kitchen table, Luca and the statuesque estate agent traipsed back into the kitchen. She handed me a list that was several pages long. ‘You fix these, then we take pictures and put the house on our website. But the way the castello is now, no di certo! No chance! There are already too many rundown farmhouses on the market.’

      I glanced at the list, and my mouth fell open. Some seemed easy enough: fix the front door, re-paint the interiors, clear the clutter, but the rest…! Plumbing, wiring, plastering, the access road to be re-tarred – I might as well re-build the castello from the ground up to make it sellable. Maybe a fire would have been a blessing. I would certainly need a contractor to tick off at least half the items on this list.

      I walked them out to the car, the list still clutched in my floury, sticky hand. For one brief moment as we said goodbye, with the estate agent already seated in the car, I caught a glimpse of the Luca who’d taken me to lunch and charmed me with his attention.

      ‘You need help hiring a contractor?’ he asked. The mischievous spark was back in his eyes, but it didn’t have its intended effect. What was it with all these men treating me like a delicate flower? I needed Luca’s help even less than I’d needed Tommaso’s.

      ‘I’ll be fine.’ Making a few phone calls and getting quotes was hardly up there with brain surgery. Or with structuring private equity deals.

      A day later, I no longer felt quite so confident. I cradled the old rotary phone in my lap and resisted the urge to smack it violently against the bedpost. How was it possible there wasn’t a single building contractor in the whole of Siena province willing to look at the house before Christmas?

      I was in the kitchen, pounding out my stress on a fresh ball of bread dough, this time for my own consumption, when Daniele arrived in the farm’s battered pick-up truck to fetch the daily delivery for the trattoria. He carried in a basket of brown eggs and set them on the counter beside the kitchen sink. ‘What’s got into you?’

      ‘Nothing.’

      He chuckled. ‘When a woman says “nothing” it definitely means “something”.’ He leaned against the doorjamb. He wore work-stained cargo pants, scuffed boots, and a checked shirt, and looked as if he’d just stepped off a tractor. I’d never before thought a farmer could be sexy, but I was rapidly changing my mind. If I were ten years younger, I’d be salivating about now. Instead, I simply felt old beyond my years beside his youth and vitality.