That's Amore! (11 page)

One whip of the coverlet and the decorative pillows went flying. She climbed between the Egyptian sheets, the material silky against her bare skin,
then
drew the sheet up to her chin. Changing her mind, she draped it to lie against her stomach, then struck a pose of lazy invitation, waiting for the moment Nick would walk through the door.

She heard his key in the lock and swallowed in anticipation. A quick crunch of her hair and she smiled in wicked pleasure.

Her cell phone chirped from where she'd put it on the bedside table. Damn, what a mood breaker. She groped to turn it off. Probably her mother. She flipped the receiver open to punch the silence button, only to find that it was Nick's name in the display screen…

And looked up to see her mother standing in the bedroom doorway…

CHAPTER FIVE

Day five

The irony of the situation
wasn't lost on Efi, although she was hard put to find any amusement in it. Just the day before she had been caught by her mother in bed waiting for Nick, her excuse that she'd stopped by for a quick nap making not a dent in what she and her mother knew was the truth. Namely that she was hoping to finish what she and Nick had started in the pantry those days ago.

And now, some thirty hours later, in the same apartment, both sides of the family were crammed into the small place, on the same bed—however remade and minus her—the single women decorating it with rose pedals and
koufetta,
sugar-coated almonds. Efi wasn't all that sure how she felt about Aphrodite being one of those women, her long dark hair silky and swaying as she bent over the bed. She supposed it was a good thing her cousin didn't know which side of the bed she was going to sleep on or else she might find a series of strategically placed pins protruding from the mattress.

At any rate, Kiki seemed as tuned in to Aphrodite's suggestive intentions as Efi and thwarted the beautiful woman at every turn. If Aphrodite tried to make eye contact with Nick, Kiki stepped in the way. When Aphrodite tried to test Efi's perfume on the dresser, Kiki took the bottle out of her hands and put it back down. The moment Aphrodite positioned herself so she was in front of the
women,
Kiki edged her out of the way. At one point Kiki jostled Aphrodite so hard the other woman nearly fell headfirst into the connecting bathroom. Efi thought it good that she hadn't fallen, because Kiki likely would have locked her in for the duration of the
krevati.

The
krevati
simply meant "bed," but in this context, the marital bed was prepared by the single women. Rose petals for romance. Sugar-covered almonds to indicate the bitter sweetness of love and life. Even her
cousin
Helen's baby was rolled across the mattress for fertility reasons, the six-month-old crying the entire time (which Efi hoped didn't mean her own babies would be as irritable). Then the rest of the family filed through and put envelopes of money on the sheets. Some of the envelopes were given rather than a gift.

Next came yet another party.

Efi helped her mother and her aunts put together a buffet-style meal in the kitchen, wondering if she could withstand yet another party, Greek or otherwise. Her head ached and she feared her feet were deformed for life, given the nonstop series of different heels she'd had to wear over the past week. But at least tonight was the official end of the festivities. At least until the wedding and reception on Sunday two days away. The only thing planned for Saturday was a quiet dinner with her and Nick and their parents. She found she was looking forward to it, especially once someone put a CD on and one of her uncles grabbed her hand and urged her to lead in the start of the dancing.

The size of a room didn't matter to her relatives. Give them a closet and they'd find a way to dance without anyone being seriously injured. While not as extravagant as the Constantinos party with the bouzouki band, the atmosphere emerged even more personal, what with the close confines and the more casual dress. "The ceremony is only two days away! Opa!" seemed to be exclamation of the night. And it could mean one of two things: it's almost over, thank God! Or our kids are beginning their life together, amen!

As she stumbled over a rug, Efi preferred to look upon it as the former rather than the latter.

"May I?"

She blinked up to see Nick holding out his hand for hers. Instantly all her weariness eased away, replaced by a burst of strong love and gratitude. If ever she forgot what all this was for, she had only to look into Nick's grinning face and remember.

He took her hand and led in the dance, Efi easily following, and taking the lead from him herself in a way that earned whistles and cheers from the family, their dance seeming to reflect their life to come. The struggles. The love. The fact that one of them would take the lead, but it wouldn't always be the same one. They were partners in this particular dance of life, and if their harmonic steps now were any indication, they would have a very sweet life indeed.

And Efi wanted Nick so badly she ached with it.

"May I?"

Aphrodite indicated she wanted to break in between them. Nick instantly moved to release Efi's hand to take her cousin's, but Efi held fast and instead reached to include her on her left side, between her and her uncle Spyros. Aphrodite didn't appear pleased, but Efi really didn't care. Nothing was going to come between her and her groom. Especially not a little attention-hogging tart like Aphrodite.

Almost immediately afterward Kiki cut in between her and Aphrodite, putting the other woman even farther away from Nick. Efi smiled at her best friend in gratitude. She hadn't chosen Kiki as her
koumbara
for nothing.

A little while later Efi was in the kitchen helping with some of the clean-up and the cutting of fruit to put out which would officially call the drinking to an end and thus the night. She peeled a banana then pushed her hair from her forehead with the back of her hand.

"I'm going to have a talk with that girl," she heard her mother mumble next to her.

Efi blinked at her. "Who?"

"Your cousin Aphrodite, that's who. She's going after Nick like she's a bitch in heat."

Efi gasped, surprised by her mother's comments. Penelope Panayotopoulou was usually level-headed and polite to a T. It wasn't like her to engage in kitchen gossip when the subject was in the other room.

Every bone in Efi's body relaxed. Up until that moment she'd been afraid she was experiencing a bout of jealousy she couldn't quite figure out how to handle. Something irrational and unreasonable that she would have to just grin and bear until it finally passed. But with her mother's comments, she was shown that she wasn't the only one noticing her cousin's unwanted advances on her groom.

"It's hard to believe it's the same Aphrodite I knew when you were kids," her mother continued, arranging the fruit Efi cut on silver platters. "That girl had been afraid of her own shadow. Now she's looking to cast her shadow in places she shouldn't."

"I don't think she's that bad," Efi said. She stopped. "Well, okay, maybe she is."

Her mother waved a strawberry at her. "She did the same thing back home, you know."

Efi raised her brow. Gossip was rarely as good as what you heard when it came from back home.

"She broke up the wedding of her best friend. Uh huh. Caught her canoodling with the groom in the back of a pickup truck the night before the wedding." Efi's throat tightened. "She's engaged to him now."

She stared at her mother. "She's engaged?"

Penelope waved vaguely. "Well, from what I understand she was. She found out just yesterday that her fiancé went back to his first bride. They're to be married while she's here."

Efi's head spun with the information. Aphrodite had been engaged to a man once set to marry her best friend. And now she was making moves on Efi's groom.

She met her mother's gaze and they looked at each other for a long moment.

"I think I'd better get back out there."

"I think you'd better get back out there."

They said their thoughts at the same moment,
then
Efi left her mother to finish up the fruit, passing her watchful aunt Frosini on the way out. Her aunt seemed to look through Efi in a way that made her shudder to the bone.

Sure enough, there was Aphrodite, head thrown back, sexily laughing at something Nick had apparently just said to his
koumbaro
Alex. Her cousin was draped over the arm of the chair he sat in. A chair Efi herself had helped him pick out.

"Excuse me," she said to Aphrodite, nearly shoving her from the arm, then smiling widely. "Oh, I'm sorry. Here, let me help you over to the couch."

The young woman's eyes flashed as if she understood exactly what was going on. And Efi was more than happy to confirm her suspicions. She was in the right. Nick was her groom and Aphrodite had no right to openly flirt and try to engage him as if he was the only single man in the room.

The music had switched over to old American songs. A slow one came on and she walked over to where one of Nick's younger cousins, Pericles, was holding up the corner, barely having spoken all night. The gangly, shy guy wore glasses that made his eyes look twice as large. Efi smiled at him and led him to where Aphrodite was standing looking miffed, her arms crossed under her ample breasts, in the opposite corner. She motioned for them to dance.

"You think Perry will know what to do with her?" Nick asked, sweeping Efi up into his arms to join the other couple on the dance floor.

"Unlike yourself, you mean?"

He blinked at her.

"Never mind," Efi said, snuggling closer to him, breathing in his subtle cologne, reveling in the feel of his arms around her and his body against hers. She wasn't going to let anything ruin this one moment.

Nick grazed her ear with his lips. "We can lock ourselves in the closet," he murmured.

She laughed softly. "And have half the family banging on it? No, thank you."

"We could sneak outside. My
car's
parked up the block."

"They'd be on our heels before you could start the engine."

He sighed. "You're right."

"There is some good news, though," she whispered.

He pulled back to look at her. "In two more days there's not going to be anyone trying to keep us apart."

In two days they would be husband and wife.

The thought sent goosebumps shivering up her arms.

In the midst of all that had been going on, she'd somehow lost sight of the light at the end of the tunnel. The reason their families were going to such great lengths to keep them apart. The motivation behind the loud celebrations.

She and Nick were getting married.

Efi watched the slow, wicked grin spread across his handsome face and her breath left her body. God, what she wouldn't give to see that grin every moment of every day for the rest of her life.

And judging by the hardness pressing against her belly, she had a pretty good idea that he felt the same.

"Wish for another slow song," he muttered.

"Why?" she asked innocently.

"Because we're going to look awfully awkward dancing slow to a fast one."

CHAPTER SIX

Day six…

The day before her wedding.

Efi automatically jerked upright in bed, only to realize there really wasn't anywhere she needed to be. At least not at 8:00 a.m. So she nudged her sister Diana's elbow over and away from her ribs and rested her head back down on the pillow, watching the sun dapple the walls of her room through the branches of the big oak outside her window.

In just over twenty-four hours she would be Mrs. Nick Constantinos. She twisted her lips, not sure she liked the sound of that. Okay, how about Efi Constantinos? She settled more comfortably against the mattress. Yes. That sounded much better.

She couldn't remember a time when her name and the length of it hadn't caused her problems. Filling out any sort of form was a chore because inevitably there weren't enough spaces to fit Panayotopoulou. On her bridal magazine subscription they had cut her name so she was Efi Panayotopo.

Not that Constantinos was that much shorter. But it was connected to Nick. And that alone was enough to make her feel all warm and mushy inside. Not to mention sexy. Merely imagining waking up to Nick curved against her backside or with her cheek smushed against his hard chest made her shiver all over. Never again would they have to worry about relatives lurking on the other side of the door or tracking them down to make sure they weren't doing anything they shouldn't be doing. They would be married and a healthy sex life would be expected … along with lots of little grandchildren named after their grandparents.

Okay, she'd traveled a little far down that particular imaginary road. Right now all she wanted to think about were periods of unbroken, hot monkey sex between her and her husband on that white bed decorated with rose petals and sugared almonds.

She blinked, bringing into focus the opposite side of her room. Wedding gifts had been arriving throughout the week from relatives abroad and closer who couldn't make the wedding. Her mother had initially begun stacking them in the dining room. Until she'd caught one of her aunts skillfully trying to re-wrap a gift she'd opened to see what was in it. In fact, Penelope was convinced that a gift or two might even be missing, along with a crystal ashtray, a figurine of the Greek goddess Athena and an oven mitt her mother was sure Aunt Frosini might have burned in some sort of strange old village ritual. So the gifts had been moved to Efi's bedroom, along with the rest of the
boubounieras,
a great number of the bridesmaid dresses, and umpteen other items connected to the wedding, making her room look like a bridal shop. She glanced at Diana sleeping next to her and Eleni and Jenny sleeping together on the floor near the gifts. Well, almost like a bridal shop, anyway.

The smell of freshly brewed coffee reached her nose and she followed it like a woman in a trance, slipping from the bed, putting her feet into her slippers and grabbing her robe, never breaking her leisurely stride. She wrapped her fingers around the door handle.

"Are you sure you're ready for this?"

She looked over shoulder at where Diana peeked at her from barely open eyelids.

"I was born ready for this," she said.

She swung open the door to find nearly every one of her female relatives on the other side, her mother leading the way with a makeshift tambourine by way of a metal pie plate and they launched into an old Greek wedding song that could be translated as "Tomorrow we're going to the chapel and we're going to get married…"

Efi broke out into a grin, glanced at where Diana groaned and pulled her pillow over her face, then led the way down to the kitchen, the group dancing and singing and banging on metal pans behind her.

Efi was accustomed
to the way Greeks like to celebrate. It didn't take much. A normal dinner was often reason enough to overindulge in wine and food and to dance until you couldn't dance anymore. But when it came to the really big events, like her wedding, the Greeks knew how to celebrate in a way that made her giddy with wonder.

If they were back in the old country, she knew that traditionally the men would be walking up and down the town streets singing and calling out for everyone to join in the ceremony the following day. Of course, doing so in Grosse Point, Michigan, would probably get them arrested for disorderly conduct at best, public drunkenness at worst, so the group's activities were contained to the bride's and the groom's respective family homes.

Even Aunt Frosini's dark, scowling presence couldn't detract from the events. Thankfully she hung back from the main crowd, content watching everything unfold before her.

Efi thought there was probably some sort of civil safety ordinance about having so many people in one place. Everywhere you looked there were people. A good many of them had stayed in their house from the night before, others came over at the break of dawn to join in the festivities. While each day of the week leading up to the actual day of the ceremony held some sort of significance, from the
krevati
on, there would be nonstop eating and drinking and dancing until the family saw the bride and groom off after the reception … and sometimes it didn't even stop then, but continued on with the family minus the couple of honor.

Efi had participated in events for other family members, but it was different now that she was the object of attention. From being told how beautiful she was, how much she glowed—followed by the requisite three spits, of course, to ward off the evil eye—to be waited on hand and foot lest she break a nail or something in preparation for her big day, everyone went out of their way to make sure she was happy.

Even her father had closed his shop for the weekend, something she hadn't known him to do except on Christmas day, and even then he often went in to fill some special orders for his best customers and for the family.

Of course, he wasn't here amongst the women. Instead he was probably at Nick's parents' house helping organize the men's celebration.

At somewhere around
10:00 a.m.
, the telephone began ringing and never seemed to stop. A constant stream of good wishes poured in from family and friends, near and far.

Only, as Efi watched her mother take this particular call, she got the unsettling impression that the caller wasn't a well-wisher. Penelope's face drained of color and she gripped the phone so tightly her knuckles were white.

"I don't understand," she said in her thickly accented Greek. "Could you please repeat what you just said?"

More than a few people in the room seemed to tune in to the situation and motioned for the others to hush.

Efi moved to stand next to her mother, resting her hand on her arm.

Slowly Penelope hung up the phone, her hands trembling.

"Your grandfather's been arrested."

No
matter how resolutely
they asked the family to stay put, it seemed the entire household of female relatives, along with the males from the Constantinos house, stood outside the metro Detroit police station, cars double-parked, others letting their passengers out at the curb in the front. Efi had a denim shirt and jeans on over her nightgown, her youngest sister Jenny not even going that far, putting a hoodie on over her pj's, which nowadays could have been considered clothing.

"Damn fool of a man," Efi's mother grumbled as they waited at the front desk for the officer to get her grandfather's paperwork.

"Ladies, ladies!" a female police officer was shouting to get the attention of Efi's many relatives where they crowded the small lobby. "All those without business, you'll have to wait outside."

"We have business," one of Efi's aunts insisted. The female police officer looked an inch away from putting them all into holding cells until they settled down or listened to her.

"All those without immediate business, outside. Now," she said, her tone brooking no argument as she swung her cuffs.

Like a bunch of angry hens, Efi's aunts and cousins quickly filed out of the station, leaving a blessed calm in their wake. That still left her parents, Nick and his parents, and her sisters at the desk. The female officer eyed them, then sighed and went back to work.

The officer with the paperwork stepped to the desk. "He's been arrested for grand larceny," he stated.

Efi's mother shook her head. "What does that mean, exactly?"

The officer stared at her. "It means he crashed his car through the window of a local furniture shop and made off with some of the goods. When the responding officers caught up with him, he was dragging a dining-room table on a blanket on the street behind him."

Her wedding gift of a dining-room table…

Efi closed her eyes, wishing the nightmare away.

Her father looked around. "Where's Gus?"

Everyone looked
around,
as if by doing so they could make her grandfather's best friend, and very likely the owner of the furniture store in question, materialize.

"I'll go get him," Nick offered, earning him a grateful gaze from Efi.

He left and she turned her attention to the officer.

"How do we get him out?" she asked.

"Thankfully it's been a light day. He's already gone before the judge." The officer then named a bond amount that made her mother gasp.

Her father took out his checkbook.

"I'm sorry, sir," the officer said. "I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask for either cash or a cashier's check. We don't take personal checks, for obvious reasons."

"What obvious reasons?" her father asked.

The officer merely stared at him.

"Are you calling me a liar? Saying I don't have the money to cover the bond?"

Efi touched her father's arm. "Why don't you let Diana go to the bank and cash the check, Papa? There's a branch just up the block."

A half hour later they were leaving with her grandfather.

"Damn thief," he was saying, apparently about his best friend. "He's the thief and it's me they arrest."

"Papou,
you crashed through the front of his shop." And he'd been dragging a dining-room table behind his car.

Efi found it amazingly easy to envision her grandfather doing just that, going twenty miles an hour down the street in order not to do much damage to her wedding gift, even as broken glass fell from the hood of his old
Lincoln
.

"I should have crashed through all the windows, the
klefti,"
he said vehemently.

Nick pulled up to the curb,
then
rounded his car to help Gus out, her grandfather's lifelong friend and the owner of the shop he'd vandalized.

"You son of a bitch!" her grandfather shouted, advancing on the other man.

"They let you out?" Gus countered. "They should keep you locked up for good. You're a danger to society!"

And just like that the families fought to keep the two men apart as officers coming into the building slowed their steps, wondering whether or not intervention would be needed.

"Would you two stop
it!
" Efi stepped between them. "You're acting like children."

"Children?" Gus said to her. "Who are you to insult me? It must be in your blood, this blatant disrespect."

"Don't you talk to my granddaughter in that tone, you old goat!"

Efi stared at her grandfather. "Yes, you're right. I am your granddaughter. Your granddaughter who is set to get married tomorrow and whose day you just ruined with the stunt you pulled."

Her grandfather had the grace to look abashed.

Gus snorted. "None of this would have happened had he just paid what the furniture was worth."

"Worth? You marked the price up three times retail because you knew that was the piece I wanted to buy for my granddaughter! The girl who is named after my wife, God
bless
her soul."

"Others were interested in buying the set."

"Others aren't your best friend!" her grandfather said. He lifted a hand showing two fingers. "Twenty years we're friends. Twenty years I drink wine with you, treat your kids like they're my kids, help put your son through
college,
and this is the thanks I get?"

"You? What about my shop? Do you know how much money it's going to cost to repair the damage you've done? Forget the window—the pieces that were in the display are destroyed."