So Irresistible Read Free

that.
    Not that doing so had helped her much lately.
    In fact, it had landed her in a whole heap of trouble.
    Maybe that’s why, while Gabriella was still running around doing her usual morning routine, she started imagining things.
    It started off innocently enough. She’d gotten up (relatively) early for a head-clearing run. She’d refueled afterward with Stumptown coffee and marionberry pancakes at the café down the street from her house. Then she’d bicycled to the Wednesday farmers market to see what had been newly harvested.
    As a restaurateur, it was important for her to network with her local farmers, suppliers, and vendors. It was good for her to know what they had on offer at any given time. As a pizzaiolo who made traditional “Nonna-style” pizzas, Gabriella didn’t have much need for produce beyond tomatoes, basil, button mushrooms, and garlic. Truffles, shitakes, and fiddlehead ferns were out. But as she wandered through the market that morning, examining the green spring lettuces, newly dug leeks, berries, and freshly baked baguettes, Gabriella couldn’t help wishing she could expand Campania’s menu. Just a little. Just enough to remain competitive in the Pacific Northwest’s up-and-coming food scene.
    Predictably, that traitorous thought made the hallucinations kick in. Because one minute, Gabriella was dreaming up mushroom bruschetta with arugula and a drizzle of hazelnut oil . . . and the next she was seeing her father, the longtime head of her family’s chain of local pizzerias, ducking behind the piled-up boxes at a central Oregon dairy’s cheese stall. What the . . . ?
    Her father should have been at home. Resting. Those were his doctor’s strict orders. After the ordeal Robert Grimani had been through while trying to keep their family’s pizzerias afloat during a takeover bid, he’d begun having chest pains. His doctor had prescribed medication for his elevated blood pressure, then had ordered him to “cut the stress.” Knowing how impossible doing that would be for her husband of thirty-five years, Donna Grimani had phoned Gabriella for help. Immediately after getting that call, Gabriella had ended her self-imposed exile in the coastal Oregon town of Astoria and come home to Portland.
    Home to run Campania . . . and to see her mother now scurrying away behind a five-foot-tall stack of boxed farm-fresh eggs?
    Frowning in confusion, Gabriella followed her. She had to be imagining this. She knew her parents were probably both at home, in the same house Gabriella had grown up in, reading actual paper newspapers and watching television. Maybe, if they were feeling really frisky, they were puttering in their garden.
    They definitely had no reason to be casing the farmers market. Or to be hiding from Gabriella if they saw her. Sure, things had been . . . strained among the three of them, ever since Gabriella’s legendary showdown with her father. But they were all adults. Gabriella had come home to do the right thing. In time, all would be forgiven. Right? Wasn’t that how things went?
    As Gabriella rounded the next corner, she caught a mushroom purveyor giving her a perplexed look . . . and realized she was actually skulking around trying to catch her parents, as if they were hiding from her in a colossal (and imaginary) game of hide-and-seek. She straightened. This was ridiculous. It didn’t take a Freudian psychologist to know what was really going on here.
    She was worried her parents wouldn’t forgive her. End of story.
    Too bad that insight didn’t make Gabriella feel any better. Neither did knowing that she hadn’t even been aware of the takeover attempt her father had been fighting until it was too late. No one had told her. After the final face-off that had caused their estrangement, Gabriella had deliberately tuned out from the pizza world. Unfortunately, her father had apparently done the same thing. Distracted and distressed—but too stubborn to hammer out a truce with