My Big Fat Italian Break-Up Read online

  Also by Nancy Barone

  THE HUSBAND DIET TRILOGY

  1. The Husband Diet

  2. My Big Fat Italian Break-up

  3. Storm in a D Cup

  OTHERS

  Snow Falls Over Starry Cove

  Starting Over at the Little Cornish Beach House

  Dreams of a Little Cornish Cottage

  No Room at the Little Cornish Inn

  New Hope for the Little Cornish Farmhouse

  MY BIG FAT ITALIAN BREAK-UP

  Book Two of The Husband Diet series

  Nancy Barone

  AN IMPRINT OF HEAD OF ZEUS

  www.ariafiction.com

  First published in the UK in 2022 by Head of Zeus Ltd, part of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

  Copyright © Nancy Barone, 2022

  The moral right of Nancy Barone to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN (PB) 9781803287683

  ISBN (E): 9781803287669

  Cover design: Nina Elstad

  Head of Zeus Ltd

  First Floor East

  5–8 Hardwick Street

  London EC1R 4RG

  WWW.HEADOFZEUS.COM

  Contents

  Welcome Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1: My Big Fat Tuscan Dream, Two Years In…

  Chapter 2: If It Ain’t Broke…

  Chapter 3: Venues and Menus

  Chapter 4: External Influences

  Chapter 5: The Erica of Yesteryear

  Chapter 6: To Catch a Groom

  Chapter 7: No Turning Back

  Chapter 8: The Miracle Maker

  Chapter 9: Wedding Bells

  Chapter 10: Madonna Mia

  Chapter 11: Biblical Vengeance

  Chapter 12: Brides Past and Present

  Chapter 13: Living, Loving and Being Happy?

  Chapter 14: Back to Back

  Chapter 15: I Hear Those Church Bells Ringing

  Chapter 16: The Kiss of Betrayal

  Chapter 17: Here Comes the Bride, There Goes the Groom…

  Chapter 18: The Beginning of the End

  Epilogue

  Apology

  About the Author

  Acknowledgements

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  To Mamma.

  1

  My Big Fat Tuscan Dream, Two Years In…

  ‘Surprise!’

  I jumped, my day planner and multicolored Post-its exploding all over the floor like a mini piñata.

  ‘Jesus, Julian, do you want to give me a heart attack? It’s not June 1st yet, you’re not due until tomorrow, did something happen?’

  My fiancé grinned and bent to pick up the pieces of my life as he always did. Even the black-and-white ones.

  ‘Sorry, love. I couldn’t wait until tomorrow, so I took an earlier flight back. I missed you.’

  I’d missed him, too, but I’d grown used to it by now, as every week or so he was off on some book tour and hobnobbing with his agent in the States, leaving me to run this Italian madhouse of a farm and B & B rolled into one. And to think I’d practically bullied him into resuming his writing career even before we’d moved here to Tuscany.

  ‘Welcome home,’ I said, giving him a quick hug as I grabbed my notes back, fretting over the shopping list in my head. Yellow Post-its for the cleaning products I needed to get, brown for the bread and focaccia goods I didn’t have time to bake today. Green for the produce I’d send the kids out into the orchard for later and pink for desserts. Guests always loved desserts. It was my special touch as the owner of A Taste of Tuscany.

  We were only hours from receiving the first guests of the season. In other words, The Matera Brainstormers – an international group of female writers who had met here last year and enjoyed it so much they’d decided to make it a tradition and branch out to Tuscany.

  So far, they were the only ones who had booked this year. After a successful first year (beginner’s luck?), things now were not going as well and I was beginning to feel a twinge of panic. We’d left a secure, albeit suffocating life in Boston to start a new and relaxed life in a new country, but so far I hadn’t got to the relaxed part yet.

  I blew my hair out of my face as my bag slid off my shoulder and when I yanked it back, I took the thin strap of my sundress with it, the rip sounding loud in the quiet kitchen. Damn. I didn’t have time to go upstairs and change, not now.

  ‘Slow down, honey,’ Julian said. ‘Come and sit.’

  ‘I can’t. I have to go back into town.’

  ‘Have a break. Come, I’ll pour you a glass of iced mint tea.’

  Iced tea. That would be the closest I’d come to relaxing in weeks. Which reminded me.

  ‘I need to go down to the cellar and get some wine… And fresh flowers – I need to pick some fresh flowers…’

  He put a hand on my shoulder.

  ‘Relax. I already did all that. And I also went down to the orchard and picked some strawberries and peaches.’

  Aww, bless his soul…!

  ‘And the pears? Did you pick the pears?’

  ‘I picked the pears. Erica, honey, come and relax.’

  ‘I can’t,’ I insisted. ‘They’ll be here in a few hours.’

  He poured some homemade tea into a tall glass. ‘Sit down. Drink this. I’ll go. You can go for a swim and chill out.’

  Swim. Chill out? Those were foreign words to me. I hadn’t been anywhere near our pool yet, living my summer vicariously through the happy sounds of my kids splashing around. But this afternoon they were at a birthday party. I’d have the whole pool to myself. Even half an hour would restore me. I knew I should make time to relax if I didn’t want to end up in a loony bin by the end of the summer. But it just never happened.

  Delegate. Could I do that? The idea was certainly tempting. Even twenty minutes floating on my back with an empty mind would do me good. But what if he forgot something? Well, I could always send him back. I eyed my lists, then Julian.

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘I’m sure. And when I get back, I’ll come and join you in the pool.’ He bent over and kissed my mouth, his lips lingering over mine. ‘And just for us, I’ll get a chocolate mousse for bedtime…’

  Ooh. Saturday was definitely looking up now.

  He ran a finger down my cheek and chuckled at the look on my face.

  ‘Erica, honey, I was thinking… now that things have slowed down a bit, don’t you think it’s time we set the date?’

  That was the problem. Business hadn’t slowed down a bit, but definitely ground to a terrifying halt. There was nothing I wanted more than to be Mrs. Foxham. He’d proposed inside a hot-air balloon two years ago and we’d set a date at least three times since. But there had always been something: the mumps (my now ten-year-old daughter Maddy), the measles (my fourteen-year-old son Warren), a sprained ankle (me) or Julian’s busy book tour schedule. Our wedding plans were now beginning to sound like a running joke between us. Only neither of us was laughing anymore.

  But first I wanted to make sure I’d be OK before he committed to
me. Financially OK. This was the one fly in my Tuscan champagne. Julian had invested a lot of his own money in our new life and business and the first year we’d been beating bookings away with a stick. But now? One booking all season. Why? Had my kick-ass manager skills gone downhill since I’d left my Boston job at The Farthington Hotel? If so, it was time to get back on track and pronto.

  ‘I know we’ve been putting it off for some time now,’ I apologized as Julian’s eyebrow shot up. ‘But can’t we wait just a little longer?’ I tried to negotiate without hurting his feelings. God knew how I’d fought tooth and nail to believe in myself after all that my ex-husband Ira had put me and the kids through. I needed to feel I could still do it on my own and not depend on the ‘rich husband’. Nothing bothered me more than that. ‘I want to sort the business out first…’

  He groaned. ‘It’s been two years, Erica. No more waiting. Let’s go away, anywhere you want, and do it.’

  ‘I—I can’t just take off like that, Julian. What about our guests?’

  ‘They’ll be OK. Rosina can take care of them. It’s not like we’ve got an army coming in,’ he insisted.

  ‘Exactly, you see? I need to figure out what’s going on.’

  He shrugged. ‘We can always do that when we get back. One week isn’t going to change anything.’

  Now, I know that money gave him the confidence not to worry about much these days, but it was starting to feel like he didn’t understand my worries. Didn’t he care as much as me anymore? Or was I the official family worrywart?

  ‘What about our responsibilities?’ I insisted. ‘The kids need us.’

  But he was shaking his head. ‘Erica, it’s always something with you. I’m getting a little tired.’

  ‘Tired… of me?’ I asked, instantly meek.

  The prospect of losing him hadn’t occurred to me, I’ll be honest. But seeing the look in his eyes, I was beginning to worry.

  He’d taken a leap of faith to follow me out here, abandoning his cushy job as a principal, and precisely my children’s principal in Boston. Those who don’t know me yet may think I’m the smooth seductress mom, but they’d be sooo wrong. I’m anything but smooth.

  In fact, despite the gazillion diets I’ve tried, I still have my share of lumps and bumps, although some are still in the right places. And over all those skinny-assed women courting him shamelessly, he’d gone and chosen the one frazzled, stressed-out workaholic freak– moi.

  At that time, a mother of two and married (albeit in name only), my life had been suffocating me like a size four dress. I had too much stuff to fit into it, trying to juggle all the balls in the air on my own. Because my better half (ha!) had spent all his time and money, most of it mine, on sneaking around with a woman half his age. To do so, he’d dispensed himself from all fatherly duties, leaving me to graduate to the all-in-one position of mommy and daddy.

  Truth be told, Ira and I had been slowly and very painfully dying as a couple. Until the day he tried to badger me into a stomach bypass because I was ‘too big for him to handle’. I know, right? In any case, just a few minutes before they were to take me into the operating theatre, I found out that he was cheating on me. Which had given me the push I needed to face him. And believe that even if he and I were done, my life was far from over. I still deserved to be loved.

  And then one fine day, Julian had come along and torn my pants off. Literally speaking. And, between a parents’ night and a school sports event, it had soon become apparent that Principal Foxham had wanted to spend more and more time with yours truly. And when Ira finally did the unmentionable and went baseball batshit crazy on us, who was there to protect us? You got it – Principal Julian Foxham, former baseball star (it turned out) and lover extraordinaire.

  And when he’d agreed to move to Tuscany with us, the rest was history. I ran the B & B and he continued his writing career, globetrotting from one book tour to another. And dealing with my lingering insecurities.

  I repeated my question. ‘Are you growing tired of me?’

  He exhaled, but it wasn’t quite a sigh, bless his soul.

  ‘No, honey, not tired of you, but tired of waiting. When are you finally going to let go and give up to the good life?’

  The good life. He was right. With this need to stay financially independent through my business, I’d carved myself something that was more a trench than a happy routine. Then again, if I didn’t succeed, everything the kids and I had been through before Julian would have been for nothing.

  And yet, deep in my heart I knew he was right. What the hell was I waiting for? We loved each other. Maddy and Warren adored him – the one loving father they’d ever had. Even now that he dashed around the world, he still found time for them, when Ira couldn’t even be bothered to praise them for anything, be it their artwork or their marks. Here in Italy, Julian had even learned Italian so he could speak to their teachers and get to grips with their curriculum. Need I say more as to why I adore this handsome, sexy, caring man who believed in me enough to follow me halfway across the world?

  So why couldn’t I let go and try to relax? If things went belly-up, we’d face it as a family. It wouldn’t be my fault, right? Plus, wasn’t I in my dreamland now, where only good things could happen to us? So what if this season was a disaster? I’d make it up the next. Julian was right. We had a safety net. It wasn’t like we were poor.

  ‘Well?’ he prompted softly.

  I looked up, conscious I was being ridiculously recalcitrant. Julian was everything I’d ever wanted. I took his hand. ‘Uhm…’

  He studied me through eyes that were knowing but never sure.

  ‘I’m kidding!’ I cried. ‘Let’s do it! Let’s set the date once and for all!’

  Julian beamed and wrapped his arms around me. ‘Erica…’

  Truth was, I was the one beaming, so grateful he’d actually stuck around all this time because, let me tell you, a lesser man would have sent me packing. So yeah, we were going to do it. We were finally going to get hitched.

  There was only one thing. (Are you at all surprised?)

  ‘Can we just not run away and do it overnight, though?’ I pleaded. ‘I want our families to be there in case they don’t believe it.’

  Actually, my stepmother, Marcy, would have an absolute fit. She never seemed to accept that Julian and I were an item. She didn’t not like him – in truth, she thought the world of him. She simply didn’t like him with me, because in her opinion, I hadn’t put up with my first husband, Ira, long enough.

  ‘So we’re finally doing it,’ Julian said as if he still couldn’t believe it.

  I laughed and threw myself into his arms. ‘Yes,’ I gushed, taking his face between my hands and giving him a whopper of a kiss. ‘But with your tight schedule?’ I asked. ‘When did you have in mind?’

  ‘September 24th?’

  My mouth fell open. ‘But that’s in less than four months…’

  He shrugged. ‘We’ll get everything done on time.’

  Which was my cue to worry all over again. Because at this point I feel bound to tell you that Julian is the biggest procrastinator in the world. And not only that – his plans always seemed to change on a dime.

  For instance, the original idea when we moved to Tuscany was for me to run the B & B while he bred horses and ran a farm and wrote in his spare time. But now, when he returned from his book tours, he secreted himself in his study to write his next novel. So we’d had to hire more workers for the fields and the stables.

  But to look at him, you wouldn’t think he lived out of his suitcase, always stylishly casual and freshly pressed (by yours truly, of course). Always cool, calm and collected, while I was the one always charging around like a headless chicken in my cheap sundresses and my flip-flops, baking, cooking and running errands and keeping the farmhouse in top shape. Not impossible for someone who ran the Boston Farthington like clockwork.

  Of course, with our farmhands doing all the work, what worries did he have, at
the end of the day? As soon as his book about his former life as a baseball champion had hit the shelves, he’d sky-rocketed back to fame, appearing on TV shows and in the papers. He was a celebrity reborn.

  And to think that when I met him I’d thought he was just my children’s new school principal (I kid you not) who had simply been very kind to me during my divorce, stopping by with apple pies to cheer me up. And it had got to the point I’d literally had to will myself to stop thinking about him all the time, let alone believe he could be interested in me. Doesn’t ring any bells? Boy, where have you been to miss out on the most exciting part of my life? The worst of times, but also the best.

  So you can imagine my surprise when I found out my kids’ principal was a celebrity. Even if everybody else did, how was I supposed to know? I don’t follow sports. I simply don’t have the time. Nor do I know anyone in the jet set, contrary to Julian. So I can’t exactly say I’d seen any of this coming.

  Truth be told, I was the one who’d badgered him into finishing the novel that had been lodged in the drawer of his nightstand for years, the rest being history. And now we were getting married? Surreal. Even I didn’t believe it. And now, in retrospect, maybe I shouldn’t have believed it.

  ‘Right. Sorted!’ he chimed. ‘Finally. Now all we have to do is make you write your vows in your own blood.’

  I giggled and checked my watch. ‘Silly. Now go and run those errands like you promised. You’ll find me in the pool.’

  If I don’t suddenly remember any last-minute chores. But it was looking pretty good. The place was spotless, the rooms ready. Bring on the Matera Brainstormer Ladies…

  He grinned. ‘Wait for me before you have a swim. The last time you stayed in too long your back packed up and I had to carry you upstairs.’

  Which was no mean feat for any guy. Because I was anything but pocket-size.

  I grinned. ‘Worried about me? When did you turn into an Italian mamma?’

  But he had a point. Whenever I didn’t dry my hair or I stayed in the water too long, I’d get a stiff neck for days, screaming if even the slightest breeze so much as blew my hair the wrong way. Man, I hated it when he was right. Still, I rolled my eyes.