Cleo Coyle - Espresso Shot

Still… looking at Janelle’s beautifully shaped and decorated anginetti , I had to admit that she’d done a near-perfect job on reinventing the rustic Italian cookie, getting it all dressed up for its Manhattan debut.

“I enjoyed these cookies at family weddings when I was a little girl. The ring shape represents the wedding bands. But Janelle recast the idea of a single rope of dough. See how she sculpted each tiny cookie to look like a coffee cake ring?”

“ Si. Very clever.”

I sampled a bite for myself. The texture was tender and buttery, the glaze of icing a sophisticated kiss of lemon flavor.

“Janelle’s using Meyer lemons. They have less acidity than other varieties. And the sculpting of the anginetti into a tiny coffee cake shape goes with our primary theme for the dessert display: Saloma Sunrise.”

“Saloma?” Nunzio smiled. “My little hometown?”

“And Ovid’s, too, right?”

He nodded, clearly happy that I’d done my research.

“We worked with the metric volume of liquid that your fountain holds and determined the perfect amounts of peach nectar and cherry juice to be added to the Prosecco in order to create a Bellini that will mimic the romantic golden orange color of a Saloma dawn. The wedding is at sunset, but the coffee and dessert station is looking to our bride and groom’s future, to their first sunrise as a married couple. So the primary pastry theme is breakfast.”

“Breakfast?” Nunzio frowned. “What? Eggs and bread?”

“No, no, no… it’s just a theme. Look…” I opened the second box. It was filled with samples of cookies shaped and baked with a slight egg wash to look exactly like miniature croissants. “Each cookie carries a different flavor experience. The Grand Marnier croissant cookie is accentuated with orange rind, the Frangelico with finely powdered hazelnuts, and the Kahlua with a premium coffee infusion from Panama ’s Esmeralda Especial geisha coffee trees-what we call the champagne of the coffee world.”

Nunzio sampled each one, sipping champagne between bites of the tiny, sculpted pastries. “Delizioso!”

“Now try Janelle’s version of orange à l’orange.”

Nunzio nodded, picked up one of the delicate confections that resembled a tiny half orange.

“Janelle dyes and shapes marzipan, fashioning it to resemble the shell of an orange rind. She then cooks oranges in a simple syrup, incorporates slivers of their own candied skin, and fills the marzipan shell.”

“Mmmmmm. Buonissimo.”

“Because it’s marzipan, you’ll taste a creamy hint of sweet almond to counterbalance the tangy-sweet yet slightly tart citrus filling. She’s imported blood oranges from Sicily just for the wedding. She’s doing the same thing with Key limes, which have a milder level of acidity.

“Our secondary theme is tied directly to your Lover’s Spring fountain. Since each tier in the gold-plated fountain is sculpted with reliefs that tell the stories of great lovers through time, we attached pastries to each tier.

“For Adam and Eve, we have Forbidden Fruit Cakes, which are not actually fruitcake but mini-sponge cakes soaked with the grapefruit-orange-honey flavors of the cognac-based Forbidden Fruit liqueur.

“For Antony and Cleopatra, we have stuffed caramel walnuts, a recipe translated from hieroglyphics and said to have been used by Cleopatra to fortify her lovers.”

“Ah!” Nunzio perked right up on that story. “Do you have any of those?” He began looking in all three boxes.

“Sorry, no sale.”

“Oh, too bad.” He threw me a wink.

I cleared my throat. “I’ll bet you can guess what we’re doing for Romeo and Juliet.”

Nunzio laughed. “Baci di Romeo e Baci di Giulietta!”

I smiled and nodded. Romeo’s Kisses were small almond-flavored cookies, sandwiched together in pairs with chocolate filling. Juliet’s Kisses were the same, only the cookies were chocolate.

“For Romeo’s Kisses, Janelle is replacing the almonds with pistachios, and for the filling, using her favorite recipe for chocolate ganache. For Juliet’s Kisses, she’s staying with the chocolate-flavored cookie, but for the filling she’s using vanilla pastry cream infused with raspberry-since, of course, chocolate and raspberry are a wonderful pairing. We have a latte that uses that same flavor profile at my coffeehouse.”

Nunzio tasted Janelle’s twists on the old Verona favorites. He nodded and smiled. “She is very good, Clare. An artista.”

“I was hoping you’d say that. But as good as she is, her field is highly competitive. Breaking out of the pack and getting noticed is very difficult in this town-in any profession. That’s why Breanne’s wedding is so important for Pastries by Janelle, and that’s why your fountain is so important. Without it as the centerpiece of our display, Trend magazine won’t photograph it. Janelle Babcock will have lost a great opportunity for exposure.”

“Your friend, she is quite talented. And these treats are delizioso . But I think… listening to you speak so passionately for her, it makes me want a taste of something else even more…”

He stepped closer. I stepped back.

“I’d like you to agree to lending us the fountain.”

“We both want something then? I think we can both get it, don’t you? A nice little transaction?”

“My virtue’s not on the bargaining table.”

He snorted, genuinely amused. “Keep your virtue, by all means. I only desire your company for the evening. Is that so terrible?”

I closed my eyes. It would be easy to give in, so easy…

My attraction to Nunzio wasn’t some fantasy on his part. I was in awe of his talent, and the artist himself was magnetic. But if the situation were reversed, if Mike slept with some woman in a casual one-night stand, I’d be devastated, and I’d begin to doubt him, especially after what I’d been through with my ex-husband.

Mike’s own broken marriage was still a fresh wound. The pain of his wife’s cheating had tortured him for years. I cared too much about the man to risk damaging what we had for a fleeting few hours of fantasy love; and that’s what it would be: the facsimile of something real.

Nunzio certainly had a girlfriend or even a wife back in Italy. I was a momentary trifle, an amuse-gueule during a brief business trip. What I had with Mike wasn’t an illusion. The view was closer to earth in Alphabet City, but so was the affection: real, well-rooted, and just starting to grow. I wasn’t willing to trade that for anything.

So what else did I have to trade that Nunzio wanted? Nothing. But I could trade on something. His reputation. That’s what Otto Visser was trying to tell me today; the key to Nunzio was his ego!

I walked to the floor-to-ceiling windows and pointed down fifty-plus floors. “Tell me something, Nunzio; you’ve seen the monument of Christopher Columbus at the center of the traffic circle, right?”

The sculptor smirked. “That is why they call it Columbus Circle, no?”

“Yes, but did you know that statue of your countryman is the point at which all distances to and from New York City are geographically measured?”

Nunzio’s eyebrows rose. “Is that so?”

He stepped up behind me. He wasn’t touching me, but he was standing so close I could feel the heat of his body. I swallowed uneasily, continued my little speech.

“The Metropolitan Museum is like that for America -the place from which art is measured-the most important museum of art in the country. For your work to be seen and photographed inside the Met, among the other great masters, that would really be something, wouldn’t it?”