“Good.” Carlo relaxed with the first sip of frosty wine. “Perhaps I’ll have time to give your kitchen an inspection. Summer came here to remodel and expand Blake’s kitchen, then stayed on because she’d grown attached to it.”

“Quite right.” Summer sent her husband an amused look. “In fact, I’ve grown so attached I’ve decided to expand again.”

“Yes?” Interested, Carlo lifted his brow. “Another Cocharan House?”

“Another Cocharan,” Summer corrected.

It took him a moment, but Juliet saw the moment the words had sunk in. Emotion she’d always expected from him, and it was there now, in his eyes as he set down his glass. “You’re having a child.”

“In the winter.” Summer smiled and stretched out her hand. “I haven’t figured out how I’m going to reach the stove for Christmas dinner.”

He took her hand and kissed it, then kissed her cheeks, one by one. “We’ve come a long way, cara mia.”

“A very long way.”

“Do you remember the merry-go-round?”

She remembered well her desperate flight to Rome to flee from Blake and her feelings. “You told me I was afraid to grab the brass ring, and so you made me try. I won’t forget it.”

He murmured something in Italian that made Summer’s eyes fill. “And I’ve always loved you. Now make a toast or something before I disgrace myself.”

“A toast.” Carlo picked up his glass and slipped his free arm around Juliet. “To the carousel that doesn’t end.”

Juliet lifted her glass and, sipping, let the champagne wash away the ache.

Cooking before the camera was something Summer understood well. She spent several hours a year doing just that while handling the management of the kitchen in the Philadelphia Cocharan House, satisfying her own select clients with a few trips a year if the price and the occasion were important enough, and, most important of all, learning to enjoy her marriage.

Though she’d often cooked with Carlo, in the kitchen of a palace, in the less expensive area of the flat she still kept in Paris and dozens of other places, she never tired of watching him in action. While she was said to create with the intensity of a brain surgeon, Carlo had the flair of an artist. She’d always admired his expansiveness, his ease of manner, and especially his theatrics.

When he’d put the finishing touches on the pasta dish he’d named, not immodestly, after himself, she applauded with the rest of the audience. But she’d hitched a ride to the studio with him and Juliet for more reason than to feed an old friend’s ego. If Summer knew anyone in the world as well as she did herself, it was Carlo. She’d often thought, in many ways, they’d risen from the same dough.