Hello, my darlings,

 

Welcome to Friday’s sneak peak - it’s time to kick back and reeeeeelaxed…

It’s a Saturday afternoon at The Dower house…

Bronte, Rosie and Janine, are enjoying some girl time in the kitchen–family–dining space.

The men, meanwhile, are dressed down in a jogging pants/T-shirts/Thermals ensemble, in Nico’s new man-cave (formerly known as his study) having the time of their lives watching one of the legs of the European cup, live, on a five foot wide, state-of-the-art-with-surround-sound flat screen, a new addition along with a tall, glass fronted beer-cooler.

When the referee made a ‘crappola’ decision, the men were on their feet and they all wail, long and loud at the screen.

Back with the females, a dull roar came from the man-cave.

As one, their women look to heaven.

“Good God,” Rosie said. She wore skinny blue jeans and a ribbed over-sized sweater of ivory cotton. Her hair was tied in a loose plait that fell down her back. “They seem to forget we have children that understand every single bad word that comes out of their big mouths. They’re a disgrace.”

Bronte, dressed in chocolate brown yoga pants, a matching hoodie over a striped T-shirt and her blonde hair tied in a high tail, shook her head. She cuddled a dozing and rosy-cheeked Eve close. Her daughter wore her favorite fleecy pink bunny pj’s. Teething was not fun.

“Well,” said Janine, keeping a weather eye on Boo’s frantic coloring-in attempts with purple crayon. Mother and daughter wore soft denim jeans and bright pink hoodies. “I just don’t get it, when do we women ever make a howling racket over anything the way they do? They’re like wild beasts.”

Rosie, her eyes like pancakes, stared hard at Janine and said, “How soon you forget! We made plenty of noise when we watched Magic Mike Two.”

Bronte had to laugh.

“Ah yes. I’d forgotten all about that girly night.”

“Well, we did have a couple of bottles of wine,” Janine reminded her.

“Yeah, I remember the hangover. I also remember those awesome six packs, and I’m not talking about beer.” Rosie cackled like an evil witch. “Alexander was absolutely disgusted with me because I kept calling him a Joe Manganiello reject.”

“That was a good night. My favorite stripper, and don’t for the love of God tell Nico, is Channing Tatum. I LOVE Channing.” Bronte said.

“Matt floated my boat. Although not as much as Josh,” Janine said, loyal to the bone. “Where are the kids?”

“Well the boys are with the men,” Bronte said, “picking up all sorts of bad habits and foul language.”

“And my favorite bad girls?” Rosie asked, referring to Sophia and Emily.

“Upstairs. They’re practising with a new Boogie Box my dad sent Sophia for her birthday. It’s like a karaoke machine, except for kids. So the pair of them are pretending to be rock stars.”

“Do you remember when we were about five or six years old,” Rosie began. “We wanted to be Spice Girls. I used to sing into the hairdryer, and you sang into your hairbrush.”

Bronte laughed. “Those were the days.”

Rosie did a bum boogie. “Girl power!”

“I think that was the start of girl power,” Janine said, then send them a filthy look. “Neither of you would let me join your girl band. Bitches.”

“Well you were an absolute little bitch yourself,” Rosie said, as usual not mincing her words. “These days you’d be called a mean girl.”

Janine nodded. “Absolutely right. I was spoiled rotten.”

Bronte studied Janine’s face.

“How are things with your father these days?”

“Pretty good actually,” Janine said. “It helps smooth the path that he absolutely adores Boo, and he gets on incredibly well with Josh.”

“I love Josh,” Rosie said.

Unoffended, Janine grinned. “I know you do. And he loves you too.”

 

 

Meanwhile, in Sophia’s bedroom, a duet, wearing pink leggings and black and pink over-sized T-shirts that said, Girls Rule The World, were practising strutting their stuff to a Little Mix song…

“Do you think we could be on YouTube and make millions and millions of pounds and be superstars?” Emily asked Sophia when they took a well deserved break.

Sophia plopped onto a fat beanbag the color of hot pink, and thought about it.

“No. We’re not very good singers.”

“I don’t know,” Emily said. She sprawled on her belly on Sophia’s Cinderella Princess bed. “I think we could be, if we worked hard enough, be really good. I think all we need to do is practice.”

Sophia rubbed her chin. “You mean like have proper music lessons or singing lessons?”

“Yes. I wanna learn to play the guitar.”

Sophia made an I’m-gonna-be-sick face.

“I don’t know. I’m not sure I come from a musical family. When he’s in a good mood, my papa likes to sing O sole mio, but mama says he can’t carry a tune in a rusty bucket.”

“Do you think that Tonio will could be a good singer?” Emily asked, her blue eyes all dreamy.

Sophia thought about it.

“You know I don’t think I have ever heard him sing. He whistles a lot though. Doesn’t sound very tuneful to me though.”

“Can he dance?” Emily asked in all seriousness.

Sophia shrugged, made big eyes. “Who knows?”

“The thing is, he’s got the look. He could be a huge, huge star—if only he could sing.”

“We can always ask him if he wants to be in our band,” Sophia said.

“What about Luca?”

Sophia pursed her pink lips, made a kissy sound.

“He looks pretty enough. He can always mime.”

So the girls made their way downstairs, along a narrow hallway, turned a corner, and entered—the man cave.

Stunned, they stopped dead.

 

 

Stony-faced, Sophia assimilated the entire scene.

Her narrowed gaze scanned a Big Mess.

The racket of the blaring TV, her papa blowing on some sort of horn, while the rest made a collective noise, which sounded exactly like male gorilla’s mating call.

Her papa, her uncle Alexander and uncle Josh, AND Luca and Tonio, were all flushed and wild-eyed, and there was a lot of pushey-shovey going on.

Right then, Sophia and Emily shared a purely womanly look of utter disgust.

However, Sophia’s brows flew up when her papa and Tonio started speaking BAD words in Italian about the referee, as if not saying it in English made a difference.

Tonio jumped up and down like a lunatic, his socked feet crunching a bag of potato chips, cheese and onion by the stink, into crumbs that spilled all over an expensive Chinese rug.

There were three cans of what looked like beer on the glossy table, and they hadn’t used mats to protect the table top.

Mama would NOT be pleased.

 

Now Sophia also knew that her best pal Emily had a deep seated aversion to raised voices and too much noise—it had something to do with a small flaw with her hearing.

Sophia turned to a wide-eyed Emily.

“Show no weakness. They have reverted back, in millennia in human evolution, to knuckle-draggers.”

Emily looked alarmed. “What does that mean?”

Sophia shrugged. “Dunno. It’s what auntie Rosie says when they watch Italian football. Men! Pitiful, aren’t they?”

“Are they fighting?” Emily asked in a very small voice as Josh growled like a wild beast and caught Luca in an elbow lock and vigorously scrubbed his head with his knuckles.

“Nah. That’s just male posturing.”

Emily turned to stare at her. “What’s that?”

“Dunno. Auntie Rosie said it’s an alpha male thing.”

“I don’t like it.”

Sophia placed her arm around Emily’s shoulders and pulled her close.

“Don’t be scared. We have girl power.”

Emily hugged her back. “‘Kay.”

Sophia took a good long look at the male shenanigans and guided her best friend out the door.

It was time, she decided, for reinforcements.

***

Bronte, Rosie and Janine listened with deadly serious faces, their mouths tight, to the many sins of their men as listed by Sophia, and a very quiet and pale Emily.

Honestly, Bronte thought, what on earth was Nico thinking scaring Emily like that? The child was like a delicate little flower, all big violet eyes, a soft voice and riot of short red curls atop a creamy complexion kissed by a constellation of freckles. She simply wasn’t used to adults behaving like heathens on the war path. What on earth would her mother, Grace, say? In fact, how embarrassing was this? Now she narrowed her eyes as Sophia, her arms folded and her hip cocked, came to the end of her story.

“They’ve got beer cans on my table?”

Sophia nodded.

“Tonio’s ground chips into my good carpet?”

Sophia nodded.

Bronte handed a still dozing Eve to her auntie Rosie and stood.

“Right,” she brushed her hands together. “Let’s get this sorted.”

But just as she was about to head out the door, the sound of men and boys making their way toward the kitchen assailed their ears.

Nico Ferranti just loved Saturdays when live soccer from the Serie A and Legs of the European cup played on the sports channels. As a bonus, the boys not only had the time of their lives, but male bonding time, which was important and could only be good for them. Ah, he was a lucky man. However, he had a hitch in his stride when he walked into the family room and took one look at his wife’s face, a face that shot sheer terror into his heart.

He sent her his most charming smile with zero affect.

The boys, their antennae more attuned to Bronte’s expression than the laughing and joking Alexander and Joshua, slid towards the door on their socked feet.

Bronte’s arm shot out, her pointy finger zeroed on them.

The stopped dead, like stone statues.

“Don’t even think about it,” she growled.

By this time Alexander and Joshua had received the message that all was not well with their women.

Nico sauntered over to the love of his life, took the hand with the pointy finger and kissed the fingertip. “Problemo?”

“Where shall I begin?” she asked, her tone ice over steel.

Nico turned to his pals, his sons, and shrugged as if to say, What did we do?

“Were we too loud?” Joshua asked, his blue eyes the perfect picture of innocence.

“Well, let’s just say the language was colorful,” Janine told him.

He made an ouch face.

“The referee was a dick,” Alexander muttered.

“How terribly charming,” his wife told him, and jerked her chin towards two wide-eyed little boys. “Shame you couldn’t be an adult and come up with a better descriptive word, like useless, ineffective, or incompetent.”

He made an ouch face, too.

Nico rubbed the bridge of his nose, and his gaze caught the butter-wouldn’t-melt eyes of his eldest daughter.

Sophia raised her brows.

“You said bad words in Italian.”

“I knew it,” Luca said terribly, his dark eyes filled with rage. “You’re nothing but a tittle-tattle. What happens in the man-cave stays in the man-cave.”

In response, his twin sent him a look that would blister paint.

“We,” she said. “Have girl power.”

Nico stepped in before things got physical.

“It is half-time,” he said in a voice meant to soothe. “We are hungry.”

“After using all that adrenaline, I’m sure you are hungry. Help yourselves,” Bronte said and indicated the huge double door American sized refrigerator made of stainless steel.

“But if my table top is damaged by beer cans and my carpet by a packet of chips…” she eyed a pale-faced Tonio, “… there will be trouble.”

Nico held up his hands in a gesture of surrender.

He knew when to pick his battles and this was not one he could win.

“We will clean up any mess.”

“This is because it was World Women’s Day this week, isn’t it?” Alexander muttered to Joshua. Unfortunately for him, his wife, his sister and his best friend’s partner heard him.

Rosie handed Eve to Bronte and strolled up to her husband like a gunslinger.

She poked him in his flat belly, and tipped back her head to stare into those twinkling green eyes.

“Excuse me?”

He poked her right back on the shoulder.

“This is you flexing your rights.”

“I don’t need to flex my rights. I own my rights,” she told him, but her dimples popped.

“Gimme a kiss,” he said, then he grabbed her.

Meanwhile, Nico wound his arms around his wife and child.

Then he went nose to nose with Bronte. “Forgive me?”

“I’ll think about it.”

Joshua grinned at Janine who grinned right back.

“It’s always fun with the Ferranti family isn’t it?”

 

***

 

It didn’t take long for peace to be restored to The Dower House, except not everyone was entirely happy.

“You’re a horrible, stinky, boy,” Sophia told her twin.

“And you have a mouth bigger than the Eurotunnel.”

Emily, her blue eyes wide with what looked like alarm, sat in the corner of the couch.

“Do not worry,” Tonio told her. His shoulder gently nudged hers. “They do not really mean it.”

“At least I don’t have a face like baboon’s butt,” his lovely sister said.

Luca went nose to nose with a narrow-eyed Sophia. “I’m a boy. Boys bathe in shark-infested waters.”

“Pooh,” she said, not once taking her eyes from his. Then her face went so fierce poor Emily sucked in a breath and her hand clutched her throat.

“I have girl power,” Sophia growled low in her throat. “I bathe in the blood of my enemies.”

FINE

Well, I’d say Sophia won that round.

LOL!

Until next week, spice up your life!

Christine x