Gladly Beyond Page 5

  Whereas I looked down on Pierce and was eye-level with the Colonel, I had to look up, up at Dante. At five ten myself, it takes a lot to make me feel short. But he somehow managed it. He had to be at least six four and linebacker-wide. Did he play football in high school?

  His dark, wavy hair had been smoothly slicked back when he arrived earlier. But I had watched it creep forward as the morning went along until a section of it came loose, swinging down to kiss his jaw. My fingers itched to brush it back.

  Dante was the type of man I had always had a sweet tooth for. Until I learned, oh-so-painfully, how bad for my health they could be.

  I could hear Grammy. Four out of five psychologists recommend avoiding luscious man-candy to maintain proper mental health . . .

  I was the collateral damage of a lifetime of men like him. Pierce was supposed to have been my compromise. The man who didn’t make my pulse race but also wouldn’t destroy my heart. My savior from all the Dante D’Angelos of the world.

  The. Irony.

  Dante was staring at me again. A squinty, focused look, just as he had all through the meeting.

  What was his problem? Trying to subtly intimidate me without technically violating the Colonel’s Sandbox Rule?

  “How may I help you?” I asked.

  “Just making sure you’re okay. I couldn’t help but overhear your conversation with the Colonel and Pierce. Things seemed a little tense back there.”

  “My issues with Mr. Whitman are hardly your concern—”

  “Look, I’m just trying to be polite and considerate here.”

  I sighed. Right. “Thank you. Good day, Mr. D’Angelo—”

  “It’s Dante, and I was hoping I could talk you into joining me for lunch.” His face morphed into a friendly smile. “I have a favorite restaurant off Piazza Santa Croce. Quiet. Delicious traditional Tuscan dishes.”

  Sheesh. Three meal invitations in less than fifteen minutes had to be some kind of record.

  Dante probably thought to sweet talk me into . . . what? Giving him pointers? Not exposing him and Branwell as frauds?

  I hesitated too long.

  “C’mon. I promise the food will be amazing.” His grin widened. Moving from merely charming into heartbreaking territory.

  Granted, I understood stunning smiles were a specialty of men like him. But even knowing this, my heart still sped up.

  Gah! Why did I always have to be attracted to flashy exteriors? I hated myself for finding him sexy. I needed to pack every last ounce of that away—

  Exactly! Become dismantled, I could hear Grammy chuckle.

  Besides, the thought of eating in a public place where anyone could recognize me, take a photo of us together, paste it all over the internet . . .

  “Thank you for the invitation. But I don’t think the Colonel wants us fraternizing—”

  “I don’t recall ol’ KFC forbidding us from talking to each other. Just no throwing sand or stealing toys. I promise to be on my best behavior.”

  Uh-huh. And the day I believed that . . .

  “The less contact we have with each other, the better—”

  “There’s a lot we could do to help each other.”

  Ah. There it was.

  Did he really want my help? Or did he intend to undermine me? Both?

  “Again, the Colonel made it clear we aren’t supposed to help each other.”

  “No, he just said no plagiarizing. Talking about the project is hardly plagiarism—”

  “You’re hair-splitting here.”

  “If I must.”

  “I prefer to keep my professional integrity unimpeachable, Mr. D’Angelo—”

  “Dante.”

  “—and I feel that we should work separately. Buon giorno.”

  I turned to leave. And then paused in front of the wooden doors leading out to the piazza.

  They were enormous. Like I’m-here-to-see-the-wizard huge. When open, you could probably drive an Escalade through them. Or at least a carriage and some munchkins. And, like front doors everywhere, they opened inward.

  There was no door knob.

  I looked to each side of the door, searching for a release button. Something. Anything. Someone had buzzed me in earlier.

  It figured that I would be stuck staring at the doors. I swear I could feel Dante’s amusement tickling my shoulder blades.

  “Would you like some help with the portone?” he asked.

  He pronounced portone sharp and staccato, rolling the r . . . port-OWN-ay. He sounded native.

  I turned back to him. “Portone?”

  “Like porta and -one. Big door. The door that opens to the outside.” He chuckled. A deep smooth sound that rumbled out of his chest.

  He stepped around me and threw the deadbolt. Or, at least, what looked like the deadbolt. He spun it one, two, three times. On the fourth round, it caught. With a loud click, he pulled the heavy door ajar. Politely motioned for me to pass through.

  Ah.

  “Grazie,” I said. Agenda or not, he was being courteous. I could at least thank him.

  “Parli italiano?” he asked as I moved to step out onto the bright piazza.

  It would be impolite to not reply. That’s what I told myself.

  It wasn’t that I subconsciously liked every word out of his mouth . . . his very fine, full-lipped mouth.

  Nope. I was emancipated.

  “Not really,” I said. “Just a few tourist phrases. Art words. Chiaroscuro. Sfumato. My brain short circuits when it comes to learning a foreign language.”

  “Peccato. I love hearing my native language on the tongue of a gorgeous woman.”

  I rolled my eyes. Oy.

  But the teenage girl part of my brain squealed and shook her hands. He called me gorgeous. Eeeek!

  I was pathetic.

  Just walk out the open door, Claire.

  Unbidden, I found myself pivoting as I stepped past him. My body a compass helplessly pointing to his north star.

  “So you are Italian, then?”

  “Sì.”

  “Your English is perfect. I could have sworn you’re American.”

  “Yes.”

  I popped a hand onto my hip. Shot him a skeptical eyebrow.

  “My mom is American from Portland, Oregon.” His gaze honey warm. “My dad was Italian from Florence.”

  “Was Italian?”

  His smile froze. An emotion flickered. “Yeah. My father passed away when I was a teenager.”

  “Oh. I’m so sorry. My dad died in a car accident when I was three.” The words just popped free. I bit my tongue a second too late.

  Why, why, why would I share that tidbit of personal information with Dante D’Angelo of all people? Why would my stupid subconscious leap to confide in him?

  His head canted. Interested.

  “I’m sorry.” Even though he repeated my own words, they hung with genuine sincerity.

  I shrugged. “It was a long time ago. I don’t have any memories of him. Not like being a teenager.”

  “Well, it feels like a long time ago for me too. My parents had been separated for years. Though I lived my first ten years in Italy, after that, I grew up mostly in the States with my mom. I just spent summers here with my dad’s family.”

  Wow. I was standing in a doorway, bonding with a (surprisingly nice) playboy over our shared grief. This could not bode well for my emotional state.

  I needed to leave. C’mon feet, start walking.

  But for some reason, my body had stopped listening to me.

  “So, do you still live in the States?”

  “No. We all live here now. In Florence. My brothers and I took over the family business after college.”

  “Brothers? You have a brother other than your twin?”

  “Branwell is my identical twin, but we’re actually triplets. Branwell, Tennyson and myself. We have a younger sister too, Chiara.”

  I liked how he said her name . . . key-AH-rah. Again, trilling the r, so it sounded some
where between an r and a d.

  He braced an arm against the open door. The movement pulled his suit coat tight against his bicep, angling his body toward me. Looming. He looked expensive. Decadent, even.

  I could always tell him and Branwell apart in photos. Despite being identical twins, it wasn’t hard. Dante had this urbane smoothness about him. Like he had just walked off a Milan runway. His brother, Branwell, was more Free People hobo with a thick beard and homespun vibe. The fun-loving playboy and mountain-man recluse, as the industry gossip labeled them.

  Dante was leaning decidedly too close. Probably the Italian in him ignoring my personal space bubble.

  I meant to take a step back. Really I did. But then I caught a whiff of his cologne (old school Drakkar Noir . . . classic), and my kneecaps liquefied just as my heart pounded its way up my throat.

  Sheesh. Could I be more pathetic? Stupidstupidstupid physical attraction.

  A wide flashy smile. Some smooth Italian charm. A few bulging biceps . . . and all my hard-won resolve fluttered out the window.

  Surely World’s Biggest Idiot was flashing across my forehead.

  “You know—” There went that grin again. I had a feeling women denied him nothing when he smiled like that. “—if you come to lunch with me, you can ask me all the questions you like.”

  “But would you answer them?”

  “Possibly.”

  “Tempting.”

  “Mmmmm, so I’ve been told.” He winked, just like Pierce.

  My senses plummeted back to reality.

  Honestly.

  How many times did I have to be sucker-punched before I learned to stay down for good? I was not going to let a man ruin my career again.

  “Thanks, but I have no more questions to ask.” Finally my feet listened. I stepped out the door.

  “Wait.”

  His bare hand wrapped around my bare wrist.

  And, I swear, the entire universe came to a jarring, hiccupping stop.

  Sparks. Electricity. Connection.

  How do you describe that first jolt of contact? When every sensation focuses down, down, down to a single point of touch?

  A shocking ping of sensation. A zap that chases your spine.

  I don’t think he actually heard my gasp. But I certainly felt it.

  I stared at his hand, heart instantly in my throat. Raised my gaze to his.

  Our eyes locked. Fixed. Silence stretched.

  He swallowed. Dropped my wrist.

  I moved backwards.

  One, two, three steps. And then turned, all but running across the piazza.

  Trying to wipe the image of his face from my mind.

  Eyes wide. Mouth slack.

  His expression just as shell-shocked as mine.

  Six

  Dante

  Something’s up with you.” It wasn’t a question. Branwell folded his arms and sat back.

  “What makes you say that?” I asked.

  “Womb-mate.” Branwell pointed a gloved thumb at his chest. The pun so familiar I didn’t even groan. “We literally share the same genetic brain, remember?”

  Sometimes I hated having an identical twin brother.

  We were in Nonna’s galley-style kitchen, a floor up from our own apartment, helping prep lunch. Or, rather, I grated fresh parmigiana reggiano into a bowl while Branwell watched. Things were easier that way.

  Light from the enormous window at one end flooded the room. Nonna’s sugo di pomodoro bubbled on the stove behind me. The smell of cooking tomato, garlic and basil wafted through the room.

  I had already given Branwell a rundown of the meeting earlier in the day: the ‘audition’ parameters, the Sandbox Rules, the Michelangelo sketch.

  “You think the Colonel has an actual unknown Michelangelo?” Branwell asked.

  “Hard to say.” I glanced at my brother. “It’s certainly possible given the provenance of his family vaults.”

  “And this job?”

  “It should be a slam-dunk for us. Pierce is a pretentious jackass, and Claire can be . . . unpredictable. We’re the professional, steady ones.”

  Branwell grunted. “Good. Getting this job would take a lot of pressure off.”

  “Agreed.” I nodded. “The last thing I want to do is move the company to a larger city and leave Mom alone to deal with Tennyson.”

  And you too, I mentally added.

  I had yet to bring up Claire Raythorn’s disturbing blankness. Chatting with her in the stairwell had been the same. No shadows. Just her lovely sculpted face and velvet voice. A sense of connection and that shock when I touched her wrist . . .

  “How’s your GUT been lately?” I tried to lob the question in casually. Like I was changing the topic or something.

  But, of course, it detonated like a grenade.

  “My GUT?” Branwell’s eyebrows snapped to his hairline. “The same.”

  “No changes?”

  “Nope. But you wouldn’t ask the question if something hadn’t happened. Like I said, something’s up with you.” Branwell beckoned me with a gloved hand. “Out with it, man.”

  Even though we technically shared a genome, Branwell was my opposite in many ways—the difference in our ‘talents’ ensured it.

  As usual, he was dressed in jeans and a long-sleeve, homespun-style shirt with embroidered zigzags around the cuffs. Leather gloves encased his hands, the same zigzag embroidery around the wrists. His long hair was knotted in a loose man-bun on top of his head, while his beard currently reached mountain man proportions. All ensuring not a sliver of bare skin showed from his nose down.

  In our world, you did what you had to in order to function.

  I pretended to assess how much more cheese needed to be grated while thinking how to frame my next question. Branwell and Tennyson’s lives were already pressure-cooker tense.

  So, you know that supernatural inheritance from our father that isn’t too bad for me, but hell on earth for you two . . .

  “Has your GUT ever just stopped working?” I finally asked.

  “Magari.” He snorted. “It never lets up.”

  That was the truth. Relentless tenacity had always been the strongest feature of our abilities.

  Every first born D’Angelo male for the last seven hundred years had been cursed with a Grossly Unusual Talent—the ability to see, hear and feel the past and future. It had always been a complicated mix of psychometry, clairvoyance, clairaudience and clairsentience.

  But my mother conceived triplets, causing the GUT to fracture, scattering it helter-skelter between us boys.

  You’d think the fracturing would be equal or logical or, at the very least, understandable.

  You’d be wrong.

  Branwell and I—as identical twins who had once been a single egg—shared the past portion. Tennyson got the future GUT all to himself. Lucky him.

  My GUT was pretty vanilla, in as much as a paranormal, freak-of-nature talent could be.

  Basically, I saw the past in an extremely limited way—I could see shadows of what someone or something had been.

  On a daily basis, I saw the silvery shapes of who people had been in previous incarnations. Objects showed me nothing unless I touched them and nudged my GUT. Then, like with the table earlier, I could see things that had happened around the object. I couldn’t see entire historical scenes and never heard anything . . . well, almost never.

  My GUT was gentle and subtle—vanilla, remember?—not hampering my day-to-day living. Though there had been two times when it proved more powerful.

  My brothers’ GUTs were not quite as benign.

  The hearing-past was Branwell’s portion of the talent. Clairaudience to use the proper lingo. Branwell had a complicated GUT, full of weird rules (that he probably had color-coded and laminated somewhere).

  If something inanimate touched his body—bare skin, lips, mouth—Branwell would hear what occurred around the object the last time it changed form in some way.

  Through trial and
error, we had figured out the object had to be large enough to be felt, liquids and livings things didn’t count, the change had to be obviously noticeable . . . (And by we, I mean Tennyson and me as kids, and by trial and error, I mean we would scream while ripping a piece of paper and then sneak up on Branwell and slap it on his bare neck. We were nothing if not scientifically thorough.)

  All of which explained the gloves and embroidery. Branwell altered everything that touched his skin in a sound-proof room.

  But, like me, if Branwell touched an object and concentrated, he could sift back through the sound at each point of change. It was tiring and overwhelming—the cacophony of noise, the unexpected situations—but he could do it.

  We were two sides of the same coin. I saw the past in a limited way. Branwell heard it. It made art authentication a lucrative business choice.

  Tennyson, on the other hand, was future clairsentient (more lingo). He could feel the future emotions of those around him. Or, at least, that was his story and he was sticking to it. Tennyson got all kinds of pissy when we asked too many probing questions about his GUT.

  Being around emotion-full people was . . . difficult, so Tennyson lived by himself in the family villa just north of Volterra. We talked on the phone more than anything.

  Not that I would bother him with my current GUT problem—

  “So what’s up?” Branwell asked and then held up a hand. “Wait—do you suppose Nonna has any more of that pecorino from Sardegna?”

  My twin did have this thing for cheese. Branwell stood, moving for the fridge.

  “Let me see.” I waved him back down.

  I finished with the parmigiano, put it away and then dug around the fridge until I found the pecorino sardo wrapped in wax paper.

  In complete silence, I flaked off several chunks of the white cheese for Branwell, spacing them neatly on a plate. I slid the plate across to him.

  He shot me his usual look. A cross between ‘thank you’ and ‘stop treating me like I’m in kindergarten.’

  I returned with my typical ‘let me help you’ blink.

  Branwell sighed.

  “Okay, go. Tell me what happened.” He picked up a piece of cheese and popped it in his mouth. Hyper careful not to alter it in any way before eating it.

  “Claire Raythorn has no shadows.”