Dying For Siena

Dying For
Siena

Elizabeth Jennings

Trademarks Acknowledgement

The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of the following wordmarks mentioned in this work of fiction:

Wall Street Journal: Dow Jones Company, Inc.

Armani: GA Modefine S.A.

The Merck Manual: Merck & Co., Inc.

Alessi: F.A.O.

Brunello di Montalcino: Consorzio Vino Brunello di Montalcino

Formica: The Diller Corporation

Batmobile: DC Comics Inc.

Lavazza: Luigi Lavazza

Monte dei Paschi: Monto dei Paschi Di Siena Corporation Italy

Brava: Fiat Auto

Dedra: Fiat Auto

Glenfiddich: William Grant & Sons Limited

Coke: The Coca-Cola Company

“Everything that can go wrong, will go wrong.”

Murphy’s Law

“In the worst possible way.”

Faith Murphy

Prologue

Never sleep with anyone crazier than yourself.

The telephone rang.

Nick Rossi wanted to groan and roll over in bed but something told him to keep quiet and not make a move. The noise of the bell had almost been enough to take the top of his head off.

Through the greasily nauseous roiling going on inside, he tried to take stock, but it wasn’t pretty.

His hair hurt. His eyelashes hurt. His toenails hurt. And everything else in between hurt.

The telephone rang again and hammered sharply pointed spikes into his skull. He tried to bring a hand up to his head, but there was something on his arm. Nick moved his hand—even that small movement caused pain—and touched a soft, springy mass. Hair. Human hair.

He hoped.

The way he was feeling, maybe he had spent the night with a very furry gremlin.

He opened one eye. Cautiously.

Nope. No gremlin. A girl.

She was sleeping with her back to him and all he could see was a finely drawn pale profile surrounded by a cloud of brandy-colored hair. He knew her. He knew he knew her. If only his brain could shoot him messages through the thick fog that fouled his head. As it was, merely trying to conjure up the memory of the face—and of last night—taxed his pain threshold.

The phone rang again, the bell echoing shrilly in his head for long seconds. Each second seemed like a lifetime. Everything was happening in an unsteady, sickening slow motion, as if he were on a boat. The girl turned over in bed, the rustling noise of the sheets sounding like thunder. She looked at him, wide-eyed, all fresh and innocent and not at all as if she should be in the bed of a hundred-year-old man, which is what he felt like.

He took in her features one by one, his brain too befuddled to be able to put the parts together. She had pale skin, with a spattering of freckles across her nose over high cheekbones. He knew—without knowing how he knew—that she blushed easily.

Her eyes were large, the same brandy color as her hair and the whites were milky-white, like a child’s. Small straight nose, arching sandy eyebrows, lips which he knew were full, but were now compressed in a thin line.

It was an unusual face, not conventionally pretty but…arresting. He knew her, knew her well even, and her name was going to break through the cobwebs…any second now…

A loud noise made him start in pain. It was his answering machine kicking in. His recorded voice sounded preternaturally loud in the room. “Hi, this is Nick Rossi. Sorry I can’t come to the phone, but if you leave a message and a phone number, I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”

There was a hum, then a high, breathy, impossibly sexy female voice came on. “Nick, love, sorry I couldn’t make our hot weekend, but I was held up. I hope you didn’t go looking somewhere else for fun and excitement because, believe me, I’m going to make it up to you next weekend and I want you fresh.” A loud phone kiss ended the message and Nick winced.

The girl bolted up in bed like a startled fawn and Nick tried to think of something to say. Hell, he just tried to think. Period. But nothing was happening up there.

“Y-You—” she stammered softly. “You…and I…last night…and all the time—you were supposed to be
with someone else
?”

“Er,” he replied, trying to gain time while trying to jump-start his head. He couldn’t think and his memory was shot, but his body was frantically sending him messages. About last night. Fragments of memory jockeyed tantalizingly for attention. The memories were entirely tactile and unbearably sweet. Soft limbs, sweet caresses, gentle words.

Who is she?
It was
on the tip of his furred tongue. He would remember in just a minute…

But he wasn’t going to have that minute. She was hurriedly dressing, her movements jerky and awkward, as if she weren’t used to dressing in front of someone. And he should be saying something, but what? He sat up in bed, regretting the movement instantly. By the time the room stopped spinning, she was fully dressed and halfway to the door.

He didn’t know why he wanted to stop her, he only knew that he did. “No, wait, ah—” And then his mind pulled a blank. Utterly empty, like a desert plain.

She turned and her eyes widened even more. “Oh—my—
God
.” She brought her small fist to her mouth. “You don’t even remember my
name
.”

“Don’t be silly. Of course I do, ahm…” But it was too late. She had gone and the sound of the door slamming behind her was so painful he couldn’t even breathe for a full minute.

By the time he could think again, he could hear the elevator slowly taking her down to the ground floor. Then, suddenly, his treacherous memory kicked in. Images from the previous night blossomed in his mind. It had been wonderful, extraordinary…and he had the horrible feeling that he had just cut himself off from the sweetest thing in his life.

“Faith,” he groaned as he fell back onto the mattress. “Faith Murphy.”

Chapter One

Smile, tomorrow will be worse.

Thirty hours later, Certosa di Ponteremoli near Siena, Italy.

Faith Murphy was expecting Professor Roland Kane to be cold and unresponsive to her request.

She wasn’t expecting him to be dead.

At first, it wasn’t entirely clear he was dead. The door to Professor Kane’s cell had swung open unexpectedly at her tentative knock. Unsure what to do next, Faith peeked into the room where generations of monks had lived out lives of prayer and meditation.

The cell was familiar—an exact replica of the one she was inhabiting during the yearly Quantitative Methods Seminar at the
Certosa di Ponteremoli.
The cell was simple and spare as befitted the monastic life. One small metal cot, one laminated desk and wardrobe combination, one wicker-seat chair.

One full Professor of Applied Mathematics, stretched out on his back on the floor, eyes closed. At least he was fully dressed. Faith could remember once entering the office of Professor Harlan White, another mathematical genius, and finding him in the lotus position.

Naked.

It was like the old joke—why do universities have math departments? Because it’s cheaper than institutionalizing them all.

To prove the point, Professor White’s nakedness had been immediately forgotten once he had started talking about a new demographic model for social security.

So, for all she knew, Professor Kane was working out a new quantitative theory, stretched out on the terra-cotta tiles with the buttery Italian sunshine streaming in through the open window.

Indeed, what better place to meditate on the infinite than in this former Franciscan monastery perched picturesquely atop a Tuscan hill, with Siena a russet-turreted vision on the horizon and the very air redolent with the echoes of centuries of chants?

Of course, Professor Roland Kane, for all his genius, was anything but a monk. Though in mathematical terms he was a genius, in human terms he was a pig. A monstrously intelligent pig. A drunkard and a lecher and a despot and an opportunist.

And a pig.

And a genius.

Which was why Faith was here. Only Roland Kane had enough clout to get her a few minutes of Cray time, which she desperately needed for her paper. She had been shoehorned into the conference at the very last minute as a replacement for Tim Gresham, who had come down with the flu.

Some of her calculations were still incomplete. Otherwise, there was nothing on this earth that would have her knocking on Roland Kane’s door at
eight o’clock
on a sunny Italian morning.

Faith stood in the doorway and made polite humming sounds. Then she coughed. Professor Kane didn’t show a flicker of response. “I, ah—” Faith coughed again, louder. “Professor Kane?”

Faith took two steps into the room and wrinkled her nose. The smell of alcohol was heavy in the air. An unstoppered bottle of Glenfiddich, three-quarters empty, stood on the laminated plastic next to another full bottle, unopened.

Faith remembered the incredible fuss Roland Kane had made at Rome airport when the customs officer had halted him to check the clinking sounds in a carryon bag and discovered four bottles of Glenfiddich.

Four bottles for a three-day seminar. God forbid he should run out.

Bottle number one was almost finished by day one. Faith wondered whether they sold Glenfiddich in Italy. She also wondered what Professor Kane’s liver looked like.

Faith stood in the doorway a moment longer, then stepped cautiously into the room. Professor Kane didn’t seem to be paying her any attention, so she edged over to the left, rising a little on tiptoe, eager to get a look at the view through his window.

The St. Vincent’s contingent had arrived late the previous night and, so far, all Faith had seen of Italy was
Rome
Fiumicino
Airport
, the Florence airport, and some of the Tuscan countryside from Florence to Siena from the minivan that had picked them up.

But it had been growing dark, and all she’d seen of fabled Tuscany was the rather dingy outskirts of Florence and a few hilltop towns on the darkening horizon. They had arrived at the
Certosa di Ponteremoli
well after dark, and their Italian hosts had been so anxious to feed them that they hadn’t seen anything at all but the refectory room and the cell each mathematician had been assigned.

Her cell was on the other side of the large quadrangle where the monks had lived and prayed. It had a view over a small, charming cloister garden with an ivy-bedecked stone well. She was looking forward to sitting down with a book in the cloister after lunch, but now, right now, she wanted to see something of Tuscany in the daylight.

She shot another glance at Professor Kane. He still showed no flicker of response.
Probably out cold,
she thought disgustedly.

How could so much intellectual power be packed into such a miserable human being? Still, he was her boss, so she couldn’t give in to her urge to haul back and kick him, as he so richly deserved. She stood on tiptoe and craned her neck to see out his window, barely suppressing an exclamation of awe. The view was like an impossibly beautiful painting by a Renaissance artist.

Beautiful trees marched up and down the gentle hills. They were tall, dark green, as slender and as elegant as church spires.
Cypresses,
she thought. In the distance topping the highest hill was Siena, golden-red and magical.

Faith stood for a long moment, transfixed by the scene. The intense colors, the landscape which looked as if an impossibly gifted gardener had planned it down to the finest, most meticulous detail, the bright, cloudless cobalt blue sky—everything called out to her and touched a chord deep in her heart she hadn’t known existed.
There isn’t a human being alive,
she thought,
whose very soul wouldn’t thrill to that view.

Well, maybe not the pig at her feet. Professor Kane’s soul, she was certain, was completely impervious to beauty. As it was to kindness and responsibility. Faith flicked a glance down at him. He looked exactly like what he was—a self-centered monster.