Dying For Siena (17 page)

“This is my big chance and I won’t have it ruined for me because you seem to harbor totally unjustified guilty feelings about a perfectly harmless roll in the hay. Have I made myself clear?”

“Totally,” Nick said. “I’ll see if they can let me sleep over at the
Certosa
.”

Chapter Eight

If you’re feeling good, you’ll get over it.

All the warm, fuzzy feelings Faith had had for Nick had evaporated by the time they topped the last rise and the
Certosa
suddenly appeared—massive yet graceful, a powerful gem set off by the dark spears of cypress trees.

Neither spared the
Certosa
a glance.

They’d been arguing all the way and Faith was about ready to take a hockey stick to Nick’s other leg. She’d pleaded and cajoled and threatened. When Nick said he would pretend to be a participant, she laughed. Nick’s jaw had tightened, but he didn’t give in.

“Look,” she said finally, exasperated. “What am I going to do? I won’t be able to deal with you. I’m going to be busy. I’m supposed to be helping with the organization. I’ve been given two meetings to co-chair, and I have to bone up on them and on the work of the other co-chairs. There’s a lot of work involved and you’ll just be in my way.”

“I won’t be in your way.” Nick’s jaw jutted. “I’ll just sleep there and get out in the morning. I’m hooking up with Dante tomorrow morning anyway. You’ll be okay in the daytime. Damn it, Faith, for someone who’s so smart, you’re being really dumb about this.”

“Dumb?
Dumb
?” Faith’s voice rose. “I’m being
dumb
because I don’t want to trip over you during the most important days of my life? That’s rich coming from
you.
The guy who took six years to get through high school.”

“Five.
Five years.” Nick’s overlarge jaw muscles bunched and he thumped the steering wheel.

She figured if he’d had more room, he probably would have used more body language. The car was too small for someone of Nick’s size. When he’d squeezed into the driver’s seat, he’d grunted and groped until he’d managed to find something under the seat that shot it back to its full extension. It was still a tight fit, but at least his knees didn’t top the steering wheel.

He shifted a gear so hard it ratcheted. His entire profile was hard, tense.

He was angry. That was cool. Angry was cool. She was angry, too.

Thoughts and stomach churning, Faith stared blindly out the car window, seeing nothing, until Nick jerked the car to a stop, throwing her against the seat belt so hard it caught.

“Nice driving, ace.”

Nick’s jaw muscles bunched again and he threw her a sulphurous look. He unsnapped his seat belt and maneuvered his way out of the car. When Faith realized he was coming around the car to open her door, she shot out by herself and moved toward the entrance.

They were on the gravel driveway, and his shoes made a loud crunching sound as he followed her, his limp making the noise irregular.
Crunch
, crunch,
crunch
, crunch…

Faith had almost made it to the big wooden door when he growled and caught her arm. He turned her around and, when she opened her mouth to argue, he covered her mouth with his and her brain shorted.

Total static.

Plummeting from an IQ of one-forty-five to zero in point-three seconds.

She moved her mouth mindlessly under his, blasted by heat and lust.
Closer…
she needed him closer and she threw her arms around his thick, strong neck and tunneled her fingers in his hair.

Somewhere amidst the popping neurons, she knew that what they were doing would lead to mind-bending pleasure. She knew that for a fact.

Nick’s big hand held her head for his kiss as he deepened it and she whimpered…

“Faith?”

She jolted and tried to pull away. Getting away from Nick’s large hands was impossible.

“Faith?”

Oh God, Tim.
With great reluctance, she pulled her lips away.

Nick bent again and she turned her head, wishing she didn’t have to. But kissing Nick in front of Tim was too soap opera for her. Both men had been her lovers. Exactly once, but still…

Besides, she wasn’t supposed to want to kiss Nick. She was supposed to be mad at him.

She pushed, hard, and Nick opened his hands.

Tim came forward, smoothing down his wispy hair that had escaped the small, thin ponytail at the nape of his neck. “Do you need help, Faith?”

If she did, Tim wasn’t it. Looking at the two of them, she had a little moment of reality distortion. Tim—short and tubby and flabby. Nick—tall and strong and athletic. Did Tim actually think he could defend her against Nick?

“Okay.” Nick shifted on his feet. “Who’s this?”

“Uh, Nick Rossi, meet Tim Gresham. He’s…uh, he’s a colleague of mine. At the university.”

Tim shot her a wounded gaze, as if she should have said—
this is Tim Gresham, with whom I have wild and crazy sex four times a day
.

“Tim, Nick plays—used to play—for the Hunters.”

“A jock,” Tim said, with exactly the same tone of voice with which he would have said “a leper”.

“A nerd.” Nick’s voice was low and vicious. “Nice to meet you. Get lost.”

Tim straightened and sucked in his little potbelly. Faith’s mouth fell open. “Listen, Nick, you can’t—”

“No,
you
listen,” Nick said heatedly. “What the hell’s the matter with you anyway? Do you realize that there’s a murderer
here? Someone killed your boss, have you forgotten that? So who’s going to protect you—Mr. Geek here? For all you know, he’s
the one who offed your prof. Did you think of that?”

Tim’s eyes went wide and he surged forward. “Why you overgrown—”

Faith shot out an arm to halt Tim. It wasn’t hard.

“Actually, for your information, Tim was in the States and only just arrived, so he can’t have killed anyone. Listen carefully, Nick. I am now going inside the
Certosa
, in Tim’s company, where I will be perfectly safe.”

“Over my dead body,” Nick growled.

Tim puffed up. “That can be arranged, big guy.”

Nick bristled. “Faith needs protection.”

“I can do that.”

“What the hell are you talking about? You look like you can’t protect your hat in a wind.”

“Oh yeah?” Tim stepped closer. “Just watch me.”

Faith rolled her eyes. Tim came up to Nick’s collarbone, and the most strenuous physical activity Faith had ever seen him engage in was peering at his computer screen.

Nick could punch out Tim’s lights in a nanosecond, and watching Nick, muscles corded, neck tendons sticking out, he was a hair’s breadth away from doing just that.

Something had to be done. She pressed her hand against Tim’s chest. There was a second as she and Tim adjusted to the polite fiction that her hand was the only thing that stopped him from stepping forward and cleaning Nick’s clock.

Tim was trembling under her hand.

Faith turned. “Listen, Nick. I’m going in now. I’m going to my room, where I will lock my door and no one will disturb me until tomorrow morning. Then I will go downstairs and have an excellent breakfast. Believe me, the only bad thing that can happen to me will be my laptop’s batteries running out.”

She turned on her heels and walked through the huge iron-hinged doors that only lacked a portcullis.

“You fucking weenie—”

“Listen, iceman, you can—”

Faith took one last look at them before rounding the corner—Nick huge and menacing, Tim, a rabid terrier, unwilling to let go. It was hard to think that she had had an affair with each of them.

She started climbing the stairs up to the second floor.

She definitely needed a Boyfriend Upgrade, Version 3.0.

Today is the first day of the rest of your life.

The next morning, after a sleepless night, Nick stared glumly at his red, jet-lagged eyes and un-chic, non-designer beard stubble in the bathroom mirror of his grandparents’ country house and contemplated that greeting-card thought.

It didn’t reassure him in the least. He couldn’t even begin to think about the rest of his life and the changes that were coming.

He’d liked his life just fine the way it had been. On bright shiny rails, moving right into the future and he was the train just chugging along. Without hockey, he didn’t have the faintest idea what to do with his day, his week, his year.

It had all been so neatly boxed up and tied with a ribbon for him.

Summers were for the yearly trip to Siena to see his cousins, scheme and yell for the Snails, and get drunk with an entire city district when they lost. Maybe beat up a few rowdy members of rival
contradas
in a friendly little tussle. The Snails had been losing since junior high.

But even losing the
Palio
was more fun than anything else except hockey. The
Palio
gave him exactly what he got on the ice—noise, crowds and excitement.

It was that feeling of going to war—without actually having to shoot at anyone or having anyone shoot at you.

The ends of summers were workouts at least four hours a day, keeping fit and having fun while staying out of trouble.

September was the exhibition season, training camp, more workouts. Keeping an eye on the youngsters coming up as they kept an eye on him, wanting his job, and him thinking,
Not yet, kids. Not yet.

October to April…ah…The Season. Show time. With every nerve, every muscle in his body like an arrow aimed straight at winning. Which he did more times than not.

May and June were for playoffs until he left for Siena.

He’d been living this routine for twelve years now and was far from ready to let it go.

Nick picked up his grandfather’s ancient razor and started hacking at the undergrowth on his face. He winced as it took some of his beard off by taking the skin underneath it as well.

He missed hockey and wanted it back.
What was there to look forward to now?
Not to mention the little fact that maybe he’d taken a blow too many to the head and he might end up like those punch-drunk boxers who had trouble enunciating and counting to ten without using their fingers.

He supposed he was better off than most men who had just lost their job. In fact, technically, he was rich, though he never thought of himself that way. His agent had been about to sign an eight million dollar season contract and though that had gone straight down the toilet, there’d been another one before it for five million dollars. He was worth zip now as an athlete, but he’d salted it away.

Or rather, Lou had.

He’d once confessed to Lou his horror at meeting up with Robert “Hulk” Gascoigne, who’d aced all his opponents on the ice while nailing everything in skirts within a thirty mile radius all during the nineties.

Hulk had buttonholed him after a practice session and Nick had had to peer hard to recognize the athlete in that three-hundred-and-fifty-pound body. Hulk had been dressed in a cheap suit that had the sick green sheen of an oil slick and had tried to sell him an insurance policy.

Horrified, wanting just to get away, Nick had bought the policy—he wasn’t even sure if it was for fire or life or even his car—and had promptly lost his copy. Later in the locker room, his teammates had joked that he’d been “
blitzed by the Bulk
”
.

Lou had responded in typical Lou fashion, by taking his money right out of his hands and investing it all in what she called “pin-striped pork bellies”, some newfangled type of commodities trading.

She took out a subscription to the
Wall Street Journal
in his name. The copies, gathering dust, were stacked in musty gray piles in his spare room.

She also gave him bewildering quarterly reports he couldn’t pretend to follow. Lou blinded him with economics, but the bottom line was she knew what she was doing. Even he boggled at the figures given on the bottom of the quarterly and annual reports.

Of course, Lou being Lou, when she’d taken his money out of his hands, she had also been very miserly about what she let trickle back into them.

He was given an allowance. A very small allowance, which mysteriously became even smaller while he dated Dee Dee.

Nick was a seriously rich man. If he wanted to, he could probably spend the rest of his life without having to put in a single day’s work.

It was a depressing thought.

Given his family, Nick wouldn’t even be allowed to go to seed. Who on earth in his family would let him become a bum?

For a moment, he had a vision of himself in a dirty stained raincoat with a bottle of beer in a paper bag hanging out of a torn pocket, living in one of the two buildings that could technically be classified as slums in Deerfield.

The image didn’t work. His family would never let it happen. Look what happened the one time he went on a bender—Lou had hounded him until he’d cleaned up.

So here he was—all riched up with nowhere to go.

Today is the first day of the rest of your life.