Mysterious Ways

by Julia Talbot

  So engrossed was he in the painting that he lost track of time until someone pounded on his workroom door. He jumped, barely avoiding taking a swipe of paint off that he didn't mean to, and stood up. His back hurt from being bent into one position for too long. That was a good thing. Grinning, he opened the door to face a pair of pouting, six foot tall children “Sorry,” he told them with perfect good cheer. “I forgot what time it was.”

  “Time for you to come out and play,” Gianni said.

  “Just let me clean up.”

  They bitched and moaned at him as he carefully tucked away his cleaners, then grabbed him and practically carried him out to change clothes. Yes, yes they knew he was a priest and he would wear the collar, but he didn't have to look like a street sweeper. He laughed with them at his own expense, and couldn't help but like them more and more as the day progressed. In a way it was perfect that they had no real interest in the family collections. He asked them about their signatures being on some of the insurance forms, and they shrugged it off. Someone had to be there, didn't they? The family insisted that each and every member do their duty, after all. That was how it was to be a Rossi.

  They showed him cheesy tourist sights, like the overblown Victor Emmanuel monument and out of the way churches, such as San Clemente, with its intact Mithraeum. They splashed water at him at the Trevi fountain, and bought him a late lunch on the Via Venetto, near the Cappucin cemetery and the Lamborghini dealership. He was dizzy from their ping-pong approach to conversation and their pinball approach to tourism, but Jacob honestly couldn't remember having a better time with anyone. He also learned more about them, as individuals. Jacob had assumed that they didn't work, that they were trust fund babies, as much time as they had on their hands. That assumption proved erroneous. They owned their own business, they told him, an export conglomerate named Gemini, Inc., which had offices in major cities in both Europe and America.

  Gianni, he found out, was a swimmer, while Damien was a runner, and Damien liked dogs, where Gianni was fond of horses. Damien had a passionate hatred for and surprisingly an allergy to most kinds of cheeses, and Gianni thought chicken was of the Devil. Which explained why so many meals at the Palazzo were served buffet style, with such an alarming array of food. They both loved children, and had an almost embarrassed desire for children of their own, but no desire to marry. “What woman,” Damien asked, “would understand that we have to be together?”

  “They separated us once,” Gianni said, “when they sent us off to school. Damien tried to slit his wrists.”

  “And Gianni took many pills.”

  “They never did it again,” they finished together, and Jacob was sad for the children they had once been, separated from the one person who understood and loved them like no other.

  He had forgotten what it was liked to be touched so much. Since he joined the seminary, really, and people had seen the collar first and nothing else, he'd been a little starved for human contact. And they touched. Like the last time they'd given him a tour, they kept a hand on him here, guiding him, or one of them would nudge him with an elbow or knee to get him to notice things. They touched each other just as much, he had seen that before, but when they were sure no one was watching their touches were more intimate. It should disturb him, Jacob knew, but he couldn't find it in him to disapprove. By the time they got home, Jacob was tired, sore and sunburned. He was also happy. It had been a good day.

  The twins hugged him before they let him go, and told him they'd see him at dinner. He hugged back just because it felt so good, and then went and took a bath, and actual bath in the sunken tub of his bathroom. The nymphs and mermen cavorted around the edge of the tub and from the submerged position the water-spout looked more phallic than dolphinish. Jacob shook his head at his fancy, and climbed out of the bath, letting water stream off him onto the floor with only a twinge of guilt. To hear the twins tell it, the house maintained so many servants that they had to invent jobs to keep them all busy, and they were all allowed to be as slobbish as they pleased because of it.

  Apparently it would be just he and the twins at dinner tonight as well, which suited him to the core. They debated the writings of Saint Augustine and the worthiness of secular art, and flung forks full of salad leaves at each other. Jacob laughed at their antics and enjoyed their conversation and felt horrible that he was devoutly glad of the absence of the rest of the family. Cecilia and Marco had gone to some business dinner or other, and Terri had been Giovanni's date for a charity function, an idea that Jacob found amused him to no end.

  They were lingering over drinks in the gold salon, with Damien playing a creditable Queen number on the piano, when Marco and Cecilia joined them. Jacob gulped his brandy at the sight of her and tried not to choke. Cecilia wore a little red dress, cut to there and fashioned out of a material that managed to look indecent and still modest at the same time. She sucked all of the air out of the room, and Jacob felt lust hit him like a fist to the gut. His palms were sweating, and he looked at Marco with real resentment. Some small part of himself was amazed at his own thoughts, but he couldn't make them stop.

  A high-heeled shoe whizzing over his head finally snapped him out of it, and thought for a moment that he had been caught staring. Then Cecilia leaned over and slipped the other shoe off sending it sailing over her shoulder. Jacob watched a footman make a running leap for it and catch it just before it crashed into the chandelier, and he realized this must be something she did often. Not caught after all. Cecilia flopped back onto a settee and wiggled her bare toes at him, grinning that funny grin with the gap between her two front teeth, and Jacob had to shift his drink glass to his lap to cover his reaction.

  “Grazie a dio,” Cecilia exclaimed. “How I hate those shoes. And those interminable dinners. Tell me again, Marco, why we bother?”

  “He doesn't want to tell you, because he's afraid you won't go anymore,” came a voice Jacob had never heard before. The voice was smooth, deep and cultured, and the man that it belonged to didn't match it at all. Jacob stared. He looked like a pirate. Oh, not on the surface, mind you. The suit was Armani, even Jacob could tell that. He was impeccably dressed and groomed. The dark hair was swept back ruthlessly from a face carved in larger, more masculine lines than Cecilia, but similar nonetheless. The twins resembled him too, but where they were all twinkling eyes and mischief, this man was all uncompromising challenge. He radiated power. He smiled lightly along with his words, but the smile never touched his eyes, and Jacob was absolutely mesmerized by him.

  “Introduce me to your guest?” the man said, and Cecilia had the grace to look a little guilty.

  “I'm sorry. Alessio, this is Father Jacob Ellory. Father, my brother, Alessandro Rossi.”

  “Father.” Alessio Rossi held out his hand, and Jacob shook it. He felt the same jolt got through him that he felt every time Cecilia smiled at him a certain way. The other man's palm was warm and hard against his, and callused instead of soft. He let go just a bit too quickly and ducked his head against Alessio's quizzical look.

  “Pleased to meet you, signore.”

  “Alessio will be here for at least a week, Jacob. Perhaps he might be of assistance to you on some of the research you wish to do. He's quite the family historian.” Cecilia grinned impudently at her brother, who swatted at her on his way over to hug the twins.

  “Thank you. I'd like that.”

  Dark eyes flashed at him over one shoulder as Alessio glanced back at him. “So would I, Father. I always enjoy rambling on about the family and our collections.”

  “And he does. Endlessly. It's most tedious.” Gianni ducked a well-aimed smack as he finished and was engulfed in a bear hug. They pounded on each other's backs, then Alessio moved on to embrace Damien. Jacob snickered when the twins hugged each other dramatically afterwards. It was reassuring to Jacob to see such a normal family scene unfold, because for fleeting moments now and then the whole lot of them seemed somehow inhuman. More or less, he wasn't sure, bu
t simply not. This sort of affectionate display made Jacob feel like they were just people, and that loosened his chest a bit.

  Jacob spent the rest of the evening sitting quietly and listening to the others insult each other. It was more fun than it sounded like. The addition of Alessio seemed to make everyone, with the possible exception of Marco, more animated. In the case of Damien and Gianni, that made them almost frenzied. They bounced off the walls. Cecilia sparkled. Jacob found himself smiling with her, admiring the dark sheen of her hair and the little gap between her front teeth. He admired the twins just as easily, with their happy smiles and bouncy ways, and he could not help but sneak glances at Alessio as well. The whole lot of them amazed him. The night erased all of the bad feelings he'd had the day before and then some.

  Agreeing to see Alessio the next day, Jacob excused himself with every intention of going to bed. The spirit of the evening seemed to affect him more than he realized though, because he couldn't settle down. He tried reading, but the trashy mystery novel he'd brought with him failed to hold his interest. He thought about going to find the twins, but decided not to intrude. Finally he went to the library to grab a few reference books, then retreated to his workroom to make notes and study his Venetti.

  The first book he cracked open was the tome on family crests. Rossi was a very popular surname in Italy. They all had variations of the same heraldic design. A great helm topped by plumes, and a shield cut into four sections holding eagles and lions. Some families living closer to the coasts even had sea lions. But none of them carried the symbol he was looking for. Only one variant was an obscure reference to a family that had held a powerful position in Venice for a brief fifty-year period during the 1600s. Apparently the family was extremely wealthy, and exceptionally infamous. They fell from social grace sometime around 1680 and removed from Venice to settle much farther south, where they were unable to regain their former magnificence. The crest for that particular branch of the family was a radical departure from the others. It showed a shield crowned by a ship instead of a helm, and on the shield itself it had just two images: a bend sinister and a lion extant, with a scaled, finny tail and a glorious pair of feathered wings. Jacob imagined that if he went to the Rossi palazzo in Sicily he would see that crest hanging over the door.

  Next he went to his volumes on Venetti. He'd been researching the man for the better part of two years. How had he missed references to his excommunication? Obviously it was common knowledge. Father Bertolli and Father Fermozzi both knew about it. He scoured both books that he'd brought from his office at the University and found nothing. No mention of Easter, or excommunication, or trial. The only things the books told him were what he already knew. That Matteo Venetti killed himself, and that he died unshriven, and therefore was not buried on holy ground. Jacob made a note to talk to Father Bertolli about whether or not his knowledge came from school history, as he claimed, or from some obscure Church history.

  Research wore him out where nothing else had during the day, and Jacob sat and stared into to space for a while, unwilling to make the trek back to his room. The Venetti drew him, as it always did, and he lifted the cover off and stared at it instead of the wall. The painting was much more pleasant. Except that it wasn't. Once again, Jacob was struck by how very ordinary it was. No hint of the talent that came out in the later allegorical paintings showed in this portrait. It was simply a flat, dull Renaissance picture. It made him crazy.

  He stared at the painting long and hard, until his vision blurred around the edges, and he couldn't figure it out. Finally he just let himself drift, running ideas through his mind, but not really thinking, which sometimes helped him to organize his thoughts. That night it did little for his organizational skills. It simply pushed him into a light doze.

  The dreams came, completely unexpected, as vivid as a movie reel. A young man, with long, sensitive fingers, a journeyman painter, filling in the background colors on a portrait started by his master. A woman, dressed in deep blue-green to match her eyes sitting for the painting, flirting, teasing, laughing at him. Too bad, she told him, that he had no patron. No sponsor. That he would always be a poor boy from Venetia who would never be admitted to the academy because his master would never let him paint. The anger coloring the boy's cheeks, the answering snarl in his voice as he promised to make her eat her words. They were all sailing by in a blur of sight and sound, and when Jacob snapped awake he was still dizzy from the rush.

  Shocked, Jacob stared at the painting as if he expected it to start talking to him. Like it already had. He quickly covered the painting again and left. He wanted to go to his room and crawl into bed and cover his head. It was like seeing a ghost, and his heart raced and his temples throbbed. Jacob was almost to the door of his suite before he calmed down. When he did, he realized that he needed to write it all down, just in case. No way was he going back to his workroom tonight, though. And he certainly wasn't taking a chance on the Venetti in the library telling him tales. His notebooks were all in one of those rooms, though, and he didn't have a single sheet of scrap paper in his room. There was a study downstairs, and if that failed him, Cecilia's morning room had stationary.

  It took him a while to find the study, and he kept running the dream through his mind over and over, trying to memorize the details. Now that he was more rational, he wanted to go back and check the details against the actual painting, see if it was just his subconscious playing a nasty trick on him. In the morning. When it was light. He grinned at his silly nervousness. He was turning into an idiot. He had even crossed himself in there somewhere, and automatic action. Silly. The study was dark too, but the smells of leather and ink reassured him. Until he heard the sounds.

  The sounds resolved themselves into the slap of flesh on flesh and the breathy exhalations that meant sex. His first thought was that the only thing they did in this house was fuck. His second was that he really didn't want to walk in on another one of Giovanni's conquests. He backed away, and started out, but froze in spite of himself when he heard a moaned name. Damien. Damien was in there, making those noises, and for some reason it pissed Jacob off. Maybe he felt bad for Gianni, although why he should he didn't know. He used that as an excuse to peer into the dark to see who called Damien's name, but he couldn't see anything more than a pair of shadows twisting and turning together on one of the deep leather couches.

  Moving closer stealthily, Jacob squinted, finally making out more than just a shade. Two bodies rolled and dipped coming together and snapping apart with great force. Damien was on top, on his knees, pushing his hips down into the man beneath him. The man. Jacob saw red. It had to be Vanni. He wanted to scream at Damien, to ask him what the Hell he thought he was doing. Some distant part of his mind was amazed at his rage on behalf of Damien's twin, but there it was. Didn't Damien know that this would kill Gianni if he found out? And shouldn't that thought scare Jacob right down to the core?

  Closer still, and Jacob could distinguish one body from another now, could smell the sweat and musk of them, mixed with the earthy, animal smell of the leather couch. His mouth was open, he was going to say something, anything, but he couldn't get the words to come out. The rhythm caught him, and he swayed with them, trying to tell them how wrong they were, but simply unable to speak. The man beneath Damien moaned, pushing back with his ass, pulling Damien deep inside, and his head snapped back, and Jacob saw two identical faces set in perfectly mirrored expressions of pleasure.

  It might very well kill Gianni, what Damien was doing, but only if Damien fucked him to death. Jacob's remaining breath left him in one giant whoosh, and his legs trembled beneath the weight of what he saw. Damien and Gianni, brothers, twins, and they moved together with the ease of practiced lovers, whimpering and begging. Muscles bunched, relaxed and strained, and hoarse breathing reverberated around the room. Part of it was his. Jacob's cock was a live thing in his pants, beating against his zipper, trying to find its way into his hand. Sick revulsion warred with dazed lust in h
is belly, and he was close enough to touch them, so close. They were moving faster now, bucking into it, and Jacob saw Damien's hand moving on Gianni's hard length, up and down in time with his increasingly brutal thrusts.

  His own hips were rolling, his ass clenched as if accepting them into him and Jacob whimpered along with them. He wanted to go as much as he wanted to stay, to go to bed and forget he ever saw this; to forget he ever liked it. He'd never been so hard in his life, not even his mysterious lady had produced this fever, and visions of Hell floated in his mind. Two loud, gasping moans sounded from the pair in front of him, and their bodies stiffened and jerked with orgasmic spasms. Jacob stuffed his fist into his mouth and bit down hard enough to draw blood, and his come was a hot, wet lump in his trousers.

  The two were like one, now, wrapped around each other in a sweaty pile; their breathing slowing and evening out. Jacob was frozen. He must have made some sound, a small noise, even though he was afraid he'd never be able to force words out again. Two dark heads came up, and they looked at him. Damien and Gianni, who made him laugh, who made him like them, looked at him. And they smiled. The scene was so familiar, just like Giovanni and Cristina, except that their smiles were genuine, not sly. One of them, Damien he thought, held out a hand and beckoned to him, and Jacob stifled a sob.

  Shaking his head violently, shaking all over really, Jacob backed away. He'd been through a lot these last few weeks in the way of surprises, and arousal and feelings that he had long suppressed. But nothing had ever, not in the last few weeks and not before, been as much of a temptation to him as that outstretched hand and those welcoming smiles. Smiles that melted into concern as they uncoiled and moved toward him, naked bodies gleaming in the dull light from the open door.

  He ran. He turned on his heel and ran as fast as he could away from them, ignoring their worried shouts. Jacob pelted down the halls to the front door, for once beating the footman to it. Out, out of that house, running like Venetti's painted Hellspawn had come to life and were on his heels. He didn't stop running until he was far away from the Palazzo Miggliozzi and all of its insane asylum inhabitants. His lungs hurt, and he was gasping, and his pants were wet and sticky and thoroughly uncomfortable.