by Peggy Jaeger
I nodded and sighed, to which he laughed again. “You’re a good mimic. That sounds just like her, straight down to the craggy voice. Anyway, she’s been with us since I was little, so I understand the whole extended-family-living-situation thing.”
His lips twitched at the corners, and I have to admit for a hot second I had the notion to stretch over and put mine firmly against them.
“We have a lot in common, you know,” he said.
“La familigia, for sure.”
His grin grew. “Where are you in the food chain?”
“Last of six. I was an oops baby. My sister, Chloe, is the closest in age to me, and she’s nine years older. Daddy and Mama thought they were done when she came.”
“My sister Elizabeth Ann was an oopsie, too. And I’ll deny this if you ever tell my siblings, but she’s my favorite.”
Awww. “How much younger is she than you?”
“Sixteen years. She just turned eleven.”
So that made him twenty-seven. “That’s a lifetime. My brother Gianni is the oldest of us, and he’s forty-two, eighteen years my senior. When I was a kid, he was already married. I’ve got a few nieces and nephews who could pass for my siblings. That gets kinda weird at times, having a seventeen-year-old call you zia.”
“Like I said, we’ve got a lot in common.”
This was so nice, just sitting here, having a normal conversation with a guy. So different from all the other recent dates I’d had with guys my aunts and uncles set me up with, no-neck musclemen with comic-book educations and old-world notions on virginal brides.
With the next breath, it dawned on me this wasn’t a date. Not even remotely resembling one because, hello, the man sitting across from me wasn’t a potential love interest, but a priest.
“I bet you were a cute kid,” he said, breaking through my thoughts, his eyelids going to half-mast again as his gaze swept across my face and neck. And lower.
Whoa. Flirty, much? My new cleric was giving off a very secular vibe here.
A totally hot, available-male, secular vibe.
“So, Gia San Valentino.” He leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table now, his hands clasped and close to mine, that cut-to-the-bone jacket pulling against his massive shoulders. “What are you doing here on this chilly December afternoon?”
Okay, that tickling sensation between my legs? Yeah, it turned into a full-blown, thigh-rubbing clench when he said my name. He made my name sound soft, smooth, seductive, like a hot puff of wispy smoke floating on a breeze.
I crossed my legs and then too late appreciated this was absolutely the wrong thing to do. All the blood in the lower part of my body had pooled to the most private part of me. It actually pulsed—pulsed—when my thighs crossed over one another.
“I-I needed to get out of the house for a little while.” I tried valiantly to calm the way my breath was coming in spurts. “It’s Sunday, so you know, everyone’s over. Everyone. It gets a little…” I shrugged.
Santini nodded and reached out to tap the top my hand. A warm bullet of awareness fired at my nerve fibers in the spot where he’d touched.
Branded. I’d been branded was all I could think.
“Too much, yeah. I get that. I’ve got a big family too, and although I love them all, sometimes it’s just good to be alone. To get away from all the noise and commotion.”
It was my turn to nod.
“I love my siblings, dearly,” he said, “but with so many of us so close in age, it gets claustrophobic at times.”
I’d been thinking the same thing.
He hadn’t moved his hand from the top of mine, and now his index finger was doing a slow, steady crawl across my knuckles. Almost like a—gulp—caress.
Gesu, Gia, what the heck?
Deep down inside my brain where the logical, analytical receptors were stored, it registered that the way he was stroking my hand wasn’t exactly proper behavior or accepted touch for an almost-priest. But in the area where my emotions, feelings, and desires lived? Well, that bunch was screaming, “Hell, yeah!”
I couldn’t move my hand.
Okay, let’s be honest. I didn’t want to move my hand. Ever.
The mix of confusing and conflicting emotions bowling through my system regarding this guy was beginning to get to me. One minute, just staring at him and hearing his voice could turn me to mush; the next, it was like I was talking to my brother. And now, well, my heart was pounding, and my skin was prickling and tingling like a live, spliced wire was electrifying through it at just his simple touch.
While he continued with his absentminded finger stroking, we engaged in a mutual staring competition sweltering enough to start me sweating. The deep cognac and brighter gold flecks in his eyes were mesmerizing, and I couldn’t look away from them.
Mama had raised us with the notion that staring was one of the rudest things you could do, so I avoided it as much as possible. But right now, in the middle of Pontevecchios’s on a chilly December Sunday afternoon, I couldn’t look away from the delectable man in front of me.
I wanted to shrug out of my jacket because my armpits were dripping—as was another place on me—but that would mean I’d have to pull my hand away from the table where he was—God help me—fondling it. There was no way in hell I was going to do that. The moment I thought of hell, the notion I was paving my way straight there with my actions and thoughts danced a vigorous tarantella across my mind.
“You know”—his gaze wandered across my face—“I had a lot of fun yesterday at the festival setup. Much more than I thought I would. I was sorry I had to leave so soon.”
Swallowing, I simply nodded. I couldn’t get my brain synapses to fire to form a coherent response. Everything about him, from the way his gaze raked across my lips and back up to my own eyes to linger, to the rhythmic back and forth trailing of his index finger across my knuckles, even to the subtle yet totally intoxicating scent of clean soap and man drifting from him, floated through me.
I hadn’t had a drop of real alcohol in weeks (dinner wine doesn’t count), but I felt drunk just being in his presence. Drunk with desire, with need, with, Madre di Dio, longing.
I couldn’t read what was written in his eyes, but when his tongue skimmed across his lower lip and he leaned in a little closer to me across the table, I knew without a doubt that I had to put an end to this.
Mio Dio, we were in a public place where I was as well known as the owners. If someone recognized me or if any members of my connected family walked in and found me locked in a lust-filled eye orgy with the new parish priest, a priest who was, for lack of a better term, making love to my hand, I would be sure to not only suffer the fires of the underworld for all eternity, but before suffering that fate, my life would be turned into a living, breathing hell by my parents.
Just when I decided I really needed to pull my hand away and get a grip on the reality of this situation, Papa called out my name from the counter.
“Got ya pizzelles ready, Gia.”
I blinked. Hard. My flickering eyelids must have looked like I was tapping out Morse code, because Santini squeezed my hand. “You okay, Gia?”
This was becoming the question of the decade with people where I was concerned.
I had to physically will my hand to release itself from his. His fingers were long, straight, and solid. The nails and cuticles cared for, not in a fussy, metrosexual way, but in a man-who-was-conscious-of-his-appearance way.
I had to get away from this guy. Once you start noticing the way a man grooms his hands, you need to put some distance between the two of you because this will lead to other thoughts. Forbidden thoughts. Impure thoughts. Thoughts like what would those hands feel like trailing across your naked flesh? What would they be able to do to set your pulse endings on fire? Make you scream in ecstasy? Make you want to die for pleasure?
This man was forbidden on all counts. On every count.
“I-I need to go. To get home. They’re waiting. My family is
waiting. For me. For the pizzelles.”
Gesu. Now I was babbling, and that was never a good sign.
“Gia—”
“Have a fun visit with your grandfather.” I stood and threw my laptop into my bag. “I know he’s gonna love the cookies. Like Fr. Mario told you, they’re the best in town.”
Papa stood at the counter, my pizzelle box wrapped and waiting. He held it up, and I grabbed it.
“I’ll put it on your mama’s account,” he told me, his lifted-eyebrow gaze shifting from me to Santini and then back to me. “Nessum problema.” No worries.
If he only knew.
I nodded and threw a final “See you in church,” over my shoulder to Santini.
Outside, the wind had picked up and slapped me silly when I went through the door. I welcomed the frigid blast. I needed it to cool me down physically, emotionally, and, God forgive me, sexually.
Why in the name of all that’s holy and good did I react in such an out-of-control way toward him? I was all set to jump across the table and into his lap at one point.
I’d never acted this way with any guy. I’d never been in such a desire-filled haze that I forgot everything I’d ever been taught about how a good girl behaves.
The one time I hadn’t reacted to him like a sex-starved puttana was when he’d said mass that morning. Why not?
And then it hit me.
Could it really be as simple as that? Seeing him in his church vestments turned off any and all sexual thoughts about him. He was still as handsome as sin, but it hadn’t affected me in the least. It was only when he was garbed in regular cleric clothes that my brain went haywire.
Maybe I should just picture him in priestly attire every time I came in contact with him in the future.
I mulled this over as I sprinted home, the pizzelle box secure in my arms.
Chapter Five
Monday morning broke clear, cold, and way too fast for me. I had to be in lower Manhattan by eight a.m. to take the first part of my licensing exams, and since I hadn’t gone to bed until after two due to the last-minute nervous and stress-filled studying I’d tried to cram in, I was cranky, tired, and a little nauseous. Sleep had further eluded me due to constant images of a fair-haired man of the cloth drifting before my eyes.
Mama and Nonna had been up since four, Mama because of the postmenopausal insomnia that ruled her life and Nonna because she’d been a life-long farm girl, up before the first light, halfway done with chores by daybreak, and old habits died hard.
I would have been happy to be the only one awake and spared the coaxing and commanding to eat a huge breakfast to “help my brain.” All I wanted was coffee to wake me up and little bit of chocolate as a de-stressor. With these two domineering, mothering woman, that wasn’t about to happen.
I begged off a second helping of eggs, toast, and sausage and calculated if I avoided putting on any makeup, I would have a few extra minutes to run into a chain coffee shop and grab an extra-large cup of caffeine to go.
As I was dashing out the door, Mama stopped me and shoved a stuffed brown paper bag into my hands.
“Take this, Gia baby. It’s a piccolo spuntino for when you have a break. You gotta keep your brain cells nourished.”
The piccolo spuntino, or little snack, she handed me was enough to feed a family of four. It was so heavy that when I put it in my messenger bag my shoulder drooped, and I had to walk with my left hip pushed out to balance.
“Kiss the Holy Father for luck,” she ordered before she’d let me out the door.
Because, really, I had no recourse, I did. Then because it was expected, I crossed myself. With a last quick buss to Mama’s cheek and a loud “Ciao, Nonna,” I bolted out the door and jogged the four blocks to the downtown train.
The morning session of tests went by so fast, before I realized it, lunchtime rolled around and I was actually hungry. I had an hour and a half to kill before the afternoon session started, so I left the building for some needed fresh air and sunshine.
Two weeks before Christmas is not the time to be ambling casually around lower Manhattan. The holiday shopping hordes were larger than usual due to the unexpected, but lovely, warmer weather we’d woken to, and the sidewalks were chock-full with illegal vendors and hawkers trying to interest anyone and everyone in their “bargain-priced” items. As I left the testing center, I spotted a guy trying to unload designer handbags I knew sold at retail for over five hundred bucks each, for thirty dollars. They had to have fallen off a truck, as Mama would say.
I wondered if the vendor knew my Uncle Sonny.
It took me almost five minutes to cross the street from the testing center to Battery Park. I wanted some quiet time to myself to think, eat, and wind down a little, and sitting in the park, watching the harbor boats, was my idea of self-soothing.
I found a quiet bench in front of the seawall, planted myself on it, and took Mama’s brown bag from my purse. As I’d predicted, her small snack was anything but.
She’d sent me out with a liter bottle of Pellegrino, a full-sized sub sandwich on her homemade ciabatta bread, cut into two six-inch portions laden with prosciutto, provolone, a healthy splash of olive oil, sliced garden tomatoes, a few peppers, and some romaine lettuce. In a separate plastic container, she’d added two cannoli and three biscotti.
Francesca San Valentino, the patron saint of carbs.
It was a wonder we all didn’t weight five hundred pounds eating like this every day.
I settled into my seat and dug in.
The harbor water was calm, an effect of the warm weather, but listening to it slap and splash in a gentle staccato against the tugboat planks filled me with a relaxing and centering peace. I hadn’t had a moment to think about my life and my future for some time. I’d been studying like crazy for the licensing exams, and living at home was never a quiet place to be, with my various family members drifting in and out every day.
And let’s be honest: we weren’t exactly what you’d call a quiet bunch.
At twenty-four, I still lived under my parents’ roof, had no full-time paying job other than occasionally helping my father with his business books and those of a few of his business associates, and my love life was nonexistent.
It wasn’t that I didn’t get asked out. I did. Often. Plus, I was perpetually being set up by the aunts and uncles. I’d had a steady boyfriend all through high school, but we went our separate ways when we graduated. My choices had been limited in recent years to guys I met in college—who were all looking to score, not forge a life-time commitment—and then in accounting school who were, for lack of a better word, boring and absorbed either in numbers theory, finding jobs after graduation, or in just getting into my pants. The men my extended family routinely set me up with were mostly rough around the edges, wise-guy wannabes who wanted a conventional Italian bride they could keep barefoot, pregnant, and cooking.
So. Not. Me.
I needed to make some decisions about my life, and make them soon. First, pass the exams and get licensed. That accomplished, I could then look for a real job so I could afford to live on my own. This one might be the hardest to bring about since my parents were old-school thinkers who believed girls should stay home until they were married. They couldn’t understand why I didn’t want to go from their house to a husband’s house, and never experience what it would be like living on my own.
Lastly, I wanted to find the one special guy I could commit to. A guy who’d be family oriented like me, want kids, the minivan, a house in the ’burbs, the whole family-comes-first-and-always mentality I’d been breastfed on.
I wasn’t too picky. Obviously, I didn’t want him to look like a troll, but nice looking wouldn’t hurt since I’d be spending eternity staring across the kitchen table at his face. A job that paid well would be nice in a career where I didn’t need to worry he’d make one wrong move and wind up as fish food in the Meadowlands marshes.
Don’t laugh. Have I mentioned my Uncle Sonny?
/> A flash of mink-colored eyes passed in front of my mind, and my pulse kicked up a little at the memory of how they’d been focused on me at the volunteer setup and then again yesterday in the bakery. He’d been so intent on studying me, listening to me tell him about my family, sharing his own thoughts. If he hadn’t been a man of God, I swear, he’d have been the best first date I’d ever had.
But our meeting hadn’t been a first date, and he was a man of God.
In the next breath, I heard my name in a voice that warmed my entire body like a shot of fine, aged brandy.
I looked up, and the pair of eyes I’d been daydreaming about just a moment ago was staring straight at me, grinning from etched cheekbone to etched cheekbone.
“It’s my turn to ask this,” he said, as he sat down next to me. “What are you doing here?”
Words wouldn’t form in my brain. I could only stare at him, mute.
He looked, well— Amazing is the only word I can come up with. He’d been handsome as sin dressed all in black. Even his godly vestments hadn’t been able to dull his attractiveness. But today he was in purely civilian clothes, and my toes curled in my boots when I got a look at the total package.
A light blue chambray button-down shirt under another down vest, this one dark blue, covered his lengthy torso. Today he wore jeans—or I should say they wore him. Faded, split at one knee, they hugged his trim waist and thick thighs as snugly as when my nephew Lorenzo throws his chubby arms around me and squeezes a hug in his full-body contact, two-year-old way. Work boots, the color washed out and worn and earning their name, finished him off.
I’d never seen any man connected to the church not garbed in the standard-issue black from head to toe. It’s weird, but I don’t think I’d ever even imagined Fr. Mario in anything other than his clerical clothes, collar included.
Santini continued to gaze at me, killer smile in place, waiting for my reply.
Earth to Gia: Wake up!
“I…I have exams today…licensing exams.”
“Oh, yeah? What for?”
