by Peggy Jaeger
“Angels singing.” I wasn’t at all sure I’d said the words aloud.
“What?”
I swallowed, trapped in his stare. “When you say my name, I swear I hear angels singing.”
“You’re the angel,” he whispered. In the next breath, his lips slid across mine.
He may have sounded and looked like a god, but he kissed like Lucifer himself, all heat and fire blasting from every movement of his mouth across mine. When his tongue slipped past my lips, he skimmed his hands down to my butt and pressed me as close as two people could get completely garbed in artic wear.
I heard someone moan, deep and throaty. In a heartbeat, I realized it was me.
Horrified, I yanked myself back with such force, I almost fell. Santini was quick, though, and reached out to save me.
“Stop. Let me go.”
My hand flew to my mouth, my lips burning with the taste of him.
He started to say something, but I cut him off. “No. I can’t do this. You can’t do this. You’re a priest—”
“No, I’m not.”
“Well, not ordained, yet,” I said, shaking my head, “but almost, so it’s the same thing. Don’t argue semantics with me.”
“Gia.” He took a deep breath in and shook his head. “I’m not a priest. Ordained, soon to be, or in any other way.”
He looked so sincere, I stopped for a moment and just stared at him.
“Yes, you are.”
“No, sweetheart. I’m not.”
Not a priest? Yes, he was…wasn’t he?
The little niggle jerking at me a moment ago tugged firm and rough in my head.
I nailed him with a hard-eyed stare. “Why did Sister Agnes call you Timothy?”
“Because it’s my name.” He cocked his head and shrugged. “Timothy Santini.”
“I know that.” I flipped my hand in the air like Mama does when she thinks you’re being thick-headed and stupid. “But she didn’t say ‘Father Timothy.’ ”
“Correct, because, like I’ve been trying to tell you, I’m not a priest. I’m—”
“T? What are you doing back here?”
I turned my head to the voice. It was so familiar I had to blink twice before my brain registered the person standing behind Santini.
Clad in priestly black from head to toe, save for the weird green skullcap and gloves, stood…Santini. Another one.
Gesu. Two of them?
“What…who…” Those were the last two words I remember saying before the world went black in front of me.
Chapter Ten
“She’s coming around. Her eyelids are fluttering.” Chloe’s voice sounded far, far away. “Come on, Gia. Wake up.”
When I pried my eyes open, the first thing I realized was I was flat on my back on the ground, something warm and soft underneath me.
The second thing was that I was surrounded by people, like when Dorothy woke up in her own bed at the end of The Wizard of Oz. Chloe, Sister Agnes, and two, identical Tim Santinis, one of whom was holding my hand and rubbing my knuckles in a worried death grip.
A quick roll of my eyes told me I was in the back of our booth.
“Are you okay?” the Tim holding my hand asked, concern draping his face.
“I’m confused.” He held on to me while I stood up. “What happened?”
“You fainted,” Chloe told me, her arms folded across her chest. “You’re lucky, too. Tim caught you before you hit your head on the ground.”
I looked at the Tim holding my hand and then to the other Tim standing next to him, a duplicate look of concern on his face.
In an instant, the proverbial dawn broke.
“Twins?” My gaze shot back and forth between the two of them.
“Identical,” the other Tim said.
“You’re Father Tim?” I asked the one cloaked in the cassock.
“No, I’m Thomas. He’s Tim.” He cocked his thumb at the guy holding my hand and grinned.
I looked up at him. “You’re not a priest?”
“Not a priest.” He shook his head and grinned exactly like the guy standing next to him. “Not even close. I manage a restaurant downtown.”
“But I thought—”
“I know what you thought,” Tim the non-priest said. “It’s what everyone thinks until they see us side by side.”
“We’re monozygotic twins,” the real Fr. Santini said. “Identical. Our mom’s had three sets, us and two sets of girls.”
“Dinner at your house must be fun,” Chloe said, her lips lifting. “Or confusing as all hell. Sorry, Father. I didn’t mean that the way it came out.”
“No worries,” Fr. Santini, the real one, told her.
“Most people can never tell us apart,” Tim said. He glanced over at his brother, and his adorable grin grew. This grin, his, had my insides twitching.
“It’ll be a whole lot easier now since your wardrobe is so telling.”
They both laughed, high-fived, and grinned at me.
Twins. Holy Mother of God.
“Well, now, everything is fine here,” Sister Agnes said, “so I’d better be getting back to my booth. The crowd is getting bigger.”
“I need to go, too,” Fr. Tom said. To his brother—Gesu, his brother—he added, “Call Mom. She wants to talk about Christmas Eve.”
Chloe’s attention was diverted by a couple of women who stopped to buy sauce, so it was just me and Tim, the non-priest, left.
“You’re really not a priest?” I asked.
“Like I said, not even close.”
My head screamed yippie and my heart went zing.
“Why did you think I was?”
I explained about setup day. “When Mama pointed to where you were standing, I thought you were the new guy. You were dressed all in clergy black, and I didn’t see anyone else around I didn’t recognize.”
“Tom recruited me into helping, but a little while after we got here, Fr. Mario called him back to the rectory for something. And the reason I was all in black is because I was heading to work as soon as I was done.”
“You manage a restaurant, you said?”
“Yeah. And before you ask, total black is the uniform.”
It was easy to see how I’d made the mistake in his identity.
“I know Tom told everyone about our family during his first homily. Three sets of twins makes for a good introduction story. I’m surprised you didn’t make the connection then.”
I groaned out loud and rolled my eyes. “I would have if I’d heard it.” I explained about Arianna’s needing a diaper change. “By the time I got back upstairs, Communion had started, so I never heard what he said.”
His sigh was loud and long. “When you ran away from me in the bakery, I couldn’t figure out what the heck was wrong. After working together at the setup, it seemed we got along pretty good. There was something there, between us. I wanted to ask you out, was just about to suggest going for coffee when I got called away before I could.”
“All those questions about sacraments and marriage,” I said, remembering the conversation in full detail. “You were, what? Trying to find out if I was seeing anyone?”
“Yup. When you said you weren’t, it told me I had a shot. But like I said, I had to leave. There was a crisis at the restaurant. There’s always a crisis at the restaurant.”
He rolled his eyes, and we both laughed.
“I was thinking about you nonstop that day. I don’t even remember what the crisis was. I just knew I really wanted to see you again. When I saw you at Pontevecchio’s, I couldn’t believe my luck. But then, just when I was going to ask to see you again, you bolted.”
I lowered my head in shame.
“I was convinced I’d misread the signs between us. Convinced you didn’t, I don’t know, like me.”
“No.” I shook my head. “The problem was I liked you too much.”
It was his turn to nod. “I was all set to just try and put you out of my mind when I got the surpris
e of my life and saw you sitting on that park bench.”
“It was a surprise, all right.”
His eyes went all soft, his lids heavy, and I could tell he was remembering what happened between us in the park the same way I was.
“When you kissed me, well, all I could think was I was going straight to hell for having corrupted a priest.”
He grinned again. “I tried to talk to you about it. I wanted to know why you kept running away from me. I didn’t know what was wrong. I know kissing a total stranger like that was, well, not usual. But Gia”—he pulled me in closer—“I truly couldn’t help myself. It was like someone pushed me from behind, straight into you. Once there, I didn’t want to let you go.”
I told him I’d gotten the same sensation.
“You have no idea what this past week has been like for me. Thinking I was going to hell one minute and not minding at all the next. Plus, I was as confused and mad as all get out every time your brother pretended not to know me. It’s plain now, he didn’t.”
I gave him a quick rundown on the times I’d run into his brother and how angry I’d been when Tom, the real Fr. Santini, gave no indication we’d not only met but had been involved in a public make-out fest.
Tim stared down at me for a moment, his lips curving at the corners, making my toes curl again.
“Gia.”
It was then I realized he was still holding my hand, had been the entire time. And just like before, it felt so right.
“So,” he said, tugging me even closer until we were standing toe to toe, touching knee to knee. I had to lean back to see him clearly, and when I did, he slipped his hands around my waist. “About asking you out.”
I smiled.
“Now that you know it’s not—how did you put it?—forbidden for us to see one another?”
I squinched up my face, embarrassed at being so dramatic.
“How about dinner?”
“When?”
He laughed. “Right now seems good to me. What do you say?”
Gazing up at his grinning face, seeing the laughter and something more dancing in his eyes, I nodded.
“I just need to tell Chloe I’m leaving.”
“No, you don’t,” she called out from the front of the booth. She snuck her head around the partition, smiled, and added, “Go. Please. Now. All these pheromones shooting off you two are making me miss my husband. Leave. Tu vai. Go!”
How to be a Good Italian, Lesson Eight:
When you’re told to leave, do it.
No questions asked, no arguments.
Without another word, hand in hand, we did.
****
So…
The night before Christmas Eve is usually the busiest one of the St. Rita’s Festival. A year later, this still proved true.
Mama, Daddy, and I were all working, the family sauce flying off the shelves. This year, though, I had the added bonus of having my boyfriend of a year helping out as well.
From our first dinner date, Tim and I had been inseparable.
This was the first relationship I’d ever been in where everyone in my family, including a usually disapproving Nonna, liked the boy.
Tim was the best guy I knew. Truly. He worked hard, long hours at the restaurant, which had just expanded; he visited his parents every week, spoke to his siblings frequently, and treated me like what my father calls “an Italian princess.”
We’d had a busy year together. I’d passed my licensing exams and had been recruited by the same firm where Tim’s cousin Rocco worked, after he’d put in a good word for me.
I still lived at home, but since Tim had his own place downtown, more often than not I just stayed with him on the nights and days we were able to see one another.
Miraculously, my parents never said a word about the arrangements, and Nonna never threw a malocchio our way. Both of those very telling occurrences.
At nine p.m., the festival closed, and we started to pack up the unsold jars.
“I’ve only got a couple quarts left,” Mama said.
Daddy kissed her on the cheek. “Everybody loves your sauce, Frankie.”
“Gia and me can finish up,” Tim told my parents. “Why don’t you two head on home?”
A strange look passed between him and my dad, and then Mama nodded, a small smile on her lips.
They each kissed me, told me they loved me, and they’d see me at home. Before leaving, Mama pulled me into one of her bone-crushing hugs and Daddy looked like he had tears in his eyes when he hugged me, too.
“Okay, that was weird,” I said when they’d gone.
“What was?” Tim circled his hands around my waist and pulled me into his arms. He dropped a kiss on my nose, then nuzzled it.
I swear to the Holy Virgin, my thighs started to vibrate.
“They’re gonna see me in ten minutes, but from the way they acted, you’d think I was never coming home again.”
Tim shook his head and pulled me in closer. “Not never,” he said. “Just not as frequently.”
Now I was really confused. “What?”
He pulled back, keeping me at arm’s length. I don’t ever think I’ve seen such a serious look on his face in all the time I’ve known him.
“Gia.”
“Every time,” I whispered, staring up at him. “Every time you say my name, I swear it sounds like angels singing to me.”
He trailed a finger down my cheek and across my jaw. Taking a step back, still staring at me, he reached into his vest pocket and pulled out something I couldn’t see. Whatever it was, it was small, because he fisted it in his hand.
He took my hand in his and—Holy Mother of God—got down on one knee.
“Since we met under these lights a year ago”—he pointed his chin to the top of the booth—“I figured this was the best place to do this.”
“Tim?” I could barely whisper his name.
His smile bent into a crooked line, his brow folding together in the middle. “I don’t know if you can understand this, but when we met last year, from the very first hour we were together, I knew this is what I wanted. That you were what I wanted. In my life. Forever.”
“Tim.” Tears burned my eyes.
“My father always told us boys we’d know the girl we were meant to spend a lifetime with in a heartbeat of meeting her. I never believed it. I didn’t think it was possible. Then, I met you.”
He unfisted his hand and held up a ring between his thumb and index finger.
No, not a ring: a boulder. The thing was huge. The Christmas lights surrounding the booth bounced off it, making the area around us look like bright daylight.
“Tim!”
“And I knew what my father told us was true.”
I couldn’t stop the tears from water-falling down my face.
“Gia Gabriella Bernadetta San Valentino.” He grinned, and I laughed through the tears.
Why did I have such a long name?
“I can’t think of a future that doesn’t have you in it. I’ve loved you from the moment I first saw you, and I promise I will never stop. I couldn’t. I want a life with you, Gia. Children. A big house filled with them. As many as you want. But I want you most. Forever. Will you marry me? Will you make that life with me?”
How to be a Good Italian, Lesson Nine:
When the love of your life asks you to marry him,
say yes.
So I did.
A word about the author…
Peggy Jaeger writes about strong women, the families who support them, and the men who can’t live without them. When she isn’t writing, you can find her either painting, crafting, or cooking. She loves to hear from readers on her website: PeggyJaeger.com and on her Facebook page:
http://peggyjaeger.com
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Peggy-Jaeger-Author/825914814095072?ref=bookmarks
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