Gladly Beyond (4 page)

“I’m not sure my father is going to approve of this change.”

“Boy, I don’t give a damn what your daddy has to say—”

Crack.

A tall man strode into the room. Head high. Gaze firm.

Of course.

It had been almost too predictable.

Dante D’Angelo.

The industry hot-shot who used well-oiled charm, and little else, to assess art.

Basically, the one actor this melodrama had been missing.

Dante nodded to us all.

“Welcome, Mr. D’Angelo.” The Colonel lifted a hand.

Natalia visibly perked, her body canting toward Dante. I got the distinct impression all her manicured primping had been for Dante D’Angelo’s benefit. Granted, I heard that was how
most
women responded to him. The man was definitely a player.

Pierce, on the other hand, bristled like a tomcat spotting competition.

“I apologize for my tardiness.” Dante’s voice was deep and smooth with an unexpected West Coast American twang. He shut the door behind him.

“Alone, I see,” the Colonel said. “Will your twin be joining us?”

Dante shook his head. “Branwell sends his regrets for today.”

“That’s fine. Have yourself a seat, boy.” The Colonel waved at a chair. “I trust you already know Claire Raythorn and Pierce Whitman.”

“By reputation. We’ve never had the privilege of meeting.” Dante set down a briefcase, greeting us both with a polite smile and nod.

Dante settled into the chair across the table from me, somehow taking up more than his fair share of oxygen.

He didn’t just own the room.

He
saturated
it.

Dante was not classically handsome, per se. His nose was a little too long and his features too strong, though his meticulously man-scaped stubble and dark wavy hair certainly added.

No, he was somehow more than the sum of his looks. He hinted of shadowy, more dangerous things. An apex predator.

He sat back with an attitude that said I-am-literally-larger-than-life.

Which he truly was. So much bigger than I would have expected. You can’t get a true sense of size from a photograph. He was tall enough to make even
me
feel dainty, which was saying something.

Given his last name and Mediterranean coloring, I had always assumed the D’Angelo twins were Italian. Hadn’t I read somewhere he was an Italian earl?

But Dante’s accent was as American as rootbeer and peanut butter. No trace of anything foreign. And the physique in his Armani suit was more hulking Viking than lean Italian. Only genetics could grant a man that kind of bulk.

Natalia certainly made her position evident. She instantly popped over to the sidebar—wiggle-walking in her tight skirt and high stilettos—and snagged a bottle of water.

“We’re so glad you made it today, Mr. D’Angelo,” she crooned as she
leeeaaned
into his shoulder to set the bottle in front of him, giving everyone at the table a solid understanding of exactly how low her blouse was cut.

Sheesh.
Have some self-respect.

Startled, Dante pulled away, shooting her a smooth smile, eyes staying firmly on her face.

“Thanks.”

Dante also didn’t rubberneck as Natalia wiggled her way back to her seat. Granted, Pierce shot Dante a hostile look and then ogled her backside for the both of them. A deliberately antagonizing display for both Dante and myself.

Not that Dante seemed to care. He glanced at Pierce and the Colonel, studying them for a moment, as if tracing something I couldn’t see. Then he swiveled back toward me, settling farther into his chair.

He met my gaze with a tight grin that did not reach his eyes.

It was a very nice smile, full of white hyper-straight teeth. The kind of smile I imagine a tiger gives before eating you for breakfast.

I didn’t smile back.

Instead, I pointedly turned my head toward the Colonel. I wasn’t being rude; I was just making my position clear.

Right before Grammy’s death, I had spent a month authenticating the provenance of a suspected
Madonna and Child
by Gaimbattista Pittoni. (Venetian. Baroque.) The influential owner of the painting wanted to send it to auction at Sotheby’s in New York.

I painstakingly researched the provenance, artistic technique, mass spectrometry age analysis . . . the usual routine. I concluded the painting was a genuine early work of Pittoni based on use of line, the unique mixture of Pittoni’s azure blue, blah, blah . . .

But the day I returned from burying Grammy, I got a phone call.

For some reason, Sotheby’s had decided to get a second opinion—the D’Angelo brothers.

Apparently, Dante and Branwell D’Angelo spent all of ten minutes looking over the Pittoni
Madonna and Child
before declaring it a fraud, created in the late 1960s by a pair of well-known Russian forgers.

Yeah. No discussion of painterly technique. No questions about provenance. No assessment of the oil paint.

Just a quick lookie-loo and
bam
. Here’s our ‘professional’ opinion.

As if.

Sotheby’s refused the Pittoni painting. The owner was devastated. I lost a considerable amount of professional credibility.

So I did what any self-respecting woman would do—I found a bar and drowned my sorrows in one mojito too many.

Don’t judge.

I managed to drag myself home on the Tube and stumbled into our Kensington flat. Only to find Pierce cuddled up with his father’s assistant, Heather. (Literature grad. Slutty. Desperate.)

So yeah. The entire world knows the rest of the story.

Part of me felt that if Dante hadn’t negated my appraisal of the Pittoni, I wouldn’t have gotten drunk and might have reacted more calmly to walking in on Pierce and Heather.

The rational part of my brain recognized I could hardly blame Dante D’Angelo for Pierce’s infidelity and subsequent cruelty in filming and posting that video. From Dante’s point of view, he had just been doing his job.

But that didn’t stop me from disliking him. I disliked that my pulse rose when he came into the room. Disliked that I wanted to watch him, follow him with my eyes, study him in his natural habitat . . .

Stop!

Not. Attractive.

I refused to be another one of his fangirls.

I dug my fingernails into my palm.

In my peripheral vision, I noted Dante angle his head, keeping his dark eyes firmly fixed on me.

What? Was this part of his alpha posturing?

“Now, we begin.” The Colonel placed his hands, palms down, on the table. “I thank you all for being here today. As you can see, I’m an old man—”

“I’ve always said you only get better with age, Colonel,” Pierce said.

“Stuff it, boy. You’ll have plenty of time to suck up to me later.” The Colonel shot Pierce a warning glance.

Wow. Not much love there. My flame of hope burned brighter.

“As I was saying,” the Colonel continued, “I am not getting much younger. Though some might argue, I
am
becoming more eccentric. As you all probably know, I am the sole heir to two old family lines. I have vaults of unknown . . . stuff, I guess I’ll call it. I’ve been meaning for years to hire someone to assess and catalog it. But I want to make sure I hire the right person. I originally signed a contract with Mr. Whitman and Ms. Raythorn of Whitman Auction Services to do just that. However, with the changes in WAS staffing, I pulled out of the project to let things simmer down a bit.”

Translation: My mega-viral, mojito-infused rampage gave him cold feet.

“But I’m back in the game.” The Colonel cleared his throat. “Or, rather, I have decided it’s ‘game on.’ Which is why you all are here. Despite any personal differences, the three of you are some of the best in the business.”

Dante continued to stare at me.

Did I exude man-hating pheromones? I had plenty of reasons to be annoyed with him. But why the reverse?

Or was he like Pierce? Just trying to get under my skin. Rattle me. This meeting was high-stakes for us all.

“It goes like this,” the Colonel was saying. “You are each auditioning for the job of curating my collection of art and antiques. This would be a permanent, salaried position based here in Florence, as you have seen from the preliminary paperwork I sent out.”

Yeah. My jaw had hit the floor when I saw how much he was offering to pay. It was nearly four times the amount I had been earning with WAS. Being paid an exorbitant salary to curate a billionaire’s private art collection while living in my favorite boyfriend-city . . . sheesh, it was every appraiser’s dream. Career-saving employment for sure.

I yearned for this job with frightening ferocity.

Dante was still staring at me.

I shot him my firmest
down-boy
look.

He just narrowed his eyes. Unfazed.

Pierce noticed Dante’s noticing.

He shot a look back and forth between us, eyes speculative.

Done. With. Men.

Four

Dante

I
still couldn’t
see
her.

Correction. I obviously could see
Claire
just fine, even with back-lit sun rimming her in golden light.

Close-up, she was shockingly pretty.

The kind of woman a guy slaps a ‘trophy’ sticker on and fist-bumps his buddies as she walks by.

Not that
I
was that kind of guy . . .

She met my gaze with large, winter-blue eyes. Blond hair framing her face. High cheekbones. Heart-shaped upper lip. Defined chin.

Grace Kelly reborn.

But I couldn’t
see
her.

No shadows. No figures. Nothing.

She was absolutely
blank
.

I leaned to the right, casually resting on the carved arm of my chair, getting a different angle. Sometimes backlight could make
see
ing difficult, and she had been at a distance earlier . . .

I narrowed my eyes, trying to force her into focus.

Nothing.

I let out a stuttering breath. Swallowed. Adjusted my tie, loosening it a bit.

This was . . . not good. Unprecedented. I was in uncharted territory.

Claire arched a perfectly manicured eyebrow, coolly meeting my eyes. Every line of her telling me to
Knock. It. Off
.

Fine.

The Colonel opened a folder and shuffled through some papers. As usual, silvery forms gathered behind him. Like a repeating shadow, some clearer than others.

A young man in a pale Edwardian suit.

A grizzled Confederate soldier.

A stern man sporting a Pilgrim’s hat.

The typical shapes of who the Colonel had been in lives past.

But in between the figures, the air wavered. Like static noise made visible.

Odd.

Usually, the shadows were clean and methodical.

But at least the Colonel
had
shadows.

Pierce was much the same.

A man in a Nazi uniform.

A primped courtier in a powdered wig and embroidered frock coat.

A Scottish laird in a belted great kilt with a sword in hand.

But that visual static sputtered in and out around the figures.

Again . . . not good.

I shifted my gaze back to Claire.

Still nothing. No shadows. No figures. No static. Just empty sun-filled air behind her.

This had
never
happened before. Strangers were rarely staticky. And
no one
outside of my closest loved ones were blank.

What did this mean? Were things changing? Evolving?

Why couldn’t I
see
her?

I resisted scrubbing a hand over my face in frustration. Now I had to talk with Branwell and Tennyson about it.

We all
hated
talking about our GUTs—the Grossly Unusual Talents we got from our father. Yeah, kinda cutesy acronym but we’re guys. What else would we call our ‘gifts’?

If my GUT was having problems, what did it mean for my brothers? Were things fracturing further for all of us?

Would more and more people start to be blank to me? Or was there something unique about this situation?

I angled further back into my chair, tamping down my twitching anxiety. Or at least relegating it to a bouncing foot and drumming fingers.

There was nothing I could do about Claire’s missing shadows right now. I needed to focus on the Colonel. My family was depending on me to nail this meeting.

“Here’s how this is going to go down.” The Colonel gestured for some papers from Natalia. “There’s a work of art I found in my family vaults. Who knows how long it’s been there. I can’t find any record of it, and I want to know what I have. So, you will each be tasked with individually assessing it.”

“Just a regular assessment?” Pierce asked.

“Yep. Starting today, you will have no more than one month to complete the appraisal. You will have all resources at your disposal, as if you were already my employee. I will also pay your salary for that month. At the end of the month—or sooner if you can—you will present me with your findings and the reasons behind them.”

“So how will you decide who to hire?” Pierce again.