Falco’s tone annoyed him. “What, I need a note from Mama saying why I’m absent?”
“Are you sick?”
“Am I—?” Rafe shook his head. They were worried about him, was all. His expression softened.
“No, Nicolo. I’m not.”
Nick and Falco exchanged looks. Then Nick reached into the pocket of his suit jacket.
“You left this in the elevator.”
He looked at what was in Nick’s hand. Hell. Chiara’s white cotton panties. He’d forgotten to tell the clerk at Saks to provide his wife with lingerie, but it didn’t matter; there was something about all that innocent white cotton that—
“Rafe?”
His head came up. Nick’s eyebrows were raised. So were Falco’s.
“Yeah,” he mumbled, and grabbed the panties from his brother.
“Either you’ve taken to cross-dressing,” Falco said calmly, “or more than the elevator was going down.”
Another time Rafe would have laughed. Now he was too busy trying to stuff the panties into his pocket.
“Very amusing.”
“Does this have to do with that woman you said was staying here?”
“No. Yes.” Rafe glared at Nick. “Hey, man, what is this? An interrogation?”
His brothers looked at each other again.
“It’s called brotherly concern,” Falco said wryly. “It’s what happens when you have a brother who’s always behaved a certain way and all of a sudden he begins doing stuff that doesn’t make sense.”
“Look, I’m fine. Okay? I’m not a kid. And—”
“We’re worried about you, man.”
Rafe’s righteous indignation vanished. They were worried. He could see it. Besides, putting this off wouldn’t make the telling any easier.
“Yeah.” He cleared his throat. “Uh, anybody for a beer?”
“No,” Falco growled.
Nick gave him a sharp elbow in the ribs. “Beer sounds good.”
Falco glared at him. Nick shrugged his shoulders, raised his eyebrows, did everything he could to transmit the message. Back off. Give him time. Don’t crowd him. Okay?
A muscle ticked in Falco’s jaw. He was not good at backing off, but after a couple of seconds he nodded.
“Beer’s fine.”
The brothers marched into the kitchen. Nick almost tripped over a woman’s high-heeled boot. He grinned, gave Falco another elbow. Falco looked, grinned, but then the two of them frowned.
The situation might have been funny, but it wasn’t. They had come here worried that Rafe was sick. Now they knew whatever was wrong with him had something to do with a woman. A woman for whom he’d lost a week’s worth of appointments. A woman he was so hot for he’d undressed her in his elevator. Okay, sure, each of them had done the elevator bit or something close to it, but for one of them to change the very pattern of his life…
Not good. Not good at all.
They took the cold, sweating bottles of beer Rafe took from the Sub-Zero fridge. Opened the bottles, drank, wiped the backs of their hands across their mouths, gave him time, gave him time, gave him—
“I got married.”
Nick’s beer bottle slipped through his hand. He made a last-minute grab and caught it, but not before half its contents spilled on his shoes. The bottle in Falco’s hand tilted, sending a waterfall of beer down the front of his suit.
“You what?”
Rafe raised his shoulders, let them drop.
“I got married. A week ago.”
Nick looked at Falco. “He got married.”
Falco nodded. “The white underpants.”
“He married a woman who wears white—”
“Okay,” Rafe said coldly, “that’s enough. We’re not going to do a comedy riff on my wife’s underwear.”
Silence. Then Nick cleared his throat. “Fine. What we’d really like to discuss is your wife.”
Rafe hesitated. Then he gave another of those shrugs. “Yeah. I just—The thing is, I don’t know where to start.”
“The beginning almost always works,” Falco said quietly.
Rafe nodded. He put his bottle of beer on the counter. His brothers did the same. Then they wandered into the living room, sat down, and Rafe began to talk.
He did as Falco had suggested. Began at the beginning, at the meeting called by their father.
“The old man was at his best,” he said grimly. “He didn’t just talk about dying, he talked about his soul.”
His brothers snorted. “What soul?” Nick said.
“I told him that, but he insisted he’d done something years ago, in Sicily, and now he had to make up for it.”
“And what did that have to do with you? For that matter, what does it have to do with your getting married?”