Carl was about to shake his head no—Michael could see that—but then Danny nodded him imperiously over, and Carl shrugged and went. He took the corner of the sofa, and Michael sat next to him, sliding down as the soft cushions gave under his weight.
Suddenly he was wedged up against Carl like a girl on her boyfriend’s lap.
“Oh,” Michael said, surprised.
“Yes, oh,” Carl told him, wrapping his arm around Michael’s shoulders, his lips pursed in humor. “The only people who usually sit on this end of the couch are Josh and Grace. Apparently they’ve lived in each other’s back pockets for so long it doesn’t bother them.”
“But isn’t Grace Hunter’s boyfriend?”
Carl’s chuckle rumbled against Michael’s shoulder. “Yes. But we’re not a make-out-in-public bunch.”
Michael looked around again and realized it was true. “Why not?”
“People with secrets and pasts are private, I guess,” Carl said. “But that doesn’t mean we don’t cuddle.” He gestured with his chin to where Stirling was sitting in a beanbag chair, Molly was using him as a backrest, and Grace came to curl up at his feet.
“Friends since middle school,” Michael said, having heard them say it before.
“Yup. And not afraid to show it.”
Their conversation was interrupted when Felix walked to the console in the room’s center and cleared his throat. “Julia and Josh asked that Danny and I take this, which seems unfair, because this is really their story. That said, I’ll do the first part, Danny will do the rest, and our beloveds will tell us in private how many times we got the story wrong. We can bear any scolding they give us because we adore them.” He blew a kiss for Julia, who smiled fondly back.
Danny moved then from the wet bar where he’d been busy pulling something up on a computer, to the center of the room where he connected the computer with an adaptor. The viewing screen came alive, but not with a basketball game.
Instead there was a candid photo of an almost-familiar-looking young man, smiling and waving at somebody off camera. Fine-boned, dark-haired, and dark-eyed, he had delicate features, and even in the still photo, there was a tremendous vulnerability in his eyes and jaw.
And an amazing potential for grace.
“This,” Felix said, his tone low and sad, “is Matteo di Rossi, Leon di Rossi’s younger brother. He is important to us because he was Josh’s natural father.”
The air in the room grew fantastically still, as though all the occupants had forgotten to breathe.
“Nicely chosen, Julia,” Molly said, breaking the silence.
“Thank you,” Julia murmured, a faint smile on her face. “I was impressed with him myself.”
“As you should have been, dearest,” Felix said. “By all reports—yours, Leon’s, even the press—he was a very sweet boy. Matteo, sadly, had no idea that he’d fathered a child, and even if he had, he probably would not have claimed his son because his father was this man.” The picture on the viewing screen changed. “Benito di Rossi, who was not, by all accounts, a particularly safe person to be around.”
The man portrayed was several decades older than Matteo, his hair gray, his face wide and jowly. Matteo must have gotten his delicacy and grace from his mother, because the man in the photo had big square hands and the cold eyes of a fish. He also had a frame capable of great brutality; it emanated from the bulge of muscle in his arms and shoulders.
“Benito di Rossi worked his way up through the ranks to become one of the biggest smugglers in Italy. Of course ‘smuggler’ is a rather tame word, and it covers a variety of sins: drugs, women, guns, as well as art, rare plants, and endangered species. Benito di Rossi didn’t care what people were buying and selling. He made his money off a network of spies and bureaucrats who got the goods through international security checks and across country.”
“He looks like a bastard,” Grace said. “He’s dead, right?”
“Very,” Felix replied, not a hitch in his voice. “Assassinated by a competitor, whom Leon, in turn, brought down with a bomb in his yacht, effectively ending that particular trade war.”
“Yikes!” Chuck exclaimed. “These folks play for keepsies, don’t they?”
“Since his father died, not quite as much,” Felix told him. “Leon—pictured here—has in fact done a capital job of turning his business, which was like something out of The Godfather to a brand-new enterprise, like the Millenium Falcon.” The picture of Leon di Rossi, shirtsleeves rolled up as he walked the property line of his villa in Corfu, certainly made him look rugged and dashing.
“He’s kind of hot,” Grace said, surprised. He glared at Hunter from across the room. “You never told me he’s hot.”
“Straight,” Hunter said without blinking.
“So straight,” Carl seconded.
“There is no bend in that penis,” Chuck added in case anybody was confused.
“How lovely to hear somebody is,” Julia inserted slyly, and Felix grinned at her before moving on.
“So Leon, who appears to be very straight, is still a smuggler, but with the death of the arms dealer who killed his father, the drug traffickers and other more unsavory types were willing to back away, hands up, when Leon declined to renew their business association with his company. I don’t necessarily condone murder, but in this case, I think Leon was doing his best to not continue to roll around in blood, and that’s admirable.”
“Is he completely legit now?” Carl asked. He’d been the only person who had heard of Leon di Rossi before Felix and Julia had asked him to run point on making contact, and he’d known about Leon’s illegitimate business enterprises from the get-go. He’d scanned di Rossi’s records, but Felix and Danny would have more details to add as to whether the older scion was as good in real life as he’d made himself look on paper.
Felix, Danny, and Julia simultaneously held their hands parallel with the floor and made the universal sign for “maybe/maybe not.” Danny was the one who cracked a smile and verbalized, “He lives and works in an environment in which his business couldn’t succeed without some line-blurring. Is he enough of a good guy for your tastes, Carl?”
Carl grimaced. That had been a bone of contention between them during their brief liaison, one that Carl regretted now. “He is,” he replied soberly. “I’m just hoping nothing we’ve done will trip him up in any way.”
“No,” Danny said. “But it’s kind of you to worry. There is, however, something we can do for him. Felix?”
Felix nodded and continued. “Now, as you know, Matteo di Rossi passed away five years ago, a year after his father. What you may not know is that his death was under… mysterious circumstances.”
“Did his yacht sink in a shallow bay with the coast guard less than twenty minutes away?” Molly asked.
Michael bumped him softly, aware of an undercurrent here, and Carl mouthed, “It’s how their foster parents died.”
Michael made a slight moue of surprise and then continued to listen, as though there would be a test on this later.
Well, there might be.