Chapter 6 The Italian Job
The Italian Job
Jax
The room smells like money and chemical warfare.
Specifically, it smells like cedar and a cologne so aggressive it’s probably illegal in three countries. I am standing on a velvet pedestal in the middle of the Upper East Side, wearing nothing but my boxer briefs and a layer of cold sweat.
Giovanni, the eighty-year-old master who dressed three popes and my future father-in-law, is gone.
He has retired to a villa in Tuscany. And honestly?
I miss him. Sure, Giovanni used to stab me with pins and tell me I had the "proportions of a vending machine," but compared to his son, the man was a saint.
At least Giovanni gave me espresso before he insulted my deltoids.
In his place is Enzo.
Enzo is thirty, wears a suit that defies the laws of circulation, and is currently looking at me like I’m a pile of medical waste he found on his pristine floor.
"Disgusting," Enzo murmurs.
He’s circling me, holding a tape measure with two fingers like it’s contaminated. He stops at my chest, sighs, and shakes his head.
"My father was too kind," Enzo whispers. "He called you a vending machine. But this? This is not a vending machine. This is a... how you say... a panic room made of meat."
"I’m a trauma surgeon," I snap, resisting the urge to step off the pedestal and strangle him. "I lift patients. I do chest compressions. It’s called muscle, Enzo. It serves a function. Unlike your shoes."
"It is vulgar," Enzo corrects me, ignoring the jab at his loafers. "It is peasant geometry. You are all obtuse angles. How am I supposed to drape a morning coat over a retaining wall? The fabric, it weeps. It cries for mercy."
He turns away, pressing a hand to his forehead like a tragic heroine in a telenovela.
"I need an espresso. And a Xanax. This torso is a hate crime against tailoring."
He spins back around, glaring at my shoulders.
"My father warned me about you," Enzo whispers, his eyes narrowing. "He said, 'Enzo, beware the Trauma Surgeon. He does not wear the suit; he fights the suit.' And yet, knowing this, I still find myself in terror. You are going to pop a seam during the vows. I can feel it. It will be a tragedy."
"I hate him," I whisper to Max, who is standing on the next pedestal over, looking calm and perfect. "Max, I’m going to sedate him. I have ketamine in the car. Just one dart to the neck."
"Hold," Max murmurs, barely moving his lips. "He is an artist. He is just... temperamental."
Enzo spins around. His eyes land on Max. The disdain vanishes instantly, replaced by a look of pure, religious ecstasy. It’s the same look the residents give me when I crack a chest in under thirty seconds.
"Maxwell," Enzo breathes, gliding over to him. He touches Max’s shoulder with a reverence that makes my hackles rise.
"Now this. This is architecture. Look at the lines!
The repressed energy! You are a flute, Maxwell.
A single, perfect reed of anxiety wrapped in skin.
I could dress you in a napkin and you would look like an emperor. "
"Thank you, Enzo," Max says, standing perfectly still. "I try to maintain a low BMI for aerodynamic purposes."
"You are the Standard," Enzo agrees, shooting a withering look at me. "Your fiancé looks like he hauls stone for a living. But you? You are a York. You barely exist in three dimensions. It is exquisite."
"I’m right here," I growl. "I can hear you insulting my dimensions."
"I do not insult," Enzo sniffs. "I diagnose."
On the chaise longue, Catherine is sipping an espresso, watching me suffer with the cold, detached amusement of a scientist observing a lab rat.
"Enzo is right, Jax," she says. "You are too wide. Have you considered fasting until the ceremony? Perhaps a liquid diet? We could induce a medically supervised coma to prevent bulking."
"I will eat a steak in front of you," I threaten. "A ribeye. With my hands. While wearing the suit."
"Barbarian," Enzo mutters, sticking a pin into my shoulder with unnecessary force.
The door to the atelier opens.
Enzo's head snaps up with the territorial alertness of a man who controls who enters his space and when.
Alistair York walks in wearing a Panama hat, a shirt patterned with birds of paradise, and cream linen trousers that have clearly never been within ten feet of an iron. He is carrying a brown paper bag that smells strongly of pastry.
Enzo stares. Something moves across his face — not recognition exactly, but the specific expression of a man accessing a file he was warned about.
"No," Enzo says.
"Yes!" Alistair replies, delighted.
"My father told me about you," Enzo says, his voice dropping to something between a threat and a prayer. "He said if you ever walked through that door I was to call him immediately and then charge you a forty percent surcharge for emotional damages."
"Giovanni is a wonderful man," Alistair agrees pleasantly, helping himself to a chair near Catherine and opening the paper bag. "Cornetto?"
"Do not offer me pastry in my own atelier," Enzo says.
"Your loss." Alistair settles in, crossing his legs, and surveys the room with the calm satisfaction of a man who has arrived exactly where he wanted to be.
He looks at Jax on the pedestal. He looks at the pins.
He looks at the expression on Jax's face, which is that of a man mentally calculating the number of crimes he could commit and still keep his medical licence.
"How's the shoulder sitting?" Alistair asks Jax conversationally.
"It's sitting like a punishment," Jax says.
"That's the padding," Alistair says. "Giovanni did the same to me in 1987.
Foundation dinner. Put so much structure in the shoulders I couldn't lower my arms below the horizontal.
Spent the entire evening gesturing like a traffic controller.
Catherine thought I was having a neurological episode.
" He takes a bite of his cornetto. "The photos are extraordinary, actually.
I look like I'm conducting an invisible orchestra. "
Enzo, who has been trying to resume his measurements while pretending Alistair isn't there, stops.
"The 1987 Foundation dinner," Enzo says, very carefully, "was a Giovanni masterpiece. He talked about that commission for years."
"He talked about it because I was a nightmare," Alistair says cheerfully.
"I'd just come back from six weeks in Buenos Aires and I'd put on — well, it doesn't matter how much.
The point is I called him four days before the dinner, and when he saw me walk in he sat down and put his head in his hands and didn't speak for approximately forty seconds.
I thought he'd had a stroke. He was just grieving the original measurements. "
Enzo looks at Jax. He looks back at Alistair. A new and terrible understanding crosses his face.
"You are the reason," Enzo says slowly, "that my father has a panic button installed under his cutting table."
"He installed it after the Monaco incident," Alistair confirms. "Different story. I'll tell you over the cornetto." He holds up the bag. Enzo, against every instinct, takes one.
Jax is staring at Alistair with the pure, uncomplicated love of a man who has just found an unexpected ally.
"Alistair," Jax says. "I could kiss you."
"Save it for the wedding," Alistair says. "Now, Enzo — stop punishing the boy for having a functional musculature. He's a surgeon. He uses his body as a tool. You wouldn't insult a Steinway for being too resonant."
"A Steinway," Enzo says, pointing his measuring tape at Jax, "does not have deltoids that make the back seam weep."
"Then cut the back seam differently," Alistair says, with the breezy authority of a man who has absolutely no idea how tailoring works but has been rich long enough that no one has ever told him so.
"Giovanni used to say the fabric serves the man, not the other way around.
He told me that in 1994 when I showed up to a fitting after a cycling holiday in Tuscany and my thighs had—"
"Stop," Enzo says. He holds up a hand. He closes his eyes briefly. "Please. I am begging you. Do not finish that sentence. I have to sleep tonight."
Alistair closes his mouth. He looks at Catherine with mild innocence.
"Am I helping?" he asks.
"You are a disaster," Catherine says, without looking up from her espresso.
"Catastrophically," Preston agrees from the lounge chair, though he is smiling in a way he is clearly trying to suppress.
"Wonderful," Alistair says, and helps himself to another cornetto.
A comfortable silence settles, broken only by the sound of Enzo's measuring tape and Alistair chewing. Then Alistair's phone buzzes. He looks at it. His face lights up with the specific, incandescent joy of a man who has just received very good news from somewhere far away.
"Ah excellent, he has found a breeding pair," Alistair announces to the room.
"Of what?" Preston asks.
"Does it matter?" Alistair says, already standing, folding the paper bag under his arm.
He pats Jax on the shoulder — the pinned one, which makes Enzo inhale sharply through his nose — and straightens his Panama hat.
"The point is, they need to be collected before Thursday, and the man who has them lives in New Jersey, which means I need to leave immediately before the tunnel traffic becomes a moral crisis. "
He kisses Catherine on the top of her head. She flinches but doesn't pull away.
"The suits look magnificent," he declares, though he has spent approximately four minutes actually looking at them. "Enzo, your father would be proud. Or at the very least, relieved."
"He would be neither," Enzo says flatly. "He would be in therapy."
"Same thing, in this family," Alistair says cheerfully.
He strides toward the door, already typing a response to whomever it was had found the mysterious breeding pair. He pauses with one hand on the frame, turns back, and looks at Jax with an expression that is, briefly, entirely serious.