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 youever 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.
