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He was Johnny.
He was John.
Either way, he was smart.
There was no reason he wouldn’t be able to keep his two worlds from colliding.
An American wife in the States. An American son.
And, in Italy, a Sicilian not-quite-a-wife. An Italian son. Or daughter. Whichever, he’d provide for that family, too.
He’d manage the details.
Manage them with care and thought and skill.
And, for a long time, he believed that…
Believed it, for more than thirty years.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Texas, the El Sueño ranch, July 2014
DAWN.
The sky blazed with tendrils of pink and crimson.
The world was on fire, and the sight hurt General John Hamilton Wilde’s eyes, but then he’d never been a particularly good drunk and, man, he was drunk to the eyeballs. To his dried out, sand-filled, aching eyeballs.
Yeah, but that didn’t stop him from wanting another drink.
Hell, no.
Another shot of Jack was what he needed. Trouble was, he’d emptied the second bottle to the very last drop and though he wanted to check and see if maybe there was one more bottle he’d missed finding, he’d have to get up.
And getting up was out of the question.
As it was, he sat with his hands clinging to the arms of his big leather chair . Otherwise, the chair would spin the way the room was spinning and he’d fall out of it, squarely onto his ass.
You couldn’t have a four-star general doing that.
Right.
But he had to do something. The housekeeper would be stirring pretty soon. Or one of the guests tucked away in the ten trillion bedrooms upstairs might come wandering down for a cup of coffee.
Guests?
The general laughed. Tried to, anyway, but the sound came out a groan.
There were no guests at El Sueño this weekend. The house was filled with family. His sons. His daughters. Five sons, five daughters, and half had never known the other half existed until last night.
FUBAR. Old army slang. Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition.
Jesus, what a freaking disaster.
Bile rose in his throat.
OK. He had to do something. Get out of this chair. Haul himself to the bathroom. Take a piss. All that whiskey was having an effect on his bladder. And he had to find a way to sober up fast. Poke through the medicine cabinet until he found some of those fizzy antacid tablets. Run some water into a glass, drop one or three or six tablets in the water and see if he could keep down the resultant brew.
The general leaned hard on the arms of the chair. Tried to stand.
“Shit,” he said, and fell back.
What would his men say if they saw him now? Drunk. Disheveled. He knew what they called him behind his back. Hard-nosed. Hard-assed. A martinet. Wilde the perfectionist.
His children, too.
He snorted.
They weren’t children anymore. They were all grown up. Jacob, his firstborn with Connie; Matteo and Luca, his sons by Angelica.
Twins, like Alden and him.
No wonder Angelica’s belly had been so big.
Despite everything, he smiled at the memory.
Then, after Jacob, Connie had borne him Caleb and Travis in quick succession.
That, he’d told himself firmly, would be the end of it…
But it wasn’t.
His mouth thinned.
Connie had died.
Of pneumonia. People didn’t die from pneumonia anymore… Except, it had turned out that they did.
Pneumonia had killed his Connie.
He’d missed her terribly. So had his three toddler sons. They’d needed a mother—he was rarely home—and he’d remarried quickly for their sake if not his, taking Eleanor Halvorson, his old boss’s niece, as his wife.
Eleanor had been a good mother to his three sons, but to no one’s surprise, she’d wanted kids of her own.
Almost before he’d blinked, she’d given birth to three daughters. Emily, Jaimie and Lissa.
Beautiful girls, all of them.
And during those same years, Angelica had given birth to Alessandra and Bianca.
Nobody’s doing but his.
Somehow or other, his initial vow not to spend much time with his beautiful Sicilian spitfire had not quite worked out. Angelica was a seductress. He’d never been able to keep his hands off her.
His marriage to Eleanor had been good if not great, but he’d lost her to a car accident.
After that, he’d decided enough was enough.
He was done with women, done with marriage, he was tired of juggling an American family and an Italian family, spending not enough time with either, always afraid he’d use the wrong name at the wrong moment, awakening sometimes in the dead of night wondering where he was, in which house, with which woman, with which children, wondering if he was John or Johnny…
Ridiculous.
He was General John Hamilton Wilde, and all his offspring had better keep that in mind.
If only the whole tangled mess had not come apart.
But it had.
In the end, it was his fiery Sicilian wife-or-maybe-not-a wife who’d done him in.
Angelica had left him the same way Connie and Eleanor had. She’d died, swimming in the blue, blue sea at the foot of the cliffs below the house in Sicily. The house had been expanded half a dozen times; he’d offered to build her a new house, but she’d loved those cliffs and that sea, and after she drowned he’d missed her terribly.
It turned out he’d loved her, needed her more than Eleanor or even Connie.
A sob broke from his throat.
And then, two weeks later, Luca and Matteo had showed up in his D.C. office, sweet Jesus, in his office, their eyes burning with hate.
His heart had banged up into his throat.
“Sir,” the captain who was, basically, his guard dog had said, ready to arrest them or shoot them, and he’d held up his hand and said no, it was OK, he’d see these two young men, and once they were in his private office they’d told him that they knew everything, they knew the truth, that they’d suspected for years and kept silent out of love for their mother.
“You are a bigamist,” Luca had snarled in lightly accented English, and Matteo had called him other things, ugly names spat at him in Italian and in their mother’s harsh Sicilian dialect…
“Sir?”
And after all those years, the years of fabricating one lie more elaborate than the other, his world had come apart.
“General Wilde?”
He turned and saw his housekeeper standing in the doorway. Her gaze swept over him; he saw the shock in her eyes. He could only imagine how this looked: he, unkempt; the empty whiskey bottles; the head of the bull elk he’d wrestled hours ago hanging crooked on the wall.
“I’m sorry to bother you, General, but I heard a noise and—and—” She swallowed dryly. “May I get you something, sir? Would you like coffee?”
Decades of command took over.
“Thank you,” he said politely. “Coffee would be excellent.”
The housekeeper nodded. He knew she wanted to ask him if he was all right, but she wouldn’t. He’d never encouraged personal conversation with his staff, his children, or anyone else.
“Yes, sir. I’ll put up a pot.”
“Do that…” He hesitated. Lorena? Was that her name? “Do that, Lorena. That will give me a chance to shower.”
“Yes, sir,” she said again, and he half expected her to curtsy as she left the room.
He waited until he was certain she was gone. Then he hoisted himself to his feet, made his way to the stairs, climbed them by hanging on to the banister and carefully putting one foot ahead of the other.
He stumbled to his rooms.
He knew what he had to do.
First, he located the antacid tablets, dumped four into a glass of water. Why not keep things even? he
thought, and swallowed four aspirin.
