Page 26 of Sicilian Savior

Payback was a bitch, I guess.

Lucia and I split off and went to our rooms. I found a pair of shorts that would work, though they weren’t made for a man my size. I squeezed into them anyway, adjusting the crown jewels so they didn’t fall out the bottom of the short shorts. Not the best look on me, but that pool looked too enticing not to enjoy, and they would be more comfortable than the cargo shorts in my suitcase.

I headed back down to the pool, and when I saw Lucia come down the stairs in her black low-cut one-piece, I cursed the barely-there shorts even more. Knowing what was starting to happen down below, I spun around and dove into the cool water. With any luck, it would shock Knox Junior back into behaving. My head may know nothing could happen between Lucia and me, but Knox Junior had a different head with completely different ideas.

“How’s the water?” she asked, stopping to dip a toe in.

The long lines of her leg begged my eyes to soak it in, and I let my gaze travel up the length of her body.

Torture. This was pure fucking torture, and from a man who spent six months being torn apart, that was saying something.

“It’s perfect. Come on in.”

Lucia took the slow way, her hips swaying with each step as she descended the stairs. When she hit the base of her navel, she made a shrieking noise and dunked herself in. She came up spitting water with a squeal.

“Eek! It’s colder than I expected.”

“You’ll get used to it.” I paddled around, keeping my distance from her as she swam in circles.

“I love swimming! I used to take Luca to the pool on the roof of our apartment every day in the summer. It was neat to look down at New York City from up high, but I’ll take these views any day.” She gestured to the views of the vineyards bordering our infinity pool.

“Yeah. I could get used to this.”

“Me too. I would love to live on a vineyard. That’s what I would choose if I could live anywhere.”

“I should have thought of a vineyard when I retired and went to Costa Rica.”

She swam over, and my shorts tightened as she neared.

“So, why Costa Rica? I mean, you’ve apparently traveled all over the world. What made you choose there to retire?” she asked, leaning her elbows on the edge of the pool beside me.

I laid my chin on my forearms. “Honestly, no particular reason. We took a mission there once, and I thought it looked like a pretty nice place to kick back. So, when we all retired a few years ago, I headed down there. I planned to stay there for a while and eventually move on somewhere else.”

“And you and your team all retired at once?”

I nodded. “We each joined at the same time, each of us recruited due to our special skills that stood out. They paired us together from day one, and in our job, we stick with the same team our whole career. We know what the others are thinking without having to utter a word.”

“Like a well-oiled machine.”

“Exactly. Well, we had about a month left on our contracts when I got captured. We’d all planned on re-upping our contracts, but unbeknownst to me, they’d all retired so they would be free to come find me.”

“Wait. They weren’t allowed to come get you after you sacrificed yourself to save them?”

I shook my head. “Nope. One of the rules is if you fall behind enemy lines, you stay there. Complete deniability.”

“Wow. That’s awful. After everything you did, and they just left you to die?”

“Honestly, we kinda always thought that was all talk–that, in reality, they’d come for us if we got captured. Turns out, it wasn’t a lie at all. I went down, and they washed their hands of me. Well, the government did, but Alpha team didn’t. They all walked away from their contracts so they could focus on finding me. Took them six months, but they did it. I knew they would.”

“So, they quit their jobs to find you. That’s amazing.”

“Yeah. That’s my team.” I smiled at the memory of seeing Marcus and Piper appear in my cell. “For a moment, when I’d first seen them, I’d thought I was hallucinating, then Piper had thrown her arms around me, and I’d known my imagination wasn’t that realistic. I’d been unable to walk when they’d found me, and even though I’d lost a ton of weight in captivity, they’d still had to carry my huge ass all the way out. I was in and out of consciousness as they’d dragged me, but I remember passing so many dead bodies along the way and being so proud that they’d managed to not just find me but take out a few dozen dickheads standing between them and me.”

“And then what happened after you got out?”

“Well, even though the government has other teams than ours, they were still kicking themselves for screwing up bad enough that they lost all four of us. They offered us a pretty penny to come back, and while we thought about it, we all decided we didn’t want to go back to work for a government that really would leave us for dead. I mean, you hear it when you sign up, and you agree to it, but it’s one thing to hear it and another to acknowledge they really did consider me expendable. We all agreed to walk away together and stay gone. That, and honestly, after I’d been captured, my head just wasn’t quite right after that.”

“I don’t know how it could be. No one would be okay after six months of torture.”