Secret Honor (Honor Bound 3)

[TWO]

Avenida Pueyrredón 1706

Piso 10

Buenos Aires

0405 29 April 1943

Alicia Carzino-Cormano was twenty years old, tall and slim; and when she came out of the bathroom, her intensely black hair hung down over her shoulders and almost below her bare breasts. The bedroom was flooded with moonlight, and she could see quite clearly.

What she saw made her smile tenderly. Twenty-four-year-old Major Freiherr Hans-Peter von Wachtstein was lying naked in his bed, on his back, arms and legs spread, breathing softly, sound asleep.

She walked to the bed and looked down at him.

He was really blond, she thought, blond all over, not just the hair on his head, but the hair on his chest, between his legs, and under his arms.

There were blondes in Argentina, of course. Dorotéa Mallín, Alicia’s friend since childhood—and soon to marry Cletus Frade—was a natural blonde, an English blonde, but she had seen Dorotéa changing clothes, and she wasn’t blond all over the way Peter was.

She sat down on the bed very carefully, so as not to wake him, and looked at him again. After a moment, she swung her legs into the bed.

She ran her fingers very softly over the hair on his chest, stopping when she encountered a line of scar tissue.

Peter had told her that he had gotten that falling off his bicycle as a child, but she didn’t believe him. She was sure he’d gotten that scar in the war, just as he’d gotten the longer scars on his lower abdomen and on his right leg in the war.

He never talked to her about the war.

She wondered if Cletus Frade talked to Dorotéa about what he’d done in the war. Or if Peter talked to Cletus about what they’d done in the war. Did they talk about war? Or about women?

When Alicia leaned forward to run her fingers farther down Peter’s chest, her hair fell forward, blocking her view, and she pushed it back and over her shoulders.

Her fingers reached the blond hair at his groin. His thing looked like a long, wrinkled thumb, she thought. And ten minutes ago it had looked like…like a banana, a large banana!

She touched it, and that woke him up.

She quickly removed her hand.

“Sorry, baby,” Peter said.

“For what?”

“I fell asleep.”

“You don’t have to be sorry for falling asleep,” Alicia said.

He raised his hand to her breast, cupped it momentarily, and then put his index finger on her nipple, causing it to stiffen and rise.

“That’s chocolate, right?” he said. “The other one’s vanilla.”

A moment later, he chuckled. “I love it when you blush,” he said.

“I’m not blushing.”

He snorted.

“Precious,” she said. “I have to go.”

“Damn!” he said, and sat up and reached for the wristwatch on the bedside table.