Not that he gave a damn about any of that. Sentimental nonsense, all of it.
It was the principle that mattered, the fact that the general had created two families and had ignored one in favor of the other, ignored one woman in favor of the other.
Luca snorted.
The man had been a bigamist, and Angelica Bellini had deserved so much more than that…
“You going to stand out here and eavesdrop the rest of the morning?”
Luca blinked. The three Wilde brothers stood glowering at him from the entrance to the dining room faces hard, arms folded over their chests, legs apart.
He glared back.
He could feel his heart pumping.
They looked angry as hell, ready for a fight, and that was fine with him. He was ready to take them all on, beat the crap out of the men, tell off the women, brush off his hands and walk away.
“Why would I eavesdrop?” he said coldly, “when you do nothing but talk nonsense?”
Three pairs of eyes narrowed.
“The man has a nasty attitude,” one Wilde brother said.
“Maybe he needs to be taught a lesson,” said another.
“Maybe. And if he does, who better to give it to him than us?” the third said, or would have said, but a voice behind Luca cut his words short.
“Big talk,” Matteo growled. “But then, that is what Texas is all about, is it not? Big talk. Little action.”
The Wildes stepped forward. Luca tossed his overnight bag into a corner. Matteo’s shoulder brushed his as he moved up to stand beside him.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake! Grow up, all of you, and try to act like adults!”
The five men looked at the woman who had just spoken.
Blonde. Blue-eyed or perhaps green; it was difficult to be sure at this distance. She was a Wilde, Luca knew, although from the way she looked, she could as easily have been a Bellini.
It was a strange thought to have in the middle of what was clearly going to be war, but there was no denying that the Wildes and the Bellinis resembled each other. The men were tall, dark-haired, lean and muscular, their eye color ranging from green to blue. The women were slender, fair-haired, their eye color also ranging from green to blue.
The similarities made Luca feel…uneasy.
“Keep out of this, Jaimie,” one of the Wildes—Travis?—said.
“The hell she’ll keep out of this,” a second Wilde sister said.
“Emily. We know you mean well—”
“Do not,” the third sister said, “do not take that tone with us, Caleb!”
“Jesus H. Christ! Lissa, you sound just like a woman. We’re talking about honor and you’re talking about tone.”
The three sisters stepped forward, faces flushed, eyes flashing.
“She’s talking like a what?” the first sister asked. “Like a woman? Is that what you said, Travis?”
“Come on, James. You know what I—”
“And what, precisely, does this have to do with honor, Jacob?” the second sister asked.
“Don’t you get it? These—these Italians—”
“Sicilians,” Luca heard Bianca say and despite the heat of the moment, it was all he could do not to turn and hug her. “We are Sicilians.”
“And American,” Alessandra added. “Thanks to our father.”
“Your father,” Caleb Wilde said, his mouth turning down at the corners.
“Si. Our father. He was American.”
“You talk about him as if he’s dead.”
“He is very much alive, as you well know. It is in our hearts that he is dead.”
“And where is he this morning?” Bianca asked. “Has he run away like the coward he is?”
“You’ve got that right,” Jake Wilde said grimly. “The SOB is gone.”
Silence descended on the group, what Luca would later think of as a meaningful silence. Matteo broke it by clearing his throat.
“Assuming one likes the idea of being American, it is the one decent thing he did for us.”
Luca folded his arms and grunted.
“I take it,” Travis said coldly, “that was a ‘no.’”
“What’s wrong with being American?” Jake demanded.
Luca gave an expressive shrug.
“Nothing, I suppose.” His smile was a bright and phony as a bank of neon lights. “It’s the Texan part that we can live without.”
“Listen, Bellini—”
“No. You listen, Wilde—”
“Goddammit!”
Lissa Wilde marched into the rapidly shrinking space between the Wildes and the Bellinis. Her face was flushed, her posture was tree-trunk straight, her mouth a thin line. “Stop it,” she said. “Just stop it and look at yourselves!”
Grudgingly, Luca took the advice.
Amazing.
Ten flushed faces.
Ten rigid postures.
Ten mouths that looked as if they’d been drawn by slashes of a pen.
Ten sets of hands on ten pairs of hips.
Cristo!
Two sets of brothers, two sets of sisters. Alike not only in looks, but in body language. In temperament.
And with a common bond.
Hatred for the man who had sired them.
Was that why they were so close to blows? Was it safer to turn their anger on each other than on the man who had brought them to this ugly moment?
“Just look at us,” Lissa said, as if she’d read his mind. “I mean, look at us! Are we all crazy?”
“Liss,” Caleb said, “honey, we know you mean well, but—”
“Listen to how he speaks to her,” Bianca said softly to Alessandra. “As if she is a child to be soothed.”
Alessandra raised one eyebrow.
“Si. He speaks to her as Luca and Matteo often speak to us.”
Emily lifted her chin. “It’s probably how overbearing brothers everywhere speak to their younger sisters.”
“Hey,” the Bellini men said.
“Hey,” the Wilde men said.
The Bellini sisters pushed past Luca and Matteo and joined Lissa. Emily and Jaimie did the same.
“This,” Jaimie said, “is ridiculous. We’re acting as if we’re enemies, but we’re not.”
“You didn’t think that way last night,” Jake Wilde said.
“Neither did you,” Luca growled, looking at Bianca and Alessandra. “You didn’t even think that way this morning.”
“Well, we’ve had time to rethink the situation,” Bianca said. “Is that not correct, ladies?”
Five heads in varying shades of blond nodded in agreement.
“And what we think,” Jaimie said, “is that there’s no logical reason for us to be enemies.”
“None of this was our doing,” Alessandra said.
“We thought we were his children,” said Bianca. “His only children,” she added.
“And we thought the same thing,” Emily said. “Who’d have dreamed he was—he was—”
“A bigamist,” Lissa said grimly. “Just spit it out. The bastard’s a bigamist!”
“Exactly,” Alessandra said. “A fooking—pardon my language—bigamist.”
“Fooking,” Jaimie said, and giggled. “It’s just so right. To describe dear old dad, I mean.”
The women all laughed. The men just looked at each other. The atmosphere in the room was changing. Was that good…or bad?
“He lied to us all,” Emily said.
“Well, yes. But especially to us.”
Emily raised her eyebrows. “What does that mean?” she asked Bianca. “That he lied especially to you?”
Bianca shrugged. “You know.”
“If I knew, I wouldn’t ask.”
“Holidays. Birthdays. That kind of thing.”
“You mean, he spent them with you.”
“Of course not! How could he, when he spent them with you?”
“What? He was never with us!”
“Trust me,” Alessandra said grimly,
“he was never with us, either. He was always too busy, spying to save the world.”
The Wildes sisters smiled. After a couple of seconds, so did the others.
The atmosphere in the room underwent another subtle change. Hands dropped from hips, mouths relaxed, faces took on a kind of ease.
“It would seem he treated us all with indifference,” Luca said, after a minute.
“He was probably afraid to spend too much time in any one place. He might have said something that would give the game away.”
“It is not easy to be a cheat,” Matteo said. “And a liar.” He tucked his hands in his trouser pockets. “That endless it-wasn’t-my-fault story he told us last night. How he was torn apart by his brother’s death, how his father blamed him for it, how he tried to set things right by living the life his brother would have lived and, oh yes, in the process, he made a fool of our mother.”
“Of ours, too,” Travis said.
“You need to know that our mother was a good woman,” Bianca said. Everyone turned toward her. “Her name is—was—Angelica. She was a wonderful person, a devoted mother, and her sole mistake was believing the lies told her by that—that stronzo, your—our father.”
“What does that mean? Stronzo?” Jake demanded.