Nobody in the village knew him as John Hamilton Wilde.
Nobody knew him as an officer and a gentleman.
He was simply Johnny Wilde—Gianni, he was called by the few people who knew him well enough to address him by name.
He was a man living his own life and not one born of something that had happened a lifetime ago.
On those weekends, those occasional weeks he could get away, he flew to Sicily, lived quietly, drinking inexpensive vino, dining at the little village trattoria on pasta, freshly caught fish, and grapes or figs.
No women.
He had plenty of them wherever he was currently posted. Not that he wouldn’t have enjoyed having a woman here, but women asked too many questions and he had no wish to either explain his life or lie about it.
And then he met Angelica.
It was summer.
He’d been riding for a couple of hours, the sun was hardly up and yet the air was already hot, fragrant with the scent of the sea and of the wildflowers that grow in the rocky crevices of the cliff walls.
He refused to wear motorcycle leathers in the heat, so when he spotted a deserted beach, all he had to do to undress was pull his T-shirt over his head, toss it on the sand next to his bike, kick off his boots, strip off his jeans and Jockeys and walk into the sea.
He swam out until the island was far behind him. Then he turned and headed for shore. Halfway there, he saw a figure walking slowly alongside the beach as the surf beat against the shore.
When he got closer, he realized it was a woman.
A girl, really. Eighteen. Nineteen. And, God, incredibly beautiful.
Her hair hung down her back like a scarf of midnight sky. Her dress, an old-fashioned flowered, gauzy thing, hinted at the contours of her body. She was barefoot. Her face was tilted up to the sun.
Unexpected desire shot through him with an urgency he hadn’t experienced since boyhood, and lodged in his dick.
Dammit.
He was naked. Was he supposed to walk out of the water with a hard-on?
She must have seen his bike, the little pile of men’s clothes next to it. She’d figure out the rider was in the water.
Sicilian women were modest to a fault. Surely she wasn’t going to hang around.
He treaded water for a couple of minutes.
She was still there.
He thought about floating on his back and grinned. A man floating in the sea, with a periscope sticking out of the water.
How would that look?
How deep was the water here? Deep enough. He hoped so, anyway, and he let down his feet.
The water was up to his chest.
“Hey!”
She didn’t react. Hell. Now what?
He took a couple of steps.
The water was at his belly button.
“Hey, signorina!”
She turned and looked at him.
Beautiful didn’t even come close. She was spectacular. And he recognized her. She was a waitress in the trattoria; maybe she worked part time because he hadn’t seen her that often. What was her name? Angel. Angelica. Something like that.
She put her hand to her forehead, shielding her eyes from the bright-burning sun.
He smiled. “Buon giorno.”
No answer,. Her dark eyes fixed on his.
“Sono Johnny—”
“Tu sei Gianni Wilde.”
She pronounced it the Italian way. Gee-ah-nee Wheelldeh. He liked the way it sounded.
“Si,” he said, smiling again.
He told her that he had been swimming. That he wasn’t wearing a swimsuit. She didn’t answer. Didn’t she understand him? Sicilians spoke a dialect rougher and more elemental than what was spoken in the rest of Italy, but by now he’d spent enough time here to know that people understood his classic Italian easily enough.
He put his hands on his hips. So did she. He arched an eyebrow.
So did she.
Was that a faint smile at the corners of her lips?
His jaw tightened.
So did the rest of him.
Dammit!
He wasn’t in the mood to be embarrassed by anybody, especially by a good-looking woman determined to make a fool of him.
“I’m naked,” he said bluntly. “And I want to get out of the water.
Yes, definitely that was a smile. She was teasing him. Didn’t she realize that this could turn into a dangerous game?
Time passed. Seconds, fraught with meaning, felt like hours.
Johnny narrowed his eyes. Enough, he decided. And he started walking. Unless she was a fool, surely she’d give way.
The water level began dropping. Below his hips. Lower…
Christ, what was she doing?
His breath caught.
She was unbuttoning her dress.
Slowly. God, so slowly. One tiny button at a time until the dress slid from her shoulders, from her arms, from her hips and became a bouquet of flowers at her feet.
She was naked.
There were no words that would have done justice to her beauty.
Her skin was sun-kissed, the color of honey. Her breasts were round and tip-tilted, the nipples a soft, delicate rose. Her waist was slender, her hips generously curved; her legs were long, her toenails unpolished and the color of the tiny pale pink seashells that were strewn over the sand.
His penis stood up from the water and damn near saluted.
She looked at him, at it, and laughed.
Her laugh was low and husky and wonderful, and for a heartbeat he wondered if maybe he was home in bed, dreaming…
He took a quick step back.
“Go home,” he said sharply. “Go away! Basta! Va via!”
Another soft, sexy laugh and then she started toward him.
“Gianni,” she whispered, and he cursed and stepped forward and suddenly, she was in his arms, she was standing on her toes, she was raising her arms and winding them around his neck, and as he bent to her and captured her lips with his, she said, in Sicilian, that if he didn’t fuck her right then, she was going to die.
* * * *
He carried her from the water.
They dropped to the sand together.
She was panting, reaching out for him. He wanted to take her fast, no preliminaries, and he fought to hang onto his control, but she rose up on one elbow, kissed his mouth, nipped it, and w
rapped the fingers of her free hand around his erection.
Johnny growled, caught hold of her wrists, pinned her arms over her head and thrust into her, hard and fast and deep…
Sweet Jesus!
She was a virgin.
He froze. Pulled back. Sweat beaded on his forehead.
“No,” he said. “I can’t. You’re a virgin. Sei vergine!”
She arched against him.
“I am yours,” she whispered. “Only yours.”
One lift of her hips and she impaled herself on him.
He groaned, captured her mouth was his, and thrust through that sweet, tender barrier.
CHAPTER NINE
HE HAD PLANNED on spending one week on the island.
Instead, once they were in his bedroom and Angelica’s head was buried between his thighs, he phoned his administrative assistant and told him he’d be away for an extra five days.
He hung up, rolled Angelica on her back and finished what she had started.
After, he kissed her, swatted her on her ass and told her to make some coffee.
Once she’d left the bedroom, he phoned the general, told him he was taking a few more days off.
“That’s fine, John,” Halvorson said, and chuckled. “Got yourself a girl?”
“No sir, certainly not.”
“Well, you should. I’ve heard those Sicilian girls are hot”
He laughed politely, but over the next several days, Angelica proved the general was right.
Johnny had never had a woman like her.
All that fire. That spirit. The sexy wildness. She answered needs he’d never even known he’d had.
She told him about herself. She was twenty and lived with her grandmother.
He told her that he worked for the government and did a lot of traveling.
None of that was exactly a lie. He just didn’t see any reason to tell her more. After all, this wasn’t going to last.
There was no room in his life right now for a woman.
Even if there had been, Angelica was not that woman and never could be.
She was uneducated. Unworldly. Unsophisticated. She had a deep, honest laugh. He could not imagine her at an embassy party, making small talk with the fiancées and wives of diplomats, colonels, and brigadier generals. She didn’t even look the part. The long, glossy hair. The full lips. The high breasts, rounded hips, curved legs.