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.
Then he shaved. Brushed his teeth. Showered. Combed his close-cropped hair. Put on his uniform. His dress uniform, the four stars on his shoulders as bright and shiny as buffing with a polishing cloth could make them.
He stood before the full-length mirror on the bathroom door. Frowned. Adjusted his sleeve. Smoothed back his hair.
Good.
He looked like the professional soldier he was.
He went to his closet.
Took down a small box.
Unlocked it.
Took out his Beretta M9. He owned other handguns, but the Beretta, the look of it, the feel, had long been his favorite.
He rubbed it briskly with the same cloth he’d used to buff his four stars. Then he slapped in a loaded magazine, held the Beretta in his outstretched hand and stepped before the mirror again.
He pointed the gun at his image.
Fine.
Excellent.
His hand was steady, his posture straight and proud. He looked like John Hamilton Wilde, even if Johnny Wilde still lived inside him.
He went briskly down the stairs, the Beretta held against his thigh, and went straight to the den. Lorena had been there. She’d disposed of the empty Jack Daniel’s bottles, straightened the chair cushions.
The elk leered at him, glassy-eyed, from the wall.
A silver tray stood on a small round table. It held a small pot of coffee, a white mug, a small pitcher of cream, a small bowl of sugar, a linen napkin, a silver teaspoon, even a small plate with a muffin centered on it.
She had thought of everything.
Almost everything, the general thought, as he shut and locked the door behind him.
He went to his desk. Took a single sheet of stationery engraved with his name and rank from a drawer along with a matching envelope.
He picked up a pen.
And paused.
What was he going to say? He chuckled.
He’d never written a suicide note before.
He sat down at the desk. Thought. Thought some more, and then he wrote three simple sentences.
I love you all. I loved your mothers. I never, ever meant to harm any of you.
He signed it General John Hamilton Wilde. Then he scratched that out and signed it, instead, Your father.
Done.
He folded the paper into three neatly creased sections. Tucked it into the envelope. Sealed the envelope. Hesitated, and then addressed it To my beloved children.
He laid the envelope on the desk, neatly centering it, and put a round into the chamber of the Beretta.
It felt comforting in his hand.
He felt…he felt calm. Serene. Ready for what had to be done.
It was the right thing to do. He was—he was supposed to be—an officer and a gentlemen.
His hand was steady as he raised the Beretta to his temple.
An officer and a gentleman. A code of honor—and he had never lived up to it.
He had lied. Cheated. He had indulged his own appetites and ignored the needs of others. He had used the women who’d loved him, made a mockery of the vows he’d made to his God, his country…
To the memory of his brother.
His hand shook.
And now he was telling himself what he was about to do was honorable.
A fist thudded against the door.
“General,” one of his sons bellowed.
“General,” one of his daughters said. “We know you’re in there.”
General. Not father. General.
“Open the door,” another son demanded. “You can’t hide from us forever.”
But he could. One pull of the trigger…
Johnny, a voice inside him said gently, I know you’re better than this.
The general blinked. “Alden?”
You have to face them, Johnny. You owe them answers. You owe them something better than taking the coward’s way out.
“I can’t. I can’t face them. What can I say to them? Dear God, what can I say?”
You can tell them what you wrote in that note, Johnny, that you love them, that you loved their mothers, that you did the very best you could.
The Beretta trembled in Johnny Hamilton’s hand.
He bowed his head. Tears filled his eyes.
Then he ejected the round from the gun and put it and the gun in the bottom desk drawer.
“Father,” one of his daughters called out, one of his beautiful, bright daughters. “Please. You have to talk to us. We need you to talk to us.”
He tore the envelope and the note inside it into small pieces. He leaned toward the fireplace and scattered the bits of paper on the kindling that always stood ready on the hearth, struck a match and set the paper on fire.
He took a steadying breath, got to his feet and walked to the door, head up, shoulders back, spine straight, the way he had on the parade ground at the Point dozens of years before.
Good, Johnny. That’s good. You know you’re doing the right thing.
Johnny smiled.
“What a strange road we’ve traveled, Alden,” he said softly. “I’m just glad we’ve always been together, you and I.”
General John Hamilton Wilde wiped the tears from his eyes.
“I love you, Alden,” he said, and then he reached out, unlocked the door and opened it to his sons and to his daughters, and to the long-buried truth that was his life.
THE END
WANT MORE OF THE WILDES?
Coming Soon:
In Wilde Country
Book 1: PRIDE
Book 2: PASSION
Book 3: PRIVILEGE
Book 4: POWER
And have you read The Wilde Sisters Trilogy?
EMILY: SEX & SENSIBILITY
JAIMIE: FIRE & ICE
LISSA: SUGAR & SPICE
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On the Wilde Side Page 9
