Her Dark Angel

Blurb:
She was gone from him forever. While on a trip to Hawaii two years ago, she married a rich old man and had a child. Now that she's a widow, fate and her determination has brought her back into his life. Why would fate be so cruel?


Excerpt:

Lucian Monteverde gazed around him with pleasure. This was his favorite time on the beach—dawn, when the sun was a misty ball of reddish orange on the horizon, slowly growing in size and brilliance. The Spring break kids were long gone—no one around to disturb the blessed peace—the sighing of the lazy surf—the seagulls' excited squawks around the shrimpers returning to the small harbour at the Inlet.
He mused how lucky it was that his parents had emigrated from Italy, and had decided to live in Florida in their new country, America. His father, a well-known writer of historical fiction, had realized quickly that a writer could live anywhere he wished, and he liked the Florida climate and laid-back atmosphere.
Lucian wore a length of batik cloth as a pareu, tucked around his narrow waist—a habit he had acquired during his many visits to Hawaii and other Pacific islands. He decided to wade for a while, glancing up and down the beach to confirm that no one else was present. Quickly untucking the pareu, he bunched it up, hanging it around his neck as if it were a towel. Ah, the blissful freedom of wading in the ocean without the irritation of clothing. He went south—amused at the sandpipers—enjoying the sight of an occasional crab that hadn't succeeded in drifting with the ocean as it pulled back, and was now racing to reach its natural habitat.
Lucian realized he had been wading for at least half an hour from his own beachside cottage—one of half a dozen, built in a gap where the dunes gave out, before they started up again, farther north. Deciding to walk back, he turned.
At that moment, he noticed a movement in his peripheral vision. A flash of green… He heard a warm, husky contralto—which he would have recognized after a thousand years—sighing more than speaking his name, "Lucian…"