Nobody's Child by Ann Major

Author:Ann Major
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2011-06-07T04:00:00+00:00

The night was alive with firelight and fast Spanish guitars, but Jose Hernando, who prided himself on his strength and his machismo, was not in the mood to celebrate. He felt as weak and violated as a woman he’d once seen after she’d been beaten by a pack of vicious barrio jackals.

Outside his men were drinking and laughing together. José could not join them as was his custom. Not when his mood was so dark.

The barred windows and doors were open in his enormous living room, which served as his big game trophy room, too. Mounted heads of lions, and elephants, and tigers decorated the three-story plaster walls. In one corner stood an entire giraffe. From his heavy leather chair where Hernando sat in sullen drunkenness, he could hear his mariaches singing and strumming below in the velvet, flowerscented darkness of the courtyard of his luxurious and seemingly impregnable hacienda.

But no place was impregnable. Not even his home. That bastard Cutter Lord, el genio, the international genius, had taught him that.

José could smell wood smoke and beef burning as well as horse dung from the corrals. He could hear his men’s laughter grow louder with liquor. He alone could not take part in the festivities.

El genio thought he’d made a fool of him.

It was a warm spring night. There was much rejoicing behind the high adobe walls surrounding Hernando’s ranch in northern Mexico. Black-haired women in rebozos stood in doorways surrounded by clusters of dark children. The older boys were each taking a turn with the new bulls in the ring. A valuable wild ocelot that had been caught in a trap had been released as a sacrifice to an ancient god who had been kind.

Gracias a Dios Isabella had been returned unhurt. She’d thrown her arms around her father and with her enormous black eyes focusing on his ruthless face, she had said in her sweetest voice that she didn’t want Papá to worry, that the men who had taken her had been very nice, that they’d treated her like a princess. They had joked with her and fed her papas fritas and hamburguesas.

Hernando had stared at her exquisite Spanish face with its patrician nose, classic brow and shapely, rosy lips. She had worn a white mantilla in her hair. She was so innocent. Never had she looked more like her aristocratic mother. Never had he loved her more. He had wanted to die when her mother had died.

Family was everything. Isabella was everything.

Then he had thought of Cutter Lord, the genius, who could do no wrong, and never had José hated more, nor lusted for revenge more.

Not even when José had been the poorest and dirtiest boy in the barrio with no real family and the other children had despised him because his plump mother had been a whore had he hated this much. Not even when those gangs of older boys had beaten him with regularity.

Back then he’d had to fight for every scrap of food or starve.

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