Naked in Havana
by Colin Falconer
Publisher: Coolgus Publishing
Pages: 164
Genre: Romantic Suspense
Format: Paperback, Kindle
by Colin Falconer
Publisher: Coolgus Publishing
Pages: 164
Genre: Romantic Suspense
Format: Paperback, Kindle
Purchase at: AMAZON
18 year old Magdalena Fuentes is lying
naked next to her perfect lover when he tells her he is marrying someone else.
It is soon clear her destiny lies with another man, even though she says she
doesn’t believe in fate.
But fate doesn’t care whether we believe
in it or not...
Havana, 1958. Magdalena
Fuentes knows that Angel Macheda is the only man for her, even after he takes her
virginity and then tells her he is engaged to someone else. She knows they are
meant to be.
So why can she not stop
thinking about Reyes Garcia? From the moment I saw you, he says, I
knew there would be no one else.
From the moment I saw
you, she
tells him, I knew you were arrogant, conceited and rude.
Magdalena is a girl who
will not let sentiment stand between her and love. But as Fidel Castro’s rebels
tighten their grip around the city and she watches her family and her whole
life come apart, she learns hard lessons about love and about life.
Against the backdrop of
the boleristas and the gangsters, the music and the guns, Magdalena
discovers just how dangerous love can be.
Naked in Havana is the first in a three
part series, a sprawling epic of passion and destiny, stretching across three
decades and two continents.
First Chapter:
You want Havana?
I’ll give you Havana.
I have Havana right here, in this old
photograph album I keep up here on the bookshelf. It’s a little tattered and
the photographs are all black and white, I can’t even see them these days
without my glasses. But it’s the most precious thing I own, apart from my
wedding ring. Reyes had to smuggle it out for me. I don’t have much else left
of those days. I left Cuba with the clothes on my back and not much else.
Here’s my papi. Isn’t he handsome? He’s
standing outside his nightclub, the Left Bank, down on La Rampa. I was sixteen
then. Yes, stunning - that’s what everyone says. Being beautiful is a blessing
and a curse. When you’re young you think you own your beauty like you think you
own your youth. You don’t realise that you’re just borrowing both and that
someday life will come to take them back. Perhaps I would have done things
differently if I was smart enough to know that.
Or perhaps not. What a lowdown, spoiled
bitch I was. You really want to read this? Don’t. Do yourself a favour, find
some other book to read, because I swear, you’ll want to throttle me when you
learn the things I did. But I learned my lesson. Take some comfort in that;
life paid me back, in full.
Here’s my mother. I didn’t know her well.
She died when I was ten. We are on the Malecón, by the sea wall, back in the
early fifties before everything went to hell. Look how she’s holding me. She
must have loved me but I can’t even remember her face now, not without this
photograph to remind me.
People treat you like a princess, because
they love you, because you’ve lost your mother. And because your daddy’s rich,
you think it’s always going to be like that. But life always finds a way to
keep us honest, that’s what I found anyway.
And if life doesn’t, death will.
But I got lucky. Reyes Garcia came along,
and changed everything.
But first there was Havana.
Cuba, 1958
So there I was, naked. In Havana.
On the bed.
Angel, bless him, waited until he’d slept
with me before he told me he was marrying someone else.
In fact, he waited until he’d had me on
three separate occasions before breaking the good news. For now he sat there on
the windowsill, smoking a cigarette, listening to the scratchy sound of Beni
Moré on the old Victrola singing Santa Isabel de las Lajas. We were in
his father’s apartment on San Lorenzo, where Senor Macheda brought his own
mistresses: I suppose, in Angel’s mind, he was just carrying on family
tradition.
My thoughts were in quite another
direction. I imagined finally telling my father about us, wondered whether we
would have the wedding at the club or in the garden at home. I knew papi
wouldn’t agree to one of the big hotels, he hated those guys taking over his
country like that.
I lay on the tangled sheets, feeling the
wetness on my belly turning sticky and cold as the overhead fan stirred the
treacly air. He was always careful like that, my Angel; being late home from
shopping was easier to explain than being pregnant. I admired the lean bands of
muscle on his chest. He was a beautiful boy, a comma of inky black hair fell
over his forehead and resisted all his efforts to push it back. His half lidded
eyes made him appear more sensual than he really was.
My clothes were scattered over the floor.
The room smelled of sweat, sex and the French perfume my papi had bought me for
my eighteenth birthday.
Angel’s hand went to his penis, stroked it
casually, then he looked at me and one corner of his mouth twisted in a self
satisfied grin.
‘I’m getting married,’ he said.
I raised myself on one elbow, stared at
him. ‘What?’
‘Father’s idea. Nothing I can do about
it.’ He shrugged his shoulders, as if this was a minor inconvenience that no
one could have possibly foreseen.
‘Married? When? To who?’
He drew on his cigarette, watched the long
stream of smoke as he exhaled. ‘Some girl from America. He says it’s important
for the family, that it’s my duty. Can you believe it?’ He laughed. ‘My fucking
father would marry me to my sister if there was a dollar in it.’
He looked at her, tilted his head, like:
you should feel sorry for me, Magdalena.
‘How long have you known about this?’
Another casual shrug. He examined the tip
of his cigarette, the glowing ash I would have liked to have mashed in his eye.
‘Does it matter?’
Time stopped.
I could hear the waves crashing on the
Malecón, children playing football on the cobblestones in the plaza below.
Someone was playing a guitar and singing, quite badly. The brown barrio girls
were laughing and clapping along.
I reached for the glass of iced lime juice
beside the bed and threw it at him. My aim was off. If I hadn’t been so angry
it would have hit him on the head and sent him toppling down into the street.
Instead it missed him by a slender few inches and smashed on the cobblestones
down in the plaza. The guy playing the guitar cursed us and the girls screamed.
Angel ducked his head and ran for the
door.
I looked for something else to throw. The
lamp. Now the bedside table. I hauled a picture frame from the wall and hurled
that as the door slammed shut behind him.
I wiped myself with his shirt and tossed
that into the plaza as well. I found my clothes, got dressed. I didn’t walk
out, not then, not straight away. Take deep breaths, Magdalena. Don’t let him
see you cry.
I don’t know why, but when I got
downstairs he was still standing by the door, naked, cupping his balls with one
hand. Perhaps he was hoping that I’d calm down. You should not tell a naked
girl you’re getting married to someone else and hold even the faintest hope
that she will calm down anytime soon.
He saw the look on my face when I came out
of the bedroom and panicked. He ran out of the door and down the steps into the
plaza, bare-assed. The barrio girls started laughing and whistling, thinking
this was a great joke.
Angel was trapped, halfway between me and
the rest of Havana. He made to run back inside, then saw me coming down the
marble staircase. I kicked him and punched him while he cowered against the
wall. But how much damage can a girl do?
Not nearly enough, nothing like what he
deserved.
There was a crowd gathered, hooting and
cheering on the pretty chica beating on the rich kid. This was much fun as
anyone had seen at that end of San Lorenzo for a while. Eventually I let him
run back inside.
Luis was waiting with the car on the other
side of the plaza. I kept my head down so he couldn’t see me crying and jumped
in the back. He knew enough not to ask questions. He started the engine and put
his foot on the gas. We headed back down San Lorenzo towards Vedado.
I stared out of the window, my hands
balled into fists in my lap. I needed to calm down before I got home, I
couldn’t let papi see me like this.
Angel might think he was going to marry someone
else, but he was wrong.
This wasn’t over. Magdalena Fuentes would
see to that.
About the Author:
Colin
Falconer was born in North London, and spent most of his formative years at
school playing football or looking out of the window wishing he was somewhere
else.
After
failing to make the grade as a professional football player, he spent much of
his early years traveling, hitch-hiking around Europe and North Africa and then
heading to Asia.
His
experiences in Bangkok and India later inspired his thriller VENOM, which
became a debut bestseller in the UK and his adventures in the jungles of the
Golden Triangle of Burma and Laos were also filed away for later, the basis of
his OPIUM series about the underworld drug trade.
He later
moved to Australia and worked in advertising, before moving to Sydney where he
freelanced for most of Australia’s leading newspapers and magazines, as well as
working in radio and television.
He has
over 40 books in print. HAREM was an enormous bestseller in Germany and THE
NAKED HUSBAND was only kept out of the number one spot in Australia by Dan
Brown’s Da Vinci Code. AZTEC stayed on the bestseller lists in Mexico for four
months. He is a bestseller in Europe and his work has sold into translation in
23 countries around the world.
He travels
regularly to research his novels and his quest for authenticity has led him to
run with the bulls in Pamplona, pursue tornadoes across Oklahoma and black
witches across Mexico, go cage shark diving in South Africa and get tear gassed
in a riot in La Paz. He also completed a nine hundred kilometre walk of the
camino in Spain.
He did not
write for over five years following personal tragedy but returned to publishing
in 2010 with the release of SILK ROAD and then STIGMATA. His historical novel
ISABELLA was an Amazon bestseller last year.
His likens
his fiction most closely to Wilbur Smith and Ken Follett – books with romance
and high adventure, drawn from many periods of history.
His latest
book is the romantic suspense, Naked
in Havana.
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