Blog Tour: First Chapter Reveal: Naked In Havana by Colin Falconer
Title:
Naked in HavanaAuthor:
Colin FalconerPublisher:
Coolgus Publishing Pages:
164Genre:
Romantic
SuspenseFormat:
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.
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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.
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