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But neither did she want to call her friends in Miami. The problem was that she didn’t really fit in with the wealthy, spoiled crowd she used to run around with in Miami either. Maybe she hadn’t for a long time and that was why she’d felt so much like a hurricane back home—she’d never had enough of a reason to slow down and stop spinning.
In Alma, she’d found a reason. Or at least she’d thought she had. But apparently her judgment was suspect.
The party grew unbearably louder as someone turned up the extensive surround sound system that had come with the condo when Rafael had purchased it from a music executive. A Kanye West song beat through the speakers and Bella’s friends danced in an alcohol-induced frenzy. All she wanted to do was lie on the wooden floor of a farmhouse eating grapes with a British football player who’d likely already forgotten she existed.
Barricading herself in her room—after kicking out an amorous couple who had no sense of boundaries—she flopped onto the bed and pulled the bag she’d carried from the farmhouse into her arms to hold it tight.
The bag was a poor substitute for the man it reminded her of. But it was all she had. When would she stop missing him so much? When would her heart catch a clue that James had not one, but two females in his life who interested him a whole lot more than Bella?
Something crumpled inside the bag. Puzzled, she glanced inside, sure she’d emptied the bag some time ago.
The letters.
She’d totally forgotten about finding the cache of old, handwritten letters under the floorboards of the farmhouse. She’d meant to give them to Tía Isabella and with everything that had happened...well, it was too late now. Maybe she could mail them to her aunt.
When she pulled the letters from the bag, the memories of what had happened right after she’d found the letters flooded her and she almost couldn’t keep her grip on the string-bound lot of paper.
James holding her, loving her, filling her to the brim. They’d made love on that gorgeous bed with the carved flowers not moments after discovering the hiding place under the boards.
She couldn’t stand it and tossed the letters onto the bedside table, drawing her knees up to her chest, rocking in a tight ball as if that alone would ward off the crushing sense of loss.
The letters teetered and fell to the ground, splitting the ancient knotted string holding them together. Papers fluttered in a semicircle. She groaned and crawled to the floor to pick them up.
Indiscretion. Illegitimate. Love.
The words flashed across her vision as she gathered the pages. She held one of the letters up to read it from the beginning, instantly intrigued to learn more about a story that apparently closely mirrored her own, if those were the major themes.
She read and read, and flipped the letter over to read the back. Then, with dawning horror and apprehension, she read the rest. No! It couldn’t be. She must have misread.
With shaking fingers, she fumbled for her phone and speed-dialed Gabriel before checking the time. Well, it didn’t matter if it was the middle of the night in Alma. Gabriel needed to make sense of this.
“What?” he growled and she heard Serafia murmur in the background. “This better be good.”
“Rafael Montoro II wasn’t the child of the king,” she blurted out. “Grandfather. Our father’s father. He wasn’t the king’s son. The letters. The queen’s lover died in the war. And this means he was illegitimate. They were in love, but—”
“Bella. Stop. Breathe. What are you talking about? What letters?” Gabriel asked calmly.
Yes. Breathing sounded like a good plan. Maybe none of this would pan out as a problem. Maybe she’d read too much into the letters. Maybe they were fake and could be fully debunked. She gulped sweet oxygen into her lungs but her brain was still on Perma-Spin.
“I found some old letters. At the farmhouse. They say that our grandfather, Rafael the Second, wasn’t really the king’s son by blood. Wait.” She pulled her phone from her ear, took snapshots of the most incriminating letter and sent the pictures to Gabriel. “Okay, read the letter and tell me I misunderstood. But I couldn’t have. It says they kept the queen’s affair a secret because the war had just started and the country was in turmoil.”
Gabriel went quiet as he waited for the message to come through and then she heard him talking to Serafia as he switched over to speakerphone to examine the photo.
“These letters are worth authenticating,” he concluded. “I’m not sure what it means but if this is true, we’ll have to sort out the succession. I might not be the next in line.”
“Why do you sound so thrilled?” Bella asked suspiciously. That was not the reaction she’d been expecting. “This is kind of a big deal.”
