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“She was young,” he said, “a teenager, when she had me. I don’t know how long she’d been on the street before I was born. Her name was Ria Green. I always thought that was the wrong name for a hooker, but she never went by anything else. I don’t know where her family came from, or where she grew up. She rented a room in a run-down building not far from the boardwalk in Atlantic City. The woman who owned the boarding house, Miss Mabel, was about five hundred years old, smoked a pipe all day long and would look out for me while Ria worked the alleys around the casinos. We were there until I was seven. I pretty much raised myself.”
He didn’t bother describing the overwhelming loneliness of those years. The clawing hunger. The constant fear. Belinda didn’t need to know any of it. He cleared his throat. “One day, Ria went to work and never came home.”
He fell silent, seeing images from those years flash through his mind, like a movie montage: Miss Mabel, with skin the colour of liquorice, opening the door to his room and calling out to ask if he was okay before she went back to her daytime soaps; him stealing food from the grocery store, and hiding terrified in a closet because Ria had brought one of her clients home; trying to shake his mother awake when she was high on crack and lying in her own vomit…
“What happened to her?” Belinda’s soft question snapped him back to the present.
“She OD’d.”
Belinda stroked his chest as though to soothe him. He didn’t need it. It had happened a lifetime ago. He barely remembered her.
“What happened to you?”
“Foster care.” He’d wanted to stay with Miss Mabel, had begged, but she hadn’t wanted him any more than his mother had.
“You don’t need to tell me anything else,” Belinda said, as though she somehow knew how truly crappy things had been.
But Beast had started now, and somehow that made it easier to go on. “Ria didn’t know who my father was. She thought he might have been a Mexican-American guy who used her often during the right time frame.”
“That’s why she called you Garcia?”
“Not quite.” He felt the words solidify in his throat. The full, ugly truth about his start in life. The truth he carried with him every day. The one his mother had been kind enough to put on his birth certificate to remind him. “My full name is A. John Garcia,” Beast said.
Belinda gasped, and he knew she got it straight away.
“Yeah, she named me after my father—a john. And she used Garcia because she thought it sounded like gracias. It was sarcastic. She liked to laugh about it. A final thank you to the unknown man for his unwelcome gift.”
Belinda held him tight. “That was unbelievably cruel.”
That made him smile. Belinda Collins, darling of Hollywood, was outraged for him—a bastard mutt from the wrong side of the tracks. Who would have thought?
“I know she was your mum, Beast, but if she were here right now, I would be sorely tempted to slap her.”
He couldn’t help it. The thought of the delicate British celebrity taking on his street-toughened mother was just plain funny. He let out a bark of laughter that surprised them both and wrapped his arms around her, pulling her over his chest.
“She would have eaten you alive, Hollywood.”
“Not before I got a good smack in. Your mother was an irresponsible…terrible…person.”
He laughed again. “You can say bitch. Trust me, I get it.”
She stilled then reached up to cup his cheek. “I wish it had been different for you. I wish you could hear the name John and feel pride, because when I think of you as John, I think of a strong, honourable, accomplished, sexy man. It’s the name of presidents, of apostles, of musicians and actors. It’s an amazing name. And you fit it. If I were you, I’d claim the John and make it yours. Then I’d punch anyone who didn’t use it.”
Beast laughed again and pressed a kiss to her hair. “You think I’m sexy?”
She huffed. “That was your takeaway?”
“You think I’m sexy.” He grinned against her hair.
“I also think you’re annoying. Focus on that.”
“Belinda Collins, world-famous actress who’s worked with some of the sexiest men alive, thinks little old me is sexy.”
She pushed back from him with a frustrated grunt. “Trust me. On my list of sexy men, you are right at the bottom.”
“But I’m on the list,” he said smugly.
“I’m going to sleep, John.”
