One Classic Latin Lover, Please Read online

  Copyright © 2012

  One Classic Latin Lover, Please by Marcia Lynn McClure

  www.marcialynnmcclure.com

  All rights reserved.

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the US Copyright Act of 1976, the contents of this book may not be reproduced, transmitted, or distributed in any part or by any means without the prior written consent of the author and/or publisher.

  Published by Distractions Ink

  P.O. Box 15971

  Rio Rancho, NM 87174

  Published by Distractions Ink

  ©Copyright 2012 by M. Meyers

  A.K.A. Marcia Lynn McClure

  Cover Photography by ©Somakram/Dreamstime.com and ©Geotrac/Dreamstime.com

  Cover Design and Interior Graphics by Sandy Ann Allred/Timeless Allure

  First Printed Edition: December 2012

  All character names and personalities in this work of fiction are entirely fictional,

  created solely in the imagination of the author.

  Any resemblance to any person living or dead is coincidental.

  McClure, Marcia Lynn, 1965—

  One Classic Latin Lover, Please: a novel/by Marcia Lynn McClure.

  ISBN: 978-0-9884276-4-8

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2012951958

  Printed in the United States of America

  To a Cast of Characters Who Inspire Me…

  To Ricardo Montalbán and Gene Tierney.

  To my college roommate and forever-friend, Sandy.

  To my children, Sandy, Mitch, and Trent—who love the positive, upbeat, danceable music of the ’80s almost as much as their dad and I do. (They also know that there is no substitute for Steve Perry!)

  To Rob Pilatus (who now rests in peace) and Fabrice Morvan—I don’t care what the music industry, history, or anybody else says. Rob and Fab rocked the big shoulder pads and long braids! They sang one of my favorite songs (“Girl, You Know It’s True”) and will always be the real Milli Vanilli to me!

  And finally, to anyone who has ever inspired me in any regard,

  whether in my writing or in life.

  Thank you!

  C hapter One

  Tierney O’Brien faked a grateful smile as she thanked Maisey Buchanon for the red satin and lace baby-doll nightie. She smiled, blushed when everyone made the expected “Wooo‑whooo!” exclamation, and said, “Thank you so much, Maisey! I’m sure Dillon will love it!”

  But Tierney’s stomach churned with a slight nausea at the thought of wearing something so scandalous and revealing in from of Dillon Hawthorne on their wedding night—on any night, for that matter. Sure, she was engaged to Dillon. She’d been engaged to him for nearly six months—dated him for six months before that. And Tierney was fond enough of Dillon. But since the moment he’d asked her to marry him and she’d said yes, Tierney O’Brien had owned the sinking, almost sickening feeling that she’d made a mistake. And as her wedding day inched closer and closer, the seemingly permanent nausea that had taken up residence in her stomach the instant Dillon had slipped the three-carat solitaire onto her finger grew stronger and stronger.

  As Bethany Howard handed another bridal shower gift to Tierney, she could almost hear her brother’s voice echoing through her head. Don’t marry this guy just because Dad and Mom picked him out and pushed you together, Tierney, Alec had told her over and over again. Hold out for someone you’re really, really in love with!

  As the bridal shower guests watched Tierney begin to open the gift wrapped in silver and white, Tierney’s stomach spasmed with anxiety. One more week and it would be too late to cancel the wedding! One more week and it would be done: she’d be Mrs. Dillon Hawthorne. But Tierney gritted her teeth and tore open the paper to reveal yet another lingerie box with the Victoria’s Secret logo on it.

  “Oh, wow!” she exclaimed with false excitement.

  “You will love this one, Tiern!” Aubrey Fairchild exclaimed.

  “You mean Dillon will love it!” Aubrey’s twin sister, Tiffany, added with an insinuative giggle.

  Again Tierney felt her cheeks pink up as she drew the elegant yet very sexy red satin and black lace out of its box. Naturally the expected catcalls erupted from the guests, and Tierney’s stomach, already sore with churning and nausea, tied itself into knots of anxiety.

  “I hope you’ve been tanning, Tierney,” Blair Sinclair commented. “Otherwise the red will totally wash you out!”

  “Blair!” Aubrey scolded. “It will not! Everyone looks fabulous in red. Especially Tierney.”

  “You guys…thank you so, so much!” Tierney announced, studying the ridiculously large mountain of opened bridal gifts, most of which were sexy lingerie. She wondered for a moment what ever happened to people giving brides-to-be things like Crock-Pots, toasters, and spatulas. Yet glancing around the circle of friends in attendance, she could see that not one of her pampered and wealthy friends ever spent a moment in the kitchen.

  Tierney sighed, realizing that when she went shopping for Aubrey Fairchild’s bridal shower—for Aubrey was to be married exactly one month after Tierney—she certainly wouldn’t be buying a Crock-Pot for Aubrey. Nope. Aubrey was definitely a Victoria’s Secret kind of girl.

  Again Tierney’s anxiety welled as she thought of her impending wedding night with Dillon. She wouldn’t even feel comfortable wearing her red-and-black plaid flannel Christmas pajamas in front of him, let alone the silky, sexy nightgown the Fairchild twins had just given her. And shouldn’t a woman feel at least somewhat comfortable in anticipating intimacy with the man she was married to? Shouldn’t she be actually looking forward to it?

  Yet Tierney’s mother had told her that she hadn’t been comfortable with Tierney’s father for a couple of years after they were married, assuring Tierney that all the anxiety she was feeling about marrying Dillon was absolutely normal.

  Alec, on the other hand, vehemently disagreed. When Tierney had called her older brother and only sibling to tell him she’d accepted Dillon’s proposal, she thought for a moment that Alec O’Brien was going to reach through the phone and strangle her! In fact, Alec had spent nearly two hours trying to talk Tierney into calling Dillon that very night and breaking up with him—not just telling him she’d changed her mind about marrying him but breaking up with him altogether.

  But Tierney was confused, scared, and frustrated. She wasn’t strong like Alec was—strong enough to respectfully stand up to her parents the way Alec had. Furthermore, what if Dillon was the one she was meant to be with? After all, a guy didn’t propose marriage to a girl if he weren’t serious about building a life with her—a family—right?

  “Now apparently your brother has a shower gift for you, Tierney,” Tierney’s mother said, snapping her attention back to the festivities at hand.

  “What?” Tierney asked.

  Glynnis O’Brien sighed with exasperation at Tierney’s inattentiveness. “Alec,” she explained. “He’s sent some silly gift for you to open here.”

  But Tierney smiled. She loved her brother more than anything or anyone. She knew he was disappointed in the fact she was marrying Dillon, but she also knew he loved her unconditionally. Alec had always been her strength, and she’d missed him so much since he’d moved to Washington State. She’d often wondered whether, had Alec still been living at home when Tierney had begun getting into a more serious relationship with Dillon, Alec could have given her the courage to walk away—no matter what consequences their parents exacted on Tierney.

  “What is it?” Tierney asked with sudden excitement and less despair. “What did Alec send, Mom?”

  But Glynnis rolled her eyes and shrugged. “Well, I don’t know, Ti
erney,” she whined. “Probably one of his stupid—”

  “When should we bring in the stripper, Mrs. O’Brien?” Tierney heard Blair whisper to her mother.

  “Later, later,” Glynnis whispered, waving with one hand in a gesture of dismissal. “We’ll get Alec’s gift out of the way first.”

  Instantly, the momentary zeal Tierney had experienced over learning Alec had sent a gift for her evaporated. Oh, how she loathed the male strippers the mothers of her friends always hired to perform at their daughters’ bridal showers. Oh sure, they were always good-looking, incredibly buff professionals. Madison Waverly’s mother had even managed to hire a real Chippendale stripper for Madison’s bridal shower. But acting like a bunch of idiots over some stranger stripping off his shirt and pants to stand there dancing around in his way‑too‑small underwear just wasn’t Tierney’s idea of entertainment.

  Of course, Tierney realized her ideas of entertainment varied greatly from the norm—from the norm of the new century anyway. While the friends in Tierney’s social circle enjoyed Broadway, lavish parties, endless shopping, and being slathered with jewelry, exotic trips, and other gifts from men attempting to win them, Tierney enjoyed community theater, quiet evenings at home in front of the fire, volunteering at the local orphanages and rest homes, and watching old MGM musicals.

  In fact, it was more often than not that both Tierney and her brother, Alec, joked about having been switched at birth with children of normal, middle-class families they each wished they belonged to—for even Alec had tastes that leaned more toward cheeseburgers than shrimp cocktail.

  Tierney smiled as she thought of her brother, Alec. He’d been her confidant, her protector, the only person in all the world who truly knew who Tierney was—knew the true desires of her heart. She giggled a little as she thought of Ricardo then. Even Ricardo had come from Alec. He’d been a gift for Tierney’s fourteenth birthday, and Tierney O’Brien would never forget the first moment she’d walked into her bedroom to find the life-sized cardboard cutout of a young Ricardo Montalbán standing in her room beside her bed.

  The fact was Tierney had fallen in love with Ricardo Montalbán when she’d been no more than eight years old. Left to her own devices one night by her nanny while her parents had been out to a New Year’s Eve party and Alec had been sick in bed with the flu, Tierney had settled down and begun flipping satellite channels. Suddenly, something caught her attention—a young and handsome, very dashing, very romantic Ricardo Montalbán, waltzing with a youthful, shy, and innocently lovely Jane Powell. It was Tierney’s first mid‑twentieth‑century MGM musical and would always remain her favorite. And in that moment, it had contributed to defining her.

  From that night on, Tierney O’Brien seemed to come to know herself through vintage movies of the twentieth century and nostalgia of all sorts. Tierney found that she loved not only the happy endings of the old 1950s musicals (realistic or not) but also the “Latin lover” ideal of the time period. In fact, her love for the old movie Latin lover concept prompted her to do her research as well. Certainly, Ricardo Montalbán reigned as her favorite of the old Latin lovers, but she also studied and enjoyed the performances of the very first cinematic Latin lover Rudolph Valentino (though he was, in fact, Italian and not Latin). Although Tierney did not find Valentino to be nearly as handsome or attractive as Ricardo Montalbán, she was pleasantly taken with Valentino’s manner of kissing a woman. It had always been Tierney’s opinion that Valentino’s popularity with women had more to do with the fact that he kissed a woman the way all women of the silent movie era dreamed of being kissed—dramatically, passionately, and, above all, thoroughly! Even considering the modern times in which Tierney lived, she had never been kissed the way Valentino kissed Nita Naldi in his 1925 film Cobra. Even the manner in which Rudolph Valentino merely kissed a woman’s hand made Tierney’s heart leap more than any kiss she’d ever experienced.

  The only modern-day actor Tierney had ever added to her list of ideal Latin lovers was Antonio Banderas. Until the day she’d seen his performance with Catherine Zeta Jones in the mid-1990s version of The Mask of Zorro, even Antonio had not made Tierney’s list. Yet as Zorro he finally had.

  It wasn’t that Tierney lived in a fantasy world, avoiding reality and believing nonsense. She knew the cinematic Latin lovers of the early to mid-twentieth century were purely daydreams—learned early on to admire the actors’ performances and not the actors themselves. With the exception of her beloved Ricardo Montalbán—a devoutly loyal husband to his wife, Georgiana, for sixty-three years, Georgiana’s unexpected death being the only thing to separate them in the end—most Latin lover actors led scandalous lives when not on screen.

  Therefore, though Tierney enjoyed the movie performances of Valentino, his successor Ramón Novarro, and Ricardo Montalbán’s comrade in Latin lovers arms Fernando Lamas (and an occasional Antonio Banderas performance), she did not get lost in the rationalizing infatuation that women of the generations upon generations before her had. She simply adored the characters they played.

  Yet through it all, the man born November 25, 1920, in Mexico City as Ricardo Gonzalo Pedro Montalbán y Merino remained Tierney O’Brien’s ideal dream-man. And every morning since the day she turned fourteen, Tierney awoke with a smile as the image of Ricardo Montalbán greeted her from the life-sized cardboard cutout Alec had lovingly gifted her years before.

  It was one of the many regrets Tierney had about accepting Dillon’s proposal and her upcoming wedding. She’d have to leave Ricardo Montalbán behind! No man would want a life-sized cardboard cutout of Ricardo Montalbán lingering in their bedroom—and it bothered Tierney that she regretted leaving Ricardo behind. It seemed to her that she should be glad to give up Alec’s gift, but she wasn’t.

  “Just roll it in here,” Glynnis O’Brien said, snapping Tierney’s attention back to the bridal shower at hand. “Let’s get this over with so we can continue with the party.” Tierney was further aggravated with her mother’s attitude as she heard her mumble, “Alec and his asinine gifts…they drive me crazy sometimes.”

  Yet as all the guests began whispering, giggling, and speculating, Tierney smiled as she saw Aubrey and Tiffany pushing a very large box toward her. The box was on a roller platform and was wrapped in red shiny paper and embellished with wide black velvet ribbon and a large black velvet bow. The box looked to be about seven feet tall and four feet wide, and Tierney giggled again, wondering what Alec could have sent her.

  “There’s a card with it,” Tiffany said, offering a red envelope to Tierney.

  Accepting the card, Tierney felt the first sincere smile of the evening spread across her face. Alec knew her. Alec loved her, and she knew his gift would be individual—something only she and he understood. No doubt it would be humorous as well, for Alec was nothing if not clever, and he truly enjoyed making people smile and laugh.

  Quickly Tierney opened the envelope and removed the card.

  “Read it out loud,” Aubrey suggested.

  Tierney’s smile broadened as she read the front of the card aloud. “A special day demands a special gift…a gift sent with loving intent. Therefore, for you on your special day, I present to you…” Tierney paused long enough to open the card and then read, “One Classic Latin Lover with a very special message. I love you, baby sister. Alec.”

  As Tierney began to giggle, the younger women at the party began to press her to open the box.

  “What could possibly be in there?” Madison asked.

  “It’s the stripper for sure,” Blair suggested, giggling with excitement.

  As fast as she could, Tierney tore the wrapping paper on the front of the tall package to reveal a plastic handle attached to the box with the words, Pull this, written nearby. Tierney wondered if Alec had found a way to make her cardboard cutout of Ricardo Montalbán into something more lasting than just cardboard.

  Pulling on the handle, however, Tierney gasped as the front of the box broke away to reveal Alec
’s gift—one classic Latin lover!

  There inside the large box stood a man—not a cardboard cutout man but a real man. And, oh, what a man it was! Tierney’s mouth hung agape as she studied the man standing in the box. He was literally tall, dark, and incredibly, incredibly handsome! Dressed in a high‑end white shirt, black tuxedo, and black bow tie, the man owned black, loosely swept back, Antonio Banderas hair that gave him both the short-cropped look of a refined gentleman and yet the “just raked my fingers through my hair” appearance of a man who could seduce a woman with simply a smile. His short, dark whisker growth was perfectly manicured—a goatee and mustache, with a not-too-thin and not-too-thick beard line that followed his perfect square jaw from his goateed chin to his sideburns. His eyes were dark and smoldering—the perfect complement to his Latin complexion. His cheekbones were set high, and his nose was as straight a nose as Tierney had ever seen. Broad shoulders, long legs—the man was gorgeous!

  As Tierney began to regain her senses, her first thought was a delighted, Where did Alec find this guy? Her next thought, however, had to do with how plain Jane and dowdy she must look to him. Brown hair with caramel highlights, green eyes, the plainest brown dress she owned, she probably looked like something the cat had just dragged in.

  The man stepped from the box to stand right in front of her. He was so close to her, so close she could smell the faint scent of him—of some masculine shower gel or cologne—and it was overwhelming to Tierney’s senses. She began to take a step back, but the man reached out, taking hold of her arm, pulling her close to him and into ballroom dance position.

  “I hear you tango,” he said. His voice was low and smooth like crème brûlée and sent goose bumps popping up all over Tierney’s arms.

  Tierney nodded and managed to whisper, “A little.”

  The man smiled, his perfect lips perfectly accenting his perfectly white teeth. “Well then,” he said, and from somewhere the music began.