Stolen Pregnant Bride
Hollie Hutchins
Introduction
Jada
I had been slaving away in the kitchen all afternoon to prepare for my oldest sister Elaina’s visit. My other big sister, Lucia, busied herself with the plants and whatever else it was she did with her time. All while our mother sat in the corner and looked out the window. I couldn’t blame Mama for taking it easy. Her health had been improving ever since we moved to our new hacienda, and we wanted to keep it that way. It was my sisters’ lifestyles that had been making me particularly bitter.
Once Lucia had taken care to slip into one of her fancy dresses with her hair and makeup all done up, she finally bothered to ask and see if I might need some help. I teased that she wouldn’t know how to help me even if I did. Soon after, the doorbell rang, and she was off to answer. Elaina came in and raved about what “a vision” Lucia was in her fitted green sundress. I wiped the sweat from my brow and wished I had at least a moment to comb my hair before Elaina arrived.
And of course, Elaina hadn’t been in the door a matter of minutes before she handed our niece off to Mama and demanded that we all sneak off into the bedroom to gossip. Nevermind that I had an entire dinner to finish cooking. But ever since Elaina ran off to that damned auction, I had grown used to things being that way.
The hacienda was filled with big bouquets of fresh flowers Lucia had gathered from around the property. The air was filled with the scents of the feast of Bandeja Paisa plates I was preparing for dinner - the kind of luxurious meal we could never have afforded before. The walls were painted in deep reds, blues, and golden yellows - accented with painted flowers. Every corner was filled with terracotta vases overflowing with luscious plants, and we left the doors and windows open so all the fresh Columbian air could flow through freely.
It was a dream, really. But our lives had not always been that way. Far from it, actually. Our father was an American man who had an affair with our mother. She left him to bring us back to Columbia so we could grow up there. We were very poor, and life was hard. When our mother got sick, my sisters and I slaved away to make ends meet and pay her medical bills. It was Elaina who first decided she had had enough.
There was an auction that broke, desperate people could turn to for work, but it was rumored to be a terrible, dangerous thing. Elaina didn’t care. She was convinced she could make enough money to move us back to the states for a better life and adequate medical care for our mother. Against our advice and our mother’s wishes, she ran off to the auction in the middle of the night. Not long after, Lucia got the bright idea to do the same.
They both acted like they were making such enormous sacrifices for our family by going, but that’s not how I saw it. The way I saw it - they ran off and left me alone to take care of everything by myself. Elaina sent some money home but insisted we save every penny we could for her dream of going to America. Lucia vanished and didn’t turn up for a long time. She never sent back a dime.
Everything changed when our father called. He was on his deathbed and wanted to meet us before he died. I’ll never forget how hesitant Elaina sounded when I called to tell her. She claimed her whole reason for running off was so we could go to America. There was our chance, and she acted as if she didn’t plan on ever coming home at all. And Lucia was still nowhere to be found.
By the time we returned to Columbia after our father’s death, we had the hacienda and estate he had purchased for us along with a hefty inheritance. It put Elaina in an excellent spot to marry her employer, whom she had apparently fallen in love with, which gave us a better social standing to go with our new financial status.
But aside from the peace of mind of not having to struggle, it didn’t seem much else had changed in my eyes. My sisters were still running off on a whim and leaving me behind with everything. Elaina got to start her new life in the Perez household she married into. Lucia was off on some revenge plot against her former employers. And I was left behind to take care of all the cooking, cleaning, and our mother.
I kept all my resentment deeply buried as we piled onto Lucia’s bed. Elaina always brought us a pile of gifts wrapped in silk scarves. We rifled through them as Elaina and Lucia gossiped about the excitement of their lives. That was always how it went. We never talked about anything going on in my life...because nothing was going on beyond housework. And I got the distinct impression that a single word of protest from me would prompt them to jump down my throat about being ungrateful for our new position in life. They’d lecture me about my responsibilities to my family.
Elaina was in a terribly scandalous relationship with the Perez brothers. She married Marco Perez but had a relationship with both him and his brother, Felix. Lucia wasn’t spoken for yet, but she obviously had a thing for the Valencia cousins. They treated her like a dog when she worked for them, and once we gained our wealth, she vowed to use it as a means to get revenge against them. But both Elaina and I suspected that her hatred for them seemed to be driven by something else. Something more like lust...especially for the oldest cousin - Leo.
Maybe if they had normal, boring marriages I wouldn’t have envied them one bit. Their lives wouldn’t be so different from mine. They’d be held up in their houses tending to their families. But, no. Elaina and Lucia had wild, unconventional love affairs that seemed full of secrets they didn’t think I was old enough to know. It all seemed so exciting and unusual.
And it was not the kind of thing I would ever find from our hacienda or through any conventional means of finding marriage. It would only be found if I had a chance to go out into the world and find adventures and mischief. But that was precisely the thing I could not do. It seemed, without anyone even asking me, my job was to stay at home with our elderly mother while Lucia and Elaina ran off to live their fabulous lives.
Later that afternoon, once the gossip was over and I had donned one of the silk scarves from Elaina along with a few squirts of the imported perfume she gifted to us, we gathered around the dinner table. The luxurious little tokens that she brought from her new life weren’t enough to lessen the sting of my bitterness, but they came close. At least for a little while.
When we finished eating, Elaina laid the baby down for a nap and asked us to join her around the table. Lucia and I appeared clueless as to what it was she had to talk to us about. Whatever it was seemed important, and Mama seemed to be in on it.
“And what of your news?” Mother asked.
A faint smile curled on the edges of Elaina’s lips, but I could tell there was a catch to whatever it was she was about to say to us. She took on an air of delivering excellent, but potentially ill-received news.
“Yes, I believe I have found someone who is perfect,” she answered, darkening her eyes at me.
“Someone perfect for what?” I asked with wide eyes.
Elaina reached across the table and squeezed my hands, causing a knot to form in the pit of my stomach.
“Baby sister, you know we have been talking about how important it is to secure our new place. It’s not enough that we have the inheritance. Even my unity with the Perez brothers doesn’t give us the footing we need to uphold through future generations. And we do want to ensure that our children and grandchildren never have to struggle the way we once did.”
“Yeah…,” I replied slowly, not liking the sound of where this was going at all.
“So, Mama asked me to see about setting up an arrangement for you.”
“An arrangement for what?”
“Marriage, of course.”
“Marriage!?” I cried. “An arranged marriage!?”
&nbs
p; I flew into a rage. I couldn’t believe after everything they had expected of me that now they wanted me to sacrifice my whole life and any chance of real love and happiness on top of it all.
“I refuse! I don’t want to be married off to some stranger! I don’t want to be married at all! At least not any time soon! What about Lucia!? She’s older than me! Why can’t she do it?”
“Oh, Jada, you’re twenty-four years old,” Elaina said dryly. “It’s not like you’re a child bride. And as for Lucia…” she cut her eyes over to her in a strangely secretive way. “I see another potential for her. Anyway, these arrangements work best for someone under twenty-five. There are more options that way, and you do want to be married off to someone smart and attractive, don’t you?”
There it was again. Their deep secret knowing about life that they shared, and the only reason I didn’t know anything about it was because they always left me behind to take care of everything at home. And now they expected me to marry off to some dull, rich, spoiled brat all for the sake of them being free to carry on with their lives. It was the nail in my coffin. They had left me there to die from boredom sitting next to mom and tending to the house all day. And now they expected me to stay there.
“Look, Jada,” Elaina continued in her condescending way. “The truth is, simply, that you have never been to the auction. You could never understand what Lucia and I have been through for the sake of this family. It’s your turn to step up and do your part to ensure that our children never had to subject themselves to such cruelties just to get by.”
I sat there, seething in my quiet rage. I would have rather run off to the auction than be forced into an arranged marriage. And the thing that nobody was saying was simply this - Yes, Lucia and Elaina may have endured their hardships during their terms of employment from the auction. But in the end, they came out better for it. They were happy now. But the misery they were selling me off into wasn’t temporary. There was no six-months to a year-long contract with pay. It was a life sentence.
Mother was usually silent among all of our bickering, but she tried to step in and help Elaina out. “Sweet Jada, this may seem different from what we’re used to. But it’s very common for rich families to marry their children to keep the business of our land going strong. We’re not seen as equals in the community yet. This is a great opportunity for us.”
“This is an unfair opportunity is what it is!” I shouted back. “It’s not my fault Lucia didn’t get married off sooner! Maybe if she wasn’t so busy running around with the Valencia cousins, she would have found a husband by now! Why should I be married off just because she’s fickle and waited too long!?”
“Enough!” Mama scolded.
Elaina mimicked her stern, authoritative tone. “This is what we must do.”
“You mean what I must do,” I pouted, crossing my arms.
“This is what you must do for our family. It’s settled.”
I shook my head and stared back at her with narrow eyes. Who the hell did she think she was? Who did either of them think they were? They ran around doing whatever they wanted, and now they were making decisions about my life. Now not only would I be enslaved to taking care of our mother, but a husband would be thrown into the mix too.
Lucia left to show Elaina out, leaving me alone with Mom. She looked at me defiantly, just daring me to try and argue with her. I knew if I did, she’d find some way to cut me down and make me feel like a terrible, selfish person. I didn’t bother. I huffed off to my room to be alone. It was obvious I had no choice in the matter, so the only thing left for me to do was come to terms with the life they had all chosen for me.
I didn’t know what Elaina’s life looked like in her strange arrangement with the Perez brothers, or why she walked around with a permanent coy grin on her face now. I didn’t know what Lucia saw in that bully Leo Valencia that had her all starry-eyed. I only knew that I would never find out about any of those things through an arranged marriage. They had the “bad boys.” The kind of guys your mother didn’t approve of, but you dreamed of and longed for at night.
Those kinds of men were the exact opposite of anything I could expect to find in whatever partner Elaina and my mother had chosen for me.
Chapter 1
Nicholas
Just one thought or mention of the Garcia family and my whole body sank into a deep-seated rage. I can’t pretend like I don’t have a temper. It’s commonplace for me to fly off the handle at a moment’s notice. But the kind of fury the Garcias roused in me was not some fleeting moment of heated anger. I could feel it coursing through my veins, coming from somewhere deep inside.
Anything could bring on these surges of hatred for them. I made a point to reflect on it daily because I figured it only helped stoke the flames that would serve me in bringing them down. But on that particular day, it was the newspaper that brought on these feelings. I sat at my dining table and seethed over my coffee as I looked at the picture of the Garcia family smiling back at me. They looked young, happy, fresh, clean...Rich.
The court proceedings between myself and the Garcias would have been an easy thing to blame for my disdain for them. But truthfully, it went back much further than that. That’s why I imagined the feeling was so consuming and permanent - like I was drenched in it entirely inside and out.
I was one of seven siblings, and we were a poor family growing up in Colombia. My mother ran her fingers down to the bone working in a laundry service that left her back ruined and her hands bloody. I can remember being out, causing trouble in the streets with my brothers when we came sneaking back home at midnight, and they were relieved when our mom wasn’t up waiting to scold us. But I was just worried about her, so I went out looking for her and, unsurprisingly, found her still slaving away over a giant wooden barrel of steaming hot water. She stirred the laundry with a big paddle in one hand (which was a job meant for two) and rocked my sleeping baby sister in the other arm. Another one of my younger siblings was draped across her legs, also sleeping.
My mother went to work every day before dawn. To see her still going at it well after midnight made it apparent that she wasn’t going to get any sleep that night. The body doesn’t function well without sleep, especially when the lack of it becomes a permanent state. Everything starts to break down. It was no wonder both of my parents were riddled with health problems, none of which they had the time or the money to treat.
Something changed for me that night, and it wasn’t even an uncommon occurrence for my mom. It was just the first time I truly saw it and was old enough to understand it. I looked at the heavy, white sheets that slopped around under her paddle. I knew that laundry belonged to families like the Garcia’s who had more money than god, and yet they paid people like my mom chump change to toil their lives away so they wouldn’t be inconvenienced with something as simple as doing their own laundry. They demanded it all done on time and perfectly and paid next to nothing for my mom’s trouble.
I decided right then and there that I was going to do things differently. But it wasn’t so simple as just getting a “better” job than my parents. You couldn’t get a good job unless you came from a family of people who already had good jobs. That’s how they kept the poor - poor, and the rich - rich. I would have to find a different way to break our family out of the cycle of poverty and slavery.
You could say it was when I decided I hated the rich. The Garcias were just a well-known wealthy family who exemplified everything I hated. It was also when I decided that my life would be different, and I would try my hardest to make that change while both of my parents were still with us - so at least the later parts of their lives would be different. I didn’t know what to do yet. I only knew that there was no magic door leading to the upper class, and I knew I wouldn’t settle for anything on the side of things we had been raised on.
But what took my hatred from a general one towards the selfish, rich bastards of our town onto the Garcias specifically? My father worked for them my whole
life. He came home broken down and tired and, like my mother, with not nearly enough money to make it worth it. We were still barely getting by. The Garcias owned a lot of land and housing. That’s part of what made their fortune. One day we received notice about the tiny shack we lived in that was in grave disrepair. The Garcias owned it and they were raising the rent. We could barely afford rent as it was - much less an increase.
My father assured my hysterically sobbing mother not to worry. She was terrified that the nine of us would soon be kicked out onto the streets. But he insisted we were lucky because he had worked for the Garcias so long. He could negotiate with them. My father was hopeful and calm when he went to work the next day. It was all a lack of understanding, he thought. He’d tell them about our situation, and they’d understand. They could leave our rent the way it was or give him a raise - which he had never received once in his fifteen-plus years of employment with them.
But instead, they fired my father. Mr. Garcia was insulted that my dad would imply he was running the rental houses poorly and that he wasn’t paying his employees enough. He told my father that he was doing him a favor. He obviously wasn’t happy working for them, so he could go somewhere else and find a new landlord while he was at it.
Skip past many more years of struggle and heartache to my mid-twenties. I had accomplished everything I hoped to. I had learned how to play both sides of the coin. The Garcias didn’t have to break the laws to make money because they had dinner parties with people who made the laws. They were designed just for them. They just treated people like shit, but there was no law against that. But people like me could break those laws and make a fortune. So that’s what I did.
I was beating people like the Garcias at their own game. And part of that game was purchasing land, and lots of it. Some of it could be used for nefarious purposes. Some of it could be resold or leased out. There was plenty for the taking if you knew how to get your hands on it, and sometimes it wasn’t always on the up and up...at least for me.
Stolen Pregnant Bride (Olive Skin Devils Book 3) Page 1
