LITMIR.BIZ

      One

       “¡Dios mío!” Gabriella del Toro hissed under her breath. Blood welled up from the cut she’d inflicted upon herself with the can opener. She sighed. As if anything else could have gone wrong.

      From his seat at the breakfast table, Joaquin, her bodyguard, looked up from his tablet. “I’m fine,” she said, answering his unspoken question. “Just a cut.”

      She looked down at the injury. She had not anticipated that fixing some broth and toast for her brother, Alejandro, would be so difficult. But then, everything was difficult right now. While she had spent time in the kitchen back at Las Cruces, the ancestral del Toro estate west of Mexico City, she’d never actually prepared anything more than tea and coffee. Their cook had thought that preparing meals was beneath the lady of the house, even if the lady had been only twelve. No one had thought to teach Gabriella the first thing about cooking since...her tía had tried to show her how to make tortillas from scratch.

      Gabriella had been seven the last time Papa had taken her and Alejandro to see their mother’s sister. A full twenty years had passed since then.

      As Gabriella rinsed the cut under the faucet and wrapped her wounded finger in a towel, she mentally bemoaned how this must look. She was the daughter of Rodrigo del Toro, one of the most powerful legitimate businessmen in all of Mexico. She was one of the most sought-after jewelry designers in Mexico City. She regularly transformed hunks of metal and pieces of rock into wearable art with a Mayan influence.

      But at this moment, she was every heiress stereotype rolled into one. She couldn’t even open a can of soup.

      The bleeding staunched, she went looking for a bandage. She heard Joaquin stand and trail her out of the kitchen, although he kept a polite distance. She’d rarely been apart from the large, mostly silent man since her father had hired him to protect her when she had been thirteen. She was now twenty-seven. Joaquin Baptiste was nearing forty, but he had showed no signs of slowing down. Secretly, Gabriella hoped he never would. He was far more concerned with her happiness than her father—or even her brother—had ever been. That, and he had never let any harm befall

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