Firestorm by Brenda Joyce

that time, he has never regained his will to live. Recently, he came down with a cold that turned into pneumonia. I fear that the Lord is going to take him away from us soon .
    Brett, I know you are as proud as your father, but I beg you not to let your pride rule your emotions. Don Felipe will never write to you and ask you to come to him, although I have shared with him all my news of you. I know he wants to see you. Please come .
    The rest of the family is well. Your brother Manuel is ten, strong, stubborn, and intelligent, just like you and his father. Your two younger sisters, Gabriella and Catherine, both have their mother’s Castilian beauty. My own children, Sophia and Diego, are well. Sophia is a new mother. Your Tía Elena is the same .
    Your loving uncle,
Emmanuel
    Brett put the letter aside, his face a dark mask. He promptly went to the sideboard and poured himself a large brandy. He drank half of it, staring out of the window at the garden and street below. Damn them all.
    He was flooded with memories, none of them pleasant. Of himself living and stealing on the streets of Mazatlán, a skinny, dirty boy always one step ahead of the policía , failing to appear at home for days and even weeks on end. Not that his mother, the French whore, cared. Whenever he did return, one of her several “protectors” was there. One thing about Mother—she was ageless, beautiful. But heartless. She left his upbringing to the housekeeper, who didn’t have time. Only one of the maids seemed to care,a little English girl named Mary. When she caught him running in, usually because he was hungry and had failed to find enough on the streets, she would grab him and make him bathe and change his clothes. He would be gone as soon as his stomach was full, but not before hearing his mother’s high-pitched cries and the deep moans of whomever she was “entertaining.”
    He didn’t know who he hated more, his mother the whore, or his father the Californio.
    He was eight when his life changed—when the don sent for him because his two brothers had been killed. Brett hadn’t even known who his father was until that moment when his mother informed him she was sending him away. To this day he had no idea what the relationship between his parents had been, or how they had met.
    Don Felipe’s first wife, Doña Anna, had not given his father another heir. Old beyond her years, she did not seem capable of producing more children. She died six years after Brett’s arrival, having suffered several miscarriages, but by then, Don Felipe was relieved. He promptly married fifteen-year-old Theresa, who came from a long line of male-bearing bluebloods.
    At the time of the second marriage, Brett was fourteen. During the years he had lived in his father’s household he had been educated but otherwise either ignored or vilified. He learned to read and write in Spanish, French, and English, although he already knew how to speak all three languages. He even learned a smattering of Latin. He became well versed in mathematics, geometry, geography, and history, and excelled at riding, fencing, and handling pistols. He learned to talk and walk and act like a gentleman—which he knew he was not.
    Don Felipe seemed not to care about him, except when Brett did not succeed at something, and then his father became angry. Brett was punished, usually with a cane.He never gave satisfaction when he was hit—he never cried out.
    In the six years before her death, Doña Anna refused even to look at him, much less talk to him, although she talked about him to others. He knew he was a bastard, but it had never bothered him until he heard his father’s wife constantly refer to him as “the bastard.” Then he knew a hatred and shame like never before.
    The others looked down on him, too. Little Sophia—a cousin near his own age, a startlingly beautiful child with blue-black hair and dark