A book extra for In Dante’s Debt , The Spaniard’s Passion , The Latin Lover’s Secret Child , Lazaro’s Revenge , Mistaken For A Mistress
The aristocratic Galváns of Argentina are a complicated family, their relationships with each other stretched and tangled as they struggled to come to grips with their troubled past and hopes for the future.
Responsibility for the family problems rests squarely on the late Count Tino Galváns shoulders, a man blessed with stunning good looks and tremendous wealth, but a man lacking moral character. Married twice, Tino Galván indulged in numerous affairs, shamelessly flaunting his lovers before Buenos Aires society.
The Galván children — from Tino’s marriages and affairs — grew up in a state of unremitting chaos. The only constant in Tino’s childrens lives was excess: too much money, too much alcohol, and too much unhappiness.
Tino’s first wife: Ines Galván
Ines Galván was a true Buenos Aires blue blood, and heiress to an enormous manufacturing fortune. Swept off her feet by Tino’s dark looks and passionate nature, she married Tino at eighteen, straight from her Catholic boarding school. Raised to respect the church and traditional family values, Ines was first devestated and then disgusted by her husband’s infidelity, yet she stood by his side, determined to keep the family intact. But when Tino’s years of philandering became the mainstay of the Buenos Aires soceity pages, Ines demanded he get rid of his mistress. Instead Tino abandoned her. Marquita died not long after, and Dante privately blames his father.
Tino and Ines children: Dante and Paloma
Tino’s second wife: Marquita
A struggling fashion model when first introduced to the flamboyant Count Galván, Marquita admired Tino’s charm, wealth and sophistication. Raised in a blue-collar neighborhood outside fashioned Buenos Aires, Marquita had always wanted to be one of the ‘beautiful people’, and once married to the now widowed Tino, determined she would have everything. Unfortunately, it wasn’t until she was pregnant with their first child, that Marquita realized she might have money, she might have power, but she didn’t have Tino. Yet unlike Tino’s first wife, Marquita wouldn’t fade quietly in the background. Instead she developed her own circle of friends, and a taste for the most exclusive designers and the most fashionable drugs.
Tino and Marquita’s children: Estrella, Tadeo and Anabella
The illegitimate children:
Lazaro Herrera: product of Count Tino Galván, scandal and Sabana Herrera
Sabana Herrera’s mother worked as the housekeeper for Tino and Ines Galván, and on weekends and school holidays, Sabana would help her mother would household chores. Sabana was fifteen the first time Tino spotted her. For the next two years he relentlessly pursued her, his desire for the beautiful school girl becoming a not-so-secret obsession that ends in rape. Pregnant and disgraced, seventeen year old Sabana is sent from Buenos Aires to relatives in rugged Patagonia. It is there in a remote mountain village that she gives birth to Lazaro, a son born within 6 months of Tino’s firstborn heir, Dante.
Alonso (Huntsman) Galván: product of Count Tino Galván’s one true love affair with Welsh beauty, Meredith Huntsman
On holiday with friends in Argentina, twenty-year-old Meredith Huntsman, meets the Count Tino Galván at an exclusive Buenos Aires club one night and knows life will never be the same. Popular and confident, Meredith is intrigued by the handsome Argentine aristocrat and quickly falls in love with him, beginning a passionate love affair that was to last until Tino’s death years later. Soon pregnant with Tino’s child, Meredith never returns to the UK, but with Tino’s support, makes a new life for herself and the baby, struggling to accept that their’s is a weekend relationship at best. After Tino’s death, Meredith marries a Scottish geologic miner and moves to Colombia with her new husband, hoping to provide Alonso a more normal life.
