My American Wife

Beneath the thunder of hooves on a Kentucky racetrack, two worlds collide: Natalie Chester—sun-browned, aristocratic, fluent in the silent dialect of reins—meets Manuel La Tassa, Argentine gaucho-turned-silk-shirted diplomat, whose smile carries the smoky tang of yerba mate and revolution. One glance, and the air curdles with ozone; the crowd becomes a frieze, the horses mere metronomes to a destiny neither ordered. Hours later, in a Beaux-Arts ballroom dripping with chandeliers and whispered futures, Pedro De Grossa—a man whose blood seems tinted with absinthe and rust—publicly brands Natalie a ‘gringa mare,’ sparking Manuel’s glove across his cheek. The duel is set for dawn, steel on violet mist, yet Pedro’s industrialist father, Carlos, hires the wraith-like bandit Gomez to gut the Argentinian before honor can speak. A moonlit knife, a torso opened like a letter, and Manuel staggers into convalescence while Natalie, scenting treachery in the cordite, buys Gomez’s confession with gold enough to drown a cathedral. Pedro bolts to Europe aboard a coal-black steamer; Carlos is left gnawing the chains of scandal; and Manuel, stitched by love and vengeance, finally accepts the scepter of public office, his hand locked in Natalie’s—an American wife who has rewritten the constitution of his pulse.