Christmas Wedding

Chapter One

Rafael

Rafael Soto's mother might kill him with a bouquet of burning sage. He'd survived three tours as a Navy SEAL and was about to go out, not in blaze of glory, but in a cloud of smoke. 

A feverish glint in her normally warm brown eyes, Mama waved the smoky death stick in a rhythmic sashay in front of his face. Swells of smoke swirled around his head, and the foul smell crawled into his nose and throat. Tears leaked from his eyes. 

"Marriage Curse be gone," Mama said. 

Behind her, Mama's best friend, Ria, performed what sounded like a Gregorian chant while hopping on one foot in front of the Christmas tree. 

The trouble started when he bought Mama a laptop computer and installed high-speed internet in her apartment. Since then, she'd become a search engine connoisseur. Sadly, knowledge was not power when it came to Mama. Knowledge was dangerous. Had he known she'd use it to search for a cure to a family curse and subsequently use all the remedies on him, he might have rethought the expensive internet package. 

Turns out, there were blogs dedicated to all things mystical and magical. Mama and Ria had found every single darn one of them. 

His mother, the irrepressible Mama Soto, believed their family suffered from what she'd named the Marriage Curse. Her certainty wasn't completely unfounded. For three generations, the women in his family had raised children alone, after no-good, lying cheaters had done what they do best. Betray. Deny. Leave. It was like a tagline for the men in his family. 

Rafael didn't believe in the curse. Many marriages ended in divorce. It didn't mean your family was cursed. Did the women in his family have questionable judgment in spouses? Affirmative. Rafael's first marriage, decided in haste before he shipped out to basic training after graduating from high school, had ended as all Soto marriages of the past. By a no-good, lying cheater. Not him, but her. While he trudged through sand in a foreign country, his wife had taken up with her coworker. He'd received not so much as a Dear John letter. 

So, yes, in the past, he and his mama and grandmother and great-grandmother had chosen poorly. However, that was before he found Lisa Perry. The love of his life. An angel who walked the earth and had somehow, by a miracle that could only be a gift from God, fallen for him. In two days, they would exchange vows in the winter wonderland of Emerson Pass, Colorado. 

Lisa dismissed his first marriage and the curse. She and her best friend Pepper Griffin called it a "starter marriage." Not uncommon, according to an article they'd read in one of those fashion magazines he now found tucked into every nook in his apartment. The theory was that young people marry for a few years and then divorce, almost as if they need a practice run before finding the right person. It didn't even count, Lisa reasoned. Plus, it was ages ago. He was young and dumb. All true. 

He didn't believe in the curse. Not really, anyway.

Mama, on the other hand, firmly believed that somewhere along the way, her grandmother had committed a transgression against a witch from her village in Mexico. She didn't know the exact nature of the crime but assumed it was something to do with a man. "Witches are especially vindictive when it comes to matters of the heart," she'd said. 

How Mama, a devoted Catholic, reconciled magic and her religion was just one of the mysteries of a complex woman. 

Regardless, she insisted that if something wasn't done before the wedding, his marriage to the love of his life would end in tragedy.