Marianna Vasquez-Anselmo looked at Peter Samson's sleeping form, and grinned. The tall, dark-skinned young man whom she affectionately referred to as her "Angelito Negro" or Black Angel, was asleep at last. Hard to believe that this loco American was the same guy she met eight months, when he barged into the Student Affairs Office at the Universidade Catolica De Salvador, better known as the Catholic University of Salvador in the State of Bahia, Brazil. When the strangely attired young man, in heavily accented Brazilian Portuguese asked about the Registrar's Office, she stared at him blankly.
The City of Salvador was one of Brazil's biggest metropolitan areas and it was quite diverse. Lots of mestizos and Latinos along with Afro-Brazilians called the metropolis their home. Yet, as they always did, Americans always stood out. With his Jay-Z T-shirt, FUBU jeans and Timberland boots, Peter Samson was American with a capital A. The Director of Student Affairs, Isabel Monteiros, stared at the brash young man and her eyes flashed angrily. Before her boss could say anything, Marianna flashed what everyone knew to be her winning smile, and told her she'd take care of it. Gently rising to her feet, the tall, curvy young woman walked up to the wide-eyed interloper and asked him, in English, if he would kindly follow her.
The dark-skinned American looked her up and down, grinned wryly and nodded. I'll follow you anywhere sweetness, he said. Marianna tried not to roll her eyes as she escorted the newcomer to the registrar's office down the hall. It was mid-August, and most students had already started moving into the dormitories, and this loco American was asking about registration. Oh, well. She walked him to the registrar's office, wished him the best of luck and went about her business. She could feel the Americano's stare as she walked away. Marianna was used to having men stare at her. Standing five-foot-ten, pleasantly curvy with curly black hair, bronze skin and pale green eyes, she cut a striking figure.
Marianna sighed and extinguished her cigarillo, shaking her head. As far as first meetings went, this one could have gone better. Still, life was funny when you think of it. If someone told her a year ago that she would be sharing her life and her bed with a foreigner, she would have laughed. After all, she'd gotten enough heartbreak from Wilson Sawyer, the tall, blond-haired and blue-eyed Englishman she dated a year before she met Peter Samson. The first time she laid eyes on the handsome gringo, she felt warm in funny places. Wilson Sawyer was a devastatingly handsome man and he knew it. The Oxford-educated Englishman worked for the British Embassy in downtown Salvador, and he exuded wealth, charm and class.
Marianna Vasquez Anselmo knew a beautiful man when she saw one, and Wilson Sawyer was definitely such a man. Doubtless he had a ton of local ladies chasing after him. If there's one thing Brazil doesn't lack, it's beautiful women. From the lovely dark-skinned ladies of the Afro-Brazilian population to the golden-hued mestizo women and the bronze-skinned Latin American beauties Brazil was almost synonymous with, the whole country was teeming with lovely women. Lots of immigrants from places like India and China as well as Arab Christian immigrants from places like the Republic of Lebanon and the Coptic communities of Egypt were adding a lovely diversity to this already diverse and multicultural nation. Yeah, the handsome Englishman had many options, but Marianna decided that she wanted this tasty morsel for herself.
If Wilson Sawyer liked exotic women, he'd soon discover that they simply didn't get much more exotic than Marianna Vasquez Anselmo. Her mother, Maria Vasquez was born and raised in the Dominican Republic, and moved to Brazil while in her twenties. Maria Vasquez was half black and half white, born to an Afro-Dominican mother and white American father stationed in the Dominican Republic while in the United States Marine Corps. After moving to Brazil in search of a better life, she married a tall, handsome Portuguese immigrant to Brazil's most eventful City of Salvador, Guillermo Anselmo. The daughter born to them was a wonderful bland of ethnicities. Marianna Vasquez Anselmo had mixed Afro-Dominican, white American and Portuguese ancestry. Tall and golden-skinned, wonderfully curvaceous with sparkling green eyes, she was a sight to behold, even among the throngs of multiethnic beauties in Brazil.
Wilson Sawyer first came to Marianna Vasquez Anselmo's attention when he visited the Catholic University of Salvador as part of an English delegation. Their eyes met, and from that moment on, life would never be the same for either of them. The handsome Englishman and the lovely Brazilian doxy seemed made for each other. A whirlwind romance followed, and Marianna honestly felt that she had found the one. Wilson was so charming and smart, and he treated her like a queen. Unfortunately, the man she thought loved her turned out to be far more calculating than she could have imagined. Wilson Sawyer, the son of a wealthy British diplomat, had shady dealings with Ernesto the Cobra, leader of Salvador City's most ruthless crime syndicate. He was into drugs and illicit sex with exotic hookers. Ernesto the Cobra controlled the drugs and prostitution game in Salvador City, and Wilson Sawyer was a handsome gringo with money to spend who liked to live dangerously. Marianna Vasquez Anselmo was just another notch on the English thrill-seekers belt. She broke up with him after catching him getting a blowjob from a tranny. Yeah, her prince charming turned out to be a creep.
After that incident, Marianna Vasquez Anselmo swore off men, especially foreigners. They had never been good to the women in her family. Her mother, Maria Vasquez was born in the Dominican Republic to a black woman named Lucia Vasquez and a white American soldier named Shawn O'Malley. The man who was her maternal grandfather ran off after finding out her grandmother was pregnant with her mother. Marianna's mother Maria moved to Brazil hoping for a better life, after enduring racism and poverty in the Dominican Republic as an orphan, for Lucia Vasquez died while giving birth. Maria Vasquez moved to Brazil and thought she had found prince charming in the handsome Portuguese immigrant Guillermo Anselmo, who married her and welcomed her into the beautiful villa he owned. Sadly, Guillermo Anselmo died in a gunfight five years after marrying Maria. The poor woman was left nearly destitute after Guillermo's racist family came from Portugal to claim his riches in Brazil and didn't leave a single peso for his wife Maria and their daughter Marianna. Life was just too cruel.
Yeah, the women of the Vasquez bloodline had lousy luck with men on two continents, and Marianna Vasquez-Anselmo didn't want to be the latest victim. After her disastrous affair with that British fruitcake Wilson Sawyer, she decided to focus on school. She was close to getting her bachelor's degree in economics from the Catholic University of Salvador. Next, she'd either go for her Master's degree in business or Law school. She hadn't decided yet. Her hard work paid off, and the gentleman who ran the school, a Portuguese priest known as Father Pedro Marcelao made her the recipient of a new scholarship for young minority women at the school. Her final year of undergraduate studies, she'd only be charged thirty percent of what she'd normally pay. Yeah, there was a God for the poor people. Marianna Vasquez-Anselmo, a devout Catholic, never stopped believing that one day her savior the Lord Jesus Christ would come through for her.
Yes, finally she was getting her act together. And then along came Peter Samson, the tall and ruggedly handsome young African-American from Howard University in Washington D.C. who was spending a year studying broad at one of Brazil's top universities. After that first meeting in the Student Affairs Office, Marianna didn't give much thought to the black American who dressed like a wannabe rapper. She had bigger fish to fry. Well, one day she ran into him. She was walking around in Lapa, one of Rio De Janeiro's roughest neighborhoods. It was a Friday night and she'd gone to Club Nirvana to unwind, accompanied by her girlfriends Anita Abdullah, a Lebanese Christian immigrant, and Nikki Chang, a foreign exchange student from southern China. Marianna stepped outside the club for a minute to have a cigarillo, and also to check up on her car. That's when she was accosted by a trio of rough-looking guys. They eyed her the way hungry wolves looked at a doe. Marianna had encountered all kinds of dangers in the streets of Brazil and knew that the best way to survive was to cooperate with the baddies. The local police were largely ineffective, and she didn't want to end up yet another dead woman on the street. She showed them her purse, and told them to take it.
The three men laughed, and their apparent leader, a muscular bald guy with tattoos and bronze skin, licked his lips. Clearly he wanted something other than money from her. With a sickening presentiment Marianna realized what he wanted. The lust in his eyes. The threat of violence oozing practically out of his every pore. He wanted to rape her. When he got close enough, she suddenly darted to the right and sucker punched him. He roared angrily, spitting blood. Shouting for help, she ran off. The trio took off after her like a pack of wolves springing after a deer. Marianna ran down the street, and ended up in a cul-de-sac. A blind alley. Just what she needed. Great. Her back to the wall, the young woman made her last stand. Frantically she looked for a weapon, anything that she could use. Finally, she took off her stiletto and held it in front of her. The leader of the trio laughed and his two acolytes, a burly mestizo and a short, stocky Indian guy, flanked her. As if there was any chance of her escaping. Marianna gritted her teeth, bracing for what she knew was coming. They wouldn't take her alive if she could help it...