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The Devil and the Deep
Amy Andrews
For once reality is sexier than fiction! Author Stella Mills has writers' block. Her swashbuckling debut romance was a mega hit – and the world is crying out for a sequel. Problem is, her sexy-as-sin hero was based on childhood friend Rick Granville, who’s dangerously delicious eyes have never sparkled at her that way!So being forced to spend weeks on adventurer Rick’s luxury yacht could be just the thing to trigger her imagination - forget Jonny Depp… modern-day pirate Rick is pure physical perfection.Of course, spending night and day with the temptation that is Rick could be sailing too close to the wind – especially when her fictional fantasies start becoming red-hot reality… !
For once reality is sexier than fiction!
Author Stella Mills has writers’ block. Her swashbuckling debut romance was a mega-hit—and the world is crying out for a sequel. Problem is, her sexy-as-sin hero was based on childhood friend Rick Granville, whose dangerously delicious eyes have never sparkled at her that way!
So being forced to spend weeks on adventurer Rick’s luxury yacht could be just the thing to trigger her imagination—forget Johnny Depp…modern-day pirate Rick is pure physical perfection. Of course, spending night and day with the temptation that is Rick could be sailing too close to the wind—especially when her fictional fantasies start becoming red-hot reality!
“You can’t go a day without trying to hook up.”
“I think you’re exaggerating a little.”
Stella stopped pacing and glared at him. “In thirty-six hours, you have flirted with every woman who has crossed your path. And when we get on that boat tomorrow after about twelve hours you’re going to start in on me because you can’t help yourself,” she finished a little shrilly.
“You think I can’t go a few weeks without flirting with a woman?”
“I dare you. I dare you to go through this whole voyage without flirting with a single woman you meet along the way.”
Rick grinned, his gaze locking with hers. “And what do I get?” he asked, his voice low.
The timbre of his voice stroked along all her tired nerve endings as he stared at her with his Vasco eyes.
Stella swallowed. “Get?”
Rick held her gaze. “If I win? How about that kiss that we didn’t quite get round to?”
Stella blinked as the bad-boy looked back at her. It was a tantalizing offer. One she knew he didn’t expect her to take. But she’d never been one to back down from a dare, and frankly, the idea was as thrilling as it was illicit.
The Devil and the Deep
Amy Andrews
~ Temptation on her Doorstep ~
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
AMY ANDREWS has always loved writing, and still can’t quite believe that she gets to do it for a living. Creating wonderful heroines and gorgeous heroes and telling their stories is an amazing way to pass the day. Sometimes they don’t always act as she’d like them to—but then neither do her kids, so she’s kind of used to it. Amy lives in the very beautiful Samford Valley, with her husband and aforementioned children, along with six brown chooks and two black dogs.
She loves to hear from her readers. Drop her a line at www.amyandrews.com.au (http://www.amyandrews.com.au).
For Halle Anne Baxter.
Much loved.
Contents
PROLOGUE (#uebfab296-6c95-519f-856c-8d13f65469f7)
CHAPTER ONE (#u435e69e5-f27c-5fca-bddf-2c268d215569)
CHAPTER TWO (#u609c8938-2965-5a3b-b0c2-a0db419e4d01)
CHAPTER THREE (#uf0f8145c-6cb5-5a6e-bfa6-1708d0fb68db)
CHAPTER FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)
EXCERPT (#litres_trial_promo)
PROLOGUE
Lady Mary Bingham had never seen such a fine specimen of manhood in all her twenty years as she held out her hand to her unlikely saviour so he could aid her aboard. Pirate or not, Vasco Ramirez’s potent masculinity tingled through every cell of her body. And even had it not, his piercing blue eyes, the exact colour of warm, tropical waters that fringed the reefs he was rumoured to know like the back of his hand, touched a place inside her that she’d never known existed.
A place she could never now deny.
She supposed, if she were given to swooning, this would be as good a time as any. But she wasn’t. In fact she’d always found the practice rather tiresome and refused to even allow her knees the slightest tremble. Women who had fits of the vapours and cried for their smelling salts every two seconds—like her aunt—were not the kind of women she admired.
Her breath hitched as sable lashes framing those incredible eyes swept downwards in a frank inspection of every inch of her body. When his gaze returned to her face she was left in no doubt that he’d liked what he’d seen. His thumb lightly stroked the skin of her forearm and she felt the caress deep inside that newly awakened place.
Looking at the bronzed angles of his exotic face, she knew she should be afraid for had she not just gone from the frying pan straight into the fire?
Yet strangely she wasn’t.
Not even when his gaze dropped to the pulse beating rapidly against the milky white skin of her neck. Or lower to where her breasts strained against the constrictive fabric of her bodice. His lazy inspection of the agitated rise of her bosom did not elicit fear even when what it did elicit was reason for fear itself.
Her uncle, the bishop, would have declared him an instrument of the devil. A man willing to lead unsuspecting ladies to the edge of sin but strangely she’d never felt so compelled to transgress. The thought was titillating and she sucked in a breath, annoyed that this buccaneer had caused such consternation after such short acquaintance.
After all, was not one pirate just like the next?
Mary looked down at the insolent drift of his thumb. ‘You will unhand me immediately,’ she intoned in a voice that brooked no argument.
Ramirez’s smile was nine parts charm one part insolence as he slowly—very slowly—ceased the involuntary caress.
‘As you wish,’ he murmured, bowing slightly over her hand, his fingers tracing down the delicate blue veins of her forearm, whispering over the fragile bones of her wrist and the flat of her palm as he released her.
Lady Mary swallowed as the accented English slid velvet gloves over already sensitised skin. ‘I insist that you return me to my uncle forthwith.’
Vasco admired her pluck. The girl, who he knew to be barely out of her teens, may well be staring him straight in the eye but he could smell her fear as only a veteran of a hundred raids on the high seas could.
Lord alone knew what had happened to her in the two days she’d been at the mercy of Juan Del Toro and his ruffians. But something told him this pampered English miss could certainly hold her own.
And virgins fetched a much higher price at the slave markets.
‘As you wish,’ he murmured again.
Mary narrowed her eyes, suspicious of his easy capitulation. ‘You know my uncle? You know who I am?’
He smiled at her. ‘You are Lady Mary Bingham. The bishop commissioned me to...retrieve you.’
For the first time in two days Mary could see an end to the nightmare that had begun with her abduction down by the wharfs a mere forty-eight hours before and she almost sagged to the damp floorboards at his feet. She’d heard her former captives talking about slave markets and had been scared witless.
Alas, falling at the feet of a pirate, whether sanctioned by her uncle or not, wasn’t something a young woman of good breeding did. ‘Thank you,’ she said politely. ‘I am most grateful for your speedy response. Juan Del Toro’s men do not know how to treat a lady.’
‘Do not thank me yet, Lady Bingham.’ He smiled with steel in his lips. ‘There are a lot of miles between here and Plymouth and by the end of it my men may well care less about you being a lady and more about you being a woman.’
Mary raised a haughty eyebrow, hoping it disguised the sudden leap in her pulse. ‘And you would allow such fiendish behaviour amongst your crew?’
Vasco smiled his most charming smile, his dark tousled hair giving him the look of the devil. ‘Amongst my crew? Of course not, Lady Bingham. But captains do enjoy certain privileges...’
STELLA MILLS sighed as she closed down the document on her desktop and dragged herself back from the swashbuckling seventeen hundreds to the reality of the here and now. She could re-read the words that had flowed effortlessly out of her last year and made her an ‘overnight’ sensation until the cows came home but it didn’t change the facts—one book did not a writer make.
One book did not a career make.
No matter how many publishing houses had bid for Pleasure Hunt at auction, no matter how many best-seller lists it had made or how many fan letters she’d received or how much money competing film companies had thrown at her for the film rights.
No matter how crazy the romance world had gone for Vasco Ramirez.
They wanted more.
And so did the publisher.
Stella stared at the blinking cursor on the blank page in front of her. The same blinking cursor she’d been staring at for almost a year now.
Oh, God. ‘I’m a one-hit wonder,’ she groaned as her head hit the keyboard.
A knock on the door interrupted her pity party and she glanced up. Several lines of gobbledygook stared back at her as the knock came again. She grimaced—it seemed she was destined to write nothing but incomprehensible garbage for ever more.
Another knock, more insistent than the last, demanded her attention. ‘Coming,’ she called as she did what she’d done every day for the past year—deleted the lot.
She hurried to the door and was reaching for the knob as a fourth knock landed. ‘Okay, okay, hold your horses,’ she said as she wrenched the damn thing open.
Piercing blue eyes, the exact colour of warm, tropical waters that fringed the reefs she knew he knew like the back of his hand, greeted her. She blinked. ‘Rick?’
‘Stel,’ he murmured, leaning forward to kiss first one cheek then the other, inhaling the familiar coconut essence of her.
She shut her eyes briefly as the smell of sea breezes and ocean salt infused her senses the way they always did whenever Riccardo Granville was close. When she opened them again Rick had withdrawn and her mother came into focus, hovering behind his shoulder. Her eyes were rimmed with red and she was biting on her bottom lip.
Her mother lived in London and Rick called the ocean his home. Why were they here? In Cornwall. Together?
Stella frowned as a feeling of doom descended.
‘What’s wrong?’ she asked, looking from one to the other as her pulse wooshed like a raging torrent through her ears.
Her mother stepped forward and hugged her. ‘Darling,’ she murmured, ‘it’s Nathan.’
Stella blinked. Her father?
She looked over her mother’s shoulder at Rick, his face grim. ‘Rick?’ she asked, searching for a spark of something—anything—that would bring her back from the precipice she was balanced upon.
Rick looked down at the woman he’d known almost all his thirty years and sadly shook his head. ‘I’m sorry.’
CHAPTER ONE
Six months later...
THE cursor still blinked at her from the same blank page. Although Stella rather fancied that it had given up blinking and had moved on to mocking.
There were no words. No story.
No characters spoke in her head. No plot played like a movie reel. No shards of glittering dialogue burnt brightly on her inward eye desperate for release.
There was just the same old silence.
And now grief to boot.
And Diana would be arriving soon.
As if she’d willed it, a knock on the door heralded Stella’s closest friend. Normally she’d have leapt from her seat to welcome Diana but not today. In fact, for a moment, she seriously considered not opening the door at all.
Today, Diana was not here as her friend.
Today, Diana was here as a representative from the publisher.
And she’d promised her chapter one...
‘I know you’re in there. Don’t make me break this sucker down.’
The voice was muffled but determined and Stella resigned herself to her fate as she crossed from her work area in the window alcove, with its spectacular one-eighty-degree views of rugged Cornish coastline, to the front door. She drew in a steadying breath as she unlatched it and pulled it open.
Diana opened her arms. ‘Babe,’ she muttered as she swept Stella into a rib-cracking hug. ‘How are you doing? I’ve been so worried about you.’
Stella settled into the sweet sisterhood of the embrace, suddenly so glad to see her friend she could feel tears prick at the backs of her eyes. They’d only known each other a handful of years since meeting at uni, but Diana had called most nights since the funeral and this was her tenth visit.
‘Pretty rubbish,’ she admitted into Diana’s shoulder.
‘Of course you are,’ Diana soothed, rubbing her friend’s back. ‘Your dad died—it comes with the territory.’
