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At Her Pleasure
Cindi Myers
No more Ms. Nice Girl.Thanks to Nicole Howard's accommodating ways, her life has delivered a whole lot of disappointment. Armed with a pirate queen's autobiography–aka a girl's guide to seduction and sexual empowerment–Nicole heads to the Caribbean determined to unleash her inner diva for a steamy adventure.Hottie Ian Marshall and an almost-deserted island are the perfect ingredients for a little no-strings action. In fact, this fling is giving her everything she ever wanted. . . and then some.Once their sensual games are over, however, will she be able to walk away from the best sex. . . ever?
“Come with me.”
Nicole took Ian’s hand and led him down to the beach, to a hammock strung between two palm trees.
“Lie down,” she commanded, and pushed him into the hammock.
He did as told, and Nicole crawled on top of him and straddled his stomach. She planted her palms on his chest and stared down at him, her expression serious.
“Yes or no?” she asked. “Do you want to be seduced?”
Heat rushed through her—the heat of desire, and also a great sensation of power. With her eyes locked with his, she reached up, grasped the top of her dress and lowered the silky fabric over her breasts—slowly, revealing an inch of naked skin at a time and watching as Ian’s eyes darkened with desire.
“Yes,” he whispered. “Absolutely yes.”
Dear Reader,
I had a thing for pirates long before Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom made them popular. As a girl, I devoured stories about Blackbeard, Captain Kidd and Jean Lafitte. And as I grew older, I fantasized about being swept off my feet by a dashing pirate and carried away to a tropical paradise. (It beats figuring my taxes or making a grocery list any day of the week.)
That tropical paradise of my dreams seemed the perfect setting for a pair of sexy Harlequin Blaze fantasies. Add in the lure of treasure and legends about pirates and this was a story I couldn’t wait to return to every day. Better than Blackbeard or Captain Kidd, I made my pirate a woman with a scandalous past and a reputation as a skilled seductress. I pulled out all the stops for the character of Passionata, and I hope you’ll enjoy the steamy results.
Look for the second Passionata’s Island story in October 2008, when Her Secret Treasure goes on sale. In the meantime, I love to hear from my readers. You’ll find me on the Web at www.CindiMyers.com. E-mail me at cindi@cindimyers.com or write to me in care of Harlequin Enterprises, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario M3B 3K9, Canada.
Best,
Cindi Myers
AT HER PLEASURE
Cindi Myers
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Cindi Myers’s dreams of sailing away to an island paradise with her own swashbuckling pirate have been quashed by rampant seasickness and a tendency to sunburn easily. So she settles for drinking umbrella cocktails and letting her imagination run wild on the sun-washed beaches of her books.
Books by Cindi Myers
HARLEQUIN BLAZE
149—TAKING IT ALL OFF
168—GOOD, BAD…BETTER
180—DO ME RIGHT
215—ROCK MY WORLD * (#litres_trial_promo)
241—NO REGRETS * (#litres_trial_promo)
274—FEAR OF FALLING † (#litres_trial_promo)
323—THE MAN TAMER
333—MEN AT WORK “
Taking His Measure”
360—WILD CHILD ‡ (#litres_trial_promo)
HARLEQUIN SUPERROMANCE
1498—A SOLDIER COMES HOME
HARLEQUIN ANTHOLOGY
A WEDDING IN PARIS
“Picture Perfect”
HARLEQUIN AMERICAN ROMANCE
1182—MARRIAGE ON HER MIND
1199—THE RIGHT MR. WRONG
HARLEQUIN NEXT
MY BACKWARDS LIFE
THE BIRDMAN’S DAUGHTER
HARLEQUIN SIGNATURE SELECT
LEARNING CURVES
BOOTCAMP
“Flirting with an Old Flame”
To Emily McKay, for all her help
in researching diving.
Any mistakes are mine, not hers.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
1
THE SUNSET ON THE OCEAN streaked the sky with pink and gold and turned the sea a deep vermillion.
The color of passion.
The color of romance and love and all the things that weren’t a part of Nicole Howard’s life right now. And maybe never would be again.
She leaned on the rail of the yacht and stared out at a horizon as empty and featureless as she felt inside. Maybe agreeing to come on this vacation with her friend, Adam Carroway, hadn’t been such a great idea.
With his usual persuasiveness, Adam had made the trip sound like the perfect way to recover from losing both her lover and her job in the space of a week. They’d sail to a remote island in the Caribbean, do some diving, look for some shipwreck Adam was wild to find, get some sun and forget all about life back in Amity, Michigan.
But forgetting was proving a lot harder than Nicole had expected.
“You’re thinking about him again, aren’t you? Stop it.”
She turned and saw Adam emerging from the ship’s cabin. Broad-shouldered, barrel-chested and tanned from hours sailing on Lake Michigan, he looked nothing like the university history professor he was. Ten years older than Nicole, he had been at various times her roommate, confidant and best buddy. She thought of him as the big brother she’d never had.
He came to stand beside her on the rail. “You should have let me pound him one. Then at least you’d have the memory of him groveling to cheer you up.”
She shook her head. She couldn’t imagine Dr. Kenneth Brambling, chief of Amity Surgical Associates, groveling. When she’d first taken the job as nurse for the busy surgery practice, she’d been intimidated by his dignity. Later, when they’d become lovers, she’d been caught up in the aura of power with which he surrounded himself.
Only recently had she realized Kenneth’s dignity was merely arrogance, and the power an inflated sense of his own importance, and a callousness that had shocked her—and broken her heart. “Beating him up wouldn’t have gotten either of us anything except maybe a lawsuit,” she said.
“Might have made him think twice about cheating on another woman.”
“I doubt it.” As soon as she’d gotten over the shock of learning that she wasn’t the only woman sharing Kenneth’s bed, she’d uncovered all sorts of deceptions the good doctor excelled in, from exaggerating reports to insurance companies in order to receive higher reimbursements, to lying to his partners about the real reason he couldn’t attend a staff meeting—because he’d been occupied with his latest girlfriend. The man was an accomplished liar and it was cold comfort to know she wasn’t the first fool he’d deceived.
She’d emerged from the affair doubting everything from her physical attractiveness to her judgment. Though she knew Kenneth was in the wrong—he was the one who’d cheated and lied—she couldn’t help but wonder if she was also to blame. Maybe if she’d handled things differently, she wouldn’t have ended up so hurt.
“Here, I brought you something to take your mind off the jerk.” Adam pulled a slim paperback from his pocket and offered it to her.
“What is it?”
“Some background info on where we’re going and what I hope to find there.”
Adam had tried previously to give her more details about their destination and the shipwreck he was searching for, but once he went into academic-lecture mode her eyes glazed over and she’d refused to listen further. She didn’t care why they were headed to this deserted island, only that the island was far from Michigan and her problems.
Expecting a boring academic tome, she took the book and studied the cover. A lurid watercolor portrayed a scantily clad woman standing on a gallows. Confessions of a Pirate Queen? she read the title, amused. This certainly didn’t sound like a textbook.
“Passionata, aka Jane Hallowell, was a female pirate in the early 1700s, based on a previously deserted atoll that came to be known as Passionata’s Island—our destination on this trip,” said Adam.
“A female pirate?” This definitely piqued her interest. “Were there really such things?”
“Definitely. The most well-known is Anne Bonney, but there’s also Mary Reade, and Grace O’Malley, the daughter of a pirate who followed in her father’s footsteps.” He tapped the cover of the book. “But Passionata was in a class by herself.”
Nicole turned the volume over and studied the painting of a full-rigged sailing ship with a Jolly Roger flying from its mast. “How so?”
“For one thing, she was one of the most successful. She and her all-female crew liberated merchant ships—mostly British—of millions of dollars in cargo, from gold coins to imported spices.” Adam had warmed to his subject now, assuming the tone of a professor lecturing his students.
“I guess that kind of money will get you talked about,” Nicole said.
“It wasn’t only the money people talked about.” He grinned. “Passionata had an interesting approach to life.”
As if being a female pirate wasn’t interesting enough.
“She was known as quite a seductress, and advocated ideas that were shocking for their time. Supposedly some of the highest members of British society secretly came to the island, seeking her advice on the art of seduction.”
Nicole studied the cover illustration again. “So is this one of those tabloid tell-alls about her sordid life?”
“This book was supposedly written by Passionata herself while she was awaiting trial in Newgate Prison in 1715.” He tapped the cover again. “Read it. I think you’ll find it interesting.”
She nodded. She’d brought a couple of novels with her, but none of them had been able to hold her interest. What she really needed was something to help her get over the failures she’d left behind. She could approach Confessions of a Pirate Queen like one of those self-help books everyone swore by. A woman who’d succeeded in a male-dominated field might have some handy career lessons to impart, and a pirate queen who was also a known seductress could surely teach Nicole a few things about charting her own course in her relationships with men. She lay back against the pillows in the narrow bunk in the ship’s cabin and read the opening lines with interest:
I, PASSIONATA, the most famous lady pirate, stand as a witness to the power of woman. It is this strength that has made the men who govern the laws of the land tremble in fear before me. It is this mastery and my audacity in using it that has led them to seek to silence me on the gallows. But as long as I have breath I will speak, so that others, women and men, may learn.
I am Passionata, and this is my truth.
