Lady Reluctant Read online

  Lady Reluctant

  Maggie Osborne

  The sweet rush of unstoppable longing

  Nervous, trembling, Blu’s fingers rose to her bodice and traced the line of pearls sculpting her breasts. Thomas stared at her hungrily, and a groan of desire lifted his chest. She felt his heat enclosing and drawing her to him. Then, as her knees were about to collapse, his arms were suddenly around her, his body tight and hard against her own. His tongue penetrated her secrets, and she wanted him as a starving person wants food and drink. Breathless against his lips, Blu dropped her hands to snatch at her skirts, urgently wanting to remove the layer of material that kept the two of them from one another. She wanted to pull Thomas to the ground and offer her emptiness to be filled...

  Praise for Lady Reluctant

  “Lady Reluctant is utterly delightful and exuberant... funny... Blusette’s story embraces readers with warmth and wit.”

  – Romantic Times... 4+

  “Captivating... I really hated for it to end!”

  – Julie Garwood

  Awards:

  Reader’s Choice Award – Paperback Trader

  Finalist for Best Historical Romantic Adventure – Romantic Times

  Finalist for Reviewer’s Choice Award – Romantic Times

  Winner of Career Achievement Award – Romantic Times

  Publishing History

  Print edition published by St. Martins Press

  Copyright 1990 Maggie Osborne

  Digital Edition published by Maggie Osborne at Smashwords, 2014

  Cover design by Tammy Seidick Design

  Digital formatting by A Thirsty Mind Book Design

  All rights reserved. No part of this book, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews, may be reproduced in any form by any means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without prior written permission from the author.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, business establishments, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  The scanning, uploading, and distributing of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the copyright owner is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic and print editions, and do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  To:

  Lucille Prather

  and Eleanora Osborne,

  the finest ladies I know

  Table of Contents

  Reviews

  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

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Sample of Salem’s Daughter

  Sample of Love Bites

  Maggie Osborne

  1

  1740

  Moving with swift, furious strides, Blusette Morgan kicked across the coral dunes sloping to the tip of the island. As one rancorous thought after another blackened her mind, she raised her sword and swung viciously at the tops of the oleander bushes and the scrub spruce springing from the gritty soil. Lopping off the vegetation didn’t relieve her frustration and anger; nothing helped.

  When she reached the northernmost tip of the spit, she drove her sword point into the coral sand and leaned on the hilt, glaring at the horizon.

  “God’s balls!”

  It wasn’t bloody fair. She didn’t want to go to England, and she for damned sure didn’t want to meet her mother, Lady Katherine Paget. Considering she had neither seen nor heard from Lady Katherine Paget for eighteen years, it was a fair wager that Lady Katherine Paget did not wish to meet her either. Most of all, Blu did not want to be tamed into someone’s blithering idea of a lady. And lastly, she bloody well had no intention of agreeing to a match with some titled English buck of her mother’s choosing.

  None of these excellent arguments had persuaded her father to shift his course. He was dead set on packing her off to England.

  “‘Tis time ye learned some manners and caught yerself a husband,” her father had explained. “Yer eighteen and ye’ve never hung a skirt about yer bones. Yer mam would be appalled!”

  Blu ground her teeth. Her manners were adequate for Morgan’s Mound; she didn’t want the burden of a husband; and she had no need for cumbersome skirts. As for her mother, eighteen years ago Blu’s mother had sailed from Morgan’s Mound without a backward glance. Blu licked her thumb and spat on the sand. That’s what she thought about Lady Katherine Paget.

  It was fortunate Beau Billy was nowhere about to see the gesture. Her father would have scolded her good for showing disrespect to her mother.

  “Leaving ye behind weren’t Lady Katherine’s notion, gel, it were mine.” He had said it again and again, but in her opinion it excused nothing. “This be one of the things ye should understand, Blu, and ye don’t. In England, ‘tis a disgrace of the highest water to bear a babe outside bonds. T’would have sanded Lady Katherine’s reputation sore to send her back to society a grass widow.”

  But there were a dozen unmarried mams on the island and no one claimed their reputations were sanded. Beau Billy’s arguments were nowhere near as persuasive or as compelling as her own, and nothing he said excused Lady Katherine.

  Closing her eyes, Blu tossed her head back, letting the warm tropical wind catch her black hair and twist it behind her. What recourse did she have? None. Even Monsieur had betrayed her by agreeing with Beau Billy. She could look for no help there.

  Blu didn’t fully believe either of them. First, she saw no advantage to herself in altering her ways. Secondly, she would never forgive Lady Katherine for abandoning her. She didn’t believe the blather about England looking down its nose at unmarried women with babes, Since everyone spoke of England as if it were the Holy Land, Blu had decided this business about babes was a flam Lady Katherine had worked on her father.

  She had said so to Monsieur, who then gave her one of his wig-shaking sighs and scowled at her through the cracked lens of his spectacles.

  “Blusette, Mr. Morgan did Lady Katherine a great service by keeping you here.” No one called Blu’s father Mr. Morgan except Monsieur. “Had Lady Katherine returned to England carrying a pirate’s child in her arms, her name and her reputation would have been utterly destroyed. By keeping you with him on the island, Mr. Morgan spared Lady Katherine a great scandal. He allowed her to pretend she had survived the abduction unsullied. Your father did this because he cared for your mother.”

  Blu thought about this until her head ached. The implication was that England prized virginity. This was incomprehensible. Virginity was an embarrassing burden; it meant a woman was not wholly a woman. It also meant she had not proven herself desirable. In Blu’s view, Lady Katherine should have thanked Beau Billy for relieving her of her virginity and displayed the results—herself—with pride. It was nearly impossible to conceive that Lady Katherine’s maiden state had not caused her as much shame and anxiety as Blu’s did.

  Recalling her virginity deepened Blu’s glare and her slender hands tightened on the hilt of her sword. To her everlasting shame, she was the only virgin on the island, perhaps th
e only virgin in the Bermuda chain. There were at least fifty women on Morgan’s Mound, two of them younger than herself, and all of them were real women, not untried maidens like Blu. It was galling.

  When visiting ships put into the cove at Morgan’s Mound to fence their booty or take on supplies and fresh water, the crews poured down the gangplanks as randy as sea stallions. On such nights bonfires leaped along the beaches and there was singing and dancing. Ale and rum and palm wine flowed as freely as the ribald jests. Then, when the festivities reached fever pitch, the sailors chased the island women into the thatched huts and the warm night rang with shouts and giggles.

  But no one ever chased Blu Morgan into the huts.

  Once or twice she had discovered someone who met her standards and she had pulled him by the arm toward her hut. But then the warning had gone out: “That’s Beau Billy’s daughter.” instantly the man she had chosen vanished into the thick undergrowth, leaving her embarrassed and furious.

  The frustrating part was that Beau Billy would not have objected. Blu suspected her father was beginning to be as uncomfortable about her lengthy innocence as she. Of course, he would have killed anyone who botched the job. That much was true. And every man jack who hauled sail in the Caribbean knew it. Consequently, Blu did not find herself in the most encouraging of positions.

  Brooding, she turned her dark eyes toward a cluster of sails, picking over the bones of a Spanish wreck just north of the reef. There were days when she was depressingly convinced she would go to her grave a virgin. Her stone would read: “Here lies a woman no one wanted.”

  That wasn’t exactly true, of course. Dozens of men passed through Morgan’s Mound who might have risked Beau Billy’s wrath for a toss with his daughter. If Blu would have lowered her standards, she could have shed her loathsome virginity long ago.

  But she had her standards and she had her pride. She was Beau Billy’s daughter, after all. As such, she couldn’t give herself to just any rag of human flotsam or jetsam who washed up on Morgan’s Mound wearing a lusty look in his eye. Most of the men off the ships stank, had breath that would drop a goat, and were wrecked on rum long before they were ready to stumble toward the huts.

  Blu’s standards demanded a candidate who smelled as clean and nice as Monsieur, someone whose teeth weren’t blackened and rotted, and, most important, someone who knew the ins and outs of making a real woman out of a maiden. Isabelle insisted expertise was crucial the first time. Isabelle said a woman never forgot her first time and it had to be done just right and proper or the woman could be soured forever. Blu didn’t want to be soured forever.

  Recently, the problem had assumed an element of urgency. Blu did not want to appear on her mother’s doorstep as a virgin. If it was true that Lady Katherine prized the appearance of virginity to the extent of abandoning her daughter, then Blu had an additional reason to reject her maiden state. She did not wish to resemble Lady Katherine in any way.

  Nibbling a broken fingernail, she stared at the delphinium-blue waters and tried to guess how much time she had before she was shipped off to England. Beau Billy had already dispatched a letter to Lady Katherine informing her to expect Blu. It was reasonable to assume Beau Billy planned to push her up the plank in the very near future.

  “Dammit.”

  Starting with Beau Billy’s most trusted lieutenants and running the list down to the least significant of the salvage divers, Blue tried to recall a man, any man, who might come close to meeting her standards. There were one or two who were either clean or who had a set of whole teeth, but she couldn’t guess if they would sour her forever. It didn’t really signify, as she didn’t think any of them had the belly to face Beau Billy when it was done and over.

  Not that this was surprising. There wasn’t a man from here to Jamaica who didn’t fear Beau Billy. Before he retired to Morgans Mound, Blu’s father had been the terror of the Caribbean. It was said Beau Billy had plundered more ships than Captain Kidd, that he had killed a man for each of his forty-seven years. It was said no woman was safe from Gentleman Bill, that in his prime he had seduced the wives of every island governor and left them weeping for more.

  Beau Billy laughed at the tales, but Blu noticed he never denied them. He took a certain pleasure in his reputation and she didn’t blame him. But the fear he inspired among his fellow men was keeping her in perpetual virginity. And this she minded a great deal.

  Jerking her sword from the coral, Blu poked at a sand crab, then swept a wide circle in the pink sand at her feet and pierced it with the point of her blade.

  Absorbed in gloomy thoughts, she almost missed the soft stealth of approaching footsteps. When she heard the scrape of sand across leather, she whirled and whipped her blade up and about, her senses sharpening as she recognized Mole, a scab who was considered disreputable even for Morgan’s Mound.

  “What is it?” she snapped, understanding he must have followed her from the camp to the sand spit.

  A glance at his canvas breeches told her the question was redundant. She could see what he wanted.

  Mole opened and closed his fingers around the hilt of his sword. Watching her, he ran his tongue over blackened teeth then across his greasy lips. His small weasel eyes fixed on her thin silk shirt and the breasts that strained against it. As Blu’s gaze narrowed, he dropped his stare to the dark breeches molding her hips and thighs.

  “Ye know what I be wantin’. ‘Alf the men on the Mound be wantin’ the same. I’ll ‘ave ye first.”

  “Like bloody hell you will.” A slow humorless smile curved her mouth. Until now, she hadn’t realized she was spoiling for a fight. “I’ll do my own choosing—and it won’t be you.”

  The stench of ancient sweat pinched her nostrils as Mole stepped forward, menacing her with his sword.

  “I’d not care to hurt ye, Miz Blu, but I will if need be. Throw down yer sword.”

  His arrogance was amusing. Was she expected to throw aside her weapon because some bilge rat threatened with his? Was she to grant an imagined superiority without a challenge? Roosters would lay eggs before that happened. Standards worth having were worth fighting for. Smiling, Blu lifted her boot heels out of the sand and balanced lightly on the balls of her feet. She adjusted the hilt of her sword against her palm and relaxed her grip as Mouton had taught her.

  “If you want this sword, you’ll have to take it.” Her smile widened. “If you can.”

  “I’ve fixed me mind,” he said stubbornly. “I’ll ‘ave ye, willin’ or not.” Small weasel eyes glittered, and the stink of rum and rotted teeth wafted on the sea breeze. “I’ll have ye whole or bleedin’, makes no nevermind to me.”

  “Will ye now,” Blu commented pleasantly, moving the tip of her sword in tiny loose circles. “I’ll ‘ave yer balls first.”

  Had he been present to overhear, Monsieur would have rolled his eyes behind his cracked spectacles and given her a pained look. Monsieur disapproved when she lapsed into island vernacular.

  Mole’s thin lips vanished in a line and he raised his sword. Blu remembered Isabelle saying some men were as aroused by swordplay as by a woman. Some, in fact, preferred both: sex preceded by a fight. She suspected Mole might be such a one.

  “If it be a fight ye want first...”

  “It’s a fight I want instead.” She welcomed the idea.

  They circled each other warily, assessing stance and position. Easily, Blu maneuvered him until she had the hot sun at her back and Mole was forced to squint. But then, she had only one thing on her mind.

  Tossing back a wave of dark hair, she grinned. This was going to be as easy as skewering a hen on a spit. Moving swiftly and suddenly, she stepped forward and struck his sword with surprising strength, seizing the offensive. Mole’s red-rimmed eyes flared then narrowed and he flexed his knees and tightened his grip before she could press her advantage.

  So. It wouldn’t be as simple as she had first supposed. That was good. Sniffing grimly, she waited for his lunge and sidestepp
ed neatly when it came. But the sun glared in her eyes. Jumping forward, she engaged him before he could turn and used the flat of her blade to continue his momentum, forcing him further than he had intended. Now, neither enjoyed the sun’s advantage. They fought with the tropical glare to their sides.

  All in all, Blu conceded it was a good fight, better than she had anticipated. Mole managed to slice open her shirt and scratch a bloody line down her shoulder. She couldn’t recall when last that had happened. After she took a glance at her ruined garment, the amusement flashed from her gaze. That a rat dropping like Mole had managed to draw blood made her angry. It was a signal that she had toyed long enough. It was time to begin in earnest and lay him out on the pink sand.

  After adjusting her grip, Blu quickened the pace and darted inside and forward, relentlessly driving Mole backward. Her blade flashed in the sun like quicksilver. Smiling, showing her teeth, she forced him backward toward the foam bubbling up the coral beach. Then, with swift deliberate movements, she opened a cut across his chest, slicing through his coarse shirt, slicing his breeches at the thigh. The cuts were light, deep enough to draw blood and deep enough to leave her mark on him, but not deep enough to prove lethal.

  The rapid stroke she aimed at his waist severed his breeches cord as she had calculated and she grinned as he swore and dropped his hand to clasp his breeches.

  Now holding the advantage, she directed him backward at will, guiding him toward a large lump of driftwood and enjoying the alarm growing in his squinty eyes.

  When he stumbled over the wood and fell sprawling to the sand, she kicked his sword to the side, then sprang forward to stand over him. She positioned the tip of her blade against his throat. His panting chest heaved, sucking at the air. It pleased her greatly to note she felt hardly winded.