Rash Reckless Love, page 1
Flashing downhill on her sure-footed silver mare, beautiful Anna Smith was proving once again what a magnificent rider she was. Today she would teach arrogant Arthur Kincaid a lesson!
Her turquoise eyes sparkled; her gray-plumed hat had long since blown off, her bright hair had come unloosed and streamed behind her as she fled before him, daring him to catch her.
Behind her, Arthur had a vision of what he would do to lustrous young Mistress Smith if he caught her. He could see himself dragging the laughing wench from the mare’s back and flinging her down on the ground where he would fall upon her and take what he wanted. His breath sobbed in his throat—she would find him an impatient lover! Her struggles would be a delight, only adding to his pleasure as he tore that blasted riding habit from her back! And then her chemise—ah, he could hear the fabric rip like sweet music in his mind.
She would pay a price for inflaming him—by God, she would learn he was master!
Novels by Valerie Sherwood
This Loving Torment
These Golden Pleasures
This Towering Passion
Her Shining Splendor
Bold Breathless Love
Rash Reckless Love
Published by WARNER BOOKS
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Valerie Sherwood
RASH
RECKLESS
LOVE
WARNER BOOKS
A Warner Communications Company
WARNING
The reader is specifically warned against using any of the cosmetics or medications mentioned herein. They are included only to give the authentic flavor of the times. Ceruse, one of the most popular cosmetics of the day, contained white lead and can well be deadly—how much mischief it must have caused! Although common sense would normally restrain the reader from using such unappealing items as “woodlice steeped in wine,” a popular asthma “cure” of the 1600s, or “puppy dog urine” to clear the skin, or slaked lime and lye to remove warts, readers are implored to seek the advice of a doctor before undertaking any “experiments” in their use.
WARNER BOOKS EDITION
Copyright © 1982 by Valerie Sherwood All rights reserved.
Cover design by Gene Light
Cover art by Elaine Duillo
Warner Books, Inc., 75 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, N.Y. 10019
A Warner Communications Company
Printed in the United States of America First Printing: June, 1982
10 987654321
Table of Contents
RASH RECKLESS LOVE Prologue St. George, Bermuda,1673
BOOK I The Buccaneer’s Bride
PART ONE The Toast of Tortuga
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
PART TWO: The Hidden Past
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
PART THREE The Deadly Plot
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
BOOK II The Rakehell
PART ONE: Out of The Frying Pan ...
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
PART TWO...Into the Fire!
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
BOOK III Anna
PART ONE The Little Princess
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
PART TWO The Impatient Lover
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
PART THREE The Outcast
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
PART FOUR The Bound Girl
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
BOOK IV Coralita
PART ONE The Tall Stranger
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
PART TWO Chains of Gold
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
DEDICATION
To Bushy, my big black long-haired tomcat, dear gentle-pawed Bushy, who loves to dream by my typewriter and looks up with trusting green eyes; Bushy, with his majestic plumelike sweep of tail and gleaming coat and dainty little curls in his ears; Bushy, whose beauty is matched only by his unshakable loyalty—to Bushy, growing older and more fragile every day but loved forever, this book is dedicated.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
No era in our history is more colorful or entrancing than the 1600s, when fast-moving events outstripped valiant efforts to record them. It is in these violent times that I have set my story and while the characters and events herein are truly fictional and of my own invention, the seventeenth century backgrounds against which the story is set are real enough. From Bermuda’s long-gone forests of giant cedars and ancient cross-shaped houses with their flaring “welcoming arms” front steps, their quaint fireplace doors, and the unusual life-style and early marriages these houses knew, to the wild buccaneer ports of Port Royal and Tortuga and the great plantations of Jamaica and Carolina, the backgrounds are as authentic as I could make them. I may have anticipated the Jamaica Squadron by a few years and of course it was the redoubtable Dutchman, Piet Pieterzoon Heyne, and not van Ryker, who captured the Spanish treasure fleet entire; but history does record a destructive hurricane that raced across the Antilles in 1660; there was a famous woman poisoner who was executed in Bermuda in that century for her crimes—but she was not golden-skinned Doubloon; and fierce wreckers did ply their cruel and profitable trade in the reef-strewn islands of the sun.
But most of all, I have tried to recreate the spirit of an age, the wild, wonderful, romantic, swashbuckling 1600s, when nations clashed, new worlds were won, lean pirate ships prowled the seas, and a man might clasp his woman in his arms and sail away to distant uncharted shores—a time in which the America we know and love had its real beginnings.
And to the stouthearted men of that century and their brave and dazzling women, let me now propose a toast:
Here where the wild winds have blown,
Where the reckless lovers have played,
Here where their wild oats were sown,
Let us drink to the man and the maid!
Valerie Sherwood
The touch of your flesh is sweet torture,
You hold me and time stands still.
Stay with me till tomorrow—
And believe of me what you will!
Prologue
St. George, Bermuda,
1673
The girl in the stranger’s arms, the slender girl with the burnished gold hair who was about to lose her virginity to this tall man who had sailed in from the north only today, stared for a wild hypnotic moment into his flickering gray eyes and told herself this night was forever.
The stranger had a look of great purpose and an arresting hawklike face but the girl was a strange contradiction: beneath her worn homespun dress and plain petticoat was a chemise incredibly fine and trimmed with fabulous lace. Her delicate white hands—one with a recent burn on the back from contact with a hot saucepan—had obviously never known work. She stood on tiptoe in the dark-haired stranger’s embrace, and one of her scuffed shoes, made of fine leather, sported a broken heel. Resting against the nasty bruise just turning blue beneath her right eye—a bruise the stranger had so recently avenged—were long dark curling lashes framing eyes of an unbelievable clear turquoise, deep and brilliant and changeable as the sea itself. As her excitement mounted, so had the color deepened in her peachbloom cheeks. Now her softly parted lips trembled with an unspoken promise and the man who held her so lightly, so caressingly in his arms—as if she were a little bird he had caught in his hands and must not frighten—tightened his grip as he bent his dark head and claimed her mouth with hard, demanding lips.
Now the girl’s bright head was bent back, her throat a white curve in the moonlight, her slender back arched as she strained against his deep, throbbing chest. Her palms, at first pressed flat against his chest to restrain him, had been replaced by her ardent young breasts, their delicate curve flattened by their pressure against his strong form. Almost unconsciously, her hands had slipped across the smooth leather of his doublet and her arms had crept luxuriously around the sinewy muscles of his sun-browned neck.
Now his impudent tongue was probing, probing—he was taking liberties with her that she had never allowed, not from any of the many suitors who had once—it seemed forever ago—pleaded with her earnestly on bended knee to marry them.
Her breath sobbed in her throat as new, undreamed-of yearnings rose and shimmered within her. Like wi ldfire in her blood, this bold stranger’s touch had set her aflame. She wanted the unimaginable and felt for a reckless moment that nothing was beyond her reach, nothing was beyond her grasp.
In the seawind the girl’s light skirts blew and twined around the stranger’s long legs. They swirled around his lean thighs, encircled his wide-topped boots. A swatch of lace edging from her chemise skirt caught in his spurs and tore as, poised on the brink, the girl gasped and took a swift, involuntary step backward toward innocence.
So rapt were they that neither of them noticed the tearing lace.
To them the night wind had its own song, its own resonance, for behind their swaying forms the lapping surf rolled in sonorously across the white beach of Bermuda’s north shore. Farther along waves crashed against the old, sea-scarred rocks—but not so loudly as they crashed in the girl’s ears, for her whole being was taut as a drawn bowstring with the arrow about to fly.
She felt giddy and light-headed, for so much had happened in the short space of a few hours—more it seemed than in all her life before—although that had been eventful enough, heaven knew! But this—this giving of herself, about which she had thought so much, woven so many golden dreams— overshadowed everything: the night, the island, the beauty of the scene—everything. It seemed to her as she looked up into the stranger’s intent smiling face, shadowed now, for the wind had blown his thick dark hair like a silken screen between them and the distant moon, that all her life she had waited for this moment and that what was about to happen was inevitable, immutable as if the event had been long ago predicted and carved into stone.
She would be his, this man from the north who had winged south on white sails to claim her, she would belong henceforth to a man she knew nothing about save his name—and in that tense moment in a lost wondrous world with the sea crashing about them, she did not care.
Silently she had pledged her troth. This then was to be her destiny....
Here in the arms of a stranger on a windswept night of stars, the girl was about to become a woman—and she might have drawn back and considered if she had known the real truth about herself and all that had brought her here.
But hers was a reckless heritage, so she did not draw back. Instead, with all her sweet untried passion she embraced her newfound lover.
For she was Georgiana, daughter to the legendary Imogene van Ryker—and like the blazing beauty who bore her, she had been born to flame and torment, to a destiny of doubt and passion, of tumultuous fulfillment and aching desire.
Her mother had been such a woman, and all the Caribbean had echoed with her name.
BOOK I
The Buccaneer’s Bride
Her courage, ah, she’ll need it. ...
Come, can’t you shed a tear
For lost and lovely Imogene,
Bride to a buccaneer?
PART ONE
The Toast of Tortuga
Golden and tempting and wanton—
That’s what they'd like to believe,
A woman of passion, a woman of fire—
Yet a girl with her heart on her sleeve!
The Island of Tortuga,
1660
CHAPTER 1
On the quay at Cayona, under the burning Caribbean sun, a spectacular event was shaping up and sunburned men with cutlasses were nudging each other and edging forward through the outdoor marketplace the better to watch. For that golden beauty, Imogene van Ryker, intent on her shopping among the diverse wares of this crowded buccaneer port, had just been seized around her delectable waist and soundly and publicly kissed—and that by a towheaded half-fledged cabin boy whose cheeks, even as she struggled free from him with delft blue eyes snapping, turned fiery red at this contact with the fabled beauty.
A breathless hush descended upon the crowd. For nineteen-year-old Imogene was bride to the best blade in the Caribbean, the famous buccaneer Captain Ruprecht van Ryker, whose ship of forty guns now rode Cayona Bay, and that same Captain van Ryker, some distance away, had stiffened upon hearing his bride’s angry exclamation. Now his big dark head, bent in inspection of a captured shipment of wine, came up and swung around eaglelike to survey the scene.
What he saw caused him to break off his conversation and bound forward just as golden-haired Imogene, with the speed of a spitting cat, pulled free. Her slender body pivoted, her lemon satin skirts gave a devastating swish as she drew back her right arm and brought her palm with a sharp crack across the tall lad’s flushed face.
A moment later van Ryker, whose forward rush had led him to knock over an unsteady pile of oranges and three neighboring kegs of salt, and thus brought down on him the deprecations of a gaudy waterfront bawd whose purchases they were, reached the scene. He seized the big lad by one homespun-shirted shoulder and swung him around ungently to face him. The boy’s sly impudent face whitened as he found himself looking up into the angry gray eyes of the tall buccaneer and heard the rumbling growl that issued from van Ryker’s throat.
Even the angry bawd held her breath.
“That’s for your temerity.” The sinewy buccaneer hurled that homespun figure backward upon the quay, where he landed with a hard thump. “And this—!’’ His sword snaked out before the lad could scramble up.
“No! Van Ryker—don’t kill him!” It was Imogene’s voice, rising above the sudden mutter of the crowd.
With the point of his blade pinioning down the youth’s doublet in the general vicinity of his breastbone, van Ryker paused and studied his victim. He stood above him with his long leather-clad legs planted firmly upon the quay. In his loose white cambric shirt with its flowing sleeves, open to the waist to reveal a heavily muscled sun-browned chest, with two big pistols stuck into his belt, he looked the very picture of vengeance and the crowd held its breath to watch him. Actually the lean buccaneer had no intention of killing the lad, but he intended to strike such terror into his young heart that Imogene would be safe from any further assaults as she strolled through this buccaneer marketplace, even if she walked alone.
“And why should I not?” he drawled.
Her beautiful worried face intent, she moved toward him with a silken flutter of her yellow skirts. “Because he’s so young and—”
“We’re all young,” van Ryker interrupted sardonically, but his saturnine gaze swung toward her. “ ‘Tis well known buccaneers don’t live to be old!”
A general rueful chuckle greeted that remark, but Imogene shrank back, repelled. “He’s only a boy,” she protested desperately. “And drunk.”
“Drunk, is he?” That deadly blade toyed with the braid that decorated the youth’s homespun doublet, idly slicing off a piece here and there. White-faced now, the lad stared up in horror along the sharp silver glitter of that shining blade that seemed to lead directly up to the buccaneer’s dark face frowning down above him.
“Yes,” cried Imogene. “I could smell the wine on his breath when he seized me. Oh, van Ryker—don’t hurt him! He couldn’t have known who I was. He must have thought me—” she had been about to say “one of those women,” including with a sweeping wave of her arm the sultry harlots of all nations who sidled about among these dangerous sea rovers and the sharp-eyed traders who dealt with them in Cayona’s marketplace. Instead she finished in confusion, “someone else.”
Van Ryker shot her a brief glance. She was a woman not easy to mistake. For in all this world, he asked himself, where would one find her peer? Golden and glowing she stood there with the sunlight shimmering on her bright hair and racing in sunlit rivulets along the tempting contours of her tight low-cut satin bodice down into the folds of her billowing lemon satin skirts. She was leaning toward him with a look of mute appeal that would melt stone, and a man could lose himself forever in the depths of her delft blue eyes.
