Présentation de l'éditeur
The tempestuous saga of Lady Catherine Aldley and the pirate Jonathan Hale that began in
Island Flame now continues in
Sea Fire. . .
What can a beautiful captive say to a handsome, ruthless pirate?
He was her husband, her lover, the pirate who seized her body, then stole her heart. Lady Catherine Aldley fled England to make a home with the infamous Jonathan Hale in Carolina. But their perfect life was shattered when Cathy was summoned to England to her ailing father, and discovered that her marriage to Jonathan was a sham. He was a wanted man, one step from the gallows. The only way she could save him was to wed her despised cousin, to let Jonathan think she had betrayed their love.
Anything but "no."
With a price on his head and vengeance in his soul, Jon Hale led a mutiny aboard the prison ship Cristobel and recaptured his faithless wife. Cathy could rile his blood as no other. The fire in her eyes infuriated and beguiled him. Cathy said she hated him, yet melted at his touch even as Jon tried to despise what he most desired. Then fate threatened to part them forever and Jon risked his life to rescue the woman he could not live without. . . .
Bestselling, award-winning author Karen Robards once again brings us dazzling adventure and unforgettable characters in a searing saga of passion, seduction, and dangerous love.
Karen Robards is the author of twenty-two novels. She lives in Louisville, Kentucky, with her husband, their three sons, and a sizable menagerie.
Extrait
England was certainly cooler than South Carolina, but that was about all that Cathy could say for it. It was raining as they drove through the streets, that dreary, never-ending drizzle so common to London in late September. Cathy, seated in a hired hack with Cray on her lap and Martha occupying the seat opposite, shivered as she huddled into the soft fur trimming of her cranberry wool pelisse. The steady clop-clop of the horse's hooves on the cobbled streets, the splash of the carriage wheels as they rolled through countless puddles, seemed to her to be the loneliest sound in the world. Does the whole country smell of worms? Cathy wondered dismally. Taking some comfort from the child's drowsy weight against her, she cuddled Cray closer. With every fiber of her being she longed for Jon.
He had had to stay behind at Woodham, of course. With the cotton so near to harvest it would have been pure folly for him to leave. Cathy knew that, had even pointed it out to Jon himself when he had suggested accompanying her. But the real sticking point, the incontrovertible fact that had caused Cathy to almost implore him to stay at home, was this: in England, Jon was an escaped felon, convicted of piracy and murder. If caught, he would be summarily hanged.
"We've stopped, Miss Cathy." Martha spoke for almost the first time since they had set out from the docks nearly an hour before. The sound of her voice jerked Cathy back to the present. She leaned forward to peer out the near side window, using her bare hand to wipe a little circle of glass clear of condensation. From the outside, her Aunt Elizabeth's, Lady Stanhope's, fashionable Grosvenor Square townhouse looked exactly the same as it had two years before. Three stories tall, made of red brick with a delicately wrought, black-painted iron fence separating it from the street, it was as imposing as the lady herself. And as Cathy remembered only too well from her one previous visit, the house was as strictly correct inside as out. Formality was the unbending rule in manners as well as furnishings. Cathy had stayed there for nearly three months while she was pregnant with Cray and had thought herself deserted by her husband. That visit had been distinguished only by its sheer misery.
"You gettin' out, lady?" The truculent tone of the cabbie as he stood holding open the carriage door, rain dripping from the brim of his hat, pulled Cathy from her reve
