Hope Reborn Read Online Free PDF

That the word you were searching for?”
    “Yes.”
    “Best rework it then.”
    “How much time do I have?”
    “Enough, I’ll telegraph your editor from New Orleans.”
    She resisted the urge to hug his neck. He hated her being demonstrative. “Excellent, thank you.”
    “Ma’am, there’s another matter.”
    “What now?”
    “The captain, ma’am. He’s requested a few moments in private with you.”
    His words pushed her to the back of her chair. What could the man want? After the first couple of nights, he had refrained from any hints at a side trip to his bed. “Have any idea what he’s after?”
    “A loan perhaps?”
    She laughed. Wouldn’t that be ace high? Should she insist on a signed contract, or be adamant she didn’t loan money to losers like him?
    “No, I don’t think so. The man plays for the fun of it. He’s never offered to up the stakes. I don’t think that’s what it is. What else could it be?”
    “A proposal?” He held the china coffee cruse up. “What shall I tell the purser?”
    She declined more java. “I will require you in the next room, but with that provision, a few minutes alone will be fine so far as I’m concerned. Wouldn’t that meet with your approval?”
    “Yes, ma’am.”
    The words flowed that morning and almost put themselves on the page. She loved it when the little darlings did that. If only she could write faster, and her hand didn’t get so tired.
    Should she perhaps hire a scribe? No. She didn’t need more people in her life. She liked things exactly the way they were, just her and Chester.
    Who needed a husband anyway?
    She set her pen down. Tears welled then trickled down her cheek. She did, that’s who, and before her whole life slipped away.
    In the deepest sanctums of her inner being, she longed to be a mother, though she’d never told a soul. Not even Chester. If the captain really wanted to get her alone so he could propose, should she settle?
    Images of a little bearded baby tickled away the tears. She rather liked the facial hair, but had never wanted to settle. She wanted the entirety of the perfect happy endings she wrote over and over.
    Not one of her heroines missed having it all, not one. And she never gave one of them just any man, but the right one. She gave her protagonists the man she could fall so deeply in love with that her life would be perfect until she died.
    So why couldn’t she meet the perfect forever man to marry?
    Shouldn’t she at least be equal with all the women she’d created on the page? Hers was not the captain. The dream man who’d sweep her off her feet would never boss her around.
    She hated it when a brute thought he knew what was best for her just because hair covered his face and chest. Life was so unfair.
    She reconsidered.
    Millicent May Orr. He’d surely have to hear her first name. She’d hate that. Maybe she could change him. Were she to explain how much she hated being told what to do, that she had no need for another father, would he promise to refrain?
    May Orr. Dear Heavens, she’d sound like a grimy politician, and at only the city level. She’d certainly have to keep her maiden name for a pseudonym. Why, with May Orr on the cover of her books, her readers might even think a man wrote a romance story!
    How absurd.
    They would giggle themselves silly.
    After only three dress changes, she found herself at the captain’s supper table sitting in what had become her place to his right. She picked at broiled fish and drank no wine whatsoever.
    Nothing should dampen her resolve to tell the man flat out that she would not marry him. If indeed, that’s what plagued his bearded mind.
    Should she let him kiss her? Just once, so she’d know exactly what it felt like to have all that hair against her face? She imagined it would tickle her lips.
    Through dessert and the short stroll to his state room with Chester and the purser a respectable distance behind them, she contemplated that question. Could one