In the Arms of a Pirate (A Sam Steele Romance Book 2) Read Online Free PDF Page A

ruthlessly pulling weeds or gently tending the fragile blooms. In the orchard, she could wave to George or William, who harvested the fruit that Mary or Isabelle made into the preserves her father would take back with him on his ship.
    In the house, at least three maids were in residence at one time, tending to her, cleaning the immaculate house, or cooking. There was someone to teach her to sew, to embroider, and to cook. Her father ensured she was taught to read and to write, to play both the harpsichord and the violin. She was taught, fed, kept in the prettiest clothes and the tidiest house.
    By all appearances, she was well tended but like the most charming of faces could hide a black heart, it was no more than a guise. She did not live in a grand home where her every need was but a flick of her hand away.
    She lived in a prison.
    Certainly, she could admire the sea through the window in her bedchamber and she could smell the salt of it riding on the air when she strolled outside but she had yet, in her near eighteen years, to touch it. Or get any closer to it than the edge of the gardens. If she tried, if she asked, a guard stepped before the thick perimeter of towering hedge and reminded her it wasn’t safe to leave the yard. Of course, even if she got past the hedge, she’d have to scale the rock wall behind it.
    And go where? She’d often asked herself. She had no family she knew of, no friends to turn to. In a house surrounded by people, she was completely and utterly alone. And, she realized, had been the whole of her life.
    She’d asked her father, begged and pleaded with him to take her out of the yard, onto his ship, or to bring her into the village she knew was nearby. As a child, she’d yearned to be allowed to go play in the sand with the other children she watched enviously from her window. She’d cried bitterly when he’d simply refused, told her she had everything she needed here, and ordered her to wipe her tears.
    She’d made the mistake, only once, of opening her window and screaming for help. Her father had raged in, face red in anger, breath heaving like a wild bull. It was the only time he’d struck her but as her jaw had hurt for days after the blow, it had also been enough to keep her from doing so again. As had the threat his guards would do the same if she ever dared such disobedience in his absence.
    And so she stayed, obedient and meek as the days melted into weeks, the weeks drifted into months, and the months bled into years.
    But it hadn’t stopped her from staring out her window and dreaming of life outside her prison walls. Reality struck her hard when she had her seventeenth birthday. Was this her lot in life? Was she to waste her years staring out a window and wandering the yard as a prisoner? Was she truly willing to sit back and let her father, and all who worked for him, dictate the rest of her life? Was she willing to let them all get away with it, with no more than one token attempt to change her circumstances?
    The answer came clearer than the bells which tolled from town every Sunday morning.
    She would, absolutely not, accept that her life was to be spent confined and sheltered without having loved and been loved in return, without having lived. And so the dreaming at the window turned to planning. She spent countless hours and days memorizing the staff’s routines, the guards’ schedules. She napped during some afternoons in order to remain awake through the night to study the guards. Did they doze at night or were they vigilant? What time did the gardeners leave? How many servants and guards worked throughout the day as compared to throughout the night?
    She took her time assembling her answers and wrote every detail down lest she forget a vital piece. There was only going to be one chance at escape and she wasn’t going to ruin it by rushing. She took long walks in the gardens where she asked Henry about the flowers that grew. Such pretty flowers, she praised. So