The Romance Reader's Guide to Life

“Yes,” I said. “You don’t have to worry, Mom.”


Three days later our mother’s lungs filled with fluid and she drowned, lying in her bed and surrounded by her children. Snyder got through a quiet wake and the graveside burial and then he began to unravel. He began to smell stale. He sat quietly in corners while my sisters and I cleaned out the house, sold it, met with an accountant who helped us pay off our parents’ debts. I didn’t believe letting him sit around and feel terrible was going to help much, so I started right in on him.

We began with cooking lessons. I told him that when we had lamb chops and chocolate cake under control we could move on to tracking sales figures and business costs. Snyder was grateful, which surprised me. The cooking lessons were a disaster but the columns of numbers, and the reasons to keep those columns, started to make sense to him. After all, he had filled out and erased and rewritten countless order forms from the backs of comics all his life. “I can do this,” he said to me one night after a long conversation about mailing costs and advertising, cash-flow charts and taxes. Then he said he was hungry and he needed a shower.

We were going to be all right.





THE PIRATE LOVER


Why Do You Hate Us?

Electra’s captor blindfolded her and brought her to a darkened chamber, where she could hear men hooting and grunting as he ordered her to stand still, arms at her side, and tolerate the blindfold until he himself removed it. When he did she gasped. There on a large bed were five men surrounding what proved to be a woman’s body, her skirt rucked up and over her head, her white legs parted—pale bent wands on a rectangle of black satin. Her fists were clenched, her wrists bound and tied to the edges of the bed.

“They were a bit rough. It’s what they pay for. If the girl can’t manage, we’ll have to find some other use for her. Our customers enjoy a variety of imaginative play—there are still many roles available for girls who have been slightly damaged.” Le Cherche pulled Electra away then, into his own private chamber.

“Why do you show me this? Who is this poor woman?”

“I believe her name was Emelia Benelotte. Pretty name, no? She rejected the marriage offer of a man who had enough influence to make her disappear from her old life, and appear in this one. True, he was thirty years older than she. Fat. But he had a great deal of money. She should have said yes to him, don’t you think? When she rejected him, he simply offered her parents a handsome fee for her and they gave her to him. Perhaps they actually weren’t venal and cruel—he told them he would be kind. Then he delivered her into my hands—he’d already had particular men in mind who wanted to do particular things with her. We’ve given her a new name and a story that makes it clear that she has been a very, very bad little girl.”

“You think this will frighten me into submission.”

“If it doesn’t, you are a fool. You see what your fate could be. Of course, you could be my own personal plaything—safe from the kind of casual group use that might be unpleasant for you.”

“Why do you hate us?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, my pet. Purr for me.” He approached Electra and stroked her head. “I said purr.” She turned her head sharply away. “You will learn,” he said dryly. “Be grateful that I am patient.”

She heard the men’s casual laughter as they left the bound and brutalized girl. Was resistance seen as sexually provocative behavior in this strange world—at best a waste of time, at worst exactly what her captor desired most? She bowed her head in as submissive a way as she could and whispered, “I understand, Judge Le Cherche. I will not be a fool.”

“So much better. Do you see how pleasant this can all be?”

Just then cannon fire sounded above them. A sailor pounded into the room. “Sir—the Cat has cut out our xebec.”

“How is that possible? Who was posted at watch?”

“They approached in small boats, sir, in total darkness and quiet. It was … we were distracted, sir. They swarmed over the side and took the xebec by surprise.”

“You were drinking, you mean, and playing with some of my clients’ castoffs! What about the xebec’s crew?”

“Half seem to have joined the Cat’s number. I do not know the fate of the others.”

So the crew of the Cat was at hand, active and interceding, never mind that it was a small frigate-size craft against Judge Le Cherche’s remaining three ships.

“Whoever was at watch duty will answer to me!” cried the judge. “And when we take the xebec back, and blow the Cat into eternity, we will deal with the deserters as well. Take the wench back to her quarters and tell the first officer to report to my cabin.”

The sailor into whose hands she was thrust was clearly shaken, more frightened of Le Cherche than of the cannon whistling over their deck. Sweat beaded his brow, and his grip on her arm as he dragged her toward her cell made her cry out at one point. “Hurry up, you stupid cow! If I am not back in three minutes…” The sailor never finished his sentence. He didn’t have to. In a particularly close doorway Electra watched for her chance and made a point of losing her balance—directly onto her escort. He kept his feet, but in the tangle of skirt and legs and arms she had swiftly lifted his sailor’s knife—a tool with both blunt blade and fid, each folded neatly into the handle. The man was so anxious he did not immediately feel its absence or see it folded into her skirt as he pushed her into her cell.

Within moments she had worked aside three planks and slipped into Basil Le Cherche’s straw-covered prison. She flipped the marlinspike open, examined the links of his chains, selected what seemed the weakest, and drove the fid into its center, bracing and twisting to force the link open. With determined persistence she succeeded, and the captive took the fid from her and drove it into a link on the other hand’s chains, saying, “The first time I saw you I knew you could turn the course of my life in some way, at some time. Electra Gates, I don’t understand your powers but I am grateful to them because you have brought me alive in ways I believed were gone to me forever. This moment is proof that I was wrong.”

His words flew directly to their mark and she met his gaze, both their faces alight. She contained the deep urge to touch him and sprang to her feet.

“The Cat is driving towards us as I speak! They have taken the little xebec that accompanied this flotilla…”

“They learned our location and have planned this distraction. I would bet my life that if we can reach the water, they will be searching for us. They are giving us our main chance. Come!”

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