The Pirate & The Adventurer & The Cowboy

successfully published while he kept accumulating rejections. Especially when he was convinced that what he was writing was infinitely more important than what I wrote."

    Jared let the silence that followed her comment hang for a while. He realized he felt at peace with Kate for the first time that day. He replayed his own words in his head and saw the truth in them. Somewhere along the line he had stopped looking for a replacement for Gabriella. He wanted a wife, but he wanted someone who was a unique individual, a person in her own right, not a clone of Gabby.

    "You really don't know what you want in a second husband?" Jared asked again.

    "Like I said, I'm sure I'll know it when I see it."

    That comment shattered his feeling of being at peace with her. He scowled across the table, annoyed. "What are you expecting to happen? You think some guy will walk into your life and you'll take one look and know he's the right man?"

    "Sure. Why not?"

    "You know what your problem is? You've written one too many romance novels," Jared muttered.

    "Well?" Letty demanded a few days later when she happened across Kate curled in a shaded lounger. "Fill me in on the latest. How's Amelia doing with her pirate?"

    Kate glanced up from the diary in her lap. "Whipping him into shape, I'm happy to say. She locked him out of her bedroom on her wedding night because he showed up drunk after too much carousing with his crew. She made it stick, too. Mostly because Roger was too drunk to find the key, which she had wisely hidden."

    "I love it. What happened next?" Letty sat down nearby and poured herself a glass of iced tea from a pitcher Kate had ordered earlier.

    "Roger was too embarrassed the next day to admit he hadn't made it into his wife's bedroom. So he tried acting as if everything was normal between himself and Amelia. Pretended there wasn't a thing in the world wrong. Unfortunately Amelia fell for the act. She went for a walk with him down to a secluded little cove." Kate wondered privately if it was the same cove where Jared had first made love to her.

    "I'll bet Amelia soon found herself flat on her back in the sand."

    "Eventually. It wasn't as bad as it sounds, though. Here's how she puts it:

    Roger apologized very prettily for his uncouth behavior of the previous night and began a very learned discussion concerning the marital obligations of husbands and wives. I informed him that I was very well aware of those obligations, and having found myself wedded, however unwillingly, I intended to do my duty. He then explained in a rather awkward fashion that he would prefer it if I did not act entirely out of a sense of womanly duty. I knew then that he loved me and I was content.

    "That's sweet," Letty said.

    "Maybe. Maybe not. I can't help wondering if Roger had finally figured out that charm would work better than a lot of loud, blustering machismo."

    "I prefer to think he had learned his lesson and wanted to please Amelia."

    "More likely he just didn't want to spend another night locked out of his bedroom." Kate closed me book, wondering if she would have believed Jared loved her if he had tried the same line on her.

    Probably. He was, after all, the man of her dreams. He just didn't know it. She remembered their discussion over lunch a few days earlier and knew she had not been exactly truthful with him. But she was not about to confess to Jared that he was exactly what she wanted in a second husband. Not yet, at any rate.

    Before this relationship could go any further she had to find a way to save him from his own piratical tendencies. She had to discover what was going on at HawthorneCastle.

    The next day she got her first real clue. It was late in the afternoon, shortly before she was due to meet Jared for dinner in the hotel restaurant, when Kate came across the most interesting portion of the diary that she had yet encountered.

    Amelia Cavendish, inquisitive lady that she was, had discovered the mechanism that unlocked the hidden door at the bottom of the stone staircase.

    Amelia, Kate decided as she carefully memorized the instructions, was definitely turning out to be a kindred spirit. She had been unable to resist finding out what was behind the locked wall and Kate was filled with the same gnawing curiosity.

    According to the diary, Roger Hawthorne had built the hidden room as an emergency escape route to the sea. There was, according to Amelia, a wharf inside a natural cave adjoining the castle.