The Romance Reader's Guide to Life

by Sharon Pywell

  And so he did. And though she was still new to lovemaking, he was a man who had learned from his numberless, nameless partners exactly what would move her, and he provided it. She could not have imagined any of the things he did to her before the actual moment when he did them. She could not have imagined herself doing what he urged her to do, and yet she did it, over and over. All through that long night they made love until they finally lay, spent and beaded with sweat, in the first light of dawn.

  “Whatever you may be, little witch, you have me in your power and I am transformed. I did not know how strange and cold an existence I had before you touched me. I was dead and I did not know it. How strange to discover myself perhaps only moments away from my own death—for, beloved, my brother does not give up a hunt. It’s possible, Electra, that he is more determined to capture me than you. Henri Le Cherche has long sought a reason to destroy me and now I have given him one. I have taken his property, his amusement—you, in other words—and provided him with the reason to kill me that he has always wanted.”

  “How could such a creature be your brother? How could such a monster as he be connected to you by blood!”

  “Oh, my love, we are deeply connected. Why do you think there is such enmity between us? Only creatures who see themselves in each other could feel the kind of hatred we feel.”

  “That cannot be true.”

  His fists clenched and he took her face roughly in his hands, his voice suddenly gone wild, free of any restraint. “You do not know what was in my heart when I was a younger man! Why do you think I withdrew into a shell of myself, a creature who conducted his affairs with the world as if he had no feeling? In my youth I saw the danger I was in. I knew what I could become—I watched my brother become it, and it disgusted me. I withdrew into an icy numbness to keep myself safe from those feelings—all feelings—while my brother did the opposite and refined those feelings into elegant perversions. You have not seen his machines, his leathern toys. You have not been forced to play any of his particular games with him or his … clients. My brother has no experience of women as people—they are things to subjugate, humiliate. He fears them, and he has made fortunes by selling them to other, similar men and providing them with the perversities that satisfy their urgent compulsions.”

  She saw the depth of his horror and despair and cried out, flung the whole of her spirit and will between him and what so terrified him. “Basil. My love. That is not you!”

  “You do not know what has been in my heart … my mind! My brother and I share more than blood. I have struggled all my life to make my nature the opposite of his! I have closed it off and now it is opened. You have opened it, and I fear as well as welcome what has happened to me now. I have only the love I feel for you as a beacon to guide me! Electra Gates, until you I had never met a woman I regarded as an equal. I controlled them, and so they had no power to move me. But now I have met my match, my savior! I am not talking to you now as one bound by custom or convention, Electra Gates. I speak to you as if we had passed together through the grave and into the next world, shorn of everything but the truth. And in that next world we would stand before God as equals. As we are.”

  “As we are!” Electra repeated. “I am not afraid of your past, Basil Le Cherche, or of what you have felt. I know who you are—be only that and I will be satisfied completely. Be the man I see before me now and I will move any mountain to remain by that man’s side.”

  He swept her into his embrace, pressing her body against the length of his own, drowning them both in a kiss as sweeping and deep as the currents flowing beneath and around them, and they were carried.

  NEAVE

  You Should Be Married

  The day after I refused Max’s advice to sleep aboard the Rubber Duck, Jane called me to say that Lilly hadn’t come to pick Annie up when she’d said she would. I looked at the clock: 7:07 p.m. What time did she say she’d be there? I’d asked. “Right after she left the office,” Jane said. “She said she expected to be here at six. Neavie, when did she leave work?”

  Lilly hadn’t left the office, because she’d never come in at all. This wasn’t that unusual, especially in the weeks before a conference. Lilly’s work took her far and wide, to manufacturers and speakers and meeting planners and cosmetics events. She had a cavalier attitude about telling us her movements, and more than once we’d seen her disappear from the office for a couple days and return, triumphant, with a contract to rent five boats and an entire island for a scavenger hunt and an invoice for some kind of glittering prize to use at the end of the game. Isn’t that brilliant! she’d say when she surfaced back at the office. Won’t we have fun! I said all this to my sister Jane.

  “Neave, you know she can be late for some things, but she’s never, never been late to pick up Annie. And she didn’t come.”

  I remember looking at a grease stain on a crumpled brown paper bag in my trash can and knowing this was all wrong, that everything was changed in an instant and my life might never be all right again.

  “She’ll call,” I said.

  Lilly did not return that night. We told Annie that her mom was on business and Aunt Jane was going to keep taking care of her for a little while. We told the girls in the office that Lilly had a migraine.

  Four days later there was still no sign of Lilly, and migraines don’t go on forever. Five days in, we admitted to Annie that we didn’t know where her mom was. I looked at Annie sitting on Jane’s living-room sofa, a quiet, pale face under a mop of black curls. Her eyes got greener when she was unhappy and bluer when she was pleased. They were very green now. “Don’t be frightened,” I said to her. “It’ll be fine.”

  All my life I’d made a habit of not lying in general, but in particular not lying to children. I’d been especially careful not to lie to Annie, because I wanted her trust. But at that moment I wanted her to love me more than I wanted her to trust me, so I lied. I stood there and felt every muscle in my face arguing with me and I said, “It’ll be fine.” She didn’t believe me, of course. Her little body was braced—she could feel something evil even if she didn’t know what it looked like or where it came from. Or maybe that was me, bracing, feeling everything around me braced.

  “It’s all right, Aunt Neave,” she whispered, and I turned my head to get a glimpse of myself in a mirror. Sure enough, I was wearing the kind of face that would leave poor Annie offering me comfort, offering me the very first lie I had ever heard her tell. I shouldn’t even be in the same room with Annie if I wanted her protected. I was terrifying. “Maybe,” Annie whispered, to no one in particular, “maybe he’ll give her back.”

  At work I kept acting like there was an annual sales conference coming up and there was work to be done. The trapeze troupe that Lilly had hired called, looking for a final signed contract. “Lessons,” their manager insisted. “Miss Terhune added a budget line for us to give volunteers from the audience a flying-trapeze lesson. She asked us if we could get a couple salesgirls up on the swings safely, do something easy but flashy and we discussed pricing. We need the amended agreement…”

  She hadn’t mentioned this part of the contract, but it was Lilly all over. Trapeze salesgirls: a sure bet for a picture in at least the Boston papers, maybe the AP wires, clear evidence to anybody with a lick of gumption that selling cosmetics at Be Your Best was the most interesting job in the United States.

  We waited. Days passed. We filed a missing persons report with lots of photos of her. I went to work and pretended things were going to be fine. Jane asked me to move in with her and Todd because, she said, she thought I might want the company. I refused the offer. She pressed for visits—just dinner, she’d say. That was all. She’d call Snyder and we could all have dinner together, Jane and Todd, Snyder, Annie, and me. I tried to imagine the effect of putting all of our feelings around the same dinner table and refused again.

  Snyder called. “Just do it,” he said. “Do it for Jane. She acts like she’s bravely optimistic, but I’ve been
spending a little time with her and she’s not feeling so optimistic or brave no matter what she says. If she wants us around her at dinner, I don’t see why we can’t give her that.”

  So I agreed to let him pick me up and we went, together, to Jane’s house. Dinner was stiff and halting. Jane, a wonderful cook, had burned half the meal and forgotten the rest. We could feel the something evil out there, feel it pressing against us at a chillingly close range; feel the urge to huddle and eat out of the same pot. For dessert Jane had made Jell-O Surprise. I pushed a spoon into the wriggling green cubes and shoved it around a little. We put Annie to bed and sat together on the couch and I imagined what we might have looked like as characters in one of Snyder’s comics, three stricken figures in a barren alien landscape with the indifferent universe glowing all around us—monsters approaching from the upper left corner.

  Lilly would be ashamed of me, I thought. I would be damned if I was not only going to cower in my little sister’s dining room but eat her Jell-O Surprise.

  Annie got so quiet we sometimes were unaware of her sitting in the corner of a room. I did what I could to approximate my real life, but even though I was moving around at work looking exactly like I normally did, a part of my mind was closed down around the idea of Lilly. The dark feeling was like a wall around me. I’d peer out at the salesperson or accountant across the desk from me and wonder if they’d noticed I wasn’t really there. They didn’t seem to.

  Finally there was some actual news. The police had found someone who had seen Lilly, identified from a company photograph, arguing with a man in front of a doughnut shop in Wenham, first on the sidewalk and then in their car: a Buick Skylark. Lilly’s car. The witness remembered Lilly in particular because of her turquoise Chanel suit. The witness loved Chanel, she’d said, which is why she’d taken special notice. And something about the man made her feel strange. The man and the woman seemed to be disagreeing about something but no, they weren’t yelling. No, there was no physical violence, though things between them looked very tense. The man. I don’t know what it was about him, the witness said.

  Then, nothing.

  The fact that a witness said they seemed to be willingly in each other’s company made the police interest lessen. “Ma’am,” said the burly cop who’d told Ricky to get lost and cool off the night he came to my apartment, “women run away with guys—all kinds of guys. It’s a fact of life. If you had my job you’d see it every day.”

  I tried on the idea that Lilly had been mesmerized, forced out of her sane mind, and hypno-controlled into running off with Ricky Luhrmann. Possible, I thought. Then, no.

  No.

  I had stopped talking to Charles about Ricky Luhrmann until now. Now I needed any trustworthy support or advice I could get, so I talked to him, leaving out any mention of Max Luhrmann. I discovered that I didn’t want Charles offering any opinions touching on Max.

  Charles had no advice about finding Lilly to offer. He said he didn’t know why I lived alone, and I said I was a single adult and they tended to live alone, exactly like he did. But a woman, he said, should not live alone. See what it’s exposed you to! See what happens when a woman is alone? His tone suggested concern about reputation as much as practicality or safety, and that took the conversation into an area that Charles and I weren’t good at—disagreement. Angry disagreement, in fact. It turned out that, just as I guess I already knew, he loved my practicality, my independence, and my business experience, but he would actually be more comfortable if my independent, practical life were lived with a sister or some girl pal. Some arrangement that kept me less vulnerable. Because that, he concluded, was what I was: alone. Women should not live alone, he concluded again.

  Should? What does that mean, “should”? I demanded.

  You should be married, he finished. I should marry you.

  THE PIRATE LOVER

  Under My Protection

  Women at sea on a ship of war were unusual but not unknown. Some captains took their wives or mistresses for comfort and diversion. Pirate vessels had been known to be crewed and even led by women. If there were squeakers aboard, a comfortable matron might be signed on to the logbook to see to the boys’ manners and whooping coughs and home sicknesses—a mature someone with a figure that could be confused at a distance with a pork barrel. But a young, vibrant creature in skirts—she created tensions that could divide the tamest crew, and Basil Le Cherche’s crew had come from the more distant edges of civilization. Electra Gates was not only young and vibrant, she was a woman in the throes of overwhelming passion, and this energy radiated from her. She had but to descend or ascend a ladder, cross the quarterdeck and lean upon a rail, lift a drink to her full lips before witnesses, for Basil Le Cherche to feel the masculine attention around her vibrate. He called the ships’ company together.

  “Mademoiselle Electra Gates is under my personal protection. I assume you understand me.”

  Silence greeted this short speech, but its effects were felt. Eyes were averted when Electra came on deck. Even Trotter, most unmannerly of personal servants, ducked and bowed and crept in her presence.

  “What did you do?” she demanded.

  “I protected you.”

  “From what? If a man on this ship did anything untoward, where could he run? I am safe here. Perfectly safe.” She coiled herself around him, parting her legs and drawing a delicate line from his temple to his lips. He trembled in her hands but pulled away for a moment.

  “Electra, do you know Joe Bent? Upper yardsman? A scar from cheek to nose on the left side?”

  She nodded.

  “Do you know why he’s on board?”

  “Riches. Adventure.”

  “Both true. Also rape. Four women in London. So easy for a man to simply slip away. The ship vanishes over the horizon and you avoid uncomfortable prison sentences or undesired trips to an Australian penal colony.” She stared. He went on. “My seductive, mesmerizing creature—half the men afloat, both in the Royal Navy and in the privateers working these waters—are fleeing a woman. Sometimes it is a wife. Or perhaps the father and brothers of a pregnant girl, a girl who may have been induced to intimacy somewhat, shall we say, before she was ready to do so.”

  “You exaggerate.”

  “Joe Bent. Gunther Schmidt. Ahab Hummori. Peter Piper. One-Eye Bentham. Daniel Rose. The Davies brothers. Surely you saw something besides admiration in their eyes as they watched your arrival? Surveyed your charms?”

  Yes. There had been a darkness in the gazes of these men in particular—some hunger. She had dismissed her observation. As if he divined her thoughts and was merely responding to something she’d said aloud, Basil added, “So you did indeed see it. My love, you were not wrong.”

  “I am in no need of protection. I am not your object.”

  “Not to me. Not to you. But to them, you are. The men I named will be encouraged to volunteer for the attack I plan on my brother’s ship. In the event that I do not survive that attack, I do not want them here to watch over you. My first lieutenant and first mate will be briefed on your protection. They are steady, strong men. Good men. They can be trusted with your life. They will give their own to protect it.”

  “You plan a direct assault? Two ships like ours cannot attack your brother’s convoy and survive.”

  “We will not fire a shot, my dear.”

  “Are you mad?”

  “Only in my relations to you. In matters of war, I assure you I am no fool. The xebec will lead, but she will be tricked out as a perfect surprise—stuffed to the gunwales with powder and tar with the littlest fire left burning in her aft port—a fire that, if their own cannon does not reach her magazine and turn her into an enormous bomb, the flames we set ourselves will do the job. We will keep the Cat at a distance, appearing all the while to be moving heaven and earth to hurry her but actually we will have set a sail dragging behind her beneath the surface. We will point the xebec into the midst of my brother’s convoy, set her mizzen to keep her on he
r course, and slip over the side into our tender to pull as fast as we can back to the Cat.”

  “And if you do not gain enough distance before the explosion?”

  “Then I will die at the same time that my brother Henri does—but you will be safe. Now or later, my sorceress. He will hunt you forever if I do not stop him now. He must die in order for you to live.”

  “Do not do this, Basil.”

  “I know the danger my brother poses to you, my beloved. There is no other way.”

  “I will go with you.”

  “You will not. You have many strengths, my love, but setting sails in an instant and pulling a barge quickly through high seas are not among them.”

  Against every fiber of control and will, Electra’s eyes filled with tears. The first one sprang free and coursed down her cheek. Basil touched it, gently, and swept it aside. “I do not believe I can live without you,” she whispered. “I cannot imagine it, Le Cherche.”

  “Nor can I imagine my existence without you. So I must go to assure your safety.”

  NEAVE

  Ponytail

  Days and more days, and no Lilly. Jane and Snyder got quieter. Then I found Annie in the backyard one morning with a shovel and a shoebox.