King of Libertines

I met him on a hot and rainy day.
The clouds hung low. The sea swelled high, and his eyes glinted the
stormiest shade of gray.
The moment he stepped onto my ship, his arrogant scowl confessed
two things. One, he was rakishly, offensively handsome. Two, he wasn’t
impressed to find a woman captaining the fifty-gun galleon.
Not that I cared a whit what any man thought.
It was the summer of 1719. The British had just defeated the
Jacobites. The French had laid their beloved Jean-Baptiste de La Salle to
rest. The Governor of the Bahamas had granted the king’s pardon to my old
friend, Calico Jack. And a rare few women—yes, the gentler, weaker sex—
were joining the echelons of seafaring, hell-raising ruffians who plundered
the West Indies.
I wasn’t the first lady pirate who feared neither God nor man nor
death. And I wouldn’t be the last.
With rain slanting off my wide-brimmed hat and soaking through
my linen corset and trousers, I blew a blonde curl from my face and cast a
fleeting glance across the upper deck...