Cindi Myers - At Her Pleasure

Nicole took Ian’s hand and led him down to the beach, to a hammock strung between two palm trees.

“Lie down,” she commanded, and pushed him into the hammock.

He did as told, and Nicole crawled on top of him and straddled his stomach. She planted her palms on his chest and stared down at him, her expression serious.

“Yes or no?” she asked. “Do you want to be seduced?”

Heat rushed through her—the heat of desire, and also a great sensation of power. With her eyes locked with his, she reached up, grasped the top of her dress and lowered the silky fabric over her breasts—slowly, revealing an inch of naked skin at a time and watching as Ian’s eyes darkened with desire.

“Yes,” he whispered. “Absolutely yes.”

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Dear Reader,

I had a thing for pirates long before Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom made them popular. As a girl, I devoured stories about Blackbeard, Captain Kidd and Jean Lafitte. And as I grew older, I fantasized about being swept off my feet by a dashing pirate and carried away to a tropical paradise. (It beats figuring my taxes or making a grocery list any day of the week.)

That tropical paradise of my dreams seemed the perfect setting for a pair of sexy Harlequin Blaze fantasies. Add in the lure of treasure and legends about pirates and this was a story I couldn’t wait to return to every day. Better than Blackbeard or Captain Kidd, I made my pirate a woman with a scandalous past and a reputation as a skilled seductress. I pulled out all the stops for the character of Passionata, and I hope you’ll enjoy the steamy results.

Look for the second Passionata’s Island story in October 2008, when Her Secret Treasure goes on sale. In the meantime, I love to hear from my readers. You’ll find me on the Web at www.CindiMyers.com. E-mail me at cindi@cindimyers.com or write to me in care of Harlequin Enterprises, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario M3B 3K9, Canada.

Best,

Cindi Myers

Cindi Myers’s dreams of sailing away to an island paradise with her own swashbuckling pirate have been quashed by rampant seasickness and a tendency to sunburn easily. So she settles for drinking umbrella cocktails and letting her imagination run wild on the sun-washed beaches of her books.

HARLEQUIN BLAZE

149—TAKING IT ALL OFF

168—GOOD, BAD…BETTER

180—DO ME RIGHT

215—ROCK MY WORLD *

241—NO REGRETS *

274—FEAR OF FALLING †

323—THE MAN TAMER

333—MEN AT WORK “

Taking His Measure”

360—WILD CHILD ‡

HARLEQUIN SUPERROMANCE

1498—A SOLDIER COMES HOME

HARLEQUIN ANTHOLOGY

A WEDDING IN PARIS

“Picture Perfect”

HARLEQUIN AMERICAN ROMANCE

1182—MARRIAGE ON HER MIND

1199—THE RIGHT MR. WRONG

HARLEQUIN NEXT

MY BACKWARDS LIFE

THE BIRDMAN’S DAUGHTER

HARLEQUIN SIGNATURE SELECT

LEARNING CURVES

BOOTCAMP

“Flirting with an Old Flame”

To Emily McKay, for all her help

in researching diving.

Any mistakes are mine, not hers.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

THE SUNSET ON THE OCEAN streaked the sky with pink and gold and turned the sea a deep vermillion.

The color of passion.

The color of romance and love and all the things that weren’t a part of Nicole Howard’s life right now. And maybe never would be again.

She leaned on the rail of the yacht and stared out at a horizon as empty and featureless as she felt inside. Maybe agreeing to come on this vacation with her friend, Adam Carroway, hadn’t been such a great idea.

With his usual persuasiveness, Adam had made the trip sound like the perfect way to recover from losing both her lover and her job in the space of a week. They’d sail to a remote island in the Caribbean, do some diving, look for some shipwreck Adam was wild to find, get some sun and forget all about life back in Amity, Michigan.

But forgetting was proving a lot harder than Nicole had expected.

“You’re thinking about him again, aren’t you? Stop it.”

She turned and saw Adam emerging from the ship’s cabin. Broad-shouldered, barrel-chested and tanned from hours sailing on Lake Michigan, he looked nothing like the university history professor he was. Ten years older than Nicole, he had been at various times her roommate, confidant and best buddy. She thought of him as the big brother she’d never had.

He came to stand beside her on the rail. “You should have let me pound him one. Then at least you’d have the memory of him groveling to cheer you up.”

She shook her head. She couldn’t imagine Dr. Kenneth Brambling, chief of Amity Surgical Associates, groveling. When she’d first taken the job as nurse for the busy surgery practice, she’d been intimidated by his dignity. Later, when they’d become lovers, she’d been caught up in the aura of power with which he surrounded himself.

Only recently had she realized Kenneth’s dignity was merely arrogance, and the power an inflated sense of his own importance, and a callousness that had shocked her—and broken her heart. “Beating him up wouldn’t have gotten either of us anything except maybe a lawsuit,” she said.

“Might have made him think twice about cheating on another woman.”

“I doubt it.” As soon as she’d gotten over the shock of learning that she wasn’t the only woman sharing Kenneth’s bed, she’d uncovered all sorts of deceptions the good doctor excelled in, from exaggerating reports to insurance companies in order to receive higher reimbursements, to lying to his partners about the real reason he couldn’t attend a staff meeting—because he’d been occupied with his latest girlfriend. The man was an accomplished liar and it was cold comfort to know she wasn’t the first fool he’d deceived.

She’d emerged from the affair doubting everything from her physical attractiveness to her judgment. Though she knew Kenneth was in the wrong—he was the one who’d cheated and lied—she couldn’t help but wonder if she was also to blame. Maybe if she’d handled things differently, she wouldn’t have ended up so hurt.

“Here, I brought you something to take your mind off the jerk.” Adam pulled a slim paperback from his pocket and offered it to her.

“What is it?”

“Some background info on where we’re going and what I hope to find there.”

Adam had tried previously to give her more details about their destination and the shipwreck he was searching for, but once he went into academic-lecture mode her eyes glazed over and she’d refused to listen further. She didn’t care why they were headed to this deserted island, only that the island was far from Michigan and her problems.