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S ebastien Fonteyne stood on the fo’c’s’le of his ship, the Black Wind , and watched the last golden rays of sunlight fade below the horizon.

Every scrap of canvas was set, every sail filled and curved like sheets of marble in the steady wind.

With daylight fading, most of the men were winding down from their daily tasks, some sitting shirtless on crates and barrels to dry the sweat earned from a hard day’s work.

Some lit their pipes. Some stood holding their tin cups by the barrel of grog waiting their turn with the wooden dipper.

To a man, they warily eyed their captain, all too familiar with the ominous look on his face.

Unfettered, Fonteyne’s long black hair blew forward over his cheeks as he scanned the unbroken line of the horizon.

Eyes the color of dark amber scoured the demarcation where water met sky, occasionally peering through the brass long-glass, almost demanding to see another set of sails or, with the eastern horizon already darkening, an errant light winking in the distance.

His mouth was set in a grim line; the muscles in his jaw were clenched so tight, the veins in his temple stood out like cords.

The girl had a two-day head start. It had taken him that long to provision his ship and find enough sober crewmen to work the ship.

The Black Wind normally carried one hundred and seventy men; there were three quarters that number on board now, but Fonteyne had gone into battles with less.

As long as there were enough to keep his battery of guns firing, Fonteyne was confident.

Two days was one hell of an advantage but not insurmountable.

Over the past year or more, Lafitte’s Pride , had rarely ventured beyond the stronghold of Barataria Bay.

Her hull had not been scraped in months and was likely crusted a foot thick with barnacles that would shave several knots off her top speed.

Captured from the Spanish, the ship had been built in Cadiz, made of solid oak timber, her decks reinforced to carry the weight of armaments.

Lafitte had removed a goodly number of the heavy cast guns and modified her rigging to gain more maneuverability.

Conversely, he had kept all of the ornamental carvings and extravagant gilding which marked most galleons in a treasure fleet.

Her silhouette would be easily identifiable at any distance.

The lump on Fonteyne’s head ached like the devil and each time he scratched without thinking, a bloody scrap of scab was torn away. He had worn a bandage the first day, but that had proved to be an even greater nuisance. After two decades and countless battles at sea he knew his flesh healed fast.

His temper, however, did not.

He had a two-day disadvantage and four points of the compass to consider as the hunt began.

North was discounted at once, for that way lay only mangrove swamp and sandy coastlines; nowhere to hide a ship as recognizable as the Pride .

A westerly heading would take her toward Panama and into shipping lanes that were heavily patrolled by the Spaniards.

Since breaking ties with Napoleon and the French allies, Spain had become increasingly territorial as they watched the conflict escalate between the Americans and the British.

Spanish royalty had been engaged in battles with England since the days of Elizabeth’s reign, and they had every reason now to be wary of the Americans, They undoubtedly suspected it was only a matter of time before the land-hungry colonists turned their greedy eyes to the vast, rich plains that stretched west of the Mississippi into Mexico and California.

To the south lay the wealth of the silver and emerald mines of Columbia, riches that proved tempting to French, Dutch, Portuguese, and English pirates.

Fonteyne himself had embarked on several successful raids along the coast of Cartagena and Granada and had needed the guns of all three of his ships to blast his way back to home base.

He doubted Rose St. Clare would find sanctuary there.

Eliminating the North, South, and West points of the compass, left the long chain of islands in the East. Hundreds of them, big and small, some inhabited, some barren, some lush with vegetation, others dry as volcanic rock.

The islands of the West Indies lay in a sweeping crescent that extended downward from Florida almost to South America.

Rose St. Clare’s ancestors had once established a stronghold on one of those islands.

If fables and old seamen’s tales were to be believed, Pigeon Cay had provided the Dante pirate clan an impenetrable base for over sixty years.

Spanish raiders had eventually found it and destroyed the harbor and the warehouses.

They had looted everything of value and scorched the earth before taking the islanders captive.

But a century later, it was still not marked on any chart or map.

Many, following tall tales of vast hoards of treasure left behind, had tried to find the island over the years but none had achieved any success—none who had lived to report it, at any rate.

Stories of the infamous pirata lobo … the Pirate Wolf …

had filled penny sheets with spine-tingling adventures and heart-pounding romances for decades, few of which Fonteyne gave any credence.

Buried treasure on a hidden island and men who could make themselves invisible were just more legends alongside tales of Kidd’s hidden cache of Spanish gold and Blackbeard’s hoard of jewels secreted somewhere on the island of Jamaica.

The Dante-St. Clare Shipping Company had bases in Tobago, and London.

The patriarch of the family, Alexander St. Clare, ran his fleet of merchant ships between the two ports and from there, to all points of the globe.

The girl and her brothers had grown up at sea, so it would be reasonable to assume she would have an intimate knowledge of the Caribbean.

One thought lingered and nagged at the back of his mind: What if Pigeon Cay did exist, and what if Rose knew where it was? Lafitte could send every one of his hundred ships to scour the islands and never find it … or her.

The first time Sebastien had met Rose St. Clare at the ball in Port-Louis, he had been genuinely intrigued.

She was a seventeen-year-old beauty, slender and shapely, with curves in all the right places.

She had stood out like a beacon in the crowd of powdered and pale women who spent all their daylight hours hiding away from the tropical sun.

Rose’s skin was tanned, her arms firm with muscles not gained by pushing embroidery threads through pillowslips.

She hadn’t stared, she hadn’t fawned, her tongue hadn’t tied in knots when she spoke to him.

And she hadn’t known that Fonteyne had been in such a rage with her brother, that seducing her made the evening twice as pleasurable as he had anticipated it would be.

His duel that night had been with bodies, not swords, and he had come away the victor.

He certainly never expected to see her again, most definitely not striding into Lafitte’s stronghold claiming to be the captain of her own ship.

In all his years, Fonteyne had encountered only one other female captain, a woman as broad across the beam as a shithouse, with a face as repulsive as the odor of her black and rotting teeth.

Rose St. Clare, however, was as intriguing and possibly more beautiful than he remembered.

Seeing her walk into the tavern had caused an unexpected reaction …

one that forced him to move away from the table and stay at a distance until his blood settled to a dull roar.

The girl had nerves of steel sailing into Barataria Bay and a hundred times more so daring to sail away with Lafitte’s ship …

a feat few men would have tried, let alone accomplished.

It was difficult not to admire her resourcefulness as well as her audacity, and it was apparent she had the blood of her piratical ancestors flowing through her veins.

It would be a damned shame to have to spill it all over her deck.

“You’ll push your eye into the socket if you keep pressing that glass against it.”

Fonteyne acknowledged the comment with a low, throaty growl.

“Ah. The usual succinct response when your mind is a thousand miles away.”

Fonteyne lowered the long-glass and snapped the telescoping sections together. “Two days, Archie. Two damned days head start and only half a clue where to start looking.”

“Half is better than none.”

Ever the quick-witted optimist, Archibald Penman III was the ship’s doctor and one of the few men Fonteyne called friend.

Tall and lean, with wavy gold hair, the only time he was seen without a standing collar and cravat, an embroidered silk waistcoat and pristinely tailored jacket was when he was in the surgery, up to his elbows in blood.

His boots shone and his snow-white breeches were fitted tight to his thighs and smooth.

The current rumor amongst the crew had it that Penman was a member of the English aristocracy who had run away to sea to avoid a charge of murder. But the rumors changed as often as he changed his cravats and he neither acknowledged nor refuted any of the whisperings.

Indeed, he rather enjoyed hearing the colorful tales he was supposedly involved in.

“I have been dispatched to fetch you. Cook has laid out a fine supper of roasted suckling pig and warns that if his talents are wasted and the feast not eaten while the crackling is still … ah, crackling … he will hang himself from the nearest yardarm.”

Fonteyne frowned. “I doubt we have a yard stout enough to hold all three hundred pounds of him.”

“Each pound well-earned to judge by the smells coming from the galley and the drool running down my chin.”

“That isn’t drool.”

Penman wiped the slick of grease off his lip. “I was only testing the quality of the goods. And if you delay another five minutes, the crew will launch an assault on the galley and you’ll be lucky to get a boiled turnip for your supper.”

Fonteyne laughed. “Fine. I will come and eat the pig.”

He handed the glass to the helmsman, then followed Penman down the stairs and through the hatchway to the corridor leading to the cabins in the stern.

His quarters were utilitarian, a small space made smaller when crowded with his desk, his berth, his sea chests, and a long dining table.

His plates were wood or pewter, his candles sat in dull brass sticks.

There was no linen cloth on the table and the six chairs around it were mismatched and well worn.

The wall behind his desk was festooned with the flags and pennons from the ships he had captured; a rack held an assortment of swords surrendered by their captains.

He unbuckled his sword belt and hung it over the post of a straight-backed pilgrim’s chair before he sat. He set his pistols on the table with a thud and poured two glasses of wine, one of which he slid across to Penman.

The doctor swirled the wine gently around the bowl of his glass and glanced at Fonteyne.

“I quite understand the concept of hunting on land, and the ability to track prints and spoor by following broken branches, trampled grass, and whatnot. But how do you hunt on the sea when there are a thousand places to hide in a thousand different directions and no tracks left on the water to follow?”

“A combination of best guess and sheer luck.”

“And what would be your best guess?”

“The St. Clare home base is on Tobago. It could be that she will head in that general direction.”

“Would she not anticipate you thinking that exact thing?”

“Perhaps. Being the brazen little minx that she is, I wager it would be hard for her to resist showing off her prize to her brother. Ramsey St. Clare would pop all of his buttons if he had Lafitte’s ship in his possession.

The British would elevate him to Viceroy and make him a peer.

” He frowned into his wine and added, “Which might be exactly why she would avoid it. With her wanting to join Lafitte, I gather she and Ramsey are not on the same side of the conflict.”

“Are you aware your eye twitches every time you say his name?”

Fonteyne shrugged. “Ramsey St. Clare and I have a history. A party of armed British officers boarded my ship while it was docked and removed three of my men, claiming they were British deserters. St. Clare refused to help get them back, so I followed the vaunted Royal Naval vessel out of port, blasted their incompetent gunners to silence, and not only took my men back, but kept the ship.”

Penman looked around the cabin. “This ship?”

Fonteyne’s grin was wide and white. “She’s built of stout English oak, solid as iron from stem to stern. It was not her fault she was crewed by striplings barely a month out of their cadet jumpers. I have given her a few modifications, but all to good effect.”

Penman laughed. “Surely you must see the irony in pursuing Rose St. Clare for doing much the same thing.”

Fonteyne took a sip of wine. “You admire the chit, do you?”

“Anyone who can send that wretched little blacksmith into apoplectic fits must surely warrant a few huzzahs. Unless, of course, your vexation comes more from the lump she left on your head rather than any umbrage she caused Lafitte?”

Sebastien’s reply was delayed as the door opened to a parade of three cabin boys carrying trays of food. First to reach the table was a large portion of a suckling pig, roasted and glistening, accompanied by bowls of turnips, cabbage and biscuits.

Regarding the fragrant bounty, Penman instantly forgot what they had been discussing, but Fonteyne did not.

He sipped his wine and watched the doctor carve the meat and fill their plates, but his thoughts were back up on deck overlooking a sea as deep and unfathomable as Rose St. Clare’s eyes.

He’d not heard the chit had married and the name Whitticomb roused no memory of a captain by that name.

Dead these past three years? Probably from sheer frustration trying to rein in a firebrand like Rosamund St. Clare.

I have accepted the challenge, girl. Wherever you have gone, I will find you. And when I do …

Far to the south and east, Rose felt the whisper of a shiver run up her spine.

She glanced over her shoulder, half-expecting to see a tall black-haired devil standing behind her, but there was only sky and ocean, the latter dotted with marching whitecaps.

She chided her own foolishness and tucked her neck into the standing collar of her jacket to ward off any further chills.

As a precaution, however, she doubled the lookouts in the tops before going below to her cabin.