Joan Marlow Golan

      Senior Editor, Silhouette Desire

      The Virgin and the Vengeful Groom

      Dixie Browning

       www.millsandboon.co.uk

      DIXIE BROWNING

      has been writing for Silhouette since 1980 and recently celebrated the publication of her sixty-fifth book, Texas Millionaire. She has also written a number of historical romances with her sister under the name Bronwyn Williams. An award-winning painter and writer, Browning lives on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. You may write to her at PO Box 1389, Buxton, NC 27920.

      Contents

      Chapter One

      Chapter Two

      Chapter Three

      Chapter Four

      Chapter Five

      Chapter Six

      Chapter Seven

      Chapter Eight

      Chapter Nine

      Chapter Ten

      Chapter Eleven

      One

      His bare, size-eleven feet propped on the railing, Curt let the long-neck bottle slip through his fingers to rest on the sandy porch floor. Gazing out over the Atlantic, he continued the word game a fellow patient had introduced him to in a certain Central American hospital.

      Applicable words only. Even playing alone he stuck to the rules. He’d started over with the As once he’d settled here at Powers Point. After less than a week he was up to the R words. There was not a lot to do here.

      Not a lot he could manage yet, at any rate.

      Rest and relaxation.

      Recuperation and recreation.

      Nah. Scratch recreation, it didn’t apply.

      Rebuild, restore…retire? At age thirty-six?

      Well, hell—how about rotting, raving, royally pissed-off?

      Too much like the Bs. Bored, bad, broken. And bitter. Yeah, that, too, but he was working on that one.

      The Ps had come easy. Powers Point. Private. Privateer?

      Could his old man have been a pirate? Being the descendent of several generations of seafarers about whom he knew next to nothing, Curt had to wonder. Powers Point was a pretty valuable chunk of real estate, at least, it was now that the island had turned into a tourist haven. What about a hundred years ago? Two hundred? Why would anyone settle in a place like this unless he valued privacy and needed easy access to the sea?

      Private, privacy, privateer…

      It was only a word game, he told himself. He would never even have thought of it if he hadn’t fallen heir to six sealed boxes a few months ago. After years of believing his father was dead, he had discovered that Matthew Curtis Powers had lived right here in Powers Point until a few years ago, when he’d entered a nursing home in Virginia, suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease. Curt could have passed his own father on the street and never known it. Never even recognized him. Just thinking about it made him want to strike out at something.

      He’d been on twelve-hour notice before leaving on another mission when the lawyer had finally tracked him down to inform him of his father’s death. Stunned, he had accepted a deed and two keys—one for a house at a place he’d never even heard of at the time, Powers Point, and another one to a storage unit in Norfolk. He hadn’t had time to absorb the knowledge—barely had time to locate a storage place and stash the stuff. Six boxes of ledgers, logbooks, diaries and old newspapers, not to mention half a dozen old novels. He’d glanced at a few of the titles and seen enough to know that he wouldn’t be in any great hurry to read them.

      The Virgin and the Vengeful Groom. Was that an example of his family’s taste in literature?

      But then, what the hell did he know about his family’s taste in books or anything else? At a time when he’d been too young to know what was going on, his mother had taken him away and told him his father was dead. All those years he’d believed it, because he’d had no reason not to.

      As for the boxes, he’d had little time to do more than scan the top layers, but even that had been enough to fuel his imagination. Later, lying in a series of hospital beds with nothing but time on his hands, stories his father had told him more than thirty years earlier had started coming back. Fragments. Images—things a kid might recall, never knowing if it came from a comic book or a television show or something real. Even now he wasn’t certain how much was real and how much was invented out of need. Like the memory of a ship named the Black Swan.

      He’d just about decided it was a bunch of bull when those six boxes of papers had turned up. At least some of those papers were definitely ship related, triggering a few recollections of some female relative who had grown up aboard a ship and then written a few wildly imaginative stories.

      In fact, once he’d set his mind to it, he’d begun to recall quite a few tales about a family—his own, a few generations back—that had gone to sea and stayed there, men, women and children alike.

      The Powers of Powers Point.