When good posts go awry....prudence and chigger....

Hello all,
here I was, all set to post my anime pics for your viewing pleasure...(not quite the slide show of say, the grand canyon...but a pretty close second)...
When I realized my camera was missing.
So, I ask my oldest daughter.
She 'had' it, but now can't find it.
And looking at her room...I didn't find this to be a shocking revelation.
I am sure it will turn up attached to pieces of food or some such...

So instead I will continue on with my second installment of my 'romance novel.'
You new readers will have to go back to see Chapter one. Wherein I lament the fact that all the romance novels seem to have turned into buggery, that every hero was a bat or a wolf or a viscount or a lord... but for you old timers.. we shall simply continue as before....

The Lord of Passion
Chapter 2
The Briny beginning....

Prudence Mayhew Knew she had made mistakes, but how much worse could it get?
Stripped of her maiden head, now stripped of her home, her honor and her humor...she crouched uncomfortably behind barrels of briny cabbage, where she had ducked when she had heard the timber of rough voices, and the sound of a bar scraping and prying the lid off a nearby barrel..
The smell of salt and cabbage assaulted her delicate nose, blending with the smells of damp and mold and pine tar.

Now, knees to chin, she simply sat and cried over what could never be...

She would never be a viscountess or Duchess, adored and admired both near and far.
Her days of entertaining swains and jealous rivals were over.
Never again would she walk through the manicured gardens in the cool of the evening,
smelling the lush romance of roses in bloom.

She was a fallen woman, shunned by all good society, destined to live out her days in utter disgrace....
Prudence Mayhew was many things, but she wasn't the type to sit idly by and allow the world to dictate her life, she lived life by her own terms.
Which was why she was where she was...a last minute decision made when the realization of her fallen state had finally sunk in.
As she lay under the silk sheets of the Viscount Britishton's bed.
Moonlight throwing the room into stark relief, a sense of impending doom pervading every indrawn breath, Prudence finally realized something.
She realized that if she remained, She would be given two options.
She could be seen as a woman of easy virtue and become a courtesan,
or worse...
She could become the wife of the evil Earl of Dudsley.
A man of uneven temperament.
A man desperate for Prudence's dowry.
A man who would be too arrogant to admit he had been cuckolded.
Instead of doing the honorable thing...crying off.
Prudence knew he would spend his life taking out his humiliation and rage on her.

So, in the darkest part of night, Prudence slipped out of her family's rented apartments and stole silently to the docks.
There, she managed to bribe a deckhand and board the New Hope,
A frigate bound for India.

Determined to start anew in another land, her ill gotten gain strapped beneath her voluminous skirts, money stashed through years of clever card play in a spirit of fun and adventure.
Money whose purpose had previously eluded her, having led a sheltered and priviliged life Thusfar...Prudence had simply hid it under her mattress.
Now this Money would help Prudence find a new life, on her terms.
A new life, and much like the ship's name...a new hope.

Prudence leaned against the nearest barrel, contemplating her fallen state, and the vast void of the unknown.
She gasped as brine sloshed over the lip of the open container at her back, and shivered as it slid over her collar and dribbled in rivulets down her back.

"Make that fallen and salty." she mused bitterly.

Above deck, Viscount Britishton stood, leg braced on the gun battery, eyes scanning the horizon in search of brigands....
The merchant ships which this frigate was protecting carried naught but half empty hulls, waiting to be filled with tea and spice, and some food and clothing for colonials ensconced on the Indian subcontinent, but...
One could never be too careful...as the shrapnel in his leg could attest...one never knew what life held in store.
Being a wealthy shipping magnate, as well as a spy ( and peer of the realm) had led to a life both exciting and dangerous...and one fraught with intrigue.
Of course there were the occasional pangs of loneliness, the empty nights, the endless poetry of the sea....
But Chigger (for that was his name) was a man of purpose...
as seen by his firm jaw and stiff upper lip.
His bronzed skin gleaming in the noon day sun.
No real gentlemen would tan, but then again, He was no gentleman.
He held himself as was his custom, shoulders squared and arms akimbo, fists planted firmly on his lean and well muscled flanks...ready for anything life chose to throw his way...
A small smile flitted over his face as he contemplated his little assignation of the night before...a pleasant dalliance between assignments. An amusement, and nothing more....
Chigger mused...and chuckled...and mused some more.

Little did he know his pleasant dalliance of the night before would soon come back to bite him, hard.

Meanwhile,
Prudence was becoming impatient with not only her circumstances, but her sense of victimhood.
Never one to wallow for long, Prudence set her mind to a new purpose.
Her green eyes flashing,
She stood upright and with a tug, and jerk of her skirt...set about to make her presence known.

As she stepped out from behind the barrels, Prudence was suddenly imprisoned by an arm that wrapped around her, crushing her to a chest that felt as solid as the old oak that had risen like a silent sentinel outside her bedroom at her ancestral home, Briarhurston. ..

Prudence, suddenly realizing that her alliterative mind had caused her to stand like a limp fish instead of protest as she ought, gasped as a hand with long, lean fingers clamped over her lips like a vice.
Prudence did the only thing she could think of.
Taking her strong, white, and completely un-British teeth, she bit the hand that held her.


This story will continue the next time my blog doesn't go the way it ought...

It could be weeks, months or years...lol.
Prudence and Chigger will have to wait.
Have a great night guys...

chris out.....