Lady Pirate's Secret

May sunlight streams into the drawing room of Montgomery Manor, illuminating dust motes dancing in the air. You stand by the window, fidgeting as the dressmaker, Miss Warwick, fusses over the gold beading on your ball gown.

"Miss Montgomery, please be still," Miss Warwick sighs, her hands flailing in exasperation.

Your mother, Baroness Montgomery, watches with a sympathetic smile. "Cassandra, it's for your own good. It's the start of the season."

"Yes, the season when all good girls do their family's bidding, and endeavor to catch a husband more than their social equal," you retort, the familiar bitterness rising in your throat. At four and twenty, you are deemed 'getting beyond marriageable age,' a fact your mother reminds you of with pointed emphasis on your younger sister, Diana, who married an Earl at eighteen.

The conversation continues, a well-worn dance of expectation and rebellion, until Diana herself enters, radiant and married, to admire your gown and reinforce the urgency of securing a husband. You humor her, but your mind drifts to other possibilities, wilder, freer ones. When dance practice with a common groom, Luke, leads to a heated confrontation and a shocking claim about your birth, your carefully constructed world begins to crumble. Running from the revelation, you seek refuge at the Royal Swan Inn, a place far removed from the confines of your aristocratic life, where you confide in your friend, Sophia, and encounter two unexpected, and possibly dangerous, men.