Read on --
Seafaring Women
By Laurie Alice Eakes
When I was working on my midwives project in grad school, I ran across a book with just a couple of paragraphs about a midwife who made her living going to sea with pregnant women. Since I love books that take place at sea, this struck my fancy. What better! One of my midwives and the sea. I started my usual process of asking why questions: Why would a midwife go to sea in the middle of a war? Why would her sister-in-law want her to go to sea with her? Why would the enemy help an American imprisoned in England? Why…? Why…? Why…?The answers came to me as swiftly as a ship in full sail, and—Voila!—I had my story.
At least I had my story premise. The details took a bit more work.
toward redemption . . . and love.
All Phoebe Lee wants out of life is to practice midwifery in Loudon County, Virginia. But when she is pressed by her pregnant sister-in-law to help save her husband from an English prison during the War of 1812, Phoebe cannot refuse. The two women end up aboard a British privateer crossing the Atlantic under the command of a man with a deadly mission.
Captain Rafe Docherty promises to get Phoebe’s brother-in-law out of prison in exchange for information he holds—information Rafe needs to track down and destroy the man who killed his wife.
As Rafe plots revenge and struggles against his attraction to Phoebe, she determines to get ashore before she loses her heart and before her patient goes into labor. But an enemy in their midst threatens to end their plans, the ship, and their lives.
Excerpt:
He caught a whiff of her delicate jasmine scent, soap from the merchantman, before he heard the whisper of her slippers and skirt on the deck blend with the sigh of rippling wavelets against the brig’s hull. With all his will, he managed not to turn around and draw her to him and kiss her again. For those few minutes on the docks, he’d forgotten Brock and hatred and eve n Davina. With the fire of rage now ablaze afresh, the temptation to seek solace from the beautiful widow tightened every nerve in his body.
He would not disrespect her that way.
But she’d promised to stay. And now she’d come to him. For the past two hours she’d been below, soothing Belinda’s histrionics over being left behind all day and knowing nothing of what was afoot. Now Phoebe glided up beside him within touching distance.
He continued to grip the taffrail so he didn’t touch her. “’Tis late for you to be up and about. Should you not be in your bed?”
“When there’s a caged lion pacing overhead?” She smiled at him in the blend of silvery moonlight and golden binnacle lantern glow. “I couldn’t stay away.”
“A braw lady to approach a lion in his lair.” He allowed himself the luxury of one ghost of a touch on her face, the merest hint of his fingertips skimming across the curve of her cheekbone.
No more. No more. In harbor, no helmsman stood at the wheel to force him to propriety. The nearest watch stood halfway down the main deck and out of sight.
“And I’ve not paced this half hour or more,” he added with the merest hint of a smile.
She’d been drawn to him as he wanted her to be, connected to his spirit because of those moments of contact on the wharf, those seconds of admitting their attraction to one another. Attraction without love or even liking and respect on her side. Something purely carnal and therefore wrong with a good woman like her.
Completely wrong regardless of the woman, a faint voice from his past reminded him—a past whose teachings he’d set aside for the sake of destroying James Brock.
(Learn more about Laurie Alice Eakes at her website)
Sounds like a very interesting idea. I'd love to read about it.
ReplyDeleteThis book interests me. And I love the book cover. I will look for this author's book.
ReplyDeleteDiane Carter