The Devil and the Deep

For once reality is sexier than fiction!

Author Stella Mills has writers’ block. Her swashbuckling debut romance was a mega-hit—and the world is crying out for a sequel. Problem is, her sexy-as-sin hero was based on childhood friend Rick Granville, whose dangerously delicious eyes have never sparkled at her that way!

So being forced to spend weeks on adventurer Rick’s luxury yacht could be just the thing to trigger her imagination—forget Johnny Depp…modern-day pirate Rick is pure physical perfection. Of course, spending night and day with the temptation that is Rick could be sailing too close to the wind—especially when her fictional fantasies start becoming red-hot reality!

“You can’t go a day without trying to hook up.”

“I think you’re exaggerating a little.”

Stella stopped pacing and glared at him. “In thirty-six hours, you have flirted with every woman who has crossed your path. And when we get on that boat tomorrow after about twelve hours you’re going to start in on me because you can’t help yourself,” she finished a little shrilly.

“You think I can’t go a few weeks without flirting with a woman?”

“I dare you. I dare you to go through this whole voyage without flirting with a single woman you meet along the way.”

Rick grinned, his gaze locking with hers. “And what do I get?” he asked, his voice low.

The timbre of his voice stroked along all her tired nerve endings as he stared at her with his Vasco eyes.

Stella swallowed. “Get?”

Rick held her gaze. “If I win? How about that kiss that we didn’t quite get round to?”

Stella blinked as the bad-boy looked back at her. It was a tantalizing offer. One she knew he didn’t expect her to take. But she’d never been one to back down from a dare, and frankly, the idea was as thrilling as it was illicit.

The Devil and the Deep

Amy Andrews

~ Temptation on her Doorstep ~

www.millsandboon.co.uk

AMY ANDREWS has always loved writing, and still can’t quite believe that she gets to do it for a living. Creating wonderful heroines and gorgeous heroes and telling their stories is an amazing way to pass the day. Sometimes they don’t always act as she’d like them to—but then neither do her kids, so she’s kind of used to it. Amy lives in the very beautiful Samford Valley, with her husband and aforementioned children, along with six brown chooks and two black dogs.

She loves to hear from her readers. Drop her a line at www.amyandrews.com.au.

For Halle Anne Baxter.

Much loved.

Contents

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

EXCERPT

PROLOGUE

Lady Mary Bingham had never seen such a fine specimen of manhood in all her twenty years as she held out her hand to her unlikely saviour so he could aid her aboard. Pirate or not, Vasco Ramirez’s potent masculinity tingled through every cell of her body. And even had it not, his piercing blue eyes, the exact colour of warm, tropical waters that fringed the reefs he was rumoured to know like the back of his hand, touched a place inside her that she’d never known existed.

A place she could never now deny.

She supposed, if she were given to swooning, this would be as good a time as any. But she wasn’t. In fact she’d always found the practice rather tiresome and refused to even allow her knees the slightest tremble. Women who had fits of the vapours and cried for their smelling salts every two seconds—like her aunt—were not the kind of women she admired.

Her breath hitched as sable lashes framing those incredible eyes swept downwards in a frank inspection of every inch of her body. When his gaze returned to her face she was left in no doubt that he’d liked what he’d seen. His thumb lightly stroked the skin of her forearm and she felt the caress deep inside that newly awakened place.

Looking at the bronzed angles of his exotic face, she knew she should be afraid for had she not just gone from the frying pan straight into the fire?

Yet strangely she wasn’t.

Not even when his gaze dropped to the pulse beating rapidly against the milky white skin of her neck. Or lower to where her breasts strained against the constrictive fabric of her bodice. His lazy inspection of the agitated rise of her bosom did not elicit fear even when what it did elicit was reason for fear itself.

Her uncle, the bishop, would have declared him an instrument of the devil. A man willing to lead unsuspecting ladies to the edge of sin but strangely she’d never felt so compelled to transgress. The thought was titillating and she sucked in a breath, annoyed that this buccaneer had caused such consternation after such short acquaintance.

After all, was not one pirate just like the next?

Mary looked down at the insolent drift of his thumb. ‘You will unhand me immediately,’ she intoned in a voice that brooked no argument.

Ramirez’s smile was nine parts charm one part insolence as he slowly—very slowly—ceased the involuntary caress.

‘As you wish,’ he murmured, bowing slightly over her hand, his fingers tracing down the delicate blue veins of her forearm, whispering over the fragile bones of her wrist and the flat of her palm as he released her.

Lady Mary swallowed as the accented English slid velvet gloves over already sensitised skin. ‘I insist that you return me to my uncle forthwith.’

Vasco admired her pluck. The girl, who he knew to be barely out of her teens, may well be staring him straight in the eye but he could smell her fear as only a veteran of a hundred raids on the high seas could.

Lord alone knew what had happened to her in the two days she’d been at the mercy of Juan Del Toro and his ruffians. But something told him this pampered English miss could certainly hold her own.

And virgins fetched a much higher price at the slave markets.

‘As you wish,’ he murmured again.

Mary narrowed her eyes, suspicious of his easy capitulation. ‘You know my uncle? You know who I am?’

He smiled at her. ‘You are Lady Mary Bingham. The bishop commissioned me to...retrieve you.’

For the first time in two days Mary could see an end to the nightmare that had begun with her abduction down by the wharfs a mere forty-eight hours before and she almost sagged to the damp floorboards at his feet. She’d heard her former captives talking about slave markets and had been scared witless.

Alas, falling at the feet of a pirate, whether sanctioned by her uncle or not, wasn’t something a young woman of good breeding did. ‘Thank you,’ she said politely. ‘I am most grateful for your speedy response. Juan Del Toro’s men do not know how to treat a lady.’

‘Do not thank me yet, Lady Bingham.’ He smiled with steel in his lips. ‘There are a lot of miles between here and Plymouth and by the end of it my men may well care less about you being a lady and more about you being a woman.’

Mary raised a haughty eyebrow, hoping it disguised the sudden leap in her pulse. ‘And you would allow such fiendish behaviour amongst your crew?’

Vasco smiled his most charming smile, his dark tousled hair giving him the look of the devil. ‘Amongst my crew? Of course not, Lady Bingham. But captains do enjoy certain privileges...’

STELLA MILLS sighed as she closed down the document on her desktop and dragged herself back from the swashbuckling seventeen hundreds to the reality of the here and now. She could re-read the words that had flowed effortlessly out of her last year and made her an ‘overnight’ sensation until the cows came home but it didn’t change the facts—one book did not a writer make.

One book did not a career make.

No matter how many publishing houses had bid for Pleasure Hunt at auction, no matter how many best-seller lists it had made or how many fan letters she’d received or how much money competing film companies had thrown at her for the film rights.

No matter how crazy the romance world had gone for Vasco Ramirez.

They wanted more.

And so did the publisher.

Stella stared at the blinking cursor on the blank page in front of her. The same blinking cursor she’d been staring at for almost a year now.

Oh, God. ‘I’m a one-hit wonder,’ she groaned as her head hit the keyboard.

A knock on the door interrupted her pity party and she glanced up. Several lines of gobbledygook stared back at her as the knock came again. She grimaced—it seemed she was destined to write nothing but incomprehensible garbage for ever more.

Another knock, more insistent than the last, demanded her attention. ‘Coming,’ she called as she did what she’d done every day for the past year—deleted the lot.

She hurried to the door and was reaching for the knob as a fourth knock landed. ‘Okay, okay, hold your horses,’ she said as she wrenched the damn thing open.

Piercing blue eyes, the exact colour of warm, tropical waters that fringed the reefs she knew he knew like the back of his hand, greeted her. She blinked. ‘Rick?’

‘Stel,’ he murmured, leaning forward to kiss first one cheek then the other, inhaling the familiar coconut essence of her.

She shut her eyes briefly as the smell of sea breezes and ocean salt infused her senses the way they always did whenever Riccardo Granville was close. When she opened them again Rick had withdrawn and her mother came into focus, hovering behind his shoulder. Her eyes were rimmed with red and she was biting on her bottom lip.

Her mother lived in London and Rick called the ocean his home. Why were they here? In Cornwall. Together?

Stella frowned as a feeling of doom descended.

‘What’s wrong?’ she asked, looking from one to the other as her pulse wooshed like a raging torrent through her ears.

Her mother stepped forward and hugged her. ‘Darling,’ she murmured, ‘it’s Nathan.’

Stella blinked. Her father?

She looked over her mother’s shoulder at Rick, his face grim. ‘Rick?’ she asked, searching for a spark of something—anything—that would bring her back from the precipice she was balanced upon.

Rick looked down at the woman he’d known almost all his thirty years and sadly shook his head. ‘I’m sorry.’

CHAPTER ONE

Six months later...

THE cursor still blinked at her from the same blank page. Although Stella rather fancied that it had given up blinking and had moved on to mocking.

There were no words. No story.

No characters spoke in her head. No plot played like a movie reel. No shards of glittering dialogue burnt brightly on her inward eye desperate for release.

There was just the same old silence.

And now grief to boot.

And Diana would be arriving soon.

As if she’d willed it, a knock on the door heralded Stella’s closest friend. Normally she’d have leapt from her seat to welcome Diana but not today. In fact, for a moment, she seriously considered not opening the door at all.

Today, Diana was not here as her friend.

Today, Diana was here as a representative from the publisher.

And she’d promised her chapter one...

‘I know you’re in there. Don’t make me break this sucker down.’

The voice was muffled but determined and Stella resigned herself to her fate as she crossed from her work area in the window alcove, with its spectacular one-eighty-degree views of rugged Cornish coastline, to the front door. She drew in a steadying breath as she unlatched it and pulled it open.

Diana opened her arms. ‘Babe,’ she muttered as she swept Stella into a rib-cracking hug. ‘How are you doing? I’ve been so worried about you.’

Stella settled into the sweet sisterhood of the embrace, suddenly so glad to see her friend she could feel tears prick at the backs of her eyes. They’d only known each other a handful of years since meeting at uni, but Diana had called most nights since the funeral and this was her tenth visit.

‘Pretty rubbish,’ she admitted into Diana’s shoulder.

‘Of course you are,’ Diana soothed, rubbing her friend’s back. ‘Your dad died—it comes with the territory.’

Diana’s parents had passed away not long before they’d become friends so Stella knew that Diana had intimate acquaintance with grief.

‘I want to stop feeling like this.’

Diana hugged her harder. ‘You will. Eventually you will. In the meantime you need to do what you need to do. And I think that starts with a nice glass of red.’

Diana held up a bottle of shiraz she’d bought at an off-

licence in Penzance on her way to the windswept, cliff-top cottage her friend had taken out a long-term lease on after her strait-laced fiancé, Dreary Dale, hadn’t been able to handle the success of Pleasure Hunt and had scuttled away with a stick jammed up his butt.

Sure, Stella had insisted her reasons had more to do with the historic coastline’s rich pirate history stimulating her muse but, given that no book was forthcoming, Diana wasn’t buying it.

Stella looked at her watch and laughed for the first time today. It was two in the afternoon. ‘It’s a bit early, isn’t it?’

Diana tutted her disapproval. ‘The sun’s up over the yardarm—isn’t that what you nautical types say? Besides, it’s November—it’s practically night time.’

Diana didn’t wait for an answer, dragging her pull-along case inside the house and kicking the door shut with her four-inch-booted heel. She shrugged out of her calf-length, figure-hugging leather coat and unwound her Louis Vuitton scarf from her neck—all without letting go of the bottle. She wore charcoal trousers and a soft pink cashmere sweater, which matched the thick brunette curls that fell against its pearlescent perfection.

Diana was very London.

Stella looked down at her own attire and felt like a total slob. Grey sweats, coffee-stained hoodie and fluffy slippers. A haphazard ponytail that she’d scraped together this morning hung limply from her head in an even bigger state of disarray.

Stella was very reclusive writer.

Which would be much more romantic if she’d actually bloody written anything in the last eighteen months.

‘Sit,’ Diana ordered, tinkling her fingers at her friend as she headed towards the cupboard where she knew, from many a drinking session, the wine glasses were housed.

Stella sat on her red leather sofa if, for nothing else, to feel less diminutive. Diana was almost six feet and big boned in a sexy Amazonian, Wonder Woman kind of way. She, on the other hand, was just a couple of centimetres over five feet, fair and round.

‘Here,’ Diana said, thrusting a huge glass of red at her and clinking the rims together before claiming the bucket chair opposite. ‘To feeling better,’ she said, then took a decent swig.

‘I’ll drink to that,’ Stella agreed, taking a more measured sip. She stared into the depths of her wine, finding it easier than looking at her friend.

‘You don’t have the chapter, do you?’ Diana asked after the silence had stretched long enough.

Stella looked at Diana over the rim of her glass. ‘No,’ she murmured. ‘I’m sorry.’

Diana nodded. ‘It’s okay.’

Stella shook her head and uttered what had been on her mind since the writer’s block had descended all those months ago. ‘What if I only ever have one book in me?’

The fear had gnawed away at her since finishing the first book. Dale’s desertion had added to it. Her father’s death had cemented it.

Vasco Ramirez had demanded to be written. He’d strutted straight out of her head onto the page in all his swashbuckling glory. He had been a joy, his story a gift that had flowed effortlessly.

And now?

Now they wanted another pirate and she had nothing.

Diana held up a hand, waving the question away. ‘You don’t,’ she said emphatically.

‘But what if I do?’

Stella had never known the sting of rejection and the mere thought was paralysing. What if Joy, her editor, hated what she wrote? What if she laughed?

She’d had a dream ride—from a six-figure auction with a multi-book contract to New York Times best-seller to a movie deal.

What if it had all been a fluke?

Diana stabbed her finger at the air in her general direction. ‘You. Don’t.’

Stella felt a surge of guilt mix with the shiraz in her veins, giving it an extra charge. Diana had championed her crazy foray into writing from the beginning, encouraging her to take a break from being an English teacher and write the damn book.

She’d been the first to read it. The first to know its potential, insisting that she take it to show her boss, who was looking for exactly what Stella had written—a meaty historical romance. As an editorial assistant in a London publishing house Diana had been adamant it was a blockbuster and Stella had been flabbergasted when Diana’s prediction of a quick offer had come to pass.

She smiled at her friend, hoping it didn’t come across as desperate on the outside as it felt on the inside. ‘Will you get sacked if you return to London empty-handed?’

Almost a year past Stella’s deadline, Joy had pulled out the big guns to get her recalcitrant star to deliver. She knew how close Diana and Stella were so she’d sent Diana to do whatever it took to get book number two.

Diana shook her head. ‘No. We’re not going to talk about this tonight. Tonight, we get messy drunk, tomorrow we talk about the book. Deal?’

Stella felt the knot in her shoulder muscles release like an elastic band and she smiled. ‘Deal.’

* * *

Two hours later, a storm had drawn night in a little earlier than usual. Wind howled around the house, lashing at the shutters, not that the two women cosied up by the fire were aware. They were on their second bottle of wine and almost at the bottom of a large packet of crisps and were laughing hysterically about their uni days.

A sharp rap at the door caused them both to startle then burst out laughing at their comic-book reactions.

‘Bloody hell.’ Diana clutched her chest. ‘I think I just had a heart attack.’

Stella laughed as she rose a little unsteadily. ‘Impossible, red wine’s supposed to be good for the heart.’

‘Not in these quantities it’s not,’ Diana said and Stella cracked up again as she headed towards the door.

‘Wait, where are you going?’ Diana muttered as she also clambered to her feet.

Stella frowned. ‘To open the door.’

‘But what if it’s a two-headed moor monster?’ Even through her wine goggles Diana could see the rain lashing the window pane behind Stella’s desk. ‘It is the very definition of a dark and stormy night out there, babe.’

Stella hiccupped. ‘Well, I don’t think they knock but I’ll politely tell it to shoo and point out that Bodmin is a little north of here.’

Diana cracked up and Stella was still chuckling as she opened the door.

To Vasco Ramirez. In the flesh.

Light from inside the cottage bathed the bronzed angles of his jaw and cheekbones, fell softly against his mouth and illuminated his blue eyes to tourist-brochure perfection. His shoulder-length hair, a relic from his tearaway teens, hung in damp strips around his face and water droplets clung to those incredible sable lashes.

He looked every inch the pirate.

‘Rick?’ Her breath stuttered to a halt as it always did when he was too close, sucking up all her oxygen. The recalcitrant memory of an almost-kiss over a decade ago flitted like a butterfly through her grey matter.

Rick smiled down at a frowning Stella. ‘Now what sort of greeting is that?’ he teased as he moved in for his standard double cheek kiss.

Coconut embraced him. Nathan had bought Stella coconut body products every year for her birthday and she’d faithfully worn them. Still was, apparently.

Stella shut her eyes and waited for the choirs of angels in her head to start singing hallelujah as the aroma of salt and sea enveloped her. He was, after all, so perfect he had to be heaven-sent.

She blinked as he pulled away. ‘Is everything okay?’ she asked.

Her heart beat a little faster in her chest. Which had nothing to do with the erotic scrape of his perpetual three-day growth or the brief brush of his lips, and everything to do with his last visit.

Rick didn’t just drop by.

Last time he’d arrived unannounced on her doorstep looking bleaker than the North Sea in winter, the news had not been good.

‘Is Mum—?’

Rick pressed his fingers against her mouth, hushing her. ‘Linda’s fine, Stel. Everything’s fine.’

She almost sagged against him in relief. Certainly her mouth did. He smiled at her as he withdrew his hand and she smiled back, and with the wind whipping around them and flurries of raindrops speckling their skin it was as if they were kids again, standing on the bow of the Persephone as a storm chased them back into harbour.

‘So...not a monster from the moors, then?’ Diana asked, interrupting their shared reverie.

Rick looked over Stella’s shoulder straight into the eyes of a vaguely familiar, striking brunette. She looked at him with frank admiration and he grinned.

God, but he loved women.

Particularly women like this. The kind that liked to laugh and have a good time, enjoyed a flirt and some no-strings company.

‘Honey, I can be whatever you want me to be,’ he said, pushing off the door jamb, brushing past Stella and extending his hand. ‘Hi. Rick. I think we’ve already met?’

Diana smiled as she shook his hand. ‘Yes. When you were here for the funeral. Diana,’ she supplied.

‘Ah, yes, that’s right,’ Rick said, stalling a little. He’d been so caught up in his shock and disbelief and being strong for Stella and Linda that he’d not really taken anything in. ‘You work for Stel’s publishers?’

Diana grinned, her eyes twinkling, not remotely insulted that Rick had struggled to remember her. ‘Took you a while.’

Stella watched her bestie and her...whatever the hell Rick was—old family friend? deceased father’s business partner? substitute brother?—flirt effortlessly. Now why couldn’t she be more like that? The only time she’d been comfortable, truly comfortable, with a man had been with a fictional pirate.

Even her relationship with Dale had been lukewarm by comparison.

A blast of rain spattered against her neck, bringing her out of her state of bewilderment, and she realised she still had the door wide open. She shook her head at her absent-mindedness.

‘To what do we owe the pleasure?’ she asked, shutting the weather out and joining the chatty twosome in the centre of the room.

Rick looked down at Stella’s cute little button nose. ‘Well—’ he winked at her before returning his attention to Diana and running his finger around the rim of her glass ‘—I heard a whisper there was a party going on.’

Diana laughed. She looked at Stella. ‘You never told me he had ESP.’ Then she scurried to the kitchen to get another glass.

Rick watched her for a moment before returning his gaze to Stella. She stared up at him and the familiar feeling of wanting to wrap her up swelled in his chest. ‘How are you doing, Stel?’ he murmured.

Rick had felt the loss of Nathan Mills probably even more profoundly than his own father. Nathan had been his guardian and mentor since Anthony Granville had got himself killed in a bar fight when Rick had been seven. The man had been the closest thing to a father he had, had curbed all his hot-headed brashness and he felt his loss in a hundred different ways every day.

He could only imagine how Stella must feel.

Stella shrugged, feeling again the mutual despair that had added an extra depth to their bond. She fell into the empathy that shone in his luminescent gaze. Sometimes it was hard to reconcile the impulsive, teenage bad-boy of her fantasies with the hardworking, responsible, compassionate man in front of her.

‘I hate it,’ she whispered.

The truth was Stella hadn’t seen her father regularly since she’d started university and joined the workforce.

Become a grown-up, as her mother would say.

A flying visit at Christmas, the arrival in the mail of a single perfect shell he’d found on a beach somewhere that always made her smile, an occasional email with pictures of him and Rick and some amazing find at the bottom of a sea bed.

But just knowing he was out there doing what he loved, following his wild boyhood dreams of sunken galleons, had kept her whole world in balance.

And now he was gone, nothing was the same.

‘I know,’ he murmured, putting his arm around her shoulder and pulling her into his chest. ‘I hate it too.’

And he did. He hated doing what he did without the one person who truly understood why by his side. He hated turning to tell Nathan something and him not being there. He hated the absence of wise words and Nathan’s particular brand of bawdy humour around the dinner table.

Rick shut his eyes against the loss he still felt so acutely and sank into her, enjoying the familiarity of having her close. He liked how she tucked into him just right. How her head fitted perfectly under his chin and how his chest was just the right height to pillow her cheek and how she always smelled liked coconut.

As kids he’d been the pirate and she’d been the mermaid and they’d played endless games revolving around sunken treasure. Not very politically correct these days, he supposed, but they’d amused themselves for countless hours and forged a bond that he still felt today.

Of course there’d been times, during their teenage years, when their games had taken a certain risqué turn and while they’d never indulged, they’d diced pretty close.

Holding her like this reminded him just how close.

‘Okay, okay, you two,’ Diana teased, pushing a glass of red wine into Rick’s hand. ‘No maudlin tonight. That’s the rule. Eat, drink and be merry tonight.’

Rick forced himself to step away, grateful that Diana was here to ground them in the present. He’d thought a lot about Stella since Nathan had died, more than usual.

And not all of those thoughts had been pure.

He accepted the wine. ‘Good plan,’ he said, clinking glasses with them both.

Stella indicated the lounge chairs huddled around the fireplace and watched as Rick shrugged out of his navy duffle coat to reveal well-worn jeans that clung in all the right places and a thick turtle-neck, cable-knit sweater.

Even off the boat the man looked as if he belonged at sea.

Diana lounged back against the cushions, inspecting him dispassionately, her wine goggles making the job a little difficult. She pointed at him over the rim of her glass.

‘There’s something familiar about you,’ she slurred.

Stella didn’t like the look of speculation on her friend’s face. She’d seen that dogged look before and didn’t want to give Diana too much latitude.

‘Yes, you met him at the funeral,’ she said, hopefully redirecting her friend’s thoughts that tended to fancy after several glasses of red.

Diana narrowed her eyes. ‘Nope,’ she said as she shook her head. ‘I have this feeling I know you beyond that.’ Even at the funeral all suited and polished he’d looked vaguely familiar to her but now, looking all lone-wolf-of-the-sea, there was definitely something she recognised about him.

Was it his eyes? Or maybe his hair?

Rick chuckled. ‘Maybe I look like your great uncle Cyril?’

Diana burst out laughing as she sipped on her drink and Stella even envied her that. She had a jingly laugh that sounded like Tinkerbell waving her magic wand. Stella had no doubt that red wine would be pouring out of her nose had she tried that same manoeuvre.

Diana wagged her finger. ‘Good try but you don’t look like anyone’s great uncle Cyril.’ She narrowed her eyes again and nudged the side of her nose three times with her index finger. ‘Don’t you worry. I will remember. I may just need—’ she looked at her almost empty wine glass ‘—a while.’

Rick saluted. ‘I look forward to the final outcome.’

Diana nodded. ‘As well you should.’

Rick looked over at Stella sitting quietly watching the byplay. The firelight spun the escaping tendrils of her long blonde hair into golden streams and he was once again reminded of their childhood games when she’d been the mermaid singing his ship onto the rocks. How many times had he snorkelled over reefs with her, her long blonde hair flowing behind her just like the mermaids from ancient mythology?

‘So,’ he said when the silence had stretched enough. ‘Did you get it?’

Stella frowned at him. ‘Get what?’

‘Your half.’

‘My half of what?’

Rick grinned. ‘The map?’

Stella shook her head. ‘What on earth are you talking about?’ she asked.

Rick’s eyebrows drew together in a frown to match hers as he placed his half-empty glass on the coffee table. ‘You should have received it early last week. I posted it ages ago.’

Diana rolled her eyes. ‘She probably has. She’s just not been responding to any correspondence.’

Stella blushed at her friend’s astuteness as Diana made her way to the hall stand. Unopened mail oozed all over the edges of the sturdy eighteenth-century oak and Stella felt her cheeks grow warmer. She’d been avoiding any attempt at communication with the outside world—particularly from her editor. She didn’t open her mail unless it had a window. She screened all her calls. She didn’t go to her inbox.

Diana quickly riffled through the mound of mail, letters and other miscellaneous items that had made it through Stella’s front door, some of it spilling haphazardly to the floor. She pulled out a large flat yellow envelope with enough stamps to start a collection.

‘This it?’ she asked holding it up.

Rick nodded. ‘Arrr,’ he said in his best pirate accent. ‘That be it.’