(Book 4 in The Golden Redepennings series)

Logline: She wants to negotiate a comfortable marriage; he wants her in his bed

“… oaths and anchors equally will drag: naught else abides on fickle earth but unkept promises of joy.” Herman Melville

Naval captain Jules Redepenning has spent his adult life away from England, and at war. He rarely thinks of the bride he married for her own protection, and if he does, he remembers the child he left after their wedding seven years ago. He doesn’t expect to find her in his Cape Town home, a woman grown and a lovely one, too.

Mia Redepenning sails to Cape Town to nurse her husband’s dying mistress and adopt his children. She hopes to negotiate a comfortable married life with the man while she’s there. Falling in love is not on her to-do list.

Before they can do more than glimpse a possible future together, their duties force them apart. At home in England, Mia must fight for the safety of Jules’s children. Imprisoned in France, Jules must battle for his self-respect and his life.

Only by vanquishing their foes can they start to make their dreams come true.

Buy links

Books2Read: books2read.com/Unkept-Promises

Excerpt

Jules made his way home in the early hours of the morning, a little drunk and a lot annoyed at a waste of an entire evening. “Good of you to come out on the first night of your leave, Redepenning,” said the admiral when he was finally able to say his goodbyes. Not that his note demanding Jules’s presence at his table had offered the choice of refusal.

The evening had comprised interminable discussion of the same points over and over—points on which Jules had given his opinion in his reports from Madagascar and the final one delivered this afternoon. They needed to oust the enemy from the two ports still in French hands, since the enemy used those bases to attack British shipping.

Most of the captains favoured a frontal assault. Jules, Fleming, and a couple of the other captains held the minority view, suggesting the British support the young king of the Merinas, who was in the process of conquering the whole island. The admiral was playing his cards close to his chest, but had dismissed them all with a promise to let them know what he would be recommending to the Admiralty.

No-one had said anything new, and Jules’s evening would have been better spent with his daughters and Kirana. Or even having the overdue confrontation with his inconvenient wife.

She had better not be in his bed. If she was, he’d pack her off to her own, as he should have done with Maureen when the little baggage met him there one night, naked between his sheets, after a very similar evening. Instead, tired, frustrated, and lonely, his willpower blunted by alcohol, he had accepted what she had to offer. If she was pregnant with his child, it must have been that night, for the next time—the only other time—he’d worn a pig skin, as he always did with anyone except Kirana. Kirana, who had been too sick to give him the comfort of her body for a long time.

He had been so depressed by the sheer emptiness of copulating with Maureen that he’d sworn off any repeat engagements, though Maureen had not believed he was serious, and he’d left for Mauritius and Madagascar before she could put it to the test.

He’d kept to his resolution, too, much to Gerta van Klief’s surprise. The widow had been quite put out when he explained he intended to honour his marriage from this point on.

Which, when Jules came to think about it, he could do while still enjoying the delectable package that might be waiting in his bed. She was, after all, his wife. For a moment, he let himself imagine unwrapping the unexpected gift that was, after all, his. No. They needed to get a few things sorted, first. A ship could only have one captain, and he was it. And he decided who was on his crew and where they went.

His key opened the front door, and he locked and bolted it by the light of the shuttered lamp left waiting for him in the entrance hall. He let himself into his bed chamber. His bed was empty; the sheets crisp and neat over the mattress. He did not feel disappointed. He would not feel disappointed.

But before he could think and put a brake on the action, he crossed the room to the connecting door leading to the one requisitioned by his wife, and turned the handle. It wouldn’t budge. She’d locked the door against him!

His indignation expressed itself in a raised fist, ready to pound on the door and demand entrance, until his sense of humour caught up. So much for planning to turn her out of his bed. What a hypocrite he was being, desiring the damnable woman even while he was suspicious of her motives and annoyed about her existence.

He turned towards the bed. He’d be sleeping in it alone, apparently.