Excerpt of Almost A Scandal by Elizabeth Essex

It wasn't the first time Sally Kent had donned a worn, hand–me–down uniform from one of her brothers' sea chests, but it was the first time it had felt so completely, perfectly right. She had always been tall and spare, strong for a girl, but dressed in the uniform of His Majesty's Royal Navy, she felt more than strong. She felt powerful.

Powerful enough to ignore the voice of conscience thundering in her ear, telling her she needed to stay quietly on land and learn to be a young lady. Powerful enough to face down the potential scandal. Powerful enough to abandon her younger brother to his chosen fate.

Because her brother Richard had rejected all claims to duty and honor. He had forsaken his family. He wasn't coming back.

That morning, the very morning he was to have worn his uniform and boarded His Majesty's Ship Audacious with all the other candidates for midshipmen, he had disappeared, gone as if he had been swallowed whole by the heavy, obliterating rain.

Richard had left her, quite literally, holding his bag.

And she was going to use it. Sally closed her mind to the insistent whispering of her conscience, wrapped her breasts in cotton strapping, and put on every single piece of that uniform, from the faded blue midshipman's coat and white breeches, down to the black buckled shoes. She ignored the uneven pounding of her heart, and took a scissors to her hair. She jammed the dark beaver hat low over her eyes, clattered down the narrow stairs and out of the inn. She swallowed the sharp edges of her fear, crossed the wet cobbles, and took her brother's place in the rain at the sally port on Portsmouth's rain–drenched quay.

"Richard Kent?"

A lieutenant glared at her from under the dripping brim of his cocked hat. An irate lieutenant, his eyes glittering like a flash of black powder. He stood in the stern of a ship's boat, impervious to the filthy weather and the rise and fall of the vessel tossing fitfully beneath him. The sharp vertical lines of the scowl between his dark brows could have scraped barnacles off a hull, but his voice was incongruously smooth. "This is His Majesty's Royal Navy, Kent. Not a damned church fete. We're not going to issue you a bloody invitation."

Sally pushed her voice lower. "Aye, sir," she answered. "I'm Richard Kent."

"I know," he rumbled, unimpressed by her declaration. "Now get in the bloody boat."

Sally jerked her chin into her collar to lower her face, and hide beneath the dark brim of her hat. She would have known that deep, laconic voice anywhere, even over the pounding din of the rain.

David St. Vincent Colyear.

But would he know her?

He had been eighteen years old and on the verge of taking his lieutenant's exam the last time she had seen him, the summer her brother Matthew had brought him home to Falmouth. Col, they had called him. Six years ago, he had been long and lean, but by God, clad in the endless fall of his gray sea cloak, he was a leviathan now. A great oaken mast of a man looming up from the waist of the small boat.

A man grown. A man whose jaw looked as sharp as an axe blade and whose piercing eyes, the color of green chalcedony stone, were just as hard and impenetrable.

"Well, Kent?" Col's voice was low and dangerously soft—disconcerting in such a hard–looking man. "What's it to be?"

There was no question. There hadn't been any question since the very moment she had made her decision to tie the black silk stock around her neck and shrug herself into the loose folds of the blue coat.

She wasn't going to waste another moment living quietly and learning to act like a young lady. She wasn't going to be left ashore like some half–pay junior officer. Useless.

She was going to act.

Sally looked beyond Col, to the ship riding low at anchor some half a mile beyond. His Majesty's Ship Audacious, her thirty–six cannon hidden behind the closed gun–ports, called to Sally, even in the dirty weather of Portsmouth Harbor. She was a perfectly balanced frigate of war, trim, elegant, and sleek, her masts and spars soaring high above the deck—a vision of leashed, lethal power.

Unlike Richard, Sally would give anything to experience that power.

Here was her chance. And why shouldn't she take Richard's place?

"Aye, sir. I'll come directly.""