Well, not me but the heroine of I Married a Pirate by Samantha David which I have taken out of the selection that those nice kind people at Myrmidon Press sent me.
This book is a hoot. No other word for it. I spent most of one afternoon propped up on a pile of cushions on the sofa and read it in one gulp, laughing all the while. Camilla is a single mother of two boisterous sons, living in a run down house in France, no money and struggling to make ends meet. At the end of each day, tired and fed up, Camilla logs on to the internet and starts to exchange emails with Internet Men. She realises that this is a very sad thng to do and most of the exchanges are pretty banal, but then she starts chatting to someone called The Pirate. He is witty, amusing, comforting, funny and understanding and tells her of his luxurious boat riding at anchor just off a small Caribbean isalnd. Gradually she stops chatting to the other Internet men as they are boring compared to The Pirate. He asks her to come to the Caribbean to see him 'Come here and I look after you. I send tickets' and after he had seen her picture 'You are too thin. You need me to look after you. Come and live on my ship with me. I love you'.
So Camilla decides to go out for a holiday and meet The Pirate. Of course when she arrives she finds that the picture he had posted on the internet was not a good likeness.
Instead of this:
She got this:
However, The Pirate is big hearted, generous, her boys love him instantly and after a few weeks in the Caribbean, instead of going home she finds herself swept off her feet and married. Her sons go to boarding school back in the UK as The Pirate does not want their education to suffer. They love it so she can't complain. He gives her everything she wants so she can't complain. She lives on a Caribbean island where the sun shines and all she has to do all day is relax in the sun so she can't complain. But of course, gradually Camilla begins to feel trapped particularly when she remembers that she has given The Pirate her passport and he has no intention of giving it back.
Then the fun starts. Camilla has to hatch a plan to reover her passport and make her bid for freedom. She learns to row a boat, starts to help him in his office during the Season and increases his trade in off shore cruises, creaming money from the accounts and stuffing wads of notes in her bra to take back to hide on the boat where they live (it is slightly less than the luxury she was expecting), she discovers a gun hidden behind the fridge and she starts practicing in case it should ever come in handy. Then when The Pirate thinks he has her safe and sound with no chance of getitng away she holds him up at gunpoint, ties him to the mast of his ship and swims to the ferry and freedom.
Camilla gets back to the UK safely and settles down in a nice office job and back to the steady, uneventful life she had yearned for when she was slopping around all day in flip flops and shorts in the Caribbean with sticky salt spray hair and permanently hot and sweaty. She now sits in an air conditioned office at a desk tapping at her computer and feels organised and in control. But is she really happy now that she has got what she wants and will The Pirate stay quietly on his island and leave her be?
Well, what do you think?
