For beautiful young Ivana her stepfather Keith Waring is no replacement for her much-missed father, the Honourable Hugo Sherard, who was killed in Spain fighting against Napoleon Bonaparte. Her stepfather is a spendthrift and he has gambled away virtually everything the family owns. Ivana's hatred for her stepfather is doubled when, to her utter horror, she overhears him offering her as a 'kept woman' to the equally despised Lord Hanford for over five thousand pounds! Ivana...
Golden-haired young beauty Anona adores her father, the East India Company seafarer Captain Guy Ranson. So she is shocked to the core when he comes home to confess that far from being the successful shipowner she thought he was, he is a pirate, boarding cargo ships and threatening the crew and cargo unless they paid him a ransom. He describes himself as a 'highwayman on a ship'. Fearing that he has been identified and may face the gallows, the Captain is determined that his beloved...
Beautiful young Roxana Barclay cannot bear to see her wealthy widowed mother, Lady Barclay, marry a raffish fortune-seeker five years her junior. And so she flees to join her Dutch aunt and uncle, who are Missionaries, on their voyage to Bali in the East Indies. Matters are complicated further when Roxana discovers en route that her aunt is with child. Tragically her aunt dies of a fever after the difficult birth of her son, Karel, and then her grief-stricken uncle is found dead too, struck...