Taken by the Pirate Tycoon by Daphne Clair Page A

see the rise and fall of his chest under his shirt, hear the sound of his breathing.
    She could have reached out and touched him. Wanted to.
    Instead she turned to examine the room, taking in details she had only peripherally noticed.
    Large and squishy navy-leather sofas formed a U-shape before that expansive view, bookshelves lined one wall, and on another was a long Maori taiaha—sharply pointed at one end, tasselled at the other, intricately carved along the shaft. Below it hung a large framed map, obviously old—or pretending to be. She moved closer, away from Jase and temptation, and saw the map represented an island, with curlicued legends all around and sailing ships anchored in the harbours.
    “New Providence,” Jase said. When she looked around he was standing where she’d left him, hands jammed in his pockets, his expression stone-carved but his eyes watchful. “The island was a hangout for pirates in the seventeenth century. Part of my first commercially successfully game is based on the place.”
    “It’s genuine?” She peered at the date on one corner. “Sixteen ninety-nine?”
    “According to the expert I got to check it. Might even have come off a real pirate ship.”
    “Why did you choose to write pirate games?” she asked, turning back to him.
    “Robert Louis Stevenson,” he answered. “ Treasure Island . After we read the book Ben and Rachel and I played pirate games around the farm—not this one…my father was managing the Donovans’ estate farm then—and in the Donovans’ garden. It was a great place for kids.”
    “Rachel? Playing pirates?”
    “The most bloodthirsty of the lot.” His stance became a little less rigid, a faint smile playing around his mouth. “And adventurous—the kid didn’t know the meaning of fear. Anything Ben and I did, she wanted to do too. We had to watch out for her all the time, and she still collected a fair number of cuts and scrapes and bruises.”
    “Really?” Rachel as a tomboy?
    “Scared the wits out of us a couple of times.” Jase’s smile turned ruefully reminiscent. “There are things our parents to this day don’t know. Apart from the fact we were actually quite fond of the little brat, Dad would have skinned us alive if we’d let anything serious happen to her.”
    Something twisted painfully inside her. Bizarrely, without right or reason, she was jealous of his sister . He’d obviously never grown out of the imperative to protect her. And “fond” was a deliberate understatement. He would willingly die for her if necessary. Without a doubt. She was family, and that was all Jase needed to give his unstinting loyalty and love.
    He said, “It was Rachel who started getting library books about real pirates. That’s what sparked her interest in history. And mine, although I didn’t make a career of it.”
    “That’s how you came to invent pirate games?” she said.
    “What else was I going to do with all that information once I got hooked on computers? Interestingly, piracy in the so-called Golden Age was really all about economics and trade wars, supply and demand. You might appreciate that. I made the games as authentic as possible. Most of the characters and events in them are real.”
    “Educational games?”
    “Primarily they’re for fun.” He shrugged. “If people learn from them, it’s a side effect.”
    “I’ve never seen your games,” she confessed. “I only use computers for work.”
    He shook his head as though she were some kind of freakish, previously unknown specimen. “Sit down over there.”
    He picked up what looked like a TV remote, and one of the sofas in the U swung aside and lined itself up against another, leaving a clear space between a solid, square coffee table and a large screen in the wall like the one in his bedroom. He used the same gadget to light up the screen.
    For the next hour and a half she became a Spanish sea captain trying to get a cargo of gold and gems from the Atlantic coast of