Dream Boat Read Free

some dim-witted dolt of a husband - or worse, with an ageing roue who'd view her as nothing more than his personal prostitute to use how and when he
    wanted! Young women, as Claudia knew to her cost, were not in a position where they could pick and choose.
    'That's it, then?' Julia blinked down her long, skinny nose. 'We're on our own in this, Marcellus and I?'
    As the last trace of light faded from the room, Claudia traced a circle with her finger round the rim of the goblet. A smarmy spendthrift brother-in-law. A stepdaughter who's moody, rude and ungrateful. The sister-in-law from hell. I'd rather roll naked in a bed of stinging nettles before lending these deadbeats a hand!
    Julia's narrow jaw was rigid. 'You're leaving us to cope alone?'
    'Definitely -' Claudia tossed back the last of her wine -'not. Count me in.'

Chapter Two
    I don't believe this.' Claudia paced her bedroom like a leopard in a cage. 'I don't believe I could be so bloody stupid!'
    'Mix?' Drusilla, draped lengthways over her mistress's pillow, twizzled one ear around.
    'I need a doctor. I'm ill.'
    She felt her forehead. It did not feel like a forehead sickening for a fever, but what else could explain the aberration?
    'Hrr.'
    'Oh, fine for you to say, my girl! You haven't landed yourself the job of tracking down a gang of kidnappers for a family you can't stand and who, in turn, hate your very guts.' She poked around in search of tell-tale swellings in her throat. 'I ask you, what do I know about criminal behaviour?' 'Brrp-brrp.'
    'Other than my own, I meant.' Claudia stuck out her tongue and studied it by lamplight in the mirror. 'I ought to send for a physician,' she told the reflection. 'I have a terminal disease.'
    What other explanation could there be, for not only shouldering the role of gumshoe, but - and this is what hurt - agreeing to settle the bloody ransom? Was she absolutely barking loony?
    'You do realise, don't you,' she addressed the cat accusingly, 'that the coins in my coffers are gasping like fish in a drained pool?' She checked her skin for signs of plague or jaundice. 'The family don't know, of course,' nor did anybody else, 'but Claudia Seferius is broke. Skint. Borassic. Cleaned out. Bust, and on her uppers.'
    Good grief, why else would she have been stuck inside her dreary office yesterday when she could have been out dancing, hurling dice or eyeing up the hunky gladiators as they trained? Someone had to stretch those stubborn bills!
    'Bloody merchants.' She prodded her appendix. 'This is their fault.'
    It's all very well having your husband pop off when he did, him in late middle age and the widow not yet twenty-five when she inherited his thriving enterprise, but what provisions were there for fellow merchants refusing to deal with a woman? Claudia pulled down her eyelids and checked the colour of her eyeballs. Poor old Gaius. Not such a bad old duffer, really. She thought of his bronze bust, dulling in the cellar and his ashes which lay crumbling beneath a marble tomb along the Appian Way. She supposed she ought to visit it some time.
    She held out both hands to test for tremors and thought, if she didn't have the shakes before, the merest mention of her fellow guildsmen should surely bring them on! Her husband's ashes were still warm when the rotten sods had banded together in an effort to freeze the young widow out of trade. Their aim? To have her assets stripped from under her, her business torn apart, the proceeds divvied up among themselves. Well. Claudia Seferius, as they would find out eventually, was not the type of girl who could be bullied out of business. In the meantime, however, survival demanded drastic steps be taken: hefty bribes, for one thing; selling her dry, fruity red wine at a loss for another. And temporary though these measures were, right now her piggybank was emaciated to the point of collapse.
    Claudia explored for tumours, listened for the first manifestations of