Not All Who Wander Are Lost: An Excerpt from Love and Other Pranks

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It’s not easy being a redheaded pirate. The sun was merciless on Flaming Jane’s fair skin in the first place, and became all the more so when reflecting off the sea. Flaming Jane knew Providence was with her, however, when she happened to salvage a barrel of shea butter from a merchant ship on one of her earliest plunders. This—along with a collection of pirated parasols and a practice of war-painting their bodies flamboyant spectacular—sufficed for her sun protection.

Far more problematic than the sun, however, was the instant notoriety Flaming Jane’s red hair conveyed upon her. They could scarcely port anywhere without some seaman spying her sea-sprayed and tangled mane and recognizing her as the notorious Flaming Jane. Certainly, she could have shorn her flame of hair or taken care to hide it, but Flaming Jane was not one to capitulate to the dictates of lesser men. She embraced the epithet they dubbed upon her, and it only pleased her that the reward for her capture was twice and thrice that of far more successful buccaneers. Flaming Jane was no toothless and swill-sipping scoundrel, after all. She was an educated woman who defied her proper place as the property of her admiral husband who had kidnapped her from her village in Ireland, overthrowing his command and turning a stolen man-o’-war into a pirate ship full of runaway slaves, deserters, and other such ne’er-do-propers. Such matrimonial and nautical treachery could not go unpunished. Not in these imperial seas.