The Lady's Guide to Petticoats and Piracy (Montague Siblings, #2)

by Mackenzi Lee

When stripped of the illegalities and the Biblical condemnation, their attraction is no stranger to me than anyone’s attraction to anyone.

Yes, I think, but also to be a woman alone in the world. My character was forged by independence and self-sufficiency in the face of loneliness, so I assumed the tools for survival were already in my kit, it was just a matter of learning to use them. But not only do I not have the tools, I have no plans and no supplies and seem to be working in a different medium entirely. And, because I’m a woman, I’m forced to do it all with my hands tied behind my back.

Thank God for friends who learn to speak to you in your own language rather than making you learn theirs.

“Love has made you terribly soft, you know,” I say to him without looking. “I do,” he replies. “Isn’t it grand?”

down at where it’s written upon the top of my list. You deserve to be here. You deserve to exist. You deserve to take up space in this world of men.

I want to shut up the small, nasty voice in my head whispering that maybe they’re right and maybe I am unsuited for this and maybe I am hysterical, because even though I don’t think I am, it’s hard to be raised in a world where you’re taught to always believe what men say without doubting yourself at every step.

Your beauty is not a tax you are required to pay to take up space in this world,

Returning to a place you once knew as well as your own shadow isn’t the same as never leaving at all.

But it feels like living without a heart. Until now, I was chasing something, no matter how far in the distance it was. But now my only choice is going back, and going back means resigning myself to a life without work. Without study or purpose. And what kind of life is that?

Perhaps, like walking with a lamp in the dark, I must move forward before I am able to see the next bend in the road,

Not ridiculous, I correct myself. Softness can be an armor, even if it isn’t my armor.

“You’re trying to play a game designed by men. You’ll never win, because the deck is stacked and marked, and also you’ve been blindfolded and set on fire. You can work hard and believe in yourself and be the smartest person in the room and you’ll still get beat by the boys who haven’t two cents to rub together.”

I don’t feel confident—I feel like an actress, a pretender, someone who wears a brave face because the moment a strong-willed woman shows weakness, men will push their fingers into it and pry her apart like a pomegranate.

I have spent my whole life fighting for what would be mine without question if I were a man, and to be better at it than my brothers, because women don’t have to be men’s equals to be considered contenders; they have to be better.”

“That’s the lie of it all. You have to be better to prove yourself worthy of being equal.”

Everyone has heard stories of women like us—cautionary tales, morality plays, warnings of what will befall you if you are a girl too wild for the world, a girl who asks too many questions or wants too much. If you set off into the world alone. Everyone has heard stories of women like us, and now we will make more of them.

I do not need reasons to exist. I do not need to justify the space I take up in this world.

Every chink and rut and battering wind has made us tough and brave and impossible to strike down. We are mountains—or perhaps temples, with foundations that could outlast time itself.