Merchant sea captain Reese Thackeray is a man of order and accustomed to being in command. In his perfect world, everything and everyone has a place--except, it would seem, Marin Sutton. And he soon learns that he does not command her when there is a disagreement over his contract. The green-eyed beauty is not the naive woman he, at first, takes her to be but is annoyingly smart, clever, and, to the methodical Thackeray, much too bold. Marin is quite certain, however, that the charismatic, darkly handsome captain is every bit the condescending, chauvinistic cad she takes him to be. Unfortunately, he is the most knowledgeable in the ways of the Barbary pirates, and she needs his help on a personal matter in Algiers. When the captain refuses her offer of a contract, Marin does not take "no" for an answer. Her shenanigans ultimately land her in the middle of an international diplomatic crisis, and Thackeray soon discovers that this is just a taste of the lengths to which she will go to achieve her ends, forever upending his ordered world.