Welcome to “First Chapters,” Cosmo’s column where we shine a spotlight on newer authors who you are definitely going to be obsessed with. And what better way for you to get to know them and their books than with an excerpt of their new release. This round, we’re highlighting Katie Abdou’s A Prince Among Pirates, a swashbuckling and fun debut that features a nobleman who wants nothing more than to live a different kind of life. When he land aboard the Deliverance, not only does he figure out that a pirate’s life might actually be for him, but also discovers some new kind of sparks along the way. Here’s some more info from Atheneum Books for Young Readers:
A charming nobleman accidentally joins a pirate ship and falls for its debonair captain in this swashbuckling queer debut that’s perfect for fans of F.T. Lukens and Our Flag Means Death.
Kit Davenport is in trouble—not that this would surprise anyone who knows him. Headstrong, reckless, and utterly unsuited for the stodgy House of Lords, Kit has spent years dodging his father’s stern disapproval and delighting in clandestine rendezvous. But time is running out. With an arranged marriage looming and the confines of white wigs and stiff decorum closing in, Kit is desperate to escape a life that feels completely wrong for him.
His solution? A wildly impulsive decision that lands him aboard the Deliverance, a galleon captained by the infuriatingly charismatic Reggie Sharpe. With a devil-may-care attitude and a delicious grin, Captain Sharpe commands the waves with his crew of misfits…who all turn out to be pirates. Before Kit can say “wrong ship,” he’s trading ballroom etiquette for rum-soaked camaraderie, explosive gunfights, and, perhaps most excitingly, heart-stopping kisses under the stars.
But life at sea holds just as many secrets as treasures. And when Kit’s past catches up with him, he’ll have to decide who he truly wants to be: a gentleman or a pirate?
Oh, and now is your chance to meet Kit before he sets off on his new adventure! Check out and exclusive excerpt below! Just make sure to pre-order A Prince Among Pirates so you can follow along with the book is released on June 16, 2026.
Prelude
August 1700(ish)
Cannon fire before breakfast is obscene—and waking up to it is an atrocity.
The haze of last night’s exploits still fogs my mind as I tumble out of bed and hit the floor with an ungentlemanly grunt. The ship groans in agreement as it sways, sending my innards rolling. I want to vomit, but the second cannon blast shocks my system into waking. I have just enough sense to grab on to the wooden frame of the captain’s bed as the ship lurches from the impact. Have we been hit? Or was it just the waves that sent us bobbing back and forth?
The question of why I woke up in pirate Captain Sharpe’s bed will have to be a future Kit problem. I have neither the time nor the presence of mind to reflect on that particular matter at the moment.
The whereabouts of my trousers is another issue I dare not examine too closely. I search the cabin, find them—thank Christ—and manage to yank them on as another explosion fills the air. The silence that follows is both deafening and terrifying. It settles into my lungs like a living thing, dragging them down as I struggle to breathe. Then, somewhere beyond the ringing in my ears, I can hear the crew scurrying about on deck as their shadows pass over the stained glass of the cabin door.
“Hoist a white flag!” someone calls from above. It isn’t the captain’s deep, melodious voice. It sounds more like the first mate. My stomach sinks—an anchor into a bottomless pit of fear that sends my blood rushing. I draw in a sharp breath as I come back to myself and rummage about for my waistcoat. I find it under Sharpe’s settee and dive for it, then haul it onto my shoulders. Mercifully, my stockings and shoes lay on the floor beneath it, and I am able to pull them on despite how much my fingers tremble.
We’ve been boarded. Unfamiliar voices are speaking on deck now. It doesn’t sound like English, but my ears are still ringing from the blasts, and I am uncertain if it’s a language I understand. Whatever it is, they sound angry.
I can hear Captain Sharpe’s voice now too, as calm as ever as he tries to placate our aggressors. The silhouettes of their bodies through the stained glass seem to be in uniform. There are flashes of blue, and red, and perhaps some white—which means they could be Spanish. Or French . . .
Or English.
Bloody hell, for countries constantly at war, we are certainly all lacking in originality. Who says a navy uniform can’t be a fetching shade of chartreuse or a sensible bisque?
No matter who it is out there harassing the crew of the Deliverance, they are almost certain to kill the men and arrest the captain now that they’ve got a thorough look at our colors. I am the wild card here. And it’s absolutely insane what I’m considering doing to intervene. This plan will most likely get myself and everyone else shot—but really, it’s hardly my fault these men decided to become pirates.
Still, they haven’t thrown me overboard yet, so I suppose I owe it to them to at least try to prevent a massacre.
I collect my cravat from where it peeks out beneath a pillow on the settee, sliding it under my collar and tying it deftly with muscle memory. At the last moment a glimpse of my trunk brings an idea bubbling up through the haze of drink. I kneel before it and unlock it with the key I’ve carelessly left in the keyhole. The lid gives a small creak of complaint as it opens, but after digging through the tangle of clothes, I find my prize within a small velvet purse at the very bottom and slide it onto my first finger.
Dropping the lid shut once more, I stand with my back straight and then march towards the door. I am quite drunk, but nonetheless, the swirling vortex of fear inside me stills as I smooth my thick hair back into a queue. Decision made, I am now utterly calm as I fall into the familiarity of being moments from doing something woefully ill-conceived. I throw open the door to the captain’s cabin and march out on deck, equipped with my best disdainful glower, my chin tilted up in haughty disgust.
I am good at this game. For eighteen years I was trained in the art of snobbery. My father is a viscount, for Christ’s sake, and a permanent member of the House of Lords. Of course, the crew of the Deliverance don’t know that. I have kept it well and truly secret from them, for my own protection.
Until this moment.
“How dare you board my vessel?” I demand, ignoring the scandalized glare Captain Sharpe shoots my way, and the seven guns that are immediately trained upon me. “Have you the slight-est inkling of who I am?”
My words, as I suspected, are met with a stunned silence.
Dear Reader, you might be wondering how a highborn lad such as myself got swept up into such wanton roguery. Allow me to set the record straight—as I would not be here but for the negligence of those who ought to have been keeping me in check.
One
March 1700(ish)
It’s not that I mislike breasts. I love breasts, but they are so much work! Why must they be caged behind layers of silk and whalebone, with thousands of tiny, tedious laces holding everything together? By the time I reach my prize, I’ve already lost interest. It is far less effort, not to mention more discreet, to tug open the lacing on the placket at the front of a pair of breeches. Which is how I came to be tucked away in the candleless dark of my father’s study with my hand down Digby Hale’s trousers at my own engagement party.
I know what you’re thinking: Digby Hale is an an appalling name. Well, he’s rather an appalling lad as well. I have never found myself attracted to his nondescript appearance, nor his damp-cloth personality.
Nevertheless, he is a warm body and an eager mouth, and I am very drunk.
Still, the more time I spend crushed between Digby and the painstakingly categorized books on law and the glorious monarchy behind me, the less appealing I find him. It’s almost a relief to hear my father’s best attempt at hiding his fury as he calls for me from somewhere deeper in the house.
“Christopher-Henry!”
I absolutely detest the way he says my name. Though, in all fairness, I detest my name in general: Christopher-Henry Mortimer Davenport. Yes, you read that right. I could say I am grateful to have not been named Digby Hale—but only just.
I shove Digby back a step. (A bit unkind perhaps, but he did just bite my lip, and I loathe rough play.) There is something wet on my fingertip as I wipe the corner of my mouth, but in the dark I can’t tell whether it’s blood or saliva.“Kit—” he starts.
“Christopher-Henry!” my wretched father howls again.
I groan and turn my head towards the door. “I have to go.
Don’t follow me out.”
“Your name is Christopher?”
Digby likely can’t see the way my eyes roll. “No, it’s Christopher-Henry,” I whisper as I frantically lace up the front of my trousers. “We went to Eton together, for Christ’s sake.”
“I’ve never heard your Christian name before.”
“Shut up, my father will hear us!” I hiss, swatting away his attempt to reach for me as I step over to the door. “Wait a few minutes before coming out, unless you want everyone what you were doing.”
“What we were doing,” he whispers back. Annoying.
In lieu of a response, I smooth my shirt and waistcoat and step out into the well-lit hallway. I’m irritated to taste metal. The bastard broke skin when he bit me—I hate that. I wipe the blood off my lip with the cuff of my navy coat sleeve just as my father rounds the corner.
He isn’t a big man, my father, but he is taller than I, with wide-set shoulders and an intimidating scowl permanently affixed to his pale face. He has thick brown eyebrows, a jaw and nose that are both long and square, and dirty-blond hair tucked somewhere under that awful white wig, and I thank my good fortune every day that I look nothing like him. Though I wouldn’t mind if I were a bit taller.
He towers over me and gestures furiously for me to start walking with him immediately. Despite the way my innards twist, I offer him my most charming smile as I step forward and allow him to corral me towards the ballroom. “I seem to have walked into a door and split my lip. I ought to tend to it.”
He growls in my direction, but that is all he can do with so many people around—not that he has ever laid a hand on me—or ever would. “If you bring shame upon me or the marquess, I will give you a thrashing so thorough, you won’t sit for a fortnight!” he snarls from behind me. “I won’t have your cursed existence tarnishing this family any more than it already has. It’s time for you to grow up and take responsibility for your actions, Christopher-Henry. You have already outstayed your welcome with that ludicrous ‘gap year’ stunt you pulled.”
I don’t answer him. I might have laughed at the reminder of my impromptu gap year, but the comment about my being cursed sours the memory. But people are turning to watch us enter the ballroom now, so I let my smile widen into a grin and wave my hand with a flourish. “Forgive my tardiness,” I announce to the room as my father falls into step beside me. “I got lost; it’s such a big house.”
My father makes a show of rolling his eyes as Elizabeth bustles to my side, my father’s perfect, lily-white replacement child on her hip. I do my best not to scowl at my half sister as she sucks on her entire hand. Disgusting. It isn’t Victoria’s fault she was born, but I hate her just the same. I swat away Elizabeth’s attempts to wipe the blood from my lip, and once again rub the silk of my cuff against the cut, much to her dismay. “I’m fine, Elizabeth.”
“Christopher-Henry, call me Mother,” she pleads in a whisper, a false smile plastered across her pretty face. She’s barely one and twenty herself—only a few years older than I am—and already round with my father’s next replacement child.
I don’t mind Elizabeth. In fact, I even rather like her . . . but I simply cannot tolerate her desire to be my mother. I had a mother—my own mother—and though my father has done his best to erase her from history, his efforts to keep me from learning about her have only heightened my desire to know more.Elizabeth will never be her.
“But you aren’t my mother,” I remind her with an equally false, but far more convincing, smile on my face. Her youth aside, no one would believe her to be my mother anyway. She has milky skin and hair the color of autumn leaves. Her eyes are blue, and she is tall and stately with a smattering of freckles across her narrow nose.
By contrast, my skin is bronze, my eyes large and greenish, my hair nearly black and almost unmanageably thick. I am on the short side of average for my age, which is frustrating, but this is not to say I’m not attractive. I assure you, I am—it would be a waste of time to pretend otherwise—but I look nothing like any member of my living family. It is a source of both contention and relief for my father and me. I imagine looking at me is a constant reminder of my late mother, for I must have got these dashing good looks from somewhere.
My attention shifts to my betrothed, across the room. She’s wearing a soft pink dress adorned with lace and silk ribbons. It offsets the pretty brown of her hair and the pale white of her skin nicely. Though I cannot see them from where I stand, I know her eyes to be the deep blue of the distant ocean, and I can tell that she has enhanced the color of her cheeks with rouge.
I should be ecstatic, of course. She is the daughter of a marquess and comes with a handsome dowry and a title that out-ranks my father’s. She is beautiful and well mannered, and always has a smile for me—but in truth, ever since the betrothal, the very sight of her sets my teeth on edge.
She reaches for me as I approach her, and I take her hand, bow over it, and press a kiss to the back of her white glove, leaving a small blot of red over her ring finger.How ominously appropriate.
I stand back upright and tuck her arm into mine to hide the mark. I must play the part of the dutiful fiancé for the remainder of the evening, with Katherine Stuart on my arm.
“Are you quite all right?” she whispers to me. “Your lip is bleeding.”
“Ah, nothing to worry about, my dear. I had an unfortunate run-in with a rake in Father’s office.”
She gives her social laugh and touches my arm as if I were the most amusing man alive. I resist the urge to shrink away. Her touch revolts me, but it wasn’t always so. Merely weeks ago I would have reveled at her hand on my arm, her lips near my ear. I might even have stolen away with her in a dark hall, or a wooded area, and put her virtue in terrible danger.
But there is no fun in stealing away with someone when it is socially acceptable to do so. There is no fun in an arranged marriage, either—especially not one so clearly meant as a punishment from my father.
I wonder what led to him marrying my mother all those years ago. It’s hard to imagine the viscount of Falmouth in love with anyone. She must have been a great beauty—irresistible and charming. How I wish I had known her. How I hate him for refusing to allow me to. It isn’t his fault she died, but he has kept her identity from me all this time, for reasons at which I can only guess. I steal a glance his way as Katherine blathers on about the daffodils and yellow table dressings for our wedding reception.
I detest yellow.
Eventually I spot Digby in the crowd, chatting with a group of our classmates from Eton. Their respective wives and fiancées stand with them, looking bored and trying their best not to. Had I not a shackle on my arm, I might convince one of them to slip away with me into the garden for a romp under the waning moon. There’s nothing quite as enjoyable as another man’s wife—but I suppose my own nuptials will put a hard stop to that.
Ugh, what an absolute bore! Flirting and having illicit affairs as a young bachelor is one thing— I am charming and irresistible in my current state—but a wedded man bedding other people is just tacky. My life will be over before it has even begun.
Grief overwhelms me at the thought of what my life will be like six months hence: a wife round with child, and insufferable meetings in the House of Lords with my father. I am already suffocating at the thought of it. My days at Eton gave me some sense of freedom from my family, but they did little to quench my desire for something else—something apart from the stuffy life of the peerage. I want to experience the world, not just the tedious political intrigues of men who dress in monochrome and play chess with other people’s lives. I’m meant to do something more.
And there is nothing I want less in life than to become my father.
“Forgive me,” I interrupt. “I feel a touch light-headed.” “Are you ill?” Katherine asks, aghast.
“No,” I assure her, donning my best charming smile. “Just need a bit of fresh air. I’ll return with champagne for us both.”
Before she can argue, I extract myself from her grasp and escape to the balcony.
The cold night air fills my lungs, burning my insides, but at least now I can breathe again. I approach the railing and gaze out into the fathomless ocean below. The moon hangs over the black water, a rippling crescent of ivory dancing across its surface. All at once, I would like nothing more than to climb onto the rail and dive into the water.
The thought alarms me. I don’t want to die—yet I am tempted all the same. The water is freezing, and I cannot swim, but my hands grip the railing, and my heart beats unevenly against my ribs as I stare down into the face of certain death. I could do it. I could just jump. My father would be so glad to have got rid of me without lifting a finger or carrying a guilty conscience—and I would be free. Dead, but free.
Except I don’t want to die. I want to live.
I tear my hands away from the icy railing and step back, breathless and shaken. I stare out at the water as I try to collect myself . . . and catch sight of something black on the horizon.
“Do you think it’s a pirate ship?”
Startled, I whirl about, and I can’t hide my grimace when I see Digby looming in the open doorway. “Impossible to tell from here,” I say—but in truth there is no reason to think a pirate ship might be merrily sailing into port at Falmouth.
“I don’t understand the appeal of it,” Digby says, leaning against the rail beside me, though I certainly didn’t invite him to do so.
“Of piracy?” I ask. I should hope not.
“Of living at sea. Navy men and pirates alike.” “Don’t let a navy man hear you say that,” I snort.
“My uncle is a navy captain,” Digby says. “He speaks of living at sea like a badge of honor, but my father says it’s just an excuse for buggery and lawlessness. Even in the navy.”
I balk at the thought of Lord Hale uttering the word “buggery” in front of his son but don’t say so. “Buggery and lawless-ness?” I repeat, because I am feeling sassy. “Where do I sign up?” It’s Digby’s turn to look disgusted. “You can’t bathe for weeks,”he informs me. “You would absolutely hate that.”
“You know nothing about me,” I counter, pointing at him. “You didn’t even know my name was Christopher-Henry.” But he’s right: Not bathing for weeks sounds positively dreadful. I turn back to the smudge of black on the horizon and wonder what life must be like for the men on board such a vessel.
“It would be quite an adventure,” I say—mostly to myself, as I’ve lost interest in Digby’s opinion.
I don’t mean a word of it. I think I just want to be contrary.
“If you’re into that sort of thing, I suppose,” Digby says, to no one.On second thought . . . perhaps I do mean it.
I smile and turn on my heel to make my way back inside for the much-needed champagne I promised myself. As I cross the ballroom floor, my feet feel grounded for the first time all night.
I daresay, if only to annoy Digby Hale and the sleepy crowd around me, I may just be into exactly that sort of thing.
Copyright © 2026 by Kaitlyn Abdou. From A PRINCE AMONG PIRATES by Katie Abdou to be published by Atheneum Books For Young Readers, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division. Printed by permission.
A Prince Among Pirates,by Kaitlyn Abdou will be released on June 16, 2026 from Atheneum Books for Young Readers. To preorder the book, click on the retailer of your choice:
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