Nicola Cornick – Christmas Wedding Belles: The Pirate's Kiss / A Smuggler's Tale / The Sailor's Bride (страница 3)

It seemed a long time before he replied. His face was in shadow and she could not read his tone. ‘Yes,’ he said, at last. He shifted a little. ‘Yes, I suppose that I did.’

‘I never received anything from you,’ Lucinda said. ‘No word, no letters…Did you write to me at all? Did you even think of me?’

There was a silence. She could still remember the stifling conventionality of the vicarage drawing room where, over tea each and every day, her mother’s visitors would press her gently on whether she had heard from her fiancé yet and commiserate maliciously with her when she was forced to admit she had not.

‘It was a long time ago,’ Daniel said, and Lucinda’s heart wrenched to have her suspicions confirmed. He had not written. He had not cared.

‘So it was,’ she said. ‘And now I am a widow and you are a pirate, so I hear.’

She saw him grin. ‘You heard correctly.’

She looked at him. In boots and a tattered old frieze coat he looked more like a yeoman farmer—except for the pistol and sword at his belt.

‘You do not look much like a pirate,’ she said. ‘How disappointing.’

Daniel tilted his head on one side. ‘How do you know what a pirate looks like? Have you met any others to compare me with?’

‘No,’ Lucinda conceded. ‘I was basing my judgement on literature only.’

‘Ah. Blackbeard?’

‘And Calico Jack.’

‘Neither had any style, so I hear.’

‘They are both dead,’ Lucinda said repressively. ‘It is not a career with good prospects.’

Daniel laughed. ‘You always were the practical one.’

‘And you were reckless and dangerous,’ Lucinda said.

‘So, no change there. Which is why I am a pirate. We both made our choices, did we not, Lucy? Mine to be wild and irresponsible and yours to marry for money.’

‘I am a governess,’ Lucinda snapped, ‘not a rich widow.’

‘I heard,’ Daniel said. ‘Fine justice that you threw me over for Leopold Melville and then he turned out to be penniless.’

The anger and hurt that Lucinda had spent years repressing jetted up. ‘By what right do you say that, Daniel de Lancey? I waited and waited for you, but you never came, did not even send word!’ Her voice rose. ‘Do you think it was right that I should be obliged to wait on the whim of a man who did not care enough to send just one letter?’ She glared at him. ‘You were an arrogant, selfish, heartless boy, and you are no better now as a man! I wish I had not saved your skin just now.’

Daniel had listened to her outburst without a word, but now he took a step towards her. He put his hand on her wrist. Neither of them was wearing gloves. His touch scalded her.

‘Will you give me away, then?’ he demanded. ‘Run back to the house and raise the alarm?’

‘Of course not,’ Lucinda said contemptuously. ‘What good would that do? You would be long gone before the militia were out.’

His fingers tightened. ‘But you would like me to be caught?’

Lucinda shrugged angrily. ‘You deserve no sympathy from me.’

‘Perhaps not. But you helped me, all the same. Why was that, Lucy? If you bear such a grudge against me?’

Lucinda shivered a little, for beneath the anger that smouldered in both of them she sensed something else, something much more perilous. Old passion as hot and brittle as burning sticks.

Daniel was rubbing his fingers over the tender skin on the underside of her wrist, sending ripples of sensation cascading along her nerves. ‘Why?’ he asked again, softly this time.

Lucinda tried to snatch her hand away but he held on to her. ‘And what,’ he continued, ‘were you doing out here in the dark? Meeting a lover?’

‘Mind your own business,’ Lucinda snapped, seizing on his second question so she did not have to answer the first, more difficult one. ‘If you must know, I was out here looking for Miss Saltire. She has a tendre for Mr Chance, the Riding Officer, and I was afraid that she had made a foolish decision to elope.’

Daniel smiled a little. ‘You would not approve of that, of course.’

‘No, indeed. I know how misleading youthful passions can be.’

‘But instead of Miss Saltire it is her governess who is out meeting a gentleman in the moonlight.’

‘You are no gentleman.’

‘That’s true. Which probably makes me even more dangerous to tryst with.’

‘Then I shall leave.’

‘Very wise,’ Daniel said. His tone became contemplative. ‘Last time we parted you kissed me goodbye.’

There was a short, sharp silence. ‘I remember,’ Lucinda said, adding crushingly, ‘It was not a very good kiss, was it?’

She remembered that it had been sweet, though, despite their lack of experience. And, truth to tell, she had little more knowledge of kissing now than she had had then. One could not count Leopold’s fumbling attentions as adding to her experience. It had been endurance rather than passion that had been her companion in the marriage bed. Leopold had accused her of coldness and had turned from her in fury.

She suspected that Daniel’s experience with the opposite sex, in contrast to her own, had increased in leaps and bounds—a suspicion confirmed when he said, ‘No doubt we could do better now.’

Lucinda’s stomach muscles clenched with a mixture of nervousness and longing. She tried hard to ignore it.

‘No doubt we could,’ she said. ‘But such things were over between us a long time ago, Daniel.’

‘Then consider it no more than an expression of thanks.’

‘Most people,’ Lucinda said, ‘would make do with a handshake.’

Daniel smiled. ‘But not me.’

He drew her in to his body and the shadows merged and shifted as his arms closed about her. His lips were cold against hers. Lucinda had imagined that she would resist him, but now she found that she did not want to do so. Their bodies fitted together as though they had never been apart, as though the intervening years had never existed.

Lucinda parted her lips instinctively and felt his tongue, warm and insistent, touch hers. She had wondered how he would taste, and now she knew: he tasted of the sea and the air and something clean and masculine and deliciously sensual. She felt shocked and aroused, and shocked by her own arousal. It had been such a long time. She had thought that her wild, wanton side was gone for ever. Sensible Lucinda, who advised debutantes against unruly passion, should not feel hot and dizzy and melting in a pirate’s embrace.

She drew back a little on the thought, and felt him smile against her mouth—a smile that turned her trembling insides to even greater disorder. She was afraid that her legs might give way if he let go of her now.

‘Was that better than last time?’ he whispered.

‘I…It was…’ She grasped for words, grasped for any kind of coherent thought.

‘You do not sound very sure.’

He sounded wickedly sure of himself. Before she could protest he had tangled a hand into her hair and tilted her face up so that his mouth could ravish hers with a thoroughness that left her dazed. She found that she was clutching his forearms, seeking stability in a world that spun like a top.

Have some sense. Push him away…

Instead, she drew him closer, sliding her hands over his shoulders, feeling the broadcloth of his coat rough against her cold fingers. His jaw grazed her cheek; that too was slightly rough with stubble, and the way it scored her sensitive skin made her shudder with helpless desire.

‘Lucinda…’ His lips were against her neck, sending the goosebumps skittering across her skin. She felt cold, but her head was full of images of a summer long ago. She could smell the flowers and the scent of hot grass, hear the buzz of the bees, and see Daniel’s hands trembling slightly as he unlaced her petticoat, his skin tanned brown against her pale nakedness.

Memory was powerfully seductive. She let go of all sense and pressed closer, arching to Daniel as his hand slipped beneath her cloak to find and clasp her breast, his thumb stroking urgently over the sensitised tip. She could feel how aroused he was, feel the strong, clean lines of his body moulded against every one of her curves. She opened her lips again to the demand of his, and for one timeless moment they stood locked together before he released her and stepped back with a muffled curse.

‘Devil take it, you always could do this to me, Lucy. I thought that after twelve years—’ Daniel stopped and Lucinda drew in a long, shuddering breath. Common sense was reasserting itself now, like a draught of cold night air. She felt tired and bitter, and aching with a sense of loss for what might have been, for all the golden, glorious promise that long-ago summer had held.

‘This is foolish,’ she said. Her voice shook. ‘It was all over long ago. I must go, Daniel.’

He did not try to stop her. And because she was never going to see him again Lucinda raised her hand to touch his cheek in a fleeting caress before she turned away and walked towards the house. She did not mean to turn and look back, but when she did he had gone.

Chapter 2

THE path down to the creek was treacherous in the dark and the frost, but Daniel had walked there sufficient times in the past to leave at least a part of his mind free to think on other matters—and tonight that other matter was Lucy Spring. He could still feel the soft imprint of her body against his, and smell the flower perfume of her hair, a summery fragrance, lavender or rose or jasmine. Daniel was not sure which it had been. It was a long time since he had had the luxury of strolling in an English country garden, but the scent and the memory of her still filled his senses.