Christmas Wedding Belles: The Pirate's Kiss / A Smuggler's Tale / The Sailor's Bride. Miranda Jarrett
she said, reaching for an acceptable half-truth. ‘Rebecca would not wish me to condemn you to hang if I could save your neck.’
He went very still. ‘Do I know you?’
‘You did once,’ Lucinda said.
He took her chin in his hand and turned her face up to the moonlight, and Lucinda took the opportunity to study him as candidly as he was scrutinising her. He had not changed so much from the young man she had last seen twelve years before. He still had intensely dark hair, untouched with grey, and dark eyes that had once bewitched every young lady in the county—eyes so black she had once imagined fancifully that they were darker than midnight. Differences were there, though. His face was leaner than she remembered, hardened, perhaps, by experience and adversity—the line of the jaw harsh, the mouth firm. And he was no longer the lanky youth he had once been, but had filled out with hard muscle beneath his coat, so that his shoulders were broad and he seemed taller, tougher, altogether more dangerous.
Her skin prickled with awareness beneath his fingers. Emotions stirred. Old memories…She had been so young, only seventeen, but there had been nothing childish about her feelings for Daniel de Lancey. He had been her first love—her only love, if she were honest. And she had never forgotten him, not even when humiliation and pride had flayed her alive, and common sense and practicality and every sound, rational reason she could ever come up with had prompted her to let his memory go.
He pursed his lips into a soundless whistle.
‘Lucy Spring…By all that’s miraculous…’ There was something in his eyes, something of nostalgia laced with a wickedness that made her heart turn over. But she was a sensible widow now, not a lovestruck young girl who would fall for his shallow charm a second time.
‘Lucinda Melville,’ she corrected primly.
His hand fell. ‘Of course. I heard that you had wed. You did not wait for me as you promised.’
Emotion raked Lucinda suddenly, as raw and painful now as it had been eight years before, when she had heard of his betrayal. ‘You did not come back for me as you promised.’ The hot words tumbled from her lips before she could help herself. ‘How dare you reproach me? You left me without a word. I waited four years, Daniel! And then I heard that you had abandoned me—abandoned everything you had previously held dear!’ There was a wealth of bitterness and humiliation in her voice. ‘Did you expect me to wait for ever?’
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