Christmas Wedding Belles: The Pirate's Kiss / A Smuggler's Tale / The Sailor's Bride. Miranda Jarrett
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.
He ached for her, his body still alive and sharp with arousal. He could think of nothing but the taste of her and the need to take her to bed. It was frightening, as though all the years they had been apart were cancelled out, counting for nothing, as though the youthful passion that had fired his life then had reawoken and was concentrated solely in her.
She had saved him from capture. Fatally, he had not been paying attention. His mind had been distracted. The day before he had had the melancholy duty of visiting Newmarket, to tell the mother of one of his crew that the lad—a boy of fourteen—had died of a fever contracted in Lisbon back in the autumn. Breaking the news had been a dreadful experience. The woman had looked at him with so much grief in her eyes, but had said no word of reproof. Daniel had wanted to pour it all out—how he had nursed the boy himself, praying desperately for his recovery, how they had thought he was improving only to see him slip away from them so quietly that the moment of his death had come and gone in a breath. He knew there were no other children to support her or comfort her through her grief. He had left a big bag of gold on the table, knowing that it was not enough, that it could never replace the only son who had run away to sea and died on a pirate ship.
He ran a hand over his hair. On the way back to the coast he had ridden hard, trying to outrun his demons, but they had stayed with him at every step. When the winter fog had come down as he reached the outskirts of Woodbridge, he had stabled the horse at the Bell and sought to drown his sorrows in ale. He had sat alone in the bar. No one had approached him. Either they’d known who he was, in which case they would not have dared speak to him, or they’d thought he looked too grim to be good company. For that was the truth of it. Once it had been enough to know that he was doing the King’s work, even if he was doing it outside the law, but now he felt old and sick of the fight. He had not seen his sister, his only family, for two years now. He was damnably lonely. And seeing Lucinda, holding her close in his arms, feeling her warmth as he pressed his mouth to the softness of her hair…That had almost been the undoing of him. He had not wanted to let her go again. He had watched her walk away, and it had been the hardest thing he had ever done.
It had been such a long time. He’d thought he had forgotten her. Now the vividness of his memories and the ache of his body told him it was far from over, no matter what Lucinda said.
But there was such bitterness between them. Daniel pushed the dark hair back from his forehead. She had called him selfish, and it was true. He had not thought, in his arrogant, youthful carelessness, what it must have been like for Lucy, left at home in the stifling atmosphere of the vicarage, fending off those spiteful tabbies who would be enquiring every day as to when he was returning to make her his bride. As the weeks had slid into months, and the months into years, with no word from him, what must she have thought? How must she have felt, sitting at home waiting for him? Could he really reproach her for breaking their betrothal and accepting Leopold Melville instead?
Daniel paused, listening for sounds of pursuit, but the night was silent. Not even the call of an owl penetrated the dark woods.
The worst thing was that Lucy’s reproaches were well founded. He had assumed that she would always be there for him. He had been complacent, certain of her love for him. For a while after he had joined the Royal Navy the sea had become his mistress, to the exclusion of all other loves. She was demanding, imperious, dangerous, exciting. She pushed all other thoughts from his mind. And then the Admiralty had approached him to leave the relative security of the Navy and strike out as a privateer,