Christmas Wedding Belles: The Pirate's Kiss / A Smuggler's Tale / The Sailor's Bride

He put his arm about her. ‘Whatever happens, Lucy, you are coming with me. You have to now.’

She looked down her nose at him. ‘I have to do no such thing. Why should I?’

‘Because, as you so succinctly pointed out a few moments ago, I have ruined you,’ Daniel said calmly. He had had no time to think anything through beyond an absolute certainty that he had to put matters right for Lucinda. It was the one good thing that he could do—even if it would be the last. ‘You will come with me and you will marry me.’

‘What makes you think that I will have you?’ Lucinda said, with a flash of hauteur. ‘You are no great catch.’

Daniel grinned. ‘Being married to me will be better than trying to marry off the brats of the nobility for a living. Trust me on that.’

‘You always had an inflated opinion of your own charms,’ Lucinda commented. ‘I cannot believe that you are using the opportunity of us being locked up together to press your suit. I will not marry you, Daniel, and that is final. You are the least reliable man on earth, and I would have to be mad or desperate or both to accept you.’

Daniel was thinking quickly. He was sure that if the worse came to the worst he could barter information for Lucinda’s freedom. Justin and Sally Kestrel could help her, if not him. She could go to Allandale, do the work that he had been too weak and too wild to do. At least she would be safe…

‘Marry me,’ he said again. ‘Please, Lucy. It is the only way in which I can put matters right.’

‘I have no wish to be a pirate’s wife,’ Lucinda said. ‘If we escape I would be obliged to sail with you, and I am the world’s worst sailor. Merely sitting in a rowing boat makes me sick. It is a miracle I was not ill aboard the Defiance.’

‘You were too busy quarrelling with me to notice,’ Daniel said ruefully. He spread his hands. ‘You need not sail with me. I inherited Allandale from my cousin just a month ago. You could live there—’

‘You are Lord Allandale now?’ Lucinda’s eyes widened.

‘Yes. Which is why I need to know there is someone I can trust to take care of the estate.’

Lucinda’s gaze snapped onto him. ‘You need an estate manager, not a wife!’ She hesitated for a moment, and then looked at him very directly. Her tone changed, turned sad. ‘I cannot wed you, Daniel. Do not press me to it. Oh, I care for you.’ She laced her fingers together a little awkwardly. ‘And ’ tis true that I respond to you—’ Here she blushed, and he wanted to kiss her very much. ‘But I do not trust you. You will always put yourself first. You always have and you always will. And I could not bear for you to break my heart again.’

She stood up, smoothing her skirts, and crossed to the window. She stood with her back turned to him, her arms folded tight about her as though she was cold, and though Daniel wanted to take her in his arms, to hold her and comfort her, he knew she would not let him touch her. What could he say? That it would be different this time? That he cared for her and would never hurt her? He knew it was true, but trust had to be earned and he had forfeited the right to hers.

‘Look!’ Lucinda said suddenly. A note of excitement had crept into her voice. ‘It is snowing outside!’ She paused. ‘You will have observed that there are no bars at the window, Daniel?’

Daniel had already noticed. ‘Given that there is a drop to the ground of about twelve feet,’ he pointed out, ‘I cannot see that it benefits us.’

Lucinda ignored this. ‘We are at the back of the building, and all it faces is a wall,’ she continued. ‘And this door is solid, so the guards cannot see what we are doing in here—and anyway, they are away down the corridor…’

Daniel smiled. ‘An intriguing thought, Lucy. You are putting ideas into my head.’

‘Try thinking of escape rather than seduction,’ Lucinda snapped. ‘Mr Chance has been lamentably lax in leaving us so ill-guarded.’

‘I think he was rather trusting to the fact that you are a respectable widow,’ Daniel murmured dryly, ‘and that I might actually have been telling the truth when I said you could vouch for me.’

Lucinda cast him a look. She was ripping a length of material from her skirt, wincing at the tearing noise it made, and then another, which she knotted to the first. This left her with her gown bodice still intact, but nothing but petticoats below. Daniel stared at her shapely garter-clad legs, feeling his throat dry.

‘What the devil are you doing?’ he managed.

Lucinda edged the sash window up.

‘If the guard comes in, hit him over the head with the chair,’ she instructed. ‘Only try not to hurt him too much. I do not wish to be accused of murder as well as conspiracy!’

Daniel raised his brows. ‘Lucinda—’

She gave him a fierce frown. ‘Hush!’

She tied the end of the makeshift rope to the desk and gave it an experimental tug. Then, before Daniel could protest, she had thrown the other end of the rope out of the window and climbed out. Forgetting his duty with the chair, Daniel rushed to the window and looked down. Lucinda was standing in the snow, her breast heaving slightly with the exertion of her climb down the rope, her face upturned to his. Flakes of snow were settling on her eyelashes and she brushed them away. Her impatient whisper floated up to him.

‘Do you intend to join me, or do you prefer to wait at His Majesty’s pleasure?’

The silk gave way when he was halfway to the ground, depositing Daniel in the snow with a rather sharp bump. Before he knew what was happening, Lucinda had grabbed his arm and hauled him to his feet, dusting him down with brisk, impersonal hands. Daniel flinched.

‘Ouch! There is no need to be so rough.’ He looked her over. With snowflakes in her blonde hair she looked entirely charming. ‘Clearly I have underestimated you, Luce,’ he said. ‘You have a natural bent for criminality. I should have invited you to join my crew years ago.’

She gave him a glare from those glorious blue eyes. ‘Are we going to stand here chatting whilst we await discovery? Or are we going to hire some horses at the Bell around the corner?’

‘Surely you mean steal some horses?’ Daniel said mildly.

She gave him another glare, holding her wrist up to show her reticule, still dangling there. ‘I have some money. There is no need to make matters worse by adding theft to our list of crimes.’

‘Absolutely,’ Daniel said. He grabbed her, gave her a brief, fierce kiss. ‘Lucy, you are a wonderful girl.’

For a moment she stood still in his embrace, and he thought he felt her lips soften beneath his.

‘It astounds me that you have been at liberty as long as you have, Daniel, given your lack of resourcefulness and your penchant for wasting time,’ she said, a little breathlessly.

She was shivering. Daniel shrugged out of his jacket and placed it about her shoulders, watching as she drew it close with shaking fingers. For all her bravado he knew that she was half-shocked, half-elated by what they had done.

‘Wait in shelter whilst I get the horses,’ he began—but even as he spoke Lucinda recoiled with a gasp and, looking past her, Daniel saw a figure rear up out of the tumbling snow at the corner of the alleyway.

He had already moved to place himself between her and this latest threat when he recognised the man and saw that behind him was a carriage drawn up in the snow. No, it was not a carriage—it was a covered horse-drawn sleigh.

‘Evening, sir—ma’am,’ Lieutenant Holroyd said, coming forward to shake his hand. He grinned. ‘Good to see you again. Transport compliments of the Duchess of Kestrel. What kept you, sir?’

Chapter 6

IN THE sleigh, beneath the fur-lined rugs that Sally Kestrel had so thoughtfully provided, Lucinda sat shivering and shivering in her torn evening gown and petticoats. The sleigh was a splendid affair—a little coach on runners, with a hood lashed down on all sides so that it was very snug inside. Sally Kestrel could not have sent anything better suited to their purpose, and the fact that she had sent it led Lucinda to hope that matters might be all right, for if ever she needed help it was now.

Despite the thick furs and the cloaks that Holroyd had passed to them, Lucinda was trembling as though she would never be warm again. She knew that it was reaction to her situation, rather than cold, that was making her shake like this. She had escaped from Woodbridge Gaol with Daniel—no, she had engineered their escape—and she was ruined, a fugitive and a criminal. No doubt her face would be appearing on the ‘wanted’ posters soon. And the shocking, inexcusable and truly extraordinary thing about the whole experience was that she felt stirred up, alive, free for once from the stifling restrictions and endless petty rules that had governed her existence as a governess and chaperon. Oh, she was half appalled at her own behaviour, but she was excited as well.

She must be mad.

She must be in love.

She closed her eyes in denial of the thought. It could not be true. But she knew it was. She thought back to that terrible moment in the ballroom when she had known with blinding certainty that she could not have borne them carrying Daniel off to gaol and seeing his lifeless body swinging on the end of a rope. She knew he was all of the things she had said he was. He was unreliable and reckless and dangerous. But it made not one whit of difference because she had loved him when she was seventeen and she loved him still, after all these years.

Which still did not mean, of course, that she would agree to marry him. Daniel had said that they must be married to save her reputation—as though marrying an outlawed pirate would not be the most monstrous scandal in itself. She imagined her parents, the good vicar and his wife, positively spinning in their graves. And it simply would not serve. Daniel did not want a wife. His way of life was completely opposed to it. Besides, were not women supposed to be bad luck at sea? Lucinda had the conviction that if she went to sea it would be very bad luck for all concerned. If she felt sick sitting in a rowing boat, then once a ship began to move she would probably be horribly unwell the entire time.

So there was no possibility of her becoming Daniel’s wife. And it was not simply a practical matter of seasickness. She could, as Daniel had suggested, go to live at Allandale. But she had no wish to sit at home wondering where Daniel was and what he was doing. That was not her idea of marriage.

The truth was that she knew if she were to marry Daniel she would be an encumbrance to him rather than the person he had chosen to share the rest of his life. It would be a marriage borne of necessity rather than desire. For how could he want a wife when his way of life was so unsuited to marriage? And she was old enough and proud enough not to want to be second-best to a ship. Time and again Daniel had proved that the lure of the sea and the wild life he lived outside the law were more important to him than all else. She loved him, but she could not trust him not to hurt her again.

The smooth running of the sledge over the snow slowed a little, and then they came to an abrupt halt. Lucinda heard Daniel jump down, and then his voice, speaking low. There was a chink of harness and then the creak of the sleigh as he lifted the hood and slid in beside her, shaking the snow off him like a dog.

‘The snow is too deep to continue,’ he said. ‘Holroyd has set off back to the ship on foot.’

Lucinda scrambled up. ‘We should do the same—’

Daniel put a hand on her shoulder, pressing her back into the furs. ‘Lucinda, the snow is already two foot deep and drifting, and you are clad in nothing but your petticoats and evening slippers. We stay here until the snow stops.’

Lucinda hastily slipped her stockinged legs back under the covers. ‘But we cannot simply sit here! They will be looking for us.’

‘What is bad for us is also bad for our pursuers,’ Daniel said. He shrugged out of his jacket, then started to pull off his boots. ‘No one will be out whilst the snow falls like this. I have found an empty byre where the horse will be safe, and we shall be snug in here until we can make the last few miles down to the creek. We are near Midwinter Mallow, so there is not far to go.’

He raised the edge of the fur covers as though to slip underneath.

‘What are you doing?’ Lucinda asked, scooting across to the other side of the sleigh.

Daniel paused. ‘I am coming in there with you. What do you expect me to do? Shiver all night in a snowdrift?’

‘But…’ Lucinda grabbed the rugs up to her chin. ‘Surely you should go with Holroyd back to the ship? I will be quite safe here.’ She took a deep breath. This might be her best opportunity to explain to Daniel the half-formed plan that she had made concerning the future.

‘I have been thinking,’ she said. ‘I have a plan, Daniel, which means that neither you nor I need be trapped into anything we do not wish. I thought that if you were to return to the Defiance now, without me, someone would be bound to find me before too long. And when they do I will simply pretend that you coerced me at the ball and that I am blameless of all crime…’

Her voice trailed away as she sensed the rather ominous silence that greeted her words. She could not see Daniel clearly in the near-darkness, but she could feel his outrage.

‘Let me understand you,’ he said, after a long moment. ‘Having taken me to task for abandoning you in the past, you are now suggesting that I should behave like a complete scoundrel, leave you here at the mercy of whoever should stumble out of the storm and find you, and that I should run back to my ship, make my escape, and leave you to take all the consequences?’

Lucinda had seldom heard him so angry. Not since she had been in her teens, when an irate farmer had shouted at her for trying to free his exhausted ploughing team and Daniel had practically threatened to run the man through.

‘Well,’ Lucinda said, through suddenly chattering teeth, ‘I thought it was a good plan.’

‘It is the stupidest plan that I have heard in an age,’ Daniel said, in the same hard, insulted voice. ‘For once in my life, Lucy, permit me to do the right thing.’

These last words were hissed through his teeth.

‘But—’

‘I will stay with you,’ Daniel continued, as though she had not spoken. ‘When the snow ceases we will finish the journey back to the ship, and there I will marry you.’

Lucinda sat bolt upright. ‘Now, just a minute! That will not be necessary, Daniel. I have already said that I will not marry you.’

‘You will marry me. As ship’s captain I have the right to conduct marriage services, and the first one I shall perform is my own.’

‘That is definitely illegal,’ Lucinda said, hoping she was right.

Daniel ignored her. He slid beneath the blankets and his body grazed against hers. Lucinda felt the long, hard length of him, felt his legs entangle with hers beneath the petticoats, and tried to shift away as far as she could. Her throat was dry, and her heart was thundering in her ears, a counterpoint to the soft swish of the snow against the roof of the sleigh. A moment later he had put out a negligent hand and pulled her into his arms. Her hands came up against the hard, warm barrier of his chest.

‘You are cold and you are suffering from shock,’ he said against her hair. ‘You need to stop worrying about what is going to happen and allow me to warm you.’

Lucinda was shivering violently, but not with either cold or shock now. ‘I do not need you to warm me,’ she argued. ‘I certainly do not need you to marry me, and I cannot permit you to do the right thing.’

She felt him smile. His cheek was pressed to hers, his lips resting in the little, sensitive hollow beneath her ear. He reached with his free hand and pulled his jacket towards them, delving in the pocket.

‘Take some of this brandy, Lucy, and please stop arguing with me. You know I can be at least as stubborn as you, if not more so.’

Their fingers touched as Lucinda took the small flask of brandy from him. ‘Is this the brandy that you smuggle?’ She enquired.

‘It is. Drink it up.’

‘I hate brandy.’ Even so she tilted it to her lips, more out of curiosity than anything else.

Daniel smiled. ‘I might have known you wouldn’t care for it.’

But a rosy glow was spreading from Lucy’s stomach down to her toes and up to her face. She felt curiously warm, and suddenly a great deal more relaxed. ‘Actually,’ she admitted, ‘it is rather pleasant.’

‘Good.’

‘But I still won’t marry you, so don’t think to try and get me drunk in order to persuade me.’

Daniel did not reply. Very deliberately he took the empty flask from her hand, placed it back in his pocket, and threw his coat into a corner of the sleigh. Then he turned back to her.

‘Is there anything else you wish to say on the subject?’ he enquired.

Lucinda was starting to feel strangely light-headed. She knew there were lots of good reasons she wanted to give him for refusing his proposal of marriage, but they kept slipping out of her mind, and all she seemed capable of thinking about was how her body burned at every point of contact with his.

‘You don’t want a wife,’ she said, a little forlornly.

‘I want you,’ Daniel said. His lips grazed hers. ‘I want you very much, and I am determined to persuade you to my point of view.’

His hands stroked up from her waist, caressing the tender skin on the side of her breasts beneath the shreds of her silk gown. Lucinda gave a little involuntary moan and was shocked to hear it. What had happened to her? Her head was spinning and her body was aching with a fierce desire. Suddenly the atmosphere in the sleigh felt as hot as a summer day—the sort of long, sultry day she remembered from her girlhood.

‘You put something in the brandy,’ she said, trying to sound accusatory but instead sounding breathless and tempted. She heard Daniel laugh.

‘I hardly need brandy to seduce a woman.’

‘Why, you arrogant—’

The words were lost in his kiss. There was no warning, no gentle seduction. It was a deep kiss, and the sweep of his tongue against hers made her tremble. He tasted her, branded her, knew her, and she was helpless beneath his touch as the same wild, wanton, wicked feelings he could always arouse in her stormed through her blood and set her entire body alight. She gasped against his lips and he plundered her mouth again, the kiss at once ruthless, demanding, insistent on a response.

Once more his hand came up to brush away the shreds of silk that covered her bodice. She felt his fingers at the laces. One tug and they were undone. Her bodice parted and she relaxed gratefully, remembering how tightly it had been laced beneath her ballgown. That seemed centuries ago—the respectable chaperon in her tasteful blue silk dress, preparing for an evening’s entertainment. This was hardly the entertainment she had anticipated, and yet now that she was lying here with Daniel she wanted nothing more than to feel his body upon and within her; the strength of him, the hardness of him, the sheer, smooth masculine power. Her gown was completely gone now, ripped apart in their escape, and then the scraps that had been left brushed aside by his impatient hands. Lucinda felt as though her own fears and inhibitions had been cast away with them.

It was so dark in the sleigh that she could see nothing of Daniel’s face, nor her own shocking state of undress. He had pushed back the fur-lined rugs now, and laid her on top of them, and she could feel the cold breath of the night air against her skin. Her bodice was unlaced, parted, pushed back from her bare breasts. Her nipples peaked tightly as she waited in an agony of desire and anticipation for him to touch her.

Lucinda gave another moan of desperation, and then he swooped down, his mouth warm at her breast at last, and she actually screamed as he took her nipple between his lips and bit down gently on it before soothing away the delicious hurt with his tongue. He kissed the underside of her breast, and her sensitive skin puckered into tiny goosebumps as she writhed on the covers.

‘Daniel…’

She rolled over and raised a hand to Daniel’s cheek, felt his stubble rough beneath her palm, then pressed her fingers against the nape of his neck to bring his head down to hers so that she could kiss him again. She tangled her fingers into his hair and kissed him with all the pent-up wildness of those lost years. She slid her hands under his shirt and ran them over the hard planes of his chest and upper arms, exulting in the solid muscle and smooth, warm skin. Her whole body was a mass of sensation as she tore the shirt from his back and pressed her nakedness against him, wanting to bind him closer than ever before.

‘Lucinda…Sweetheart, slow down.’ Daniel’s voice was scarcely recognisable, so slurred with emotion that she had to strain to hear his words. ‘I don’t want to hurt you.’

‘You won’t,’ Lucinda said. Her body hummed, waiting, demanding. ‘I’m not a virgin,’ she said. ‘Leopold was an old man but he…we….’ She stopped. A pang of nervousness took her by surprise, threatening all the excited arousal that had built up within her. She bit her lip. How stupid of her to think of Leopold now, of those demeaning fumbles that had left her humiliated in mind and body. She could feel all the pleasure draining from her like water down a drain.

She felt Daniel shift a little beside her. ‘What is it, Lucinda?’

‘It was horrible,’ Lucinda said in a rush. ‘I hated it when he touched me. I had to try to endure it, but I felt repulsed. He told me I was cold.’

‘The man was a fool.’ Daniel sounded angry, but his hand at her breast still stroked with seductive gentleness, his palm a little rough against her skin. ‘You are not cold by nature. You are very, very passionate, Luce…’

He punctuated the words with little kisses scattered across the soft skin of her belly and Lucinda shivered. ‘We must make sure that you don’t feel repulsed now,’ he whispered. ‘You must tell me what you want.’

His hands moved caressingly across her bare stomach and she felt the muscles there jump and tighten.

‘Do you like that?’ Daniel asked softly.

Lucinda gulped. ‘Yes,’ she whispered. Tiny quivers were running along her nerves as his lips followed his fingers, teasing, stroking.

‘And that?’ His voice was a low murmur.

‘It is tolerable,’ Lucinda managed. The hot excitement was building within her again, but she sensed that Daniel would not let her hurry. He had reached for the ruined skirts of her petticoat, deftly rolling them up so that his hand could skim the top of her stocking and settle in sly caress on the soft skin of her inner thigh.

‘I protest,’ Lucinda said weakly. ‘You are a practised seducer.’

She heard him laugh in the darkness. ‘Acquit me. I never had the time to practise. This is all for you, Luce. Only for you.’

Lucinda caught her breath as his fingers grazed the secret place at the juncture of her thighs. Pleasure, tantalising and sublime, swept through her. He paused just long enough for her to worry that he had stopped altogether, and then his fingers resumed their gentle slide back and forth, a teasing motion that would soon, she knew, have her begging aloud.

‘Daniel—’

‘Yes?’

She could tell he was enjoying tormenting her, damn him.

‘Please…’

He did not reply, but she could almost feel his smile, there in the hot darkness. He shifted, and she sensed him moving lower, and then she felt his hand on her bare stomach again, this time below the petticoats, and the tip of his tongue instead of his fingers at the very core of her.

She shrieked, arched upwards, and felt his free hand on her hip, warm through the petticoats, holding her down so that his mouth could plunder her at will. It was blissful, agonising. Her legs were quivering now, the muscles of her stomach tight beneath his palm, her fingers clenched in the fur-lined blanket. The rub of the material against the back of her thighs was blissful torment. Never, ever had she felt like this. The incandescent sensations grew and exploded irresistibly in a cluster of light, and she felt as though her whole body had shattered too.