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

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.’