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

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      ‘We all make mistakes,’ he said, ‘and mine have been the greater.’

      He saw her smile. ‘So what were your mistakes, Daniel?’

      Daniel turned to look at her in the gathering dusk. ‘Leaving you,’ he said. ‘Arrogance, complacency, thoughtlessness…Oh, and cheating a Portuguese pirate at cards and almost paying for it with my life.’

      Lucinda gave a peal of laughter.

      ‘And wishing,’ Daniel said softly, watching her face, ‘that I could change the past.’

      The laughter died from her eyes. ‘That is a mistake, Daniel.’ She looked over her shoulder. ‘We are almost at the park wall. You may leave me here. I shall be quite safe.’

      She put a hand against his chest and stood on tiptoe to kiss him. Her lips were cool and they clung to his, and he wanted to pick her up and carry her off to make love to her under the trees of the pine forest. But he knew that some things could never be, and already he had let matters go far too far.

      ‘Goodnight,’ she whispered, and he knew that she meant goodbye.

      ‘Tell them to lock the doors fast tonight,’ Daniel said.

      She raised her chin. ‘Because you and your scoundrel crew will be out smuggling?’

      The frustration, the wanting, poured through him and almost swept everything else aside. He caught her shoulders, pressing her back against the trunk of the nearest tree.

      ‘Ah, Lucy, what a shockingly poor opinion you have of me,’ he muttered, his mouth harsh against hers. He wanted to forget her anger and her scorn and find the sweetness beneath—the sweetness he was sure was still there for him. He plundered her mouth like the pirate he was—taking, demanding, asking no permission. He held her hard against the unyielding wood as he stole the response he wanted from her, his kiss fierce and insistent, until he was panting for breath and she was too, and he knew from the touch and the feel of her that she was his for the taking.

      Her eyes were a hazy blue in the moonlight, dazed with sensual desire, and her mouth was soft and ripe and he ached for her. But he knew that if he made love to her now she would hate him in the morning. Because although he could wrench this response from her body she mistrusted him, and detested what he had become, and once she thought about what had happened she would despise herself and him too.

      With an oath he set her away from him.

      ‘You had better go, Lucinda,’ he said, deliberately cruel. ‘Go before I forget what little honour I have left and treat you like the pirate I am.’

      He saw her flinch at his harshness, and then she gathered her cloak to her and hurried away. He felt a cold desolation that had nothing to do with the winter night.

      Chapter 4

      THE middle of December brought the final Woodbridge Assembly before Christmas. The Assembly Rooms were icy cold that night. A wind was whistling in from the sea, finding all the gaps between the windows and setting the candle flames dancing in the draught. Lucinda drew her shawl more closely about her and shivered on her rout chair. Company was light that evening—a few local families, and some of the officers from the Woodbridge barracks—but amidst the small crowd Miss Stacey Saltire shone like a jewel.

      Lucinda had observed that it was often the way when a young lady was engaged: all the gentlemen who had been wary of approaching her when she had been husband-hunting now felt free to pay attention to her, knowing she was promised to another. And none was more assiduous in his attentions than the Riding Officer, Mr Owen Chance, who was even now dancing with Stacey, the two dark heads bent close to one another as they indulged in intimate conversation.

      Lucinda sighed. Not only was she concerned by what she saw—as was Mr Leytonstone, glowering from across the other side of the floor but too cowardly to intervene—but she felt for a moment a wave of envy so sharp that it that shocked her. Envy for Stacey, and for the way that Owen Chance was looking at her, and for her own lost youth and her lost love.

      She had not seen Daniel since the night he had kissed her in the woods. She had run from him then—run from his harshness and the feelings he could still stir in her. More than anything she had run from the fact that he was not the man she wanted him to be, and her heart ached that she had loved him once and now he was a stranger to her.

      She had kept away from the creek, just as Daniel had demanded, and had taken her walks in less dangerous places. Sometimes as dusk was falling she would stand by her bedroom window and scour the wide expanse of the bay for a scarlet and black ship with a snarling dragon on the prow, but the horizon was always empty, and she would draw the curtains together with a sigh and feel her heart plummet to her slippers. If only she had never met him again. But she had, and memory, reawakened, was difficult to dismiss. It taunted her at every turn with the restless passion and excitement of that distant summer when she and Daniel had been young. And the knowledge that he was a different man now, supposedly a criminal and a traitor, tortured her.

      She had asked questions about him of Sally Kestrel, and had listened to Midwinter gossip with avidity. Although she knew she should forget Daniel, she found she could not help herself. His name was mentioned frequently, but the stories were as insubstantial as smoke, and at the end it was impossible to tell the truth from the myth. Intriguingly, many of the legends painted Daniel de Lancey as a hero—a man secretly in the pay of the government rather than the renegade he pretended to be. Lucinda found she ached for it to be true, but thought it probable that she would never know.

      ‘My dear Mrs Melville, you look blue-devilled!’ a warm female voice beside her commented, and Lucinda turned to see the Duchess of Kestrel smiling sympathetically at her. She followed Lucinda’s gaze to the couple on the dance floor.

      ‘Matter for concern, do you think?’

      ‘As a chaperon, I would say most definitely,’ Lucinda said. She hesitated. ‘As someone who would wish to see Miss Saltire happy, perhaps not.’

      Sally Kestrel’s green eyes focused shrewdly on her face. ‘You think that Miss Saltire will be making a mistake in marrying Mr Leytonstone?’

      Lucinda shrugged a little awkwardly. She was acutely aware that in her youth Sally Kestrel had chosen the rather more solid merits of Stephen Saltire above the dashing brilliance of Justin Kestrel, and that it had been twenty years before they were reunited. Their glowing love for one another now was plain for all to see, and was something else that made Lucinda feel even more cold and alone.

      ‘I think that Stacey should marry for love, not money,’ Lucinda admitted reluctantly. ‘Though it contradicts my duty to say so.’

      Sally Kestrel smiled understandingly. ‘We do not wish to see others make the same mistakes that we did,’ she said. ‘I have already tried to speak to Cousin Letitia, but she is adamant. They have no money and Mr Leytonstone is very rich.’

      ‘And Mr Chance, I suppose, is not?’

      Sally Kestrel shook her head. ‘He is better born, but he has no fortune. And I fear that Cousin Letitia values fortune above all things.’

      Lucinda glanced towards the doorway, where the Master of Ceremonies was announcing a late arrival. The knot of people gathered by the doorway parted to allow the СКАЧАТЬ