Nicola Cornick, Margaret McPhee, et al (9 page)

‘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.

But only for a moment. He did not give her time to think about
what had happened. He slid back up her body and took her mouth again, and she
moved beneath him and gave a little moan. The sensations he had aroused had not
gone away. They thrummed through her like the vibration of an instrument. Her
skin felt hot with a passion she had never experienced before.

‘Please,’ she said again, and hardly recognised her own voice.

There was a brief moment of cold as he withdrew from her, but
then he was back, the whole of his long, hard body matching and fitting
perfectly against her. But when he eased himself inside her at last it was so
slow and gentle that she almost screamed with frustration.

‘Damn you, Daniel.’ Temper flared in her. ‘Don’t
tease
me
so…’

He laughed. ‘My impatient Lucinda.’