This Perfect Kiss (2 page)

Conscious of the heat of his hand through the layers of her ribbed bodice, she could not ignore the feel of him as he held her provocatively against him. “Then you admit you are a prize worthy of the game,” he replied.

No one had ever called her a prize before.

“Do we have a wager, my lady Pompadour?”

“I need no wager to let you kiss me, my lord.”

Cupping her cheeks with his palms, he looked into her face. Her lashes drifted downward in expectation. His soft chuckle opened her eyes. “I usually know the name of a woman before I kiss her,” he said.

A scar stretched the length of his hairline to his temple, but it was noticeable only with his hair swept off his forehead. Like now. “Do you? Always?”

“Always.” His gaze dropped to her mouth. “What else do you know about me?”

She could barely think. He was not known as “the Barracuda” for no reason. For years, his exploits had been a bane to pirates and French privateers alike. He was a topic of much gossip and speculation, and though his charm was still evident in an occasional smile, he seemed to have bored long ago of the
ton
. He rarely came home. He was home for the summer now only to take the requisite bride.

But she said none of this. Instead, she smiled and said something purposefully provocative. “I like the way you look without a shirt.”

She was cognizant of the heavy thudding of his heart. Or was that hers sending the blood rushing through her veins?

Then, as if in slow motion, he lowered his head and his mouth covered hers.

The kiss did not scream passion as much as it whispered pleasure. Feather light at first, like the softest touch of moonlight brushing her lips. She made a sound in the back of her throat, then lifted on her toes to better drink in the strange and wondrous sensations, only to feel him pull away as if he was slowly, deliberately testing her response.

His warm breath brushed over her lower cheek. “You taste like strawberries.”

Where his formidable authority had lent him only certitude moments ago, she now heard something else in his voice.

The pads of his thumbs pressed into the curves just beneath her jaw. Her lashes fluttered open and she stared into eyes that were dark and dangerous. “You have never kissed a man before,” he murmured.

That much about her was true. Men that she actually cared to meet were in short supply.

“I apologize if I have offended you with my wagers and games,” he said against her mask.

He wasn't sorry. She could tell by the satisfied look in his eyes that he was pleased with her response. Her lips felt thick and hot. Unfamiliar. “You have not offended me,” she said, and there was a rusty catch in her voice.

A subtle shift and he brought his mouth down on hers with a tender savagery that tightened his hand around her nape.

Then he was deepening the contact, dragging her headfirst into a sensual tide so primal that any sense of will to protest was swept away by the roaring in her veins. His tongue slid past her parted lips, filling her with the taste of his heat and whiskey, the piercing intimacy of it igniting a hunger from deep inside her. Her half groan of surrender teetered on the brink of gasp, and lost beneath the sensuous assault, she arched instinctively against him. He seemed to want to inhale her. When he came up to breathe, she pulled air into her lungs, too.

She wrapped her clumsy arms around his neck, sinking deeper into the sea of wondrous sensations. She could feel the corded muscles of his arms and shoulders delineated against his coat. His thumbs splayed the sensitive undersides of her breast. An intense tremor shook her. The shock of his touch sent shivers knifing through the length of her body, and she turned her head away.

“Who are you?” he asked. “I know nothing about you.”

I am no one,
she realized.

But the wet sea air caressed her moist lips like a drug, loosening the words from her heart. “I like the sunset over the sea after a storm and the way the air smells in spring,” she said, wanting him to know a minute piece of her self that had nothing to do with the magic of a golden night. “I love cold milk with warm bread. Roses and summertime. The smell of watercolors on canvas. I do not own a horse, but if I did, I would name him after a constellation.”

I love you,
her young heart said.

Her eyes had not moved from his, her uncertain gaze lowering without will to his lips. She could feel a strange heat run through her veins and into the pit of her stomach, before his gaze lowered to her mouth. She leaned into him to fill her senses with him and sensed caution, as if he recognized he was wading into dangerous waters.

“Which constellation?” The words vibrated against her cheek.

“Orion.”

“Ahh, poor Orion,” he chuckled against her lips, “he had the misfortune of falling in love with the virgin huntress Diana, the archer goddess who discharged the fatal arrow that killed him.”

“ 'Twas in her grief that she placed him among the stars and made him the brightest constellation in the sky. The one that guides all seafarers home.”

She returned her mouth to his. His palms slid to the curvature of her corseted waist, and he pulled her fully against him. “What do you want, Madam Pompadour?”

“I wish above all things to be seduced by you.”

There was no mistaking the feel of him against her waist. Her heart raced and she pushed aside her nerves. She might have been an innocent when it came to sexual encounters, but she was not naïve about what men and women did with each other, how male and female fit together.

But no amount of inducement was pushing him beyond the initial kiss. “Remove your mask.”

“Nay, my lord.”

His hand covered her breast, tentative at first as he registered her start at the intimate touch, then boldly as he cupped her in his palm. He turned to the side, maneuvering her body against the ivy until he had neatly confined her between his arms and the stone wall.

His lips touched hers with heat. “I could take it off you.”

“But then the seduction would lose its magic.”

He cupped her chin, raising her face another fraction. Moonlight glanced off his hair. He kissed her, pressing his lips to hers without regard to tenderness, sending her blood racing through her veins like a potent aphrodisiac. He plunged his tongue in her mouth and she heard herself moaning with strange torment. The echo in his chest became a growl as his mouth trailed down her neck and lingered on her collarbone. Nothing could have prepared her for the hunger that seemed to grow inside her. She leaned into his body. His hair was soft and silky. He smelled exotic, with a hint of cool citrus.

“Is there a brother or father or uncle waiting in the shrubberies to launch at me? Call me out?” His breath was warm. “Expert swordsmen ready for an excuse to fillet me?”

“I have no brothers or father.”

His breathing was harsh against her shoulder as he braced his hand against the wall and leaned with his head down. It was not precisely confusion she sensed but something akin to it. “Then why?”

Her lips trembled beneath his. “I . . . wish to know what it feels like.”

She thought she heard him swear, but she didn't recognize the word he'd said, except by its tone.

“Surely, 'tis no sin to be a virgin,” she ventured. As an invitation, she could not be clearer.

“You wish to escape a marriage by ruining yourself. You have picked me because you saw me naked on the beach and thought I would be . . . amenable to the idea?”

“I picked you because . . . because you are the most beautiful man I have ever seen. I mean you no harm. I will tell no one.”

He laughed almost as if her words made him blush. He seemed gratified that his reaction was finally one she could interpret. “Are you trying to protect
my
reputation?” he asked.

“No one need know, my lord.”

The cadence of his breathing changed. “
I
would know.”

“It cannot be good for you to
think
so much.”

He laughed, this time not with discomfort evident in his tone but with an acknowledgement that her words couldn't have been more true.

Footsteps and voices on the upper walkway caused them both to pause. Someone was walking down the pathway. Neither of them breathed. She shut her eyes. They stood in the shadows like coconspirators, the bastard daughter of an adulterer and England's hero and heir to an earldom. What would he have said if he'd known her mother had been known as Ayrshire's “Colonial whore”? That she was no lady at all.

The footsteps stopped. “My lord?” a voice called from the walkway to her left.

She heard the hiss of an oath against the soft shell of her ear. Shifting his weight, he shielded her from view. “What is it, Smolich?”

“I am sorry to disturb you, my lord, but your father is asking for you. The last set has begun and 'tis a half hour before midnight. Your grandmother is about to send out the cavalry to find you.” Clearing his throat, he added, “I saw you come down here earlier and thought to warn you.”

“Thank you, Smolich.” Lord Camden seemed to consider his next words. He looked down at her. “You may reassure my grandmother that I am on my way inside. I would not have her disappointed.”

“Aye, my lord.”

Lord Camden hesitated for the briefest moment. She couldn't read him, but she sensed that his unaffected expression, like his appearance, was an illusion. The great hero of the Atlantic and West Indies, the Barracuda himself, was vulnerable to normal human emotion.

“I have never hidden in the flower vines before.” He regarded her, trying to make out her thoughts. “But I have a feeling you have spent a great deal of time hiding and observing the world around you.”

Placing his hands on her waist, he pulled her nearer, peering into her upturned face, trying to see behind the mask. It was to his credit, she realized, that he did not take it from her when she knew he could have. Remnants of music floated to her. “I will play your game, madam, but we will begin in the ballroom with a dance. Do you waltz?”

The waltz was a new dance that had become all the rage. “I do.”

He looked up the path. “There will be others in the yard,” he said. “I will leave first. You can follow when you are ready.”

“You do not wish to be seen with me.”

“Nay, my love.
You
do not wish to be seen coming from the shadows of the yard with me. It takes very little to ruin a reputation and even less to find yourself ostracized.”

Her throat was suddenly tight and sore. She nodded, but as she watched him vanish in the thickening mist forming around her, she no longer felt so brave. A stone was in one of her shoes. She walked to the wall and leaned against the barrier to drag in breath. Removing her shoes, she lingered in the shadows as if the darkness had been a mask to cover the one she now wore. Her feet hurt. Everything hurt. It hurt to be a lady.

“He will turn away from you when he learns who you are?”

For a moment, Christel thought the words had been plucked from her own thoughts. She whirled toward the path.
Tia.

A swish of silk and her half sister stood in front of her. The dress she wore was similar to Christel's, but Tia was taller, her eyes darker. The white wig she wore covered chestnut hair. That they shared the same father only made Christel her enemy.

“He is betrothed, you know.”

Christel had heard the rumors. He had come home to wed.

“The papers will be signed next week. I heard Grams and the dowager talking tonight.”

“You are lying.”

Tia picked up Christel's golden slippers from the wall. “And you are a thief.” She flicked gloved fingers over the gold painted pearls Christel had sewn into the molded fabric. “Did you get these pearls from
my
castoffs or Saundra's? Or did you steal them from Grams?”

Tears burned behind Christel's eyes. “Give them back.”
Please
.

Tia held one slipper over the stone wall. Christel gasped but stopped herself from leaping after it. “Lady Etherton will be furious that you and Saundra traded places tonight. These belong to Saundra.”

“Tell her then.”

Christel knew Tia wouldn't; Tia fancied herself Saundra's best friend. Telling Saundra's mother that Christel and Saundra had traded places tonight would only bring Lady Etherton's wrath down upon her daughter.

“Saundra will wed his lordship at summer's end,” Tia said.

Christel's heart stopped with a thud. “I– You said the papers were not signed. You are only telling me this lie because you hate me.”

Tia swallowed hard. “If I hated you, I would throw this slipper over the cliff so you could never go inside to dance.” Tears shimmered in Tia's eyes behind the mask. She drew back her arm and threw the slipper over the wall.

Christel cried out. Catching herself on the wall, she glimpsed a flash of gold in the moonlight as the shoe tumbled over the rocks to the beach far below.

“His lordship would never have picked someone like you, Christel Douglas.”

Chapter 1

Nine years later

London

“I
f we do not leave on the tide, we will not get out of London, my lord.” Captain Bentwell struggled to keep pace with Camden's limping stride. “The child's cabin has been heated as instructed.”

With his daughter cradled in his arms, Camden St. Giles, the seventh earl of Carrick, turned east to look at the sliver of dawn breaking through the heavy clouds. He frowned. The trip to the docks had taken longer in the inclement weather, but even at this early hour, London's maritime district swarmed with activity on and off the water as everyone attempted to beat the snowstorm bearing down on the Thames.

“Then see that we get out, Bentwell,” Lord Carrick said as the captain opened the door into the companionway.

“Aye, my lord.”

Camden stepped over the coaming, following his daughter's stout nurse into the narrow corridor. Clearing his throat, Bentwell reluctantly added, “A woman came aboard late last night. She said she sailed from Boston—”

Camden came to a stop abruptly in front of his daughter's cabin. “This ship does not take passengers.”

“I know, my lord.” Bentwell hastily lowered his voice. “But she claims to be a cousin to your dead wife. On the chance that she spoke the truth, I put her in your quarters. I did not know what else to do.”

Despite himself, Camden felt himself turn toward his quarters and hesitate. But not out of caution or anger. His wife had had two cousins, but only one had been living in the colonies.

Camden carefully handed his sleeping daughter to the nurse and told her to take Anna to her quarters. Mrs. Gables was like a stout brown workhorse, and he was sure that carrying a willowy eight-year-old to bed would prove to be no effort.

Bentwell was working to prepare the ship to sail on the tide ahead of the storm. Indeed, the man had performed a miracle just having this ship and its crew prepared in the short time Camden had given him. Only yesterday, a missive had come from Camden's solicitor reporting that Camden's grandmother was ill.

“See that my daughter is warmed sufficiently,” Camden instructed the nurse. “I'll check on you both shortly.”

Removing his hat and gloves and stomping the snow from his boots, Camden slipped an enameled watch from his waistcoat and checked the time. “The wind has come round, and if it backs up too far easterly we will have a bloody time trying to get out of here,” he told Bentwell. “Have the customs officers finished their inspection?”

“Not yet, sir.”

“I will see to my guest. You see to the ship.”

Captain Bentwell slapped his hat back on his grizzled head. “Aye, sir,” he hastily answered.

For a moment after Captain Bentwell left, Camden was alone in the narrow, dark corridor. The idea of confronting the woman who had once been a familiar centerpiece in his mind brought silence to his thoughts.

Nine years ago, he had first encountered his wife's unconventional barefoot and half-dressed cousin collecting shells on the beach below the cliffs of Blackthorn Castle. Christel Douglas had been a seventeen-year-old sprite, the by-blow daughter of Lady Harriet's oldest son, though he had not known this at the time. It had been the month of the Golden Masquerade Ball, the summer he had come home on leave from his duties with the Royal Navy to do his obligation to his family and marry.

He had not willingly allowed himself to think about her in years.

Yet his heart raced oddly as he opened the door to his quarters. Without removing his heavy woolen cloak, he ducked under the deck beams before walking into the adjoining chamber. In the drowsy predawn, he had to be satisfied with a ship's brass lanthorn to supply illumination. No one had come into the cabin to light the stove, and the room was cold even to him, and he was as cold-blooded as a man came in these climes.

He dropped his gloves and hat on a chair. Like the rest of the room's furnishings, it was bolted down.

A rustle sounded near the gallery window, followed by a low growl from a dog. The unwelcome canine interloper stood next to the cabin's other inhabitant behind his desk, as if his entrance had only just roused her from the window bench.

She raised a pistol and pointed it directly at him. 'Twas his own pistol from his desk. “Do not come any closer, sir. Not until I first have your word that you will not have me removed from this ship.” She spoke in a familiar voice, commanding and cultured, with a slight hint of Scots in the drawl.

Whatever he had been expecting to see at that moment, it had not been some mangy hound and Christel Douglas threatening him.

He could not see her face in the shadows. She wore a thin cloak over a pair of woolen breeches tightened at the waist with rope, a loose shirt and ragged, turned-out boots. Her hair beneath a floppy felt hat curled around her chin and shoulders. He knew from memory that her hair was the color of freshly churned butter.

They had been on the opposite sides of a war. That she might have actually come to England to shoot him flitted through his brain. Walking forward, he said, “Do you always threaten to kill people you do not like? Or do you intend to hold a gun on me all the way to Scotland?”

She gasped. “Lord Carrick . . .”

He strode past her and, raising his arms like Moses parting the Red Sea, he yanked open the gallery curtains, letting light into the room.

He turned, and he was suddenly looking into eyes that were still the deep blue of the warm Aegean Sea. For a moment, neither spoke. He reached around her for the pistol. He did not have to trust Christel Douglas to respect her. “I do not take threats lightly, Christel. Especially from you.”

Her chin lifted. “ 'Tis only that I was not sure 'twould be you or that you would remember me. I would not have fatally shot you.”

“Then your aim has improved since the last time you attempted to shoot me?” He emptied the powder from the gun.

“That was a long time ago. I was target practicing. Besides”—she straightened—“if you had been a better rider, you would not have been tossed from your horse and knocked silly.”

“Aye.” He lobbed the empty pistol on a chair. “Then where would our lives be today? Hmm?”

“Exactly as we are, my lord. You would still have married my cousin and I would still have gone to Virginia.”

She suddenly gave her attention to her tattered sleeve. He had never known her to be compliant or meek. Perhaps she was remembering that he had briefly awakened from her onerous target practice flat on his back with his head in her lap, looking up into those same blue-colored eyes. She had been wearing very little when he had come upon her after she had been swimming in the sea. It was the first time he had realized that the little urchin who had been following him around all that August had been no skinny child, and that she had been the one he had kissed at the ball.

“You vanished without ever explaining a bloody thing to me, Christel. Then you left Scotland and sailed across the world.”

“What was to explain? You were already betrothed to Saundra.”

“I was always curious how you found that out,” he said quietly, “since the news had yet to be announced to anyone, including her.”

His hand moved to lift her chin into the light. The dog growled. She abruptly bent and gently soothed it with a touch. The display of unconditional affection reminded him of the ragamuffin girl he'd briefly known, who'd rescued birds and kittens and rabbits and anything else that had needed saving. Of a time when tenderness had not been such a rare commodity in his life.

Aye, he remembered Christel Douglas well enough. He had looked upon similar features for eight years of his life.

Turning away, he reached for a tin pannikin in the bookcase and filled it from a flask before raking her slender figure with a glance. “As I remember, you seem to lack a knack for proper attire and introductions. Why am I not surprised to see you dressed like a stable hand?”

“A woman traveling alone has many reasons not to trust a man,” she said without looking up.

His eyes slid from her floppy hat to the tips of her mud-caked boots. “I hate to be the one to inform you, but no one would mistake you for a man even if you do smell like a side of smoked bacon.” He held out the pannikin.

She snatched the cup and drank, then coughed delicately into her sleeve, causing him some amusement as she attempted not to choke on the fiery drink. “Rest assured,
my lord,
” she rasped, “with your dislike of pork and my distrust of powerful men we should all get along famously.”

With this blustery declaration, she lifted her watery gaze and the light fell full on her face beneath her hat's brim. Something inside him cracked. No longer holding his anger close to his chest, he wondered what fool notion had brought her across a hostile ocean a world away from her own. “What are you doing here, Christel?”

“I was on my way to Glasgow. Two weeks ago a storm diverted the ship from Boston to Lisbon for repairs. What was not confiscated from me in Spain was stolen yesterday when I arrived in London. It was only by chance that I learned you were here and that this was your ship.”

“Let me rephrase. What are you doing on this side of the
Atlantic
?”

She cautiously set down the tin cup. “I . . . I received a letter in Williamsburg six months ago.” While she spoke, she struggled to pull a crumpled, water-stained letter from beneath her shirt. “ 'Twas written by Saundra. She asked me to return to Scotland to be a governess for Anna.”

“A
governess
?” His gaze hesitating on the tattered gloves covering her fingers, he took the letter from her hand and brought it nearer to the window for light. “Saundra has been dead almost two years.”

“Do you think I do not know that? But that is Saundra's handwriting. It bears your wax seal. It came from Blackthorn Castle.”

In the uneasy silence that followed, he flipped over the letter and studied the wax seal. He shoved his hand into his waistcoat pocket and withdrew the missive he had received last evening from his solicitor concerning the onset of his grandmother's illness. The signet wax seal matched the ring on his finger, down to the laurel leaves that framed the crossed swords. This ring had not left his finger in years. He had another that he kept locked in a desk in his library. Only Saundra and his grandmother had ever had access to the ring kept at Blackthorn Castle.

Saundra could not have written the letter unless someone had mailed it long after she had died. He found it impossible to believe his grandmother would have done such a thing without his consent. But still . . . His grandmother and Christel's had always been close friends. Or else the letter had merely got lost for almost two years.

“I was not aware you and Saundra communicated,” he said so casually that the question seemed to startle her.

He looked up from the letter into her liquid blue eyes. “Why?” she asked. “Because I am the family scandal?”

“That is not what I meant,” he said quietly.

“We wrote to each other often.” She tucked her arms in her cloak. “Now that the war is over, you must know that there were many Scots sympathetic to the colonists' plight. Trade and communication between us did not cease because of an embargo.”

“Us? I am English, Christel. The Carrick title is an English patent given to one of my ancestors two hundred years ago for successfully quelling a Scottish rebellion and hanging all its leaders. Had I known she was in league with Leighton and you, I would have put a stop to it.”

The color seemed to drain from her face. “I—”

“You think I did not know my own brother worked with your uncle against me in the war?” He folded the letter, little caring that his voice was sharp. “Saundra may have kept in contact with you, I do not know. But if the individual who sent this letter knew anything about me, she would have known that hell would freeze over before I would ever ask a colonial urchin to be governess to my daughter.”

“I beg your pardon.”

“Please do. Someone should. You have a habit of popping in and out of my life like a hand full of mist. You present me with a letter mailed from a woman who has been dead sixteen months. And I should not consider this a joke?”

Her temper flashed hotly. “Acquit me, my lord. Whatever I have done to make you angry, I apologize. But if I have earned your animosity, then let it be for a sin I have actually committed.”

The ship lurched. Bentwell had cast off the mooring lines. Knowing what was about to come, Camden braced his hand against the timber stretching across the ceiling as the ship climbed and dropped. Despite his lame leg, he rode the ship's movement as years of experience and practice supplanted the effects of the injury on the psyche. Miss Douglas attempted to catch her balance on the desk and missed. He hooked his arm around her waist and kept her from tumbling to the floor. He heard her breath catch as he brought her hard against him.

Beneath the layers of homespun, her skin was warm, her curves soft. Despite the pungent scent of her clothes, he held her tightly braced against him. There was nothing about her that should have intrigued him, yet he found his interest piqued despite himself.

“What
sins
have you committed since our last meeting, Miss Douglas?”

Shoving away from him, she captured his gaze. “I have not
murdered
you. Yet,” she said, riding the pitch of the ship with more ease. “And for your information, I never considered for an instant that I was
not
qualified to be a governess.” A calm seemed to settle over her, banishing all timidity. “My grandmother saw to that part of my education before . . . before I left Scotland.”

Camden set his teeth and silently cursed himself. What was wrong with him? For a moment, all he could grasp was that she had made a dangerous trip halfway across the world alone. She could have been killed and no one would ever have known her fate.