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