Nicola Cornick, Margaret McPhee, et al (2 page)

The house was silent. A lamp burned in the porch, but the night
porter was not at his post, though the front door was unlocked. Deploring such
laxity on the part of the servants, Lucinda turned the handle and went outside,
down the steps and onto the gravel sweep. Her candle flickered and went out,
doused by the sharp sea breeze. For a moment she blinked in the sudden
darkness, but then her eyes adjusted to the moonlight and she could see a
figure slipping between the trees in the lee of the park wall. At the same time
she heard the sound of hooves on the frosty ground. Could that be Mr Chance,
coming to carry off his bride? Lucinda screwed up her face as she imagined Mrs
Saltire’s hysterics when she discovered that her little ewe lamb had thrown
herself away on a pauper.

She hastened after the fleeing figure, but Stacey—if it were
she—had already lost herself amongst the trees that bordered the park. The
night was quiet now. Suspiciously so. Lucinda held her breath, straining to
hear any sound that might give her quarry away, but there was nothing except
the wind in the top of the pines and the distant beat of the waves on the
shore.

Perhaps she had been mistaken. Perhaps Stacey really was tucked
up in bed. It was a servant she had heard on the stair and she was out here
chasing shadows. The cold was eating deep into her bones now. It was no night
for an elopement. Feeling foolish, Lucinda turned to go back to the house.

The moon went behind a cloud, but in the moment before it
disappeared Lucinda clearly saw a man crouching in the lee of the park
gates—and in the same instant she saw what he could not: the menacing shadow of
the Riding Officer moving silently along the wall, coming closer all the time.
She caught her breath on a gasp, and the hidden man turned his head at the
sound. With a shock of recognition Lucinda knew him.

Terror and amazement jolted through her. Past and present
collided violently. Lucinda started to tremble. She could see that the man had
spotted her and was about to speak; she saw too that Owen Chance was urging his
horse forward silently, every sense alert for the slightest sound.

Lucinda acted on instinct. She raised a finger to her lips in a
beseeching gesture and saw the fugitive pause, and then she was beside him in
one silent move, clapping her hand over his mouth. She pulled him deeper into
the shadow of the gate and leaned forward to whisper in his ear.

‘Be silent! There is an excise man on the other side of the
wall.’

Touching him as she was, she could feel the tension that ripped
through his body at her words. Every muscle he possessed was taut and ready for
flight—or fight. He moved slightly, silently, to grasp the pistol in his belt.

Lucinda eased her hand from his mouth and rested it warningly on
his shoulder. They were both utterly still. She could not even hear his
breathing. But she was more aware of him than she had ever been of any other
person in her life. She was pressed against the unyielding lines of his back.
She could feel the warmth of his skin and she could
smell
him, a scent
of fresh air and salt and leather that went straight to her head and made her
senses spin, and also made her wonder, quite outrageously, if he tasted of the
sea as well.

The tension spun tight as a web and seemed to last for ever, and
then there was a chink of harness. She heard Owen Chance swear softly, and the
horse snorted as he pulled on the rein. The shadows shifted and the horse and
rider turned towards the Woodbridge road to be were swallowed up in the
darkness. The frost glittered on the road behind them. Lucinda released the man
and stood up slowly, every muscle in her body protesting at being clenched so
tight.

The man got to his feet and they stood looking at each other in
the moonlight. Lucinda felt breathless—a natural enough condition, she assured
herself, since she had forgotten to breathe during the entire encounter. Twelve
long years slipped away as though they had never been, and she was a young girl
again, fathoms deep in her first love. She had thought never to see this man
again…

‘So…’ he said. His voice was smooth. ‘I must thank you for saving
my skin. I had no notion that he was there.’ He shook his head ruefully.
‘Muffling the horse’s hooves is an old trick. I cannot believe it almost caught
me.’

‘You should be more careful,’ Lucinda said. She was glad that her
voice sounded so calm when inside she was trembling. Did he not recognise her?
Had she changed so much? It seemed impossible that he would not know her when
she had known him instantly. A spasm of bitterness twisted within her. Perhaps
it was not so surprising. He had, after all, forgotten her as soon as he had
walked out of her life. Why would he remember her now?

She saw his teeth flash white as he smiled. ‘I will take your
advice in future. But you, mistress…What made you decide to help me when
ninety-nine of one hundred females would have screamed loud enough to bring
every last Riding Officer in the vicinity down on me?’

Lucinda regarded him steadily. She was not entirely sure why she
had helped him when she had reason enough to wish him dead. But instinct, as
old and deep as time, had made her save him rather than condemn him, and she
did not want to question why.

‘I did it for the sake of your sister, Daniel de Lancey,’ she
said, reaching for an acceptable half-truth. ‘Rebecca would not wish me to
condemn you to hang if I could save your neck.’

He went very still. ‘Do I know you?’

‘You did once,’ Lucinda said.

He took her chin in his hand and turned her face up to the
moonlight, and Lucinda took the opportunity to study him as candidly as he was
scrutinising her. He had not changed so much from the young man she had last
seen twelve years before. He still had intensely dark hair, untouched with
grey, and dark eyes that had once bewitched every young lady in the county—eyes
so black she had once imagined fancifully that they were darker than midnight.
Differences were there, though. His face was leaner than she remembered, hardened,
perhaps, by experience and adversity—the line of the jaw harsh, the mouth firm.
And he was no longer the lanky youth he had once been, but had filled out with
hard muscle beneath his coat, so that his shoulders were broad and he seemed
taller, tougher, altogether more dangerous.

Her skin prickled with awareness beneath his fingers. Emotions
stirred. Old memories…She had been so young, only seventeen, but there had been
nothing childish about her feelings for Daniel de Lancey. He had been her first
love—her only love, if she were honest. And she had never forgotten him, not
even when humiliation and pride had flayed her alive, and common sense and
practicality and every sound, rational reason she could ever come up with had
prompted her to let his memory go.

He pursed his lips into a soundless whistle.

‘Lucy Spring…By all that’s miraculous…’ There was something in
his eyes, something of nostalgia laced with a wickedness that made her heart
turn over. But she was a sensible widow now, not a lovestruck young girl who
would fall for his shallow charm a second time.

‘Lucinda Melville,’ she corrected primly.

His hand fell. ‘Of course. I heard that you had wed. You did not
wait for me as you promised.’

Emotion raked Lucinda suddenly, as raw and painful now as it had
been eight years before, when she had heard of his betrayal. ‘You did not come
back for me as
you
promised.’ The hot words tumbled from her lips before
she could help herself. ‘How dare you reproach me? You left me without a word.
I waited four years, Daniel! And then I heard that you had abandoned
me—abandoned everything you had previously held dear!’ There was a wealth of
bitterness and humiliation in her voice. ‘Did you expect me to wait for ever?’

It seemed a long time before he replied. His face was in shadow
and she could not read his tone. ‘Yes,’ he said, at last. He shifted a little.
‘Yes, I suppose that I did.’

‘I never received anything from you,’ Lucinda said. ‘No word, no
letters…Did you write to me at all? Did you even think of me?’

There was a silence. She could still remember the stifling
conventionality of the vicarage drawing room where, over tea each and every
day, her mother’s visitors would press her gently on whether she had heard from
her fiancé yet and commiserate maliciously with her when she was forced to
admit she had not.

‘It was a long time ago,’ Daniel said, and Lucinda’s heart
wrenched to have her suspicions confirmed. He had not written. He had not
cared.

‘So it was,’ she said. ‘And now I am a widow and you are a
pirate, so I hear.’

She saw him grin. ‘You heard correctly.’

She looked at him. In boots and a tattered old frieze coat he
looked more like a yeoman farmer—except for the pistol and sword at his belt.

‘You do not look much like a pirate,’ she said. ‘How disappointing.’

Daniel tilted his head on one side. ‘How do you know what a
pirate looks like? Have you met any others to compare me with?’

‘No,’ Lucinda conceded. ‘I was basing my judgement on literature
only.’

‘Ah. Blackbeard?’

‘And Calico Jack.’

‘Neither had any style, so I hear.’

‘They are both dead,’ Lucinda said repressively. ‘It is not a
career with good prospects.’

Daniel laughed. ‘You always were the practical one.’

‘And you were reckless and dangerous,’ Lucinda said.

‘So, no change there. Which is why I am a pirate. We both made
our choices, did we not, Lucy? Mine to be wild and irresponsible and yours to
marry for money.’

‘I am a governess,’ Lucinda snapped, ‘not a rich widow.’

‘I heard,’ Daniel said. ‘Fine justice that you threw me over for
Leopold Melville and then he turned out to be penniless.’

The anger and hurt that Lucinda had spent years repressing jetted
up. ‘By what right do you say that, Daniel de Lancey? I waited and waited for
you, but you never came, did not even send word!’ Her voice rose. ‘Do you think
it was right that I should be obliged to wait on the whim of a man who did not
care enough to send just one letter?’ She glared at him. ‘You were an arrogant,
selfish,
heartless
boy, and you are no better now as a man! I wish I had
not saved your skin just now.’

Daniel had listened to her outburst without a word, but now he
took a step towards her. He put his hand on her wrist. Neither of them was
wearing gloves. His touch scalded her.

‘Will you give me away, then?’ he demanded. ‘Run back to the
house and raise the alarm?’

‘Of course not,’ Lucinda said contemptuously. ‘What good would
that do? You would be long gone before the militia were out.’

His fingers tightened. ‘But you would like me to be caught?’

Lucinda shrugged angrily. ‘You deserve no sympathy from me.’

‘Perhaps not. But you helped me, all the same. Why was that,
Lucy? If you bear such a grudge against me?’

Lucinda shivered a little, for beneath the anger that smouldered
in both of them she sensed something else, something much more perilous. Old
passion as hot and brittle as burning sticks.

Daniel was rubbing his fingers over the tender skin on the
underside of her wrist, sending ripples of sensation cascading along her
nerves. ‘Why?’ he asked again, softly this time.

Lucinda tried to snatch her hand away but he held on to her. ‘And
what,’ he continued, ‘were you doing out here in the dark? Meeting a lover?’

‘Mind your own business,’ Lucinda snapped, seizing on his second
question so she did not have to answer the first, more difficult one. ‘If you
must know, I was out here looking for Miss Saltire. She has a
tendre
for
Mr Chance, the Riding Officer, and I was afraid that she had made a foolish
decision to elope.’

Daniel smiled a little. ‘You would not approve of that, of
course.’

‘No, indeed. I know how misleading youthful passions can be.’

‘But instead of Miss Saltire it is her governess who is out
meeting a gentleman in the moonlight.’

‘You are no gentleman.’

‘That’s true. Which probably makes me even more dangerous to
tryst with.’

‘Then I shall leave.’

‘Very wise,’ Daniel said. His tone became contemplative. ‘Last
time we parted you kissed me goodbye.’

There was a short, sharp silence. ‘I remember,’ Lucinda said,
adding crushingly, ‘It was not a very good kiss, was it?’

She remembered that it had been sweet, though, despite their lack
of experience. And, truth to tell, she had little more knowledge of kissing now
than she had had then. One could not count Leopold’s fumbling attentions as
adding to her experience. It had been endurance rather than passion that had
been her companion in the marriage bed. Leopold had accused her of coldness and
had turned from her in fury.

She suspected that Daniel’s experience with the opposite sex, in contrast
to her own, had increased in leaps and bounds—a suspicion confirmed when he
said, ‘No doubt we could do better now.’

Lucinda’s stomach muscles clenched with a mixture of nervousness
and longing. She tried hard to ignore it.

‘No doubt we could,’ she said. ‘But such things were over between
us a long time ago, Daniel.’

‘Then consider it no more than an expression of thanks.’

‘Most people,’ Lucinda said, ‘would make do with a handshake.’

Daniel smiled. ‘But not me.’

He drew her in to his body and the shadows merged and shifted as
his arms closed about her. His lips were cold against hers. Lucinda had
imagined that she would resist him, but now she found that she did not want to
do so. Their bodies fitted together as though they had never been apart, as
though the intervening years had never existed.

Lucinda parted her lips instinctively and felt his tongue, warm
and insistent, touch hers. She had wondered how he would taste, and now she
knew: he tasted of the sea and the air and something clean and masculine and
deliciously sensual. She felt shocked and aroused, and shocked by her own
arousal. It had been such a long time. She had thought that her wild, wanton
side was gone for ever. Sensible Lucinda, who advised debutantes against unruly
passion, should not feel hot and dizzy and melting in a pirate’s embrace.