Nicola Cornick, Margaret McPhee, et al (3 page)

She drew back a little on the thought, and felt him smile against
her mouth—a smile that turned her trembling insides to even greater disorder.
She was afraid that her legs might give way if he let go of her now.

‘Was that better than last time?’ he whispered.

‘I…It was…’ She grasped for words, grasped for any kind of
coherent thought.

‘You do not sound very sure.’

He
sounded wickedly sure of himself. Before she could
protest he had tangled a hand into her hair and tilted her face up so that his
mouth could ravish hers with a thoroughness that left her dazed. She found that
she was clutching his forearms, seeking stability in a world that spun like a
top.

Have some sense. Push him away…

Instead, she drew him closer, sliding her hands over his
shoulders, feeling the broadcloth of his coat rough against her cold fingers.
His jaw grazed her cheek; that too was slightly rough with stubble, and the way
it scored her sensitive skin made her shudder with helpless desire.

‘Lucinda…’ His lips were against her neck, sending the goosebumps
skittering across her skin. She felt cold, but her head was full of images of a
summer long ago. She could smell the flowers and the scent of hot grass, hear
the buzz of the bees, and see Daniel’s hands trembling slightly as he unlaced
her petticoat, his skin tanned brown against her pale nakedness.

Memory was powerfully seductive. She let go of all sense and
pressed closer, arching to Daniel as his hand slipped beneath her cloak to find
and clasp her breast, his thumb stroking urgently over the sensitised tip. She
could feel how aroused he was, feel the strong, clean lines of his body moulded
against every one of her curves. She opened her lips again to the demand of
his, and for one timeless moment they stood locked together before he released
her and stepped back with a muffled curse.

‘Devil take it, you always could do this to me, Lucy. I thought
that after twelve years—’ Daniel stopped and Lucinda drew in a long, shuddering
breath. Common sense was reasserting itself now, like a draught of cold night
air. She felt tired and bitter, and aching with a sense of loss for what might
have been, for all the golden, glorious promise that long-ago summer had held.

‘This is foolish,’ she said. Her voice shook. ‘It was all over
long ago. I must go, Daniel.’

He did not try to stop her. And because she was never going to
see him again Lucinda raised her hand to touch his cheek in a fleeting caress
before she turned away and walked towards the house. She did not mean to turn
and look back, but when she did he had gone.

T
HE
path down to the creek was treacherous
in the dark and the frost, but Daniel had walked there sufficient times in the
past to leave at least a part of his mind free to think on other matters—and
tonight that other matter was Lucy Spring. He could still feel the soft imprint
of her body against his, and smell the flower perfume of her hair, a summery
fragrance, lavender or rose or jasmine. Daniel was not sure which it had been.
It was a long time since he had had the luxury of strolling in an English
country garden, but the scent and the memory of her still filled his senses.

He ached for her, his body still alive and sharp with arousal. He
could think of nothing but the taste of her and the need to take her to bed. It
was frightening, as though all the years they had been apart were cancelled
out, counting for nothing, as though the youthful passion that had fired his
life then had reawoken and was concentrated solely in her.

She had saved him from capture. Fatally, he had not been paying
attention. His mind had been distracted. The day before he had had the
melancholy duty of visiting Newmarket, to tell the mother of one of his crew
that the lad—a boy of fourteen—had died of a fever contracted in Lisbon back in
the autumn. Breaking the news had been a dreadful experience. The woman had
looked at him with so much grief in her eyes, but had said no word of reproof.
Daniel had wanted to pour it all out—how he had nursed the boy himself, praying
desperately for his recovery, how they had thought he was improving only to see
him slip away from them so quietly that the moment of his death had come and
gone in a breath. He knew there were no other children to support her or
comfort her through her grief. He had left a big bag of gold on the table,
knowing that it was not enough, that it could never replace the only son who
had run away to sea and died on a pirate ship.

He ran a hand over his hair. On the way back to the coast he had
ridden hard, trying to outrun his demons, but they had stayed with him at every
step. When the winter fog had come down as he reached the outskirts of
Woodbridge, he had stabled the horse at the Bell and sought to drown his
sorrows in ale. He had sat alone in the bar. No one had approached him. Either
they’d known who he was, in which case they would not have dared speak to him,
or they’d thought he looked too grim to be good company. For that was the truth
of it. Once it had been enough to know that he was doing the King’s work, even
if he was doing it outside the law, but now he felt old and sick of the fight.
He had not seen his sister, his only family, for two years now. He was damnably
lonely. And seeing Lucinda, holding her close in his arms, feeling her warmth
as he pressed his mouth to the softness of her hair…That had almost been the
undoing of him. He had not wanted to let her go again. He had watched her walk
away, and it had been the hardest thing he had ever done.

It had been such a long time. He’d thought he had forgotten her.
Now the vividness of his memories and the ache of his body told him it was far
from over, no matter what Lucinda said.

But there was such bitterness between them. Daniel pushed the
dark hair back from his forehead. She had called him selfish, and it was true.
He had not thought, in his arrogant, youthful carelessness, what it must have
been like for Lucy, left at home in the stifling atmosphere of the vicarage,
fending off those spiteful tabbies who would be enquiring every day as to when
he was returning to make her his bride. As the weeks had slid into months, and
the months into years, with no word from him, what must she have thought? How
must she have felt, sitting at home waiting for him? Could he really reproach
her for breaking their betrothal and accepting Leopold Melville instead?

Daniel paused, listening for sounds of pursuit, but the night was
silent. Not even the call of an owl penetrated the dark woods.

The worst thing was that Lucy’s reproaches were well founded. He
had assumed that she would always be there for him. He had been complacent,
certain of her love for him. For a while after he had joined the Royal Navy the
sea had become his mistress, to the exclusion of all other loves. She was
demanding, imperious, dangerous, exciting. She pushed all other thoughts from
his mind. And then the Admiralty had approached him to leave the relative
security of the Navy and strike out as a privateer, gathering information,
working beyond and outside the law. It was made clear to him that he would be
denounced as a pirate from the start, in order to give his apparent betrayal
more credibility. The idea had appealed to his recklessness, and he had not
thought then of Lucy, or home, or anything beyond the excitement of the moment.
He had been a damnable fool. He had thought that one day he could go back for
her and everything between them would be as it had been.

Eventually word had come to him that she was married, and the
shock of it had brought him to his senses. He had realised what he had lost.
But it was too late. Now he knew they could never go back.

The challenge came out of the darkness and he gave the password.
One of the crew stepped onto the path in front of him. Even though the
Defiance
was a privateer, his men were drilled as on a regular Navy ship, disciplined
and sound.

‘Welcome back, sir.’ Daniel’s deputy, Lieutenant Holroyd, sounded
relieved. The crew were jumpy as cats when he was ashore. ‘There is someone to
see you.’

The
Defiance
was berthed in a deep, wide tidal pool, close
under the trees of Kestrel Creek. The tide was high and Daniel could step
aboard from the bank. It was one of his favourite moorings, but it was a
dangerous one given the length of time it took to sail out of the creek to the
open sea. But then nowhere was safe for a pirate. That was one of the things
that had attracted him to the life in the first place—The freedom and the sense
of risk. He had been young then, and dangerously wild. These days he realised
that he valued a cool head as much as reckless courage.

There was a lamp burning in his cabin, spilling warm golden light
across the papers on his desk and illuminating the still figure of the man who
sat waiting for him.

‘I heard that the Riding Officer was out,’ Justin, Duke of
Kestrel said, rising to greet him. ‘I am glad to see you made it safely back.’

Daniel shook his hand. He had worked with Kestrel for the last
five years, providing the Admiralty with intelligence on French shipping
movements during the Wars, chasing the French from British shores, smuggling
refugees from Napoleon’s regime. Daniel liked Justin; he was tough but fair.
They were also linked by the marriage of Daniel’s sister Rebecca to Justin’s
brother Lucas, but they seldom referred to their family connection. Their
relationship was strictly professional.

‘Chance almost caught me,’ he said now. ‘He’s good, but I think
someone tipped him off.’

Justin Kestrel’s brows snapped down. ‘Norton?’

‘It must be.’ Daniel threw his damp coat across the back of a
chair and loosened his stock. Many people thought that John Norton, the
infamous pirate and French spy, had died alongside his mistress in the wreck of
his ship five years before, but Daniel knew better. He had seen the ravages of
Norton’s piracy along the Suffolk coast of late, and knew that Norton was using
Daniel’s own name to cover his tracks. He had sworn to bring Norton to justice
once and for all.

‘We are trying to catch him,’ Justin said.

Daniel’s mouth set in a grim line. ‘So am I,’ he said. ‘Before he
sullies my name for ever with his cruelty.’ He shot Justin Kestrel a look.
‘That might seem strange to you, Kestrel,’ he said, with a lop-sided smile.
‘Honour amongst thieves…’

Justin shifted in his chair. He was a big man, and the cabin
seemed almost too confined for him. He looked at Daniel directly with his very
blue eyes.

‘There was another matter that I wished to discuss with you, de
Lancey. You may not have heard that your cousin, Gideon Pearce, has died.’

Daniel absorbed the news and found that he felt nothing at all.
Years ago his cousin had denounced him as a traitor and a disgrace to the
family name. The only family that mattered one whit to him was Rebecca.

‘As you know, he was childless,’ Justin Kestrel continued. ‘You
are now Baron Allandale.’

Daniel’s mouth twisted derisively. ‘I am no such thing. He
disinherited me.’

‘No, he did not. At the end, it seems, blood was thicker than
water.’

Daniel raised his brows. That had surprised him. ‘Nevertheless,’
he said, ‘I cannot inherit as a wanted criminal.’

Justin Kestrel put the brandy glass down. The lamplight shone on
the richness of the amber. ‘The government wishes you to take up your title.
They think it is time you came in to port. They are willing to grant a public
pardon. Should you wish to continue a career at sea they will offer you another
commission in the Royal Navy, as a commodore.’

‘A promotion?’ Daniel said dryly. ‘Is the Home Secretary also
willing to state that I have been working in secret for the government the
whole time?’

Justin Kestrel shifted. ‘With some persuasion, perhaps. Spencer is
a reasonable man, and he has served at the Admiralty so he understands your
role.’

Daniel grimaced. The government was notoriously and
understandably reluctant to reveal the names and activities of their spies. He
knew they would far prefer that he disappear quietly to live in the country.

‘They must want me to turn respectable very much,’ he murmured.
‘I wonder why?’

Kestrel seemed to be choosing his words carefully. ‘You are a
peer of the realm now, and you are seen to be flouting the King’s laws. If you
were to carry on as a privateer after this you would be beyond pardon. Already
some of your activities—the smuggling, for example—place you technically
outside the law, no matter that you engage in it in order to obtain
information.’

Daniel laughed. ‘I engage in it in order to obtain good French
brandy,’ he said.

‘Precisely.’

There was a silence.

‘There is a very fine estate in Shropshire,’ Kestrel continued,
‘and another in Oxfordshire.’

‘It is a long way from the sea.’

‘Perhaps you might wish to settle down, though—marry, even…?’

Daniel’s thoughts flew instinctively to Lucinda. Where had that
idea come from? Two hours before he would have said that marriage was the very
last thing he would ever contemplate. Marriage and piracy were fundamentally
opposed. Yet here was Justin Kestrel with the suggestion that he might be
married off and settled in Shropshire with a wife and family—the 28th Baron
Allandale, respectable at last. And he was getting into dangerous waters, for
he was thinking of Lucinda in his life and in his bed, her warmth thawing the
cold loneliness that had ambushed him of late, her love fending off the
darkness that threatened his soul.

He shook his head sharply. He was mad even to think of it.
Lucinda hated him for his callous disregard for her feelings all those years
ago, and anyway, respectability bored him. It was deadly dull.

He thrust his hands into his pockets. ‘And if I refuse?’