LITMIR.BIZ

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was a lot quicker and stronger than I was.

      He caught me within six paces, as I dived into a copse of pine trees in a vain attempt to hide. If I had thought him rough before, it was nothing to how he treated me now. He grabbed my arm, knocking me to the ground and pinning me there with the weight of his body on mine. All the breath was crushed out of me.

      The ground beneath me was dry and soft with last year’s pine needles. I lay still, inhaling the sharp, fresh scent and trying to catch my breath. It was too dark to see his face, but I was aware of every tense line of his body against my own. My hands were trapped against his chest, and beneath the coarse material of his coat I could feel the hardness of muscle and his heart beating steadily. In that moment all my senses seemed acutely sharp, so much so that I could smell the scent of him: leather, horses, fresh air and an echo of citrus that mingled with the smell of pine. His cheek brushed mine, and I felt the warmth and roughness of his skin against my own. A shiver seemed to echo its way through my entire body. And in that moment, although I could see nothing of his face in the darkness beneath the trees, I recognised him and knew who he was.

      ‘Mr Sinclair!’

      I heard him swear, and he clapped a hand over my mouth again. ‘Quiet!’

      I ignored him, trying ineffectually to struggle free from beneath his weight.

      ‘When you said I would see you within the month,’ I said, ‘I had no notion you meant it to be so soon.’ I took a deep breath. ‘And what the devil,’ I added, ‘do you think you are doing, smuggling whisky and accosting young ladies on the road?’

      His grip relaxed a little, though he still held me pinioned beneath him. It was, in truth, disturbingly pleasant to be held thus, so hard against him. My body, which seemed to have developed a will of its own from the first moment I had met Mr Neil Sinclair, was busy telling me just how pleasurable the whole business was. I tried to ignore the stirring of desire deep inside me, but Neil would not let me up, trapping me with one leg across my skirts and thus keeping me trussed up beneath him.

      ‘Stop struggling,’ he said, and his voice sounded lazily amused. ‘I rather like you like this, Miss Balfour.’

      I gave an angry sigh. ‘You have not answered my question,’ I said. I relaxed for a moment, staring at the spiky pattern of the pine needles against the dark blue of the night sky. ‘Why smuggle whisky?’

      ‘Why not?’ He sounded maddeningly reasonable. ‘The King’s taxes are criminally high.’

      ‘But you are an officer in the Navy and heir to an earldom!’

      ‘Which has nothing to do with the exorbitant state of the taxes.’ He moved slightly, his hand coming up gently to brush the tumbled hair away from my face in what was almost a lover’s touch.

      ‘I cannot have a conversation about tax with you in this situation,’ I said, resisting the urge to turn my cheek against the caress of his fingers. ‘It is ridiculous.’

      ‘As you say.’ His voice had dropped. ‘Taxes are not the matter uppermost in my mind, either.’ He leaned closer. And at that point, when every fibre of my being was aching for him to kiss me, we heard the sound of horses on the road.

      We both froze absolutely still.

      ‘Excise men?’ I whispered.

      ‘Maybe.’ In the darkness his face was set in taut lines.

      ‘I could call out for help—’

      His gaze came away from the road and focussed hard and fast on mine in the moonlight. ‘Then why do you not?’

      For a long, long moment of silence I looked up into his face, and then I took a deep and deliberate breath.

      Throw down the gauntlet…

      His mouth came down on mine so swiftly that I never had a chance to call out, and after the first second I completely forgot that that was what I had been intending to do. The sensuality flared within me in a scalding tide, drowning out thought. He kissed me again, fiercely, hungrily, and I instinctively understood somewhere at the back of my mind that this was something that been going to happen between us from the very first moment that we had set eyes on one another.

      No one had ever kissed me before. My being the schoolmaster’s daughter, the village lads had thought me above their touch, whilst the gentlemen who had visited the Manor had thought me beneath their notice. So, although I understood the theory of love from my reading and from observation, I was quite an innocent. But Neil Sinclair did not kiss like a gentleman, and he made no concessions to my inexperience, so I had no time to worry about what to do, or how to go about the whole business of kissing. In fact, I do not believe that I spared it one thought, but simply responded to the ruthless, insistent demand of his mouth on mine.

      When he let me go, the pine needles and the stars pricking the skies above them were spinning like a top. I saw the flash of his smile in the darkness.

      ‘Thank you,’ he said. And then he was gone.

      I lay still for another long moment, thinking of the arrogance of the man in thanking me for something he had not had the courtesy to request in the first place but had simply taken, like the thief he was. Then I struggled to sit up, and from there, by degrees, to stand on legs that felt all too unsteady. I could still feel the imprint of Neil Sinclair’s lips on mine, a sensation that threatened to rob me of any remaining strength. Then I told myself that I was acting like a silly little miss—and that Mr Sinclair had behaved like the scoundrel he undoubtedly was, and deserved everything that was coming to him. I took that long-delayed deep breath and found that I could scream after all.

      ‘Help! Smugglers!’

      I stumbled out of the woods and onto the road—right in front of two English Army redcoats. Their horses shied and almost set the poor old coach horse off at a gallop—except that it was long past such excitement. One of the soldiers was so startled that he already had his musket raised and wavering in my direction.

      ‘What the hell—’

      Indeed. What I can have looked like, tumbling out of the trees with pine needles in my hair and my clothing askew, can only be wondered at. He was a short, stocky man, and from what I could see of his expression in the rising moonlight I would have said he looked of nervous disposition. Not the kind of temperament to suit hunting smugglers through the Scottish glens.

      His companion was a very different matter. Tall, fair and languid, he put out a hand to soothe the other man and stop him shooting me in a fit of anxious overexcitement.

      ‘Put away your gun, Langley,’ he murmured. ‘Can you not see this is a lady? You will frighten her.’

      He dismounted with one fluid movement and was bowing before me. ‘Madam,’ he said, ‘Lieutenant Arlo Graham, at your service. Smugglers, you say?’

      ‘Whisky smugglers in the woods,’ I said. ‘What are you waiting for?’ I looked from one to the other. ‘They are getting away.’

      Lieutenant Graham sighed. He seemed utterly disinclined to plunge off up the wooded mountainside in hot pursuit. Perhaps it would have disarranged his uniform.

      ‘Too late,’ he said. ‘They will be well away by now.’ He turned to the carriage. ‘Is this your conveyance, madam?’

      ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I am Miss Balfour, niece to Mr Ebeneezer Balfour of Glen Clair.’

      ‘But where is your coachman?’

      ‘I have no notion,’ I said truthfully. ‘I believe the wretch ran off when the smugglers stopped the coach.’

      ‘And why should they do that?’ Langley interposed. Rudely, I thought. ‘If they were smuggling whisky why draw attention to themselves by stopping the coach?’

      ‘I have no notion,’ I said again, rather less patiently this time. ‘I am not in their confidence, sir.’

      Lieutenant Graham smiled. ‘Of course not,

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