The Pleasure of Your Kiss Read Online Free

olive-skinned face split in a grin, revealing several dazzling white teeth and one gleaming gold one placed squarely in the center of his mouth. He threw back his head with a bellow of laughter. The other men were quick to join in, making it clear the joke was at Clarinda’s expense.
    When the man spoke, his voice was a hearty boom, but his English was as sound as her own. “’Twould be a shame to skewer a creature with such spirit. She’ll fetch a pretty price at market.” He looked her up and down, the assessing gleam in his eyes making her feel as if she were already standing naked and shivering on some slaver’s block. “There are many men in this world who would pay a king’s ransom just for the pleasure of breaking her.”
    At that moment a gust of wind snatched the hat from Clarinda’s head. Her hair came tumbling out of its combs and around her shoulders in a spill of wheaten silk.
    The Corsairs breathed an appreciative chorus of oohs and aahs. A man with the face of a malnourished weasel and two broken and blackened front teeth actually stretched out a hand as if to touch her hair, his eyes glazed and his jaw slack with longing. Before his dirt-encrusted fingertips could brush a single strand, Clarinda jabbed the hatpin deep into the tender pad between his thumb and forefinger.
    Letting out a howl, the pirate drew back his wounded hand as if to backhand her. The giant gave him a casual cuff, laying him out flat on the deck with no more effort than it would have taken for an ordinary man to swat a gnat.
    “Keep your filthy paws to yourself,” the giant growled. “I do not want any marks on the merchandise.”
    The tender smile he turned on Clarinda was even more terrifying than his snarl. Deprived of her meager weapon, she began to back away from him once again with Poppy still clinging to her back like a barnacle.
    The hitch of a sob in her friend’s breath echoed her own growing despair. “Oh, if only Captain Sir Ashton Burke was here!” Poppy moaned. “I just know such a man could save us!”
    As the half circle of pirates advanced on them, their swarthy faces still glistening with the sweat of battle and their dark eyes gleaming with a chilling combination of lust and bloodlust, an even more violent gust of wind tore Captain Burke’s likeness from Clarinda’s numb fingers. The sketch went sailing over the ship’s rail, borne away on the wings of the wind.
    “That’s the problem with heroes, Poppy,” she said grimly. “There’s never one around when you need one.”

Chapter Two

    N o woman was worth dying for.
    That creed had kept Ashton Burke alive for more than nine years. It had inspired him to dodge the lethal points of countless bayonets when he was fighting for his men and his country in the blinding monsoons of Burma. It had strengthened his steps when he was using a machete to hack his way through the jungles of India, where the air was so heavy and thick it coiled around a man’s chest like a python intent upon squeezing the last breath of air from his lungs. It had kept him in the saddle for endless hours as he drove his horse across stinging sands through the deserts of North Africa, pursued by tribes of bedouin warlords howling for his blood and for whatever priceless antiquity he had liberated from their own greedy clutches.
    No woman was worth dying for.
    Unfortunately, the firing squad he was facing had other notions. As did the irate husband who had ordered his execution.
    He gazed down the breech-loaded barrels of a dozen muskets, assailed by a memory of midnight-black hair cascading over skin perfumed with jasmine and myrrh, inviting brown eyes lined in a kohl that accentuated their exotic tilt, lush lips that were the color of cinnamon but tasted of honey and ripe pomegranates.
    Perhaps both the firing squad and the husband were right. Perhaps some women were worth dying for.
    But strangely enough, when they came to slip the blindfold over his eyes, shielding them from