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seduced him.
    “You’ll have to bend your head if you wish me to kiss you,” she ground out. “Unless, of course, you prefer to dispense with such boring preliminaries.”
    Richard couldn’t help himself. He’d intended to play the game out, to discover what scheme the lady had hatched with Sir James, but the farce proved too much for him. Laughter rumbling in his chest, he wrapped an arm around her waist and tugged her hard against him.
    “Oh, no, lass. Such preliminaries never bore me. You may kiss away.”
    Eyes dancing, he grinned down at her. He fully expected her to vent the temper that flared hot and quick in her eyes. He thought for sure she’d try to clout him on the side of the head or kick back a foot to whack him in the shins. To his intense disappointment, she attempted neither.
    “This may be a matter of levity to you,” she said, her voice quivering with fury. “It is not to me.”
    His grin took a crooked bent. “No, I can see itis not. Rest easy, sweeting. I’m not about to let you sacrifice your honor for a fouled oyster like Sir James.”
    The high color in her cheeks leached away. “You swore…You promised…”
    “I promised I wouldn’t harm anyone aboard this ship. The thing is,” he said apologetically, “I never intended to. Not if I could help it, leastways. Why do you think I had my men break into the surgeon’s stores and drug the crew of the Linx if not to minimize the chance of injury to all aboard?”
    “But—but…” She sputtered, almost incoherent. “You threatened to hang James from the yardarm!”
    “Yes, well, my blood was up. A man tends to let loose with a bit of bombast after boarding an enemy ship.”
    Her mouth opened, closed, opened again. “That’s all the threat was?” she got out after a stunned moment. “A bit of bombast?”
    “That’s all it was.”
    The rueful admission left Sarah breathless with astonishment, with indignation, with fury. At that moment, she would have snatched up the man’s pistol and put a bullet through his heart without the least qualm.
    In the space of an hour or two, he’d sent her whirling through a maelstrom of emotion. First by scaring her near witless. Then by forcing Jamesto reveal his true nature and Sarah to recognize her own.
    Now…
    Now he dared to keep her body pinned against his! To smile down at her like some big, besotted dolt! To make her wish, despite her anger, despite her despair, that they could finish what they’d begun here.
    It took her some moments to realize he felt the same biting regret. Slowly, his grin faded. The roguish laughter left his eyes.
    “It must be the full moon,” he said on a rueful note. “It makes wild dogs howl and even the most civilized men suspend rational thought. But I’ve never fallen so completely under its spell until tonight.”
    She wanted to weep with the irony of it. Of all the men and all the times to feel this wild, furious racing of her blood! Swallowing the lump in her throat, she admitted the humiliating truth.
    “Nor have I.”
    “One kiss, lass. One kiss and we’ll call this bargain done.”
    “One kiss,” she agreed in a moment of breathless insanity.

CHAPTER FOUR
    O NE KISS . That’s all Richard intended to take. All he would have taken if the damned moon hadn’t cast such a spell over him.
    Or was it the delectable Lady Sarah?
    She bedazzled him. Bewitched him. Stirred a fierce, unrelenting need with just the slow, soft glide of her lips over his. Hunger leaped inside him, instant and greedy, and he deepened the kiss.
    Tongue met tongue. A searing heat danced along his skin. Hers, as well. Richard could feel it under the hand he curled around her nape. The smooth skin fired to his touch. With an inarticulate growl, he widened his stance, roped an arm around her waist and dragged her up against him.
    Sarah had never felt the slightest patience with the fainting, die-away airs displayed by the more delicate of her sex. Yet the crush of Blake’s body