Ransom My Heart by Meg Cabot

sheep track and into the quiet solitude of the woods.
    There, the bright afternoon sunlight slid in golden shafts through the ceiling of newly burst leaves overhead. The forest floor was sun-dappled and fresh with the scent of last year’s mulch, and Hugo inhaled deeply. It had been too many years since he’d last smelled good English peat.
    Heedless of the twigs and bracken crackling beneath his large boot soles, Hugo strode forward, hearing only birds calling to one another from the canopy of leaves above, the roar of water from the spring’s cascade, and the sudden shouting of his squire behind. He stopped for a moment, wondering what ailed the boy, but decided it could only be more of the lad’s foolish complaining. Rolling his eyes again, Hugo strolled toward the rock outcropping that overlooked the gorge in which the spring lay, and stood upon the gray stones, looking down.
    With the exception of the trees, which seemed taller and more twisted than ever, the spring was much the same as when he’d last seen it. The water below was as clear as the air around him,green in the golden light that streamed through the blanket of leaves overhead, its glasslike surface disturbed only by the waterfall from the rocks upon which he stood. St. Elias’s spring flowed beneath the ground and bubbled up here through a crevice in the rocky gorge, cascading in white froth a dozen feet down to the pool below.
    The sweetest, most refreshing water imaginable; one had to catch it directly at the source, before it hit the pool below, to truly divine its worth. Hugo and his brother had spent hours on their stomachs on the very prominence on which he now stood, straining their arms down the cliff side to catch skinfuls of the cool water.
    Eyeing the nearly empty water flask on his saddle, Hugo decided to repeat the practice of his childhood, and fetched the skin, emptying its stale contents on a bed of white violets. Striding back to the outcropping, he lay full down on the sun-warmed stone, stretching one long arm, flask in hand, to catch the burbling cascade at its mossy source.
    It was as he was thus engaged that a flash of color, quite unlike the cool greens and golds of the woods around him, caught his eye, and he looked down into the gorge…and froze.
    It was the girl from the inn.
    He knew her instantly, though she wore neither chausses nor white lawn shirt now. Indeed, her ivory flesh gleamed in the afternoon sunlight as she stretched languidly upon the stony banks of the pool. Naked, all that glorious auburn hair unbound, she looked as delicate as a water sprite: Her pert breasts were no larger than would fit in a man’s hand; her slim thighs, long and white, met in a fluff of silky hair that echoed the shade of the curtain of curls that fell around her slender shoulders; her waist was so narrow his hands would fit around it, his fingers meeting in themiddle; her flanks were lean and white, and, as he’d noticed back at the inn, her backside distinctly heart-shaped.
    All this he observed in the moment she hesitated upon the bank, first stretching and then coiling that long cape of hair into a knot on the top of her head. Then, with the grace of a porpoise, she slipped into the crystal waters.
    It was then that Hugo realized he’d been holding his breath, so anxious was he not to break the spell of the moment. Lying flat as he had been, there was no possibility of the girl seeing him, but he had lain frozen just the same, afraid he might do something to alert the maid to his presence and cause her to flee.
    That she would flee if he revealed himself he was quite certain. He readily equated her to the wild things that lived in the woods around them, most especially with the shy red foxes inhabiting burrows at the forest’s edge. She had the look of a vixen about her, wild and sly and yet strangely diffident. Like any virtuous maid, she would not welcome intruders to her bath, and would surely run