Ransom My Heart by Meg Cabot Page A

at the first sign of having been observed.
    Hugo stared down at the lovely apparition swimming below him, his thoughts a-jumble in his head. Foremost among them was the question, Who is she? , though he knew the answer to that. Finnula Crais, the miller’s daughter. There had been a family of that name in villenage to his father, Hugo remembered. This, then, must be one of their offspring. But what was this miller about, allowing a defenseless maid to roam the countryside unescorted and dressed in such provocative garb—or completely undressed, as the case now stood?
    As soon as Hugo arrived at Stephensgate Manor, he would send for the miller, and see to it that the girl was better protected in the future. Did the man not ken the riffraff that traveled the roads these days, the footpads and cutthroats and despoilers ofyoung women such as the one below him? Of course, the girl had more than proven her mettle back at the inn, but Hugo knew that most criminals were nowhere near as stupid as Dick and Timmy. The girl would not have lasted a second in London, and it was miraculous that she had not yet met with disaster here in Shropshire.
    So fixed was Hugo upon his musings that for a moment, he did not realize that the maid had paddled out of view. Where the waterfall cascaded, the pool below was out of his line of vision, being blocked off by the rock outcropping on which he lay. He assumed that the girl had ducked beneath the waterfall, perhaps to rinse her hair, which he noticed she’d kept well above the water. Such a heavy mane would take hours to dry, and perhaps she preferred to cleanse it in the fresh water from the spring rather than in the slightly staler pool.
    Hugo waited, pleasantly anticipating the girl’s reappearance. He wondered to himself whether the chivalrous thing to do was to creep away now, without drawing attention to himself, then meet up with her again upon the road, as if by accident, and offer her escort home to the Stephensgate.
    It was as he was deciding that he would do so, but not without a last glance at her slim beauty, that he heard a soft sound behind him, and then suddenly something very sharp was at his throat, and someone very light was astride his back.
    It was with an effort that Hugo controlled his instinctive defensive reactions. Having been employed as a soldier for the past ten years, his senses were honed into pure fighting mechanisms, and whether he was partaking in a barroom brawl or rooting out Saracens, his instinct was to strike first, and question later.
    But he had never before felt so slim an arm circle his neck, or such slight thighs straddle his back. Nor had his head ever been jerked back against such a temptingly soft cushion. Whenthe curtain of auburn hair fell about him, caressing his face and filling his senses with the light fragrance of rose, he was glad he hadn’t reached back and hurled his fair adversary over his head and down the gorge, where she would undoubtedly have split open her skull on the rocky banks below.
    â€œStay perfectly still,” advised his captor, and Hugo, enjoying the warmth from her thighs and, more particularly, the softness of the hollow between her breasts, where she kept the back of his head firmly anchored, was happy to oblige her.
    â€œI’ve a knife at your throat,” the maid informed him in her boyish voice, “but I won’t use it unless I have to. If you do as I say, you shan’t be harmed. Do you understand?”
    Hugo felt that a token of resistance must be made, though above all else, he did not want to injure the girl. So he attempted to lift his arms from where they hung, still holding the flask beneath the waterfall. But the diminutive fireball astride his back would have none of it, and stamped a pretty bare foot down upon his forearm, surprising him so that he dropped the flask into the pool below.
    â€œLeave it!” she commanded, in an imperious voice. “I told you not to