Ransom My Heart

by Meg Cabot

  “’Tis rather hard to tell, beneath all that dirt.” Hugo strode from one side of the solar to the other, as rapidly as a caged wolf Finnula had once seen in Leesbury. “The boy would be what, ten years old, then?”

  “Just.”

  Hugo stopped pacing of a sudden, and focused his inscrutable amber-eyed gaze upon her with a directness that was disconcerting. “And his mother would be?”

  Finnula rose from the windowsill and moved to the bed. Her brow was knit with annoyance, and she forgot all about Robert’s advice that she act more womanly before her husband. “You forget your lovers so soon?” she sniffed. “I wonder how long ’twill be before I’m forgotten!” She knew she sounded a petulant wife, but she could not still her tongue. How was it that a man could bed a woman, and ten years later not remember her name? Finnula would never, did she live to be one hundred, forget Hugo.

  “My lover?” Hugo echoed. “I was fifteen! I had no lover then.” Then he grinned rakishly at her. “But you I wouldn’t dare forget. You’re too well-armed.”

  Finnula, turning down the sheets on the opposite side of the bed, glared at him. He appeared to be joking, but she could never really tell. He was very strange, this man she had married. For the life of her, she could not decide why he had agreed to wed her. Except, she supposed, to prevent scandal.

  “Well, tell me,” Hugo said. “Who is this woman I supposedly got with child?”

  “There is no supposedly about it,” was Finnula’s tart reply. She slid beneath the sheets and looked at him, unabashedly staring at his nude body, and wondering what it would be like to have that great thing hanging between her own legs. Mayhap, had she one, she, too, would be unable to recall the names of the women into whom she’d inserted it.

  “Your father himself recognized Jamie as his grandchild,” Finnula went on, circling her knees with her arms and sitting up in the great bed. “’Tis only because Maggie died giving birth to him that the boy was left to run wild—”

  “Maggie,” Hugo said, his brows constricting. “Her name was Maggie?”

  Irritated because he still looked blank, Finnula said, “Yes. Maggie. I don’t know the whole of the story, being myself but seven years old at the time, but you supposedly dallied with her in the milking barn—”

  “The milking barn,” Hugo repeated. And then, loudly, he cried, “Not Maggie! Not the milkmaid!”

  Finnula regarded him calmly. “Aye, Maggie the milkmaid. Does it begin to come back to you now?”

  This news seemed to stagger Hugo, and he sank onto the end of the bed, oblivious of the fact that he’d nearly trodden upon Gros Louis’s front right paw.

  “Maggie,” Hugo echoed, like one from whom a fog has lifted. “Maggie the milkmaid. Ah, sweet Maggie…”

  Finnula hadn’t thought she’d spend her wedding night discussing her husband’s past loves, but as her only other wedding night had been even more unpleasant, she imagined she should be grateful things weren’t worse. Plucking up the wolf pelt, since a breeze had been rattling the shutters and the chamber had grown a bit chilled, she huddled down beneath it, blinking sleepily against the light from the wall sconce.

  “Maggie,” her husband murmured again, and had Maggie still been living, Finnula would have gladly run her through with a shaft from her quiver.

  “Aye,” she said irritably. “Now put out the sconces, will you? I’m tired and want to go to bed.”

  Hugo turned as if startled, and looked at her over his naked shoulder. She tried to keep her face impassive, but something Hugo saw in it caused him to grin in a completely infuriating manner. “Jealous, are you, love?” he asked, reaching out to give one of her feet a poke through the bedclothes.

  “Certainly not,” Finnula sniffed, and she kicked at the hand that teased her. “You think a mite too much of yourself, my lord.”

  “Oh, do I?”

  There was something distinctly lascivious in his grin, which Finnula chose to ignore, turning to beat her pillow into a plumper shape. “There’s no use your looking at me like that,” she informed him sharply. “And since I’m not going to swoon at the sight of your naked body, you might as well put on a bed robe—”

  “You’re very proper now, aren’t you?” Hugo stretched his long frame onto the bed beside her, his eyes glowing unnervingly gold in the light from the hearth. “Quite the prim lady, now that you’re married.”

  Finnula shrugged. “I told you that you’d regret marrying me.”

  “Oh, yes, I’m already beginning to.” Hugo lifted the wolf pelt and looked beneath it. “And wearing clothes to bed, too! How novel! I must say I preferred what you wore to bed that night at the inn—”

  “That night,” Finnula snapped, sitting up, “was a mistake—”

  “Oh, most certainly. A very grave one.”

  “—and ’tis not too late to rectify it,” Finnula went on, as if he hadn’t spoken.

  “Not too late?” Hugo grinned quizzically. “And how might that be? If I recall rightly, Father Edward pronounced us man and wife—”

  “But the marriage has yet to be consummated,” Finnula hastened to explain, “and can still be annulled…”

  A single raised eyebrow joined its twin in a downward rush as Hugo glowered at her. “I see,” he said, and his deep voice no longer held any amusement.

  Finnula eyed him uncertainly, hoping that she hadn’t angered him overmuch. He ought, if he was any sort of man at all, to be overjoyed that she was again offering him a way out of this ridiculous marriage. He had already told her that no man wished to be saddled with a wife. Here she was, generously agreeing to release him from the unwanted shackles of wedlock. But, alas, no! Judging from his expression, he wasn’t pleased at all.

  And yet, as if she hadn’t said a word, he reached forward, seemingly unconsciously, and found a limp flower petal that lay tangled in a curl of her long hair. Finnula watched as his large, callused fingers gently drew the white petal down the length of the curl, his knuckles brushing one of her breasts as he did so. Her rebellious nipple sprang erect at the contact, pressing insistently against the thin material of her nightdress. Finnula looked down at it, nibbling on her lower lip. Fie! Was she so wanton that his barest touch set her aflame?

  She was only too aware of the answer to that question.

  If Hugo noticed her body’s reaction to his touch, he didn’t say anything. Instead, successfully removing the petal from the loosened auburn curl, he held up the fragile leaf, and examined it in the firelight.

  “And you would be released from this marriage,” he said, looking at the flower and not at her, “because you despise and revile me?”

  God’s teeth! The man was impossible.

  “Nay, not that,” Finnula said, making an effort to keep her voice steady and low. “I am…fond enough of you.”

  “Fond of me?” The golden gaze swiveled toward her, and Finnula was uncomfortably aware that, with his back now to the fire, she could not quite make out his expression. “Are you? Then why this urgency to annul what I have spent so much time—and coin—to arrange?” When Finnula, frustrated, did not formulate a reply with enough alacrity to suit him, Hugo went on, “Is it because of the boy?”

  Finnula hesitated. “Nay…”

  “Is it because of his mother?” Hugo leaned forward and captured yet another flower petal between his thumb and forefinger. Extricating it from a silken tress, the back of his hand brushed her other breast, and the nipple reacted as sensitively as its twin. “Do you not ken how much I regret what happened to her? Maggie was sweet…but she was older than me by a good five years, and I won’t say she didn’t know what she was doing. Far more than I did…But I regret I was not here to see that she was better taken care of…she and the boy…but you’ll recall my family did try to send me off to a monastery.”

  He was having a bit more trouble removing this flower petal than he’d had with the last. His thick fingers worked with surprising dexterity, but occasionally, Finnula felt the gentle warmt
h of his hand against her throat, or excruciatingly close to her ear-lobe. She swallowed, her mouth gone suddenly dry.

  “Aye,” she said, and her voice was oddly hoarse. “But you have amply proven that you care not how many women you bed—”

  “That was once so,” Hugo said, gathering her lock of hair toward him, ostensibly to better examine the tangled leaf. “And I am fortunate that, with the exception of poor Maggie, no one was harmed by my amorous adventures. But now that I have a wife, I shall cleave only unto her, as the priest so instructed me, not twelve hours ago.”

  Finnula snorted, though it was difficult to keep her head about her while he lay so close, playing with her curls, the firelight casting his naked flesh in bronze. The mat of golden hair that carpeted his chest, then tapered down toward his flat belly, was particularly distracting. “A wife who brings you no fortune, no property?” Finnula shook her head. “A wife who can neither cook nor sew? Verily, my lord, you have been too long away from England, and have lost all sense of practicality. Such a wife is nigh useless—”

  “Useless?” The fingers Hugo had been running through her hair dipped suddenly to close over one of her small breasts. Gasping at the sudden contact, Finnula raised startled eyes to meet her husband’s.

  “I believe the outpouring of folk who came to our wedding today proved how useful you have been to many in the past, Finnula,” Hugo said, his fingers kneading the soft flesh. “Not least with a bow. Nay, I can think of many things at which you are quite useful—”

  So saying, he lowered his head and, through the thin batiste of her gown, delicately tasted her taut nipple with his tongue. Finnula, suddenly feeling quite warm, pushed back the wolf pelt, revealing long legs bared from the thighs down, since the hem of her nightdress had become twisted round her hips.

  Noticing this, Hugo lost no time in sliding his free hand between those slim white thighs, before Finnula, her cheeks blazing, could adjust the gown. Then, when she made a movement as if to snatch away from him, Hugo rose up suddenly, and lowered his heavy body over hers, effectively cutting off all escape routes.

  “Nay, madam,” he said, his laughing amber eyes gleaming down at her. “I’d say you are quite useful at other things not requiring a bow, as well…”

  Finnula struggled to keep her wits about her, but the introduction of a hardened thigh between her legs once again made rational thinking impossible. Hugo’s body was weighing down upon hers, and it was a weight she welcomed, for her body was instantly reminded by it of pleasure received in the recent past. Before she could stop herself, her arms were curling around his neck, her legs spreading to better accommodate him between them. God’s teeth, but she wanted him. Perhaps it was just as well that they stay wed after all…

  And then Hugo’s lips came down over hers, and all ability to think left her. She closed her eyes, feeling a familiar rush of warmth between her thighs as Hugo insinuated first one, then another finger within her. Instinctively, she arched her pelvis against him, and had the satisfaction of hearing him moan.

  “Not yet, my love,” he whispered raggedly against her mouth. “Not yet.”

  His hands moved to the neckline of her gown. Finnula’s eyes flew open as she heard the fabric rend. Gasping as he tore her nightdress down the middle as effortlessly as if it were made of parchment, Finnula cried, “Hugo! Are you mad?”

  Now that her creamy skin, tip-tilted breasts, and the silken patch of red hair between her thighs were revealed to him, Hugo grinned, eminently satisfied. “Nay. Let that be a lesson to you, love.” He chuckled. “Wear naught when you come to bed with me, or all your gowns, however pretty, will meet a similar fate.”

  Finnula eyed him, thinking that she’d married a barbarian, and was about to make her feelings on the matter known when, of a sudden, the lips that moments before had ravaged her mouth suddenly settled over a pink nipple. The sharp words that had been on Finnula’s lips turned to a moan of pleasure as Hugo’s mouth, hot on her tender skin, burned a trail of kisses down her flat white belly, and then even farther down, until once more his tongue tasted the russet curls at the joining of her thighs. This was definitely not something her sisters had mentioned that their husbands practiced—and the Crais sisters had been quite thorough in their sexual education of Finnula while dressing her that morning. But it was something Finnula was fairly certain she could get used to.

  It wasn’t until her groans excited in him a similar longing that Hugo rose, shaking off her clinging fingers, which had fisted in his hair, and plunged himself into the tight warmth he’d been kissing moments before, finally making them husband and wife in truth, and wiping out any hope of an annulment. Finnula cried out in wordless pleasure as he drew back and entered her again, more deeply this time.

  When release came, it crashed over both of them simultaneously, rocking Hugo forward again and again, driving Finnula back into the pillows with the force of his thrusts. Crying out hoarsely as wave after wave of pleasure rolled over her, Finnula didn’t even hear Hugo’s triumphant roar as he collapsed against her.

  It was only when the two of them finally lay still, their hearts pounding against each other’s, their breathing ragged, that they became aware of the sound of voices outside the solar’s windows. Hugo raised his head from Finnula’s damp throat. “What the hell…?”

  Then, when it became clear that the voices were those of their wedding guests, and that they were cheering, and calling up words of encouragement, Finnula felt herself turn crimson.

  “God’s teeth, Hugo! They must have heard you!” she whispered.

  “Me?” Hugo looked distinctly amused, and not at all embarrassed. “I wasn’t the one screaming.”

  “I didn’t scream,” Finnula cried, shocked. Then, doubtfully, she whispered, “Did I?”

  Hugo only chuckled, and, moving from her, reached for the wolf pelt. This he pulled over her nakedness, as if, with it, he could shield her from the world. Then he slipped back into his braies and, barefoot, padded to one of the unshuttered windows.

  Finnula rose up on one elbow, eyeing him curiously. “Whatever are you doing?” she asked the man who was now, for better or for worse, her husband in every sense of the word.

  “Getting rid of them,” he growled, shaking something in his hand that tinkled. “I’ll not have an audience on my wedding night…even if it is too late.” Then, calling out to the crowd below, he hurled a fistful of coins to the ground. “Take that, you ruffians,” he cried. “And get gone!”

  Appreciative squeals met his shower of coins, and Hugo was still chuckling as he drew the shutters closed. Finnula sank back against the pillows, sleepily admiring her husband’s fine profile. Mayhap marriage to such a man would not be so bad, she thought. Mayhap he could be taught…

  And when Hugo, extinguishing the wall sconces and once again stripping off his braies, slid beneath the wolf pelt and pulled her against him, she knew, with drowsy certainty, that there was no place else she would rather be. She fell asleep with her cheek upon his shoulder, lulled by the steady rise and fall of his broad chest.

  Chapter Sixteen

  When Hugo woke the next morning, it was because his wife was sidling off the edge of the bed, taking such excruciating care not to wake him that it was obvious she was up to no good. Hugo immediately rolled over onto the trailing ends of her hair, and, feigning slumber, pulled her back into his arms. Finnula made no protest, which led him to believe that whatever she’d been up to would keep…at least until after he’d caught up on a few more hours of badly needed sleep.

  When Hugo awoke again, it was almost midday and Finnula was conspicuously absent from his bed. She had not wandered very far, however. He could hear her throaty voice in the yard below his windows, barking out orders in the manner of someone well-used to doing so. Hugo did not have the slightest idea what she could be about, and was not at all certain that he wanted to know. He rose, however, and after a good deal of stretching and splashing cold water onto his face—it had never occurre
d to him that having a young wife was going to prove so physically taxing—he flung open the window shutters and blinked at the vivid spring colors that greeted him…the expanse of cloudless blue sky, the emerald of the treetops, and the bright copper color of his wife’s plaited hair.

  At first he thought it a trick of the strong sunlight that it appeared as if the yard below was filled with furniture, around which Finnula, followed by the galumphing mastiff Gros Louis, strutted—in her leather braies, he noted, grimly. But after he’d thoroughly wiped the sleep from his eyes, he saw that, indeed, his father’s canopied bed sat in the middle of the courtyard, along with a number of other items from the late earl’s solar. Hugo recognized a few shields, his father’s water ewer, even a chamber pot, all piled haphazardly in the center of the courtyard. As he watched, his squire, Peter, came stumbling into view, staggering beneath the weight of the late earl’s favorite chair.

  “Very good, Peter,” Finnula said. “Put it right there, by the bed.”

  “Yes, m’lady.” Down went the chair, with a thump and a crack of wood that caused even Hugo, two stories above, to wince. “You want I should bring down that trunk in the corner by the window?”

  “Yes, of course,” Finnula replied, as if she were speaking to a particularly dense child…and Peter being Peter, Hugo didn’t think she was far wrong. “Everything, Peter. I want everything brought down.”

  “Yes, m’lady.” Peter turned, obeying Her Ladyship’s commands with an alacrity that he’d never exhibited while serving Hugo. Hugo, frowning, tapped his fingers against the stone window casement, and cleared his throat.

  “Lady Finnula,” he called down, pleasantly.

  Old Webster appeared at that moment, dragging a ragged tapestry behind him. “’Ere ye are, m’lady. Where d’ye want it?”

  “Oh, just drape it anywhere.” Shading her eyes with a hand, Finnula craned her neck to squint up at Hugo. “Good morning, my lord,” she called.

  “Good morning, my lady.” Hugo folded his powerful arms across his chest. “’Tis a pleasant day, is it not?”