His Lady's Ransom. Merline Lovelace

He’s…infatuated with you, ‘tis all.”

      “If infatuation is all it is, you need not worry,” Madeline snapped, tugging furiously at his hold.

      “Cut the strings you keep him dangling by, or I’ll cut them myself, in a manner you’ll like not.”

      Incensed, Madeline swung back to face him. “You may take your threats and your insults straight to the reddest, hottest flames of hell, my lord, and yourself with them.”

      His jaw clenching, he caught both of her arms in an iron, unbreakable hold. “Let the lad be, lady.”

      “Why should I do so?” she retorted, stung by the flat coldness in a voice that had sent a shiver of delight through her only moments before. She wanted to hurt this man, as he’d hurt her. Humble him. Cause him to sweat under his fur-lined surcoat. If this…this dolt wanted to think she sought to ensnare his precious brother, then she’d not disabuse him of his folly.

      Without giving him time to reply, she rushed on. “The boy’s besotted, any fool can see that. And he has lands and incomes greater by far than my previous lords,” she ended on a sneer.

      He tightened his grip, drawing her up, until her toes just touched the stone walk and her head tilted back. A muscle twitched at one side of his jaw.

      Madeline watched it, fascinated and a little frightened. She swallowed, thinking that mayhap she’d been a little too precipitate. Wetting her lips, she drew in a deep breath.

      “My lord…” she began.

      “Will’s estates and income are under my control.” He ground out the words. “If ‘tis moneys you want, you play with the wrong brother.” He drew her against him, banding her body to his with an arm around her waist.

      “My lord!”

      “Why not try your games with me, Lady Madeline?” he taunted softly. “Let’s see how skilled you really are.”

      She splayed her hands against his chest, pushing against the hold that held her locked to him in such intimate embrace. “I thought you did not hunt in your brother’s preserves!”

      “That was when I believed Will the hunter. I see now he’s the quarry, instead.”

      Madeline arched backward, and realized immediately her mistake. Her hips pressed hard into his. Through the thick layers separating them, she could feel the unyielding strength of his thighs, the flat planes of his belly. And something else. Something that grew harder with every effort she made to twist free.

      She was the king’s ward, Madeline thought incredulously. She could claim royal protection. Yet this arrogant knight appeared to care naught. He would take her here, on the bare, windswept ground, did she let him!

      “You’d best beware,” she warned, breathing hard. “’Tis also royal ground you poach upon.”

      She’d meant to remind him that she was under the king’s protection, but she saw at once he’d mistaken her meaning. Disgust flared in his eyes, the same disgust she’d seen when he looked upon her at the high table, seated beside John. Before she could make clear her meaning, or even decide if she wanted to, he tangled a fist in the silk anchored over her braided hair and angled her face up to his.

      “Well, at least we know the game is plentiful,” he told her grimly, then bent and took her lips with his.

      It was a kiss intended to convey more insult than passion, and it did. His lips were hard and unyielding, taking rather than giving. They branded her. Seared her. Humiliated her as no spoken insult could have. Never in her brief years of marriage had Madeline felt so used or so dominated by a man.

      He shifted, widening his stance. Madeline gave a muffled squeak of dismay as she felt herself bent backward over his arm.

      Her distress penetrated the fury ringing in Ian’s ears. Christ’s bones, he hadn’t meant to savage the woman, only to show her whom it was she had pitted herself against.

      Not unskilled himself in the games played between men and women, Ian brought her up against him and savored the unexpected pleasure that shot through him at the feel of her body arching into his. He gentled his kiss, and his lips molded hers, tasting instead of torturing, teasing instead of taking.

      She gave a soft, breathless moan, and her fingers loosed their clawing hold on his arms.

      Ian lifted his head, his nostrils flaring in fierce male satisfaction at the sound of her surrender. His conscience screamed ‘twas Will’s love he held in his arms, but when she stared up at him, her huge eyes dazed, he could not have loosed her had his life depended on it.

      Madeline drew in a shaky breath, trying to gather her disordered senses. Anger coursed through her, so fast and hot she shivered with the force of it. And stunned astonishment that the earl would use her like some kitchen wench. And desire. Hot, shameful desire.

      Her lips throbbed from the force of his, and when he lowered his head to kiss her once again, Madeline knew she had to win free of him.

      Abandoning all pretensions to courtly sophistication or dignity, she did what she’d done once before, when she and John were but six and he wrestled her to the ground in an argument over a frog they’d found.

      She bit her tormentor. Hard.

      The earl jerked back with a startled oath.

      Madeline twisted out of his arms. Had it been a sword, the glare she gave him would have sliced off his manhood. Picking up her skirts, she stalked out of the garden.

      Chapter Three

      Madeline spent a restless night, tossing and turning on the thick fur-covered pallet on the floor. Not for anything would she have shared the curtained bed with the other women assigned to the tower chamber. Her long, frightened hours in the dark privy as a child had given her a dislike of confined spaces that she’d never lost. She far preferred a scratchy mattress of straw to the closeness of the wood-framed bed.

      The other ladies considered her strange, she knew, to forfeit warm comfort for a mat on the hard floor. Or, worse, they thought her sly beyond words, placing her pallet near the door so that she could slip away unnoticed to go to her lover’s bed. Madeline could have told them of her childhood fright, but her pride refused to admit such silly weakness to any but John. Besides, she’d long since learned not to care what others thought.

      So why did the scorn of one particular earl raise her ire so? she wondered irritably, curling her body into a tight ball under the furs. Why did she clench her teeth in the predawn darkness at just the memory of his punishing kiss? Why should she care if he, like all the others, believed her mistress to the king’s son?

      ‘Twas no disgrace to take a lover, after all. Queen Eleanor herself had postulated the rules for courtly love years ago. Following well-established procedures, a knight pursued his objet d’amour with poetry and song and feats of arms, using all his skills to win his lady’s favor. Once she accepted him as her lover, a lady was bound to her knight even more than to her husband—at least in the songs of the troubadours.

      All too often, Madeline acknowledged sardonically, courtly ideals and reality clashed, sometimes with brutal results. More than one lady discovered in the arms of her chivalrous love had been beaten or even killed by her lord. Only last year, one enraged husband had served his wife her lover’s heart on a golden plate, forcing the horrified woman to partake of it before he threw her from a tower window. The queen’s courtiers still argued the lovers’ rights in that sad affair, much good it did the unfortunate pair! The bald fact was that church and canon law gave a husband absolute mastery over his wife, whatever the troubadours might sing.

      Which was why Madeline intended to use all her influence with John to ensure that she had a say in the choice of her next husband. Whichever lord she chose, he would not, she decided, bear the remotest resemblance in face, figure or temperament to Ian de Burgh.

      She snuggled deeper in the furs, pitying the poor woman given to the man as wife. She knew he was a widower