His Lady's Ransom

“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 of some years’ standing. Although she didn’t believe the earl quite so barbaric as to cut out a rival’s heart, he would no doubt make a most exacting husband. That lazy smile hid a ruthlessness Madeline had herself tasted of just yesterday. She slid a hand from under the coverings to touch her lips, still swollen and tender from his kiss. How dare he use her so, as though she were some kitchen wench, his for the taking! She hoped with all her being that Lord Ian’s lip throbbed far more painfully than did hers this morn.

“The devil take the man!” Madeline muttered, shoving aside her furs.

The rushes covering the stone floor rustled as the slumbering form on the pallet beside hers stirred. “Be ye awake, mistress?” a sleepy voice asked. “So early?”

“Aye, Gerda. Come, get you up and help me dress. I would attend early mass this morn, that I might break my fast before I ride out to watch the tourney.”

The maid rolled over on one broad hip, yawning prodigiously and scratching her hair under the nightcap she wore as protection against the chill night air. At her movement, the other maids began to stir, as well. Soon the chamber was filled with the rustle of straw pallets being rolled up and the clatter of wooden shutters thrown open to allow in the faint glow of dawn. One by one the other ladies burrowed out from the curtained nest and began their morning toilets.

“Will ye wear your red?” Gerda asked, rummaging through the tall parquet-fronted chest that held the ladies’ robes.

“Aye, and be careful with that veil!”

Madeline’s warning came too late. The gossamer silk head covering Gerda reached for snagged on a wooden peg and tore. The maid’s brown eyes flooded with remorse as she held up the ruined strip of crimson silk.

Shaking her head, Madeline poked two fingers through the ice encrusting the washbowl, then bent to splash her face with the frigid water. ‘Twould do no good to remonstrate with the maid. She had the clumsiest hands in all of England. A sturdy lass whose mother had attended Madeline as a child bride, Gerda had neither her dam’s light touch with delicate linens nor her skill with the needle. In truth, she was more apt to step upon the hem of her mistress’s robe and rend it than not. But, though she tried Madeline’s patience, she was fiercely loyal and devoted to her mistress. In Madeline’s mind, such loyalty more than compensated for the girl’s heavy hands. Still, there were times…

“Here, let me.”

Shivering in her thin wool shift, Madeline took the scarlet bliaut from the maid’s fumbling fingers. She pulled the robe over her head and thrust her arms through its wide fur-trimmed sleeves, then twisted sideways to reach the laces. A rich Burgundian red wool edged with sable, the bliaut fitted tightly over her bust and waist, then flared in thick folds over her hips. Sitting on a low stool, Madeline pulled on brightly embroidered stockings and broad-toed boots. She winced as Gerda fumbled a comb through the heavy mass of her hair, then rebraided it with rough, if competent, hands. Bending to retrieve the wooden pins the maid had dropped for the second time, Madeline herself stabbed at her scalp to anchor the braids to either side of her head. At this rate, she’d miss not only early mass, but the escort to the tourney field, as well.

At the thought of being confined to the castle all day, Madeline threw her fur-lined mantle over her shoulders and hurried out of the tower room. Lifting her skirts to avoid the occasional droppings deposited by the hounds during the night, she sped through the drafty halls. In the distance she heard the faint echo of the priest’s voice lifted in holy song. Breathless, she rounded the corner that led to the chapel—and careered headlong into a solid, wool-clad chest.

The man she collided with wrapped an instinctive arm around her waist. Madeline found herself held firmly against a hard, muscled plane. A chuckle rumbled in his broad chest under her ear.

“’Ware, sweetings. Such impetuous haste is ever the downfall of man and maid.”

Biting back a groan, Madeline fought the urge to bury her face in the smoky wool. She had no difficulty recognizing the rolling north-country burr of the man who held her, or the huge feet of the one who stood beside him. Drawing in a deep breath, she drew back slowly and raised her eyes to Ian de Burgh’s.

The laughter faded from his eyes when he saw who it was he held. His arm dropped to his side, freeing her.

Madeline stepped back. “Your pardon, my lord.” She forced the words out through stiff lips.

“Lady Madeline!” William’s exclamation drew her attention. “I hope you took no hurt.”

She managed a small laugh. “Nay, none, except to my dignity.”

Will stepped forward and made as if to take her arm.

“Truly,” Madeline snapped with something less than her usual mellifluous charm, wanting only to be away from both of them, “I’m fine. ‘Tis your brother who took the brunt of my charge. Look instead to him.”