Ransom My Heart by Meg Cabot Read Free Book Online

calluses on her fingertips, were quite slim and beautiful. “I’m well-used to trapping dumb animals, Mellana, but how am I ever to snare a man?”
    Mellana, having gained her way, had lost interest in the details of the matter. “Lord, I don’t know,” she declared, fluffing out her hair so that she could join the rest of the family in their merrymaking in the room next door. “Just make sure he isn’t from Stephensgate.”
    â€œ What? ” Finnula looked up, her large gray eyes filled with dismay. “Not from Stephensgate? You want me to abduct a stranger ?”
    â€œWell, of course. Isabella has already ransomed every man in the village at least once. And Shrewsbury and Dorchester, too. Their families won’t pay a second time. The practice does lose its charm if overused—”
    Finnula let loose some of her finest expletives, and Mellana, genuinely shocked, huffed away, leaving her younger sister glaring at the flagstones.
    To abduct a stranger, Finnula fretted to herself, she’d have to travel the two days’ distance to the nearest large village. Shewas a frequent visitor to Leesbury, of course, since her poaching forays sometimes took her in that direction, and Patricia’s brother-in-law, Simon, ran the inn there and he wasn’t stingy with the ale, but she didn’t have much faith that the residents of the slightly more cosmopolitan village would find the practice of man-trapping amusing. Their parish priest wasn’t nearly so liberal as her own, and might very well frown upon what in Stephensgate and Dorchester was considered a piquant custom.
    But when Finnula saw the gold coin that the bearded traveler had thrown to Simon at the Fox and Hare, she knew that she’d found the ideal quarry. Obviously not from Leesbury, the tall man had both purse and a manservant, and, she soon saw, with just a little investigation, a fine destrier for a mount. Here was a man well-placed in life.
    That she sparked an interest in the man equal to the one he sparked in her, she saw at once, though she knew it was for entirely different reasons. Finnula did not consider herself at all beautiful. No, Mellana, with her voluptuous figure and blond curls was the beauty in the family.
    But Finnula couldn’t help noticing that of late, she’d been attracting more and more masculine stares, and the fact was the cause of no little discomfort to her. Indeed, the change her passage from lanky girlhood into graceful womanhood had wrought on her looks was a primary source of irritation for her. It had, after all, caused the disaster that had been her short-lived marriage, and proven quite a hindrance during her pursuit of game: She was constantly being admonished by well-meaning husbandmen that she ought not to roam the countryside in chausses, and that it was a needle, not a bow, she ought to be wielding.
    But conversely, her newfound attractiveness to the opposite sex had proven useful at times. She had all but charmed the shire reeve into overlooking her various violations of poaching laws.And there wasn’t a merchant in the village who wasn’t paying more handsomely than ever for the legally obtained game she sold them, and boasting to his customers that the fowl had been shot by none other than the Fair Finn. Like Diana and Artemis, the pagan huntress goddesses of old, Finnula’s reputation as a lovely archer did not harm as much as help in her endeavor to feed the hungry of Stephensgate.
    And of course, now that she had gotten herself into the man-hunting business, she intended to use her own winsome beauty as bait.
    That the tall, bearded stranger might not rise to the lure never crossed Finnula’s mind. She had seen the way his eyes had raked her when she’d entered the inn. There was hunger in his glance, though she’d seen caution there, too. Not enough of the latter, since he’d managed to get himself into that scrape with that