every rock and bit of vegetation. Still, he barely caught her just as she seized the reins of the mare and was trying in vain to reach the stirrup of the sidesaddle.
She turned and struck at him, but he had expected no less and was ready for her. In a heartbeat he had locked his muscular arms around her from behind and lifted her off her feet. Her heels kicking against his shins made little impression on his booted legs. Fortunately, she was a tiny thing, and the back of her head slammed into his chest rather than his chin. A very game quarry!
“Miss Hathersage! Miss!” He leaned away from another crack of her head against his collarbone. “Ow! Damnation, woman, will you be still for a moment?”
Evidently not. She started squirming, desperately trying to wriggle out of his hold. Very well. If he could not subdue her with reassurance, he could resort to threats. He shifted his hook until the point of it just barely pricked her side. She stilled as if frozen in place.
Leo lowered his voice. “Be still or you will skewer yourself.”
“You bloody bastard!” She gasped for breath.
“No, although you are not the first to make that charge.” Her defiance made him grin. “But, tsk-tsk. Such unsuitable words from such pure lips.”
“Cad! Blackguard!”
“Those allegations are closer to the mark. However, we have little time for character assassination.” He cautiously allowed her feet to settle to the ground, carefully ignoring the sensation of her warm, firm body sliding down his.
Yet there was no denying the feelings invoked from the softness of her breasts against his arm. Leo forced the excitement of the chase and its incipient arousal back. He could not afford distractions of that sort. Not now.
Not ever.
She did not renew the struggle, so apparently the hook had done its work. It usually did. The mere sight of it terrified brawny men, let alone a girl barely out of the schoolroom. Perhaps he was a cad.
Her chest rose and fell in panicked breaths. Suddenly she took a longer breath and an ear-assaulting scream cleaved the quiet of the hillside. Leo jerked his head—and his ears—away from her.
“Good Lord, girl! Do not do that again. You will deafen us both.” He jiggled the point of the hook ever so slightly to enforce this message. “No one is near enough to hear you. Save your breath and pay attention.” He paused for a heartbeat to gather his thoughts before continuing.
“Your curiosity has come very close to killing the kitten, Miss Hathersage. I cannot allow you to recount today’s experience to anyone. But neither do I wish to kill you to prevent it. In that I differ from the others in this venture. My associates would have done it in the blink of an eye.”
The quietness that settled over her told him that she understood that assertion and the implied threat. She was giving him her full regard, trembling a little in his arms.
“Hence, I must constrain you to come with me for a time. What I am to do with you, I have no notion, but we will contrive something. Please believe that I intend you no harm.”
She cried out and started to twist toward him, felt the prick of the hook, and checked. Leo sighed. “And I can see that you will not come compliantly. Therefore, as much a I regret it…” Leo pulled a leather thong from his pocket.
“No!” Suddenly she was struggling again, forgetting the hook in her panic.
“Damn it, woman! You’ll hurt yourself. Don’t you know when you are outgunned? Be still!” Leo looped one of her arms with the hook and forced her slender wrists together until he could tightly grasp both of them in his powerful right hand.
In spite of her frantic attempts to pull away, he looped the cord around her wrists and tied it with the agility of much practice, using the hook as a second hand.
Leo caught the reins of the mare and guided it close. Thanks be to his lucky stars that the bay was more docile than the lady. Since the hook prevented his lifting her by the waist, he grasped one of the girl’s arms under the shoulder with his good hand and, slipping his other arm under her knees, attempted to wrestle her onto the sidesaddle. She refused to help him at all.
Her privilege, under the circumstances, but he was losing precious time. He must be away before her household missed her. “Miss Hathersage, please put your knee over the horn.”
Her mouth firmed into a hard line and her chin went up. “I’ll be damned!”
In spite of his frustration, a chuckle escaped Leo. “If you do not, I shall be forced to tie you facedown across the saddle.”
He allowed her to contemplate traveling in that position for a moment. He was fast becoming exasperated enough to do it.
At last, she sighed, and he detected a defeated whisper, “Very well.”
Yes, he definitely was a cad.
Fearing that she would try to slide off the horse, even with her hands tied, he used a second lash to secure her neat ankle and nicely rounded knee to the stirrup straps. That should make her fast.
He guided the mare back to his own mount and climbed into the saddle. Leading the bay and her passenger, he turned and started back up the hill.
“Do you have a name?”
The question, coming from behind him, startled him. “Yes, Miss Hathersage, I do. However, I fear I cannot share it with you at this time.”
“You have the advantage of me, sir. What should I call you—other than those very appropriate sobriquets?”
He turned and gazed at her for a moment, then in spite of the troublesome situation, burst into laughter. “I believe, Miss Hathersage, that under these circumstances you should call me Lord Hades.”
Lord Hathersage was at his wit’s end. His adored wife had been having one fit of hysterics after the other for the last two hours. Nothing he said comforted her. He groped for words that might not set off another outburst, but was quickly disappointed. She spun away from the window out of which she had been staring and flung herself onto a settee.
“How could she do this to me?” His lady dabbed at her eyes and took the tiniest whiff of her salts. “She knows I worry about her—riding off who knows where by herself. Not even a groom in attendance. What people say of her I shudder to think.” Suiting the action to the word, her ladyship shivered delicately, the creamy skin of her shoulders shimmering under her gossamer shawl.
Ignoring this distraction with the ease of long practice, his lordship chanced a cautious intervention. “Now, now. Demetra, my dearest…”
His dearest Demetra rolled on without pause. “But will she stay home just because I ask her?” She jumped to her feet and stamped her shapely foot. “Nooo! I am only her mother. If she had any respect… She will ride in the sun and get those horrible freckles. If she had any consideration for me, she would at least wear a large hat! How I am ever to interest a husband in her I have not the slightest notion. She comes in with her hair looking like a birch broom in a fright! And in the eyes of all, I have failed.”
For once his lordship’s patience with his adorable wife cracked just a hair. His lady tended to forget that Peresphone was his daughter, as well as hers. He had been astride a horse for many hours of the late afternoon, searching unsuccessfully for his lost child.
They had found not a trace of her, save for the prints where her horse had jumped the wall. Even now his men rode the hills with torches while he did his best to console her mother.
“Come now, Demetra. How can you concern yourself with that inconsequential drivel now? Phona might be lying somewhere—hurt or…”
“Oooh!” His wife threw herself facedown on the settee. “How can you be so cruel? You know I cannot bear to think of anything so terrible.”
Lord Hathersage beat an immediate