The Ranger by Monica McCarty

meant pursuing a man who did not want to be pursued. Even if it meant her pride was about to take a severe lashing.
    Her father smiled. “I think it will be much easier than you imagine.”
    She hoped he was right, but she suspected there wasn’t anything simple about Sir Arthur Campbell.

Five

    Arthur had almost made it. The gate wasn’t fifty feet away. Another minute and he would have been riding out on his way to gathering more information for Bruce.
    “Sir Arthur!”
    The soft, sweet feminine voice made every muscle in his body tense.
Not again
. He eyed the distance to the gate. He wondered if he could run for it.
    Already he could hear the men around him start to snicker as the achingly—and he meant achingly, even his teeth had begun to hurt—familiar face appeared at his side.
    She was smiling. She was
always
smiling. Why the hell did she have to smile so much? And why did it have to light up her entire face, from the soft curve of her too-pink lips to the bright twinkle in her deep-blue eyes? If he were prone to ruminating like a lovesick bard about poetic allusions to eye color, he would say they were like dark sapphires. But he had a hell of a lot more important things to do, so they were dark blue.
    Sapphires ...
    He jerked his gaze away. He should have kept his eyes on her face, but he made the mistake of dropping his gaze and had to smother a grunt of pain. The persistent throb between his legs jerked hard. A state to which he was growing painfully accustomed.
    One look at her gown and he felt like dropping to his knees and begging God for mercy.
    Was she trying to kill him?
    Probably. Her flirting and increasingly bold overtures were getting harder to ignore. Seeking him out at meals, insisting on helping the healer when he’d taken a blow on the arm from a sword a few days ago (he’d been distracted, damn it, by her flouncing around the garden, laughing with her sisters), showing up at the stable at the same time he was due to ride out in the morning, and now this. Her sunny yellow satin surcote was fitted tight in all the wrong places. He didn’t know how she could breathe; it clung to her chest and slim waist as if she’d dampened it in the loch.
    But that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was how low the square neckline dipped on her chest. Her ample—mouthwateringly, prodigiously ample—chest.
    Christ’s bones, he couldn’t take his eyes off the soft, pale flesh swelling—nay, spilling—over the bodice.
Ripe
and
lush
were two words that came to mind. But that didn’t even begin to describe the perfection of her magnificent breasts.
    He’d just about chop off his left arm to see them naked. And he was having a damned hard time doing anything but imagining how they would look. How they would taste. How they would bounce when ...
    Ah, hell
. He jerked his gaze away. His body was on fire under his armor. From lust, aye, but also from an irrational flare of anger. If she were his, he’d keep her locked up in his room for a week for wearing that gown in public.
After
he ripped it off her and burned it.
    He couldn’t remember the last time a woman had gotten him so ... bothered.
    Unaware of his violent thoughts, she gazed up at him eagerly. “I’m so glad I caught you,” she said, her breath coming in short gasps. Gasps that made him think of swiving. Hell, just about everything she did made him think of swiving.
    She must have sprinted from the tower when she saw him ride out from the stable. It wasn’t the first time. He’d been wrong about discouraging her the night of the feast. Dead wrong. If anything, she’d only redoubled her efforts since then.
    He’d been living on edge all week, never knowing when she would show up. It seemed wherever he went, she was there. His brothers and the other men thought it was hilarious.
    He, not so much.
    He wasn’t as immune to her as he wanted to be. It was hard not to like the chit. She was so ... fresh. Like the first flower in