Born in Fire (32 page)

Her fork paused halfway to her lips at his tone. There was hurt beneath the sharp annoyance, and she was sorry to have caused it. Amazed that she could. “I didn’t mean it that way, Rogan. Not so impersonally. When two people are fond of each other—”

“I’m a great deal more than fond of you, Maggie. I’m in love with you.”

The fork slipped from her fingers and clattered on the plate. Panic tore at her throat in sharp, hungry fangs. “You’re not.”

“I am.” He said it calmly, though he was cursing himself for making his declaration in a brightly lit kitchen over badly cooked eggs. “And you’re in love with me.”

“It’s not—I’m not—you can’t tell me what I am.”

“I can when you’re too foolish to say so yourself. What’s between us is far more than physical attraction. If you weren’t so pigheaded, you’d stop pretending it was.”

“I’m not pigheaded.”

“You are, but I find that’s one of the things I like about you.” He was thinking coolly now, pleased to be back in control. “We might have discussed all this under more atmospheric circumstances, but knowing you, it hardly matters. I’m in love with you, and I want you to marry me.”

Chapter Seventeen

M
ARRIAGE
? The word stuck in her throat, threatened to choke her. She didn’t dare repeat it.

“You’re out of your mind.”

“Believe me, I’ve considered the possibility.” He picked up his fork and ate with the appearance of sanity. But the hurt, unexpected and raw, scraped at him. “You’re stubborn, often rude, more than occasionally self-absorbed and not a little temperamental.”

For a moment her mouth worked like a guppy’s. “Oh, am I?”

“You most certainly are, and a man would have to have taken leave of his senses to want that sort of baggage for a lifetime. But”—he poured out the tea he’d had steeping—“there you are. I believe it’s customary to use the bride’s church, so we’ll be married in Clare.”

“Customary? Hang your customs, Rogan, and you with them.” Was this panic she felt, skidding along her spine like jagged ice? Surely not, she told herself. It had to be temper. She had nothing to fear. “I’m not marrying you or anyone. Ever.”

“That’s absurd. Of course you’ll marry me. We’re amazingly well suited, Maggie.”

“A moment ago I was stubborn and temperamental and rude.”

“So you are. And it suits me.” He took her hand, ignored her resistance and tugged it to his lips. “And it suits me beautifully.”

“Well, it doesn’t suit me. Not at all. Perhaps I’ve softened toward your arrogance, Rogan, but that’s changing by the second. Understand me.” She yanked her hand free of his. “I’ll be no man’s wife.”

“No man’s but mine.”

She hissed out a curse. When he only grinned at that, she took a hard grip on her temper. A fight, she thought, might be satisfying, but it would solve nothing. “You brought me here for this, didn’t you?”

“No, actually, I didn’t. I’d thought to take more time before tossing my feelings at your feet.” Very carefully, very deliberately, he shifted his plate aside. “Knowing very well you’d kick them back at me.” His eyes stayed on hers, level, patient. “You see I know you very well, Margaret Mary.”

“You don’t.” Temper, and the panic she didn’t want to admit, leaked out of her, leaving room for sorrow. “I’ve reasons for keeping my heart whole, Rogan, and for not ever considering the possibility of marriage.”

It interested and soothed him to understand that it wasn’t marriage to him that seemed to appall her, but marriage itself. “What are they?”

She lowered her gaze to her cup. After a moment’s hesitation she added her usual three cubes of sugar and stirred. “You lost your parents.”

“Yes.” His brow furrowed. This certainly wasn’t the tack he’d expected her to take. “Almost ten years ago.”

“It’s hard losing family. It strips away a whole layer of security, exposes you to the simple cold fact of mortality. You loved them?”

“Very much. Maggie—”

“No, I’d like to hear what you have to say about this. It’s important. They loved you?”

“Yes, they did.”

“How did you know it?” She drank now, holding the cup in two hands. “Was it because they gave you a good life, a fine home?”

“It had nothing to do with material comfort. I knew they loved me because I felt it, because they showed it. And I could see they loved each other as well.”

“There was love in your house. And laughter? Was there laughter, Rogan?”

“Quite a bit of it.” He could remember it still. “I was devastated when they died. So sudden, so brutally sudden…” His voice tapered off, then strengthened again. “But after, when the worst of it had passed, I was glad they’d gone together. Each of them would have been only half-alive without the other.”

“You’ve no notice how lucky you are, what a gift you were given growing up in a loving, happy home. I’ve never known that. I never will. There was no love between my parents. There was anger and blame and guilt and there was duty, but no love. Can you imagine what it was like, growing up in a house where the two people who had made you cared nothing for each other? Were only there because their marriage was a prison barring them in with conscience and church law.”

“No, I can’t.” He covered her hand with his. “I’m sorry you can.”

“I swore, when I was still a girl, I swore I’d never be locked in a prison like that.”

“Marriage isn’t only a prison, Maggie,” he said gently. “My own parents’ was a joy.”

“And you may make one for yourself one day. But not I. You make what you know, Rogan. And you can’t change what you’ve come from. My mother hates me.”

He would have protested, but she’d said it so matter-of-factly, so simply, he could not.

“Even before I was born she hated me. The fact that I grew inside her ruined her life, which she tells me as often as possible. All these years I never knew how deep it truly went, until your grandmother told me my mother had had a career.”

“A career?” He cast his mind back. “The singing? What does that have to do with you?”

“Everything. What choice did she have but to give up her career? What career would she have had left as a single, pregnant woman in a country like ours? None.” Cold, she shivered and let out a shaky breath. It hurt to say it aloud this way, to say it all aloud. “She wanted something for herself. I understand that, Rogan. I know what it is to have ambitions. And I can imagine, all too well, what it would be like to have them dashed. You see, they never would have married if I hadn’t been conceived. A moment of passion, of need, that was all. My father more than forty, and she past thirty. She dreaming, I suppose, of romance and he seeing a lovely woman. She was lovely then. There are pictures. She was lovely before the bitterness ate it all away. And I was the seed of it, the seven-month baby that humiliated her and ruined her dreams. And his, too. Aye and his.”

“You can hardly blame yourself for being born, Maggie.”

“Oh, I know that. Don’t you think I know? Up here?” Suddenly fierce, she tapped her head. “But in my heart—can’t you see? I know that my very existence and every breath I take burdened the lives of two people beyond measure. I came from passion only, and every time she looked at me, it reminded her that she’d sinned.”

“That’s not only ridiculous, it’s foolish.”

“Perhaps it is. My father said he’d loved her once, and perhaps it was true.” She could imagine him, walking into O’Malley’s, seeing Maeve, hearing her and letting his romantic heart take flight.

But it had crashed soon enough. For both of them.

“I was twelve when she told me that I hadn’t been conceived within marriage. That’s how she puts it. Perhaps she’d begun to see that I was making that slow shift from girl to woman. I’d begun to look at boys, you see. Had practiced my flirting on Murphy and one or two others from the village. She caught me at it, standing by the hay barn with Murphy, trying out a kiss. Just a kiss, that was all, beside the hay on a warm summer afternoon, both of us young and curious. It was my first kiss, and it was lovely—soft and shy and harmless.

“And she found us.” When Maggie shut her eyes, the scene played back vividly. “She went white, bone white, and screamed and raged, dragged me into the house. I was wicked, she said, and sinful, and because my father wasn’t home to stop her, she whipped me.”

“Whipped you?” Shock had him rising out of his chair. “Are you telling me she hit you because you’d kissed a boy?”

“She beat me,” Maggie said flatly. “It was more than the back of her hand that I’d been used to. She took a belt and laid into me until I thought she’d kill me. While she did she shouted scripture and raged about the branding of sin.”

“She had no right to treat you so.” He knelt in front of her, cupped her face in his hands.

“No, no one has such a right, but it doesn’t stop them. I could see the hate in her then, and the fear, too. The fear, I came to understand, was that I would end up as she had, with a baby in my belly and emptiness in my heart. I’d known always that she didn’t love me as mothers were meant to love their children. I’d known that she was easier, a bit softer on Brie. But until that day, I hadn’t known why.”

She couldn’t sit any longer. Rising, she went to the door that led out to a little stone patio decked with clay pots filled with brilliant geraniums.

“There’s no need for you to talk about this anymore,” Rogan said from behind her.

“I’ll finish.” The sky was studded with stars, the breeze a gentle whisper through the trees. “She told me that I was marked. And she beat me so that the mark would be on the outside as well, so that I would understand what a burden a woman bears because it’s she who carries the child.”

“That’s vile, Maggie.” Unable to clamp down on his own emotions, he whirled her around, his hands hard on her shoulders, his eyes icy blue and furious. “You were just a girl.”

“If I was, I stopped being one that day. Because I understood, Rogan, that she meant exactly what she said.”

“It was a lie, a pitiful one.”

“Not to her. To her it was sterling truth. She told me I was her penance, that God had punished her for her night of sin, with me. She believed that, fully, and every time she looked at me she was reminded of it. That even the pain and misery of birthing me wasn’t enough. Because of me she was trapped in a marriage she despised, bound to a man she couldn’t love and mother to a child she’d never wanted. And, as I’ve found out just recently, the ruin of everything she really wanted. Perhaps the ruin of everything she was.”

“She’s the one who should have been whipped. No one has the right to abuse a child so, and worse to use some warped vision of God as the strap.”

“Funny, my father said nearly the same thing when he came home and saw what she’d done. I thought he would strike her. It’s the only time in my life I’d ever seen him close to violence. They had a horrible fight. It was almost worse than the beating to listen to it. I went up to the bedroom to get away from the worst of it, and Brie came in with salve. She tended to me like a little mother, talking nonsense all the while the shouts and curses boomed up the stairs. Her hands were shaking.”

She didn’t object when Rogan drew her into his arms, but her eyes remained dry, her voice calm. “I thought he would go then. They said such vicious things to each other, I thought no two people could live under the same roof after. I thought if he’d just take us with him, if Brie and I could just go with him, anywhere at all, it would be all right again. Then I heard him say that he was paying, too. That he was paying for ever having believed that he loved and wanted her. That he’d go to his grave paying. Of course, he didn’t go.”

Maggie pulled away again. Stepped back. “He stayed more than ten years longer, and she never touched me again. Not in any way. But neither of us forgot that day—I think neither of us wanted to. He tried to make up for it by giving me more, loving me more. But he couldn’t. If he’d left her, if he taken us and left her, it would have changed things. But that he couldn’t do, so we lived in that house, like sinners in hell. And I knew no matter how he loved me that there were times he must have thought if it hadn’t been—if
I
hadn’t been, he’d have been free.”

“Do you honestly blame the child, Maggie?”

“The sins of the fathers…” She shook her head. “One of my mother’s favorite expressions that. No, Rogan, I don’t blame the child. But it doesn’t change the results.” She took a deep breath. She was better for having said it all. “I’ll never risk locking myself in that prison.”

“You’re too smart a woman to believe what happened to your parents happens to everyone.”

“Not to everyone, no. One day, now that she’s not hobbled by my mother’s demands, Brie will marry. She’s a woman who wants family.”

“And you don’t.”

“I don’t,” she said, but the words sounded hollow. “I’ve my work, and a need to be alone.”

He caught her chin in his hand. “You’re afraid.”

“If I am, I’ve a right to be.” She shook free of him. “What kind of wife or mother would I make with what I’ve come from?”

“Yet you’ve just said your sister will be both.”

“It affected her differently than it did me. She has as much need for people and for a home as I have to do without them. You were right enough when you said I was stubborn and rude and self-absorbed. I am.”

“Maybe you’ve had to be. But that’s not all you are, Maggie. You’re compassionate and loyal and loving. It’s not just part of you I fell in love with, but the whole. I want to spend my life with you.”

Something trembled inside her, fragile as crystal struck by a careless hand. “Haven’t you listened to a word I’ve said?”

“Every word. Now I know that you don’t just love me. You need me.”

She dragged both hands through her hair, fingers digging in and pulling in frustration. “I don’t need anyone.”

“Of course you do. You’re afraid to admit it, but that’s understandable.” He was sorry, bitterly, for the child she’d been. But he couldn’t allow that to change his plans for the woman. “You’ve locked yourself in a prison, Maggie. Once you admit those needs, the door will open.”

“I’m happy with the way things are. Why do you have to change them?”