The O'Madden: A Novella (The Celtic Legends Series) (5 page)

She swiveled away an
d headed toward the kitchens. He watched the proud slope of her back, thinking that he’d been here twenty-four hours and he knew he’d found what he’d spent a lifetime searching for. Curse or no, he’d be damned if he’d give either one of them up without a fight.

Aye, Maeve, you’d like to be rid of me and of all that happened between us. You’d like to forget it even though the memory shimmers between us every time you meet my eye. I see the pulse racing in your throat when you’re near. I feel the heat of your body from across a room. I sense your presence before you come through a door. You’d like to forget the magic of that night. You’d like to pretend that we aren’t meant for each other, curse or no—but we are, Maeve, we are, and I know it in my bones.

The woman and the place both held mystery
. They needed nothing more than a man of determination to crack them. He wondered how great a length she would go to, to be rid of him

and
whatever unspeakable secret she held to her heart.

He raised his voice to carry across the yard. “It’ll take more than green milk and ghosts to get rid of me, Maeve.”

She slung the basket off her arm but he couldn’t read her expression across the distance.

“Time will tell, my lord. Time will tell.”

***

Maeve frowned into the churn
as she ran a hand through the mess of curdles. She sucked her finger into her mouth and frowned. The sourness burst on her tongue as if she’d bit into an unripe apple.

“Well, there’s nothing to be done about it now.” She wiped her hands upon her apron and met t
he frightened eyes of two young servants. “Don’t be staring at me like that. It isn’t the first time the butter hasn’t come on the milk, and no doubt it won’t be the last. Go to old Aileen and ask if she can spare a bit of her butter.” Her eyes narrowed on a thought. “And take one of the furs on the lord’s bed to trade. It’s sure he has no need of that mountain, and won’t miss one or two.”

The girls skittered out,
bumping into another woman bustling into the kitchens from the castle.

“
They are here, my lady,” the servant whispered. “They’re coming up the road now.”

“Well,
what good is it to tell me?” Maeve tipped the churn on its side and rolled it across the dirt floor with her foot. “Go and tell the master—it’s him who’ll be receiving the tribute this year.”

“He’s off doing something again.” The servant wrung her hands. “I heard Seamus say the master was
fixing the hurdles around the sheep pen.”

Maeve frowned as she bumped the churn over the threshold into the open yard. Last week,
Garrick had braided new thatch for the barn. Three days ago, he’d fashioned a new hinge for the door of the henhouse. Yesterday, she’d come upon him cutting back the ivy which had begun to send roots into the castle mortar. That man had lived in this castle for two weeks. Already, he’d dripped more sweat into the earth than all of the other English lords combined.

“If you don’t mind me saying so, my lady,” the servant
ventured, “he’s a better man than the others. Strong and hard-working. And he doesn’t snap and order us all about like the others.” She paused. “A pity he’s English.”

“Yes. He’s English.” Maeve heaved the churn u
pright. “Mind you remember that today when he accepts the tribute and steals the life from all of us.”

Maeve strode toward the sheep pens, jarring her heels with every step. Black clouds scudded across the sky, threatening another day of rain.
A crafty one, this lord. For the price of a bit of sweat, he wins the admiration of a people used to crueler masters. How quickly their loyalty drifted. She kept wondering when he would give up this mockery and start acting like the lord he was, instead of the rough-handed, hard-working Irishman she’d lain with on All Hallows’ Eve.

She stumbled over her own thoughts. She mustn’t resurrect that ghost again
. No, no, it must lay dead and buried in her heart. She’d lain with an illusion that night. Oh, so she still shivered with hot pleasure every time she heard him laugh in the mead hall. She still felt her body melt every time he approached to ask her some simple question about the running of the castle, or to tease her with that look in his eye. She was a woman now. She knew what kind of pleasure a man could give. The kind of pleasure
this
man could give.

She faltered to a stop as
she caught sight of him on the other side of the sheep pens. He’d discarded his cloak. It lay in a careless heap over one of the hurdles, next to a tumble of wood that lay on the ground next to a chaff-flecked axe. A splotch of sweat stained his tunic between his shoulder blades. It trailed to a point down the long, strong length of his back as he straddled the fence, wrapping rope tight in the joint between hurdle and strut.

Her throat parched. Aye, she was like a woman
who had had her first taste of wine and now struggled with the thirst of a drunkard. How greedy could she be? She’d had her one night of loving. That was all she had asked from the Fates. She would have been content with that, if they hadn’t been so cruel. Instead she was to be faced each day with the sight of those bulging arms which had held her so tight, and the powerful thighs which had razed so intimately between hers. And why, why did they have to belong to such a perfect, hard-working man, an English lord she could never, ever have?

“I know you haven’t come to fetch me for dinner,” he said suddenly, sweeping the rope under the strut again. “A man might think you’ve come to keep me company, Maeve.”

She flushed as he gave her a knowing eye. So she’d been staring, aye. Well she was made of flesh and blood like any other woman, and the powerful giant working the wood and rope before her was as fine a sight as any.

“Have done with that,” she said. “The
lord of Birr has far more important duties than fixing a fence this day.”

“There’s a ditch outside the walls that needs to be cleared, and a roof to be put on the castle if we’re to keep the third floor fr
om collapsing.”

“Such is the work of tenants, not the work of a lord.”

He stretched the rope tight, using the full of his weight. “There are times, Maeve, when I think you’d rather I let the whole place fall apart.”

“I’d rather,” she retorted, trying in vain to ignore the
way his shirt stretched across his chest, “you’d leave the place altogether.”

And leave me in
peace; leave me with memories and no more— nice, safe, controllable, memories.

“
Maeve, my girl, I’ll set this place to rights if it takes years to do it. It’s been long enough since this place saw a man’s hand.”

She frowned
, eyeing his work on the sheep-pen, noticing as if for the first time how tumble-down it had all become. She and her people had been too busy tending to their daily needs to put any work into the castle. The other lords of Birr had done nothing to improve the grounds or the outbuildings. They’d only seen fit to import their own comfort into the castle and waste as much of the land’s wealth as possible, however fleeting their stay.

“You are the lord of this place,” she said.
For now
. “It’s no concern of mine what you do with it.”

“Is that why you’re scowling and snap
ping at me whenever I pick up a mallet?”

“If I scowl, it
’s at a man’s foolishness.”  She waved a hand at the fencing, at the bulk of the knots between hurdle and strut. “What do you know about fixing such things as this? How do you know your work will not fall apart at the first storm?”

“I’ve some experience picking other men’s turnips and thatching other men’s houses and loading boxes on the docks of Wexford.”

An odd pedigree for the son of a lord, even a bastard son, but hadn’t she known from the first that this was no ordinary man? Had he been so, she never would have chosen him from the crowd at the Samhain fires.

“
I’ve worked most of my life.” Garrick made one final yank on the rope and let his sharp blue gaze trail over the green hills of Birr. “But for a few lessons in history and Latin, I took nothing from the earl until he offered me this.” He turned and settled that unsettling blue gaze upon her. “How’s a man to give up the chance at a piece of land of his own?”

La
nd taken with children’s blood.

She wrapped her
hands in her apron for warmth as she wrapped her heart against his words. “You’re likely to hurt yourself with all this heavy work.”

“
It would be a fine thing to have you as a nursemaid.”

“I’ll
be no nursemaid to you, Garrick of Wexford. Now come down off there.”

“Y
ou have an odd habit of giving orders to your betters.” He softened his words with a half-smile as he settled his weight on the hurdle. “Give me a reason to come down and you won’t find me lingering up here long.”

“The tenants,” she said, ignoring the gleam in his eye, “have come to deliver tribute.”

“Tribute?”

She gripped her elbows against the cold. “The rents they owe you for the pri
vilege of living and working on this land. They are waiting for you. Are you going to keep them standing in the cold?”

“It’s not the reason I was looking for.” 
He leapt off the hurdle with a graceful bunching of muscles. He wiped his open hands on his tunic. “But it’ll do for now.”

She turned away
from the power of his presence. She headed toward the castle. He fell into step beside her, with that lanky, easy stride. There was no escaping him. Always, always he found his way to her, breathed down upon her so she could smell the ale on his lips, or the remnants of pepper sauce from the midday meal. Always, he looked at her with those clear blue eyes that knew all her secrets. In the castle she’d worked in all her adult life she now felt like a mouse under a cat’s eye.

“You
look fine today, my girl,” he murmured. “The air has put color in your cheeks.”

“Mind you keep your eyes on the counting of the tribute.” She
flexed her hands into fists. “I won’t have it said later that the people have cheated you because you didn’t have the sense to keep your eyes where they belong.”

“
Are you asking me to stop looking at you? That’s like asking a man to stop basking in the sun. Or, better, in the moonlight.”

“Have done with your foolishness.”

“For three weeks I’ve been a patient man. How long do you expect me to wait for what we both want?”

“When God made time, he made plenty of it.”

“Castles are built stone by stone I suppose.”

She pondered what he meant by that as they wandered around the barn and took the path around the side of the castle, walking in silence until he
finally broke it.

“
So, Maeve, you might want to tell me exactly what the tribute is.”

She
startled. “You don’t know that, either?”

“
That’s why I have you to tell me.”

“
How do you know you’ll get the full of what we owe you then?”

“I’ve faith in you
.”

She frowned, and wished for a flash of a moment she’d had the courag
e to cheat him out of his due. It was too late now. The men waited in the courtyard. And she supposed he’d find out, sooner or later, what his true tribute was. There’d be no hiding it.

She pushed a lock of hair off her shoulder. “
The lord of Birr gets one out of every three calves born and a fifth of all the grain.”

“A fifth?”
He nodded. “Generous.”

“Someone has to pay for the luxuries of this manor.” She stepped over a drainage gully he’d cleared last week. “From every tenant you get two hens
, one fifth of their wool and one third of the flax harvest.”

“
All that?”

“
Yes.” Her chin tightened. “Let it not be said that the people of Birr do not pay fine tribute to their lord.”

“Maeve—”

“You also get two lambs out of every five born. That was added to the rent due by the last lord.” They swept around the corner of the castle. “That, and three pieces of gold.”

He m
ay as well ask for a chunk of their hearts, or the lives of their children—it adds up to pretty much the same.
Maeve surveyed the crowd of villagers as they came even with the castle door. A lamb, loose from its brothers, clattered bleating across the paving stones. Calves bumped against one another, lowing in the cold. A farmer clutched a coarse sack battering with trussed fowl. Other men bowed under the weight of sacks, their bony arms bare under the sleeves of their tunics.

Aye, think of this, she told herself, fixing her attention on the people weaving their way up from the village to congregate in the yard. Think of this, she told h
erself, watching the villagers leave their wealth at the castle door. Think of this, she resolved, the next time your woman’s body weakens to yearn for an Englishman’s embrace.