The O'Madden: A Novella (The Celtic Legends Series) (7 page)

So she parted her lips as his mouth descended upon hers. She opened
her mouth and drank his breath. She pressed her lips to his and felt the stubble on his cheek as he slanted his face. The softness of his shoulder-length hair tangled with hers as it slid silken past his ears. She welcomed the prison of his hands as he cupped her cheeks. She reveled in the coarseness of his callused palms, in the all-encompassing broadness of those worker’s hands.

She told herself for the hundred thousandth time that in his heart he was a man of the earth and air and wind— sa
lt and water, sweat and muscle—honest and hardworking. In any other time, in any other place, they could share this passion without hesitation. They could nurse it and make it blossom into something strong and thick-rooted, a long and steady marriage.

She clutched the illusion to her heart for as long as she could as he blinded her with kisses. She dug her nails into
the weave of his shirt and filled her lungs with the smell of his skin—river-rain and fresh-cut oak. She let her mind drift away as he flattened her between the door and himself—both things equally unyielding. Her blood sizzled through her and left her skin tingling from her scalp to her toes.

Her breath came fast as he pulled up her skirts
. She gasped as his fingers traced up her naked thighs and came to rest on her hips, which he lifted up so she pressed higher against the door. She should say no, she should tell him to stop, but she let him slide a thigh between them. He held her suspended while he made quick work of his braies. She curled her fingers into his shoulders as every movement of his leg against the juncture between her thighs made her muscles clench. She ached for him, felt hollow and desperate, and she knew they’d gone too far to stop.

She didn’t want to stop
. She wanted to feel him deep inside her again, stretching her open hot and hard and moving. With one swift move, he gripped her hips again and slipped into her with a single firm thrust. He curled his hand behind her head so she wouldn’t knock it against the door as she threw it back. He plunged again, and then again, probing deeper, making a guttural noise of pleasure as he buried his face against her throat and gave her what she’d ached for since she’d left him that Samhain morning.

He
was not tender, like before. She was grateful for that. Her body molded against his and matched his desire thrust by thrust. Her deep muscles flexed around him, tightening in anticipation of that pleasure only he could drive her too. Her whole body clenched and she cried out. She opened her mouth and tried to breathe as he swelled and stiffened inside her, murmuring her name, over and over.

It was a long time before she finally blinked her eyes open. It was a long time with no sound but the crackling of the fire in the hearth and their heavy breathing.
He was still holding her pressed up against the door. She felt the pinch of the rivets into her back, but she didn’t move. She was afraid to break the spell. She held him even as the first tear fell from her lashes and slipped into his hair.

In the end it was Garrick who pulled away
, brushed the hair from her eyes, and made her, once again, clear of sight. She knew he deserved the truth, even if it meant it would destroy this thing between them.

“This changes nothing, Garrick.” 
Her words came out in the husky voice of the woman she’d vowed to leave behind on Samhain. “You still must leave.”

“Ten thousand ghos
ts or ten thousand Englishmen could not tear me from your side now.”

Her heart turned over
. She felt him inside her, still hard, still throbbing. She heard the conviction in his voice and wished she had the freedom to echo his words.

He must have seen her hesitation, for he tightened his grip on her hips.

“Stay with me,” he said. “Stay with me now and—”

“You must leave.
If you don’t, I am doomed, and forever this land and this people.”

“Don’t be talk
ing to me of curses.”

“There will be no prosperity to these lands,” she
said, “until the last Englishman is driven off, and an O’Madden with pure Irish blood rules at Birr.”

“Y
ou talk like a little girl repeating her lessons.”

“I
t’s true that I’ve heard those words every day of my life.”

“Maybe i
t’s time to stop listening to talk of curses and fairy-tales and start living your own life.”

“There will be no prosperity to these lands,” she repeated
, pressing her palms flat against his chest, “until the last Englishman is driven off, and an O’Madden with pure Irish blood rules at Birr.” She gripped the cloth of his shirt. “The curse goes away, Garrick, as soon as you and the others leave. As soon as I rule here. Alone.”

Her words gave him pause.
She watched his face as surprise and incredulity dawned. Maeve felt a sharp, spearing pain in her chest, and she feared it was her heart just starting to break. Aye, the time had come for the truth to be known. The time had come to destroy any hope that she and this man of her heart could be one.

“
Now you know.” She released his shirt, and smoothed the wrinkles against his chest. “I, Maeve of Birr, am The O’Madden.”

***

Garrick set her down and pushed away from the door, away from her, away from what she’d just told him. Once free, she shoved her skirts down, slipped under his arm, and raced to the far end of the room.

Her words echoed in his head.

I, Maeve of Birr, am The O’Madden.

Garrick listened in incredulity as the
story came out of her in a torrent of words. She had been no more than an infant on the breast when the English had attacked. She’d been with her wet-nurse the day the Englishman seized all the O’Madden sons. The nursemaid had wrapped her in common swaddling and pretended that Maeve was her own child. The villagers, loyal even under the torture of Englishmen, had kept silent about her presence. And while the widow fasted at the Englishman’s door, begging for mercy for all her sons, Maeve was sent to be raised in the woods with a fairy-woman, Glenna.

Garrick knew she spoke the truth. He heard the verity in the tremble of her voice.
Her dark hair marked her as an O’Madden, she told him. Only in the woods apart from the fair-haired villagers could she be safe from the sharp eyes of the Englishmen. Glenna had taught her the things that an O’Madden must know. Glenna kept her safe as Englishman after Englishman took on the title of lord of Birr, until so many years passed that the English all forgot about the threat of The O’Madden. Glenna kept her safe so the English would not know that one of the royal blood still lived to fulfill the terms of a widow’s curse. In the end, Glenna arranged to have her installed as housekeeper in her own castle.

Garrick ran his hand through his hair
. The story explained so much:  Why she walked amid her people like a queen, why she didn’t fear the strange goings-on in the castle. These were things that could not touch her, for she was The O’Madden. She was his rival to the lordship of this manor.

She said, “When you said a person could not choose his parents, Garrick, you spo
ke true. I did not choose to be the only surviving child of The O’Madden and the widow whose curse only I can break.”

A thought came to him, hard and fast.

“You went to the fires,” he said, “to conceive a child.”

Collapsed at the end of his bed,
she looked so fragile as she spoke into her own lap. “For a lifetime I’ve lived separate from all. I’m too wellborn to take a husband amid the boys of the village. Yet my true identity has been kept a secret from all of the neighboring chieftains. That, too, was for my own protection, and for the safety of the manor. It was too big a risk to go to the neighboring chieftains with my true identity. I had no one to protect me but the cattle herders of the village. What was to stop one of the chieftains from marrying me off to one of their sons and conquering my lands for themselves? If that happened, those petty chieftains would call the place theirs and all memory of the O’Maddens would be erased, and the curse would continue. No man of chieftain’s rank would take his wife’s name.”

He struggled to grasp the consequences of everything she said
.

“And y
et here I was, nigh five-and-twenty,” she continued, “with no hope for a husband, no hope for a son to take these lands back.” She shrugged a shoulder, and in that moment, Garrick had never seen her looking so uncertain. “I yearned for a normal life. For a real family. But as The O’Madden I’m not allowed such common dreams.”

“You went to the fires,” he repeated, “to conceive a bastard.”

She tilted her chin. “The son I would bear co
uld be the hope of the future. He could raise armies loyal to him to take back this land— something I could never do. I told myself I would get myself with child and raise a warrior.”

“Against me.”

“Against whoever dared to hold out against The O’Madden, the rightful heir to the leadership of this clan.”

He stared at her with new eyes
and wondered how he could not have known. Look at her, so straight-backed and regal, with the stamp of aristocracy on her fine-boned features. She belonged there, perched on the edge of a royal bed.
He
was the usurper. She was of higher rank than him. She bore Irish chieftain’s blood, probably with a pedigree she could trace back to the time of Patrick the Saint. What was he but a by-blow of a lord’s summer night’s folly?

Truth
be told, even less than that.

She drew in a deep, rasping breath.
“It was a bitter twist of fate that I found you at the Samhain fires. I wanted some Irishman who would get the deed done and forget about it and about me. Someone I would never see again.”

He shook his head. “Such things a
s this never happen by accident, my girl. Luck smiled upon us.”

“
Luck? Everything is ruined, don’t you see?” She buried her face in her hands. “I’m The O’Madden, and I’m with child by an Englishman.”

Maeve stood up from the bed and strode across the room, her back to Garrick, to put as much distance as she could between herself and the words she’d just blurted. She should not have said them, even if they were the truth. She’d only just begun to suspect but her certainty grew every day. A man deserves a better way to know that he would soon be a father. Even if it were only a father to a bastard child.

She trailed two fingers through the cooling bath water. “
You really must disrobe, my lord. Else the water will be too cold to bathe in and all the servant’s labor will be for naught.”

She seized a pile of linens off the rim of the barrel only to lay them down
again on a stool by the fire. She rearranged the position of the soap and the brush in the basket. Finally, she seized a poker and crouched by the hearth, to stoke the fire now fading to a quiet crackle.

In truth, s
he had told him far more dangerous things this night. She had handed him the power to destroy her, and thus destroy the last claimant to the very lordship he was determined to hold as his own. In her heart of hearts, she knew Garrick would never hurt her. She supposed she’d blurted the truth in the hopes that he would have mercy on her and the innocent soul growing in her womb.

His voice came, softly, far closer to h
er than she expected.

“
Are you sure?”

She bit the flesh of her lower lip. “
I won’t be sure until I feel a quickening, but all the signs are there.” She rose to her feet and slid the poker into the pail by the hearth. “I should have told you in a better way than that. You do that to me, Garrick . . . you make me say things without thinking.”

“You do things to me, as well
.” His voice dipped low and husky. “You make me think of the future, of plans.”

“No one would blame you
for sending away the woman who is destined to destroy you.”

“Would you raise that babe in your womb to destroy his
own father?”

“
No. He’ll be born with English blood and thus can never stop the curse.” She hugged her arms. “Even if that weren’t the case, you know I could never set him against you.”

“And I could never
send you away, Maeve. Only a fool of a man would destroy his own heart.”

His arms curled around her and she closed her eyes against the warm, tight embrace. She couldn’t help herself. She
pressed her nose in his chest, in the opening of his shirt so she could smell the fragrance of him, cinnamon and ginger, warmth and salt-sweat. She would forgive herself tomorrow for succumbing to him. How could she resist, locked in this room with the only man she would ever love, the father of her child, the man who she was bound by honor and duty to defeat?

“All this time,” he said, his voice rumbling in his chest, “
you resisted me, and it was only this curse which kept you from marrying me.”

“My people have s
uffered for too many years. My life is not mine, it has never been mine. Except for that one night on All Hallows’ Eve.”

“Tell me this.” 
His arms flexed around her, loosened, and then flexed tight again. “If I weren’t English, would you take me as your husband?”

“W
hat’s the use in talking of ‘ifs’? A whole world rides on such things.”

“But it’s true
that it’s my blood that stops you from being my wife.”

“If you weren’t English, you wouldn’t be the
lord of Birr, you wouldn’t be here, and we would never have met.”

“
Just say the words:  If it were so, would you consent to be my wife?”

“
Without a moment’s hesitation.” She breathed in the scent of him, and then closed her eyes to commit it to memory. “There. You’ve left me with no pride now.”

“I’ll leave myself none, either.”

He let her go. She hugged herself against the chill as he backed away, slope-shouldered, toward the bed.

He said,
“I have something to tell you, and it’s not a proud thing.”  He ran his hand through his hair. He took a sudden interest in the pattern of the reeds on the floor. “You’re not the only one with a secret.”

Maeve
took a step back. The edge of the mantelpiece bit into her shoulder. Garrick avoided her eye as he filled his lungs and breathed it out in one heaving rush. She flattened her palm over her belly, sensing that her world was about to tilt all over again.

“My mother had been a laun
dress in Wexford,” he began. “Not an easy life, that. It paid barely enough to keep her belly full. But she was pretty enough in her youth. She used her looks to earn an extra coin or two when the opportunity arose. That’s how she came about meeting the earl.”

Maeve’s
cheeks warmed. She knew how the English lords took advantage of a woman’s poverty. And she knew, even more intimately, how bastards came about. “You aren’t the first man begotten from an Englishman’s roaming.”

“Nor the last
.” He shrugged his giant’s shoulder. “The way my mother speaks of it, it was
her
eye that had been roaming that day.”

Maeve understood that instinct
. She, too, had let her eye roam over the assembled men on All Hallows’ Eve for the express purpose to choose a mate and sire a bastard, so she was not to judge.

He said,
“It had been fair time in Wexford, so the story goes. My mother was walking about with a new tunic she’d borrowed from amid the laundry. The way she tells the story, the tunic was big for her, and kept slipping off her shoulders. Something about my mother caught the Earl’s eye that day. You can imagine what it was.”

“Many a good man was born on the wrong side of the blanket, Garrick.”

“Yes. Well. The earl offered my mother more than a single coin for the pleasure of an evening. My mother is a hard-headed woman who knew something of the earl’s past, so she took his money gladly. One night soon stretched into a fortnight.”

Garrick paused, walking in a circle like a hunting-hound patting down the rushes for his bed, riffling his fingers through his hair.

“Some time later,” he continued, “she found herself with me in her belly. She wasted no time going to the earl with the news. The earl gave her a purse and paid her little mind, until my mother gave birth to me, a son. The earl’s
only
son, amid a dozen legitimate daughters.”

Maeve curled her fingers into a
fist against her abdomen, as a tentative new hope swirled within her.

“
And so I was raised as the by-blow of an earl, given lessons in Latin and a few coins to my mother now and again. As the years passed and the earl’s daughters gave him hope for grandsons, the earl’s generosity began to wane. So my mother went to fight in the courts for recognition that I was his only true-blood son. In the end, the earl gave me Birr in order to wash his hands of me. And I took it. Who wouldn’t seize a chance to own a piece of land?” Garrick dropped onto the end of the bed. “But there was something the earl didn’t know.”

She was afraid to breathe
.

“
The truth is, at the same time my mother was entertaining the earl, she’d been sharing a bed with the local butcher. A giant of an Irishman, much admired among the laundresses of Wexford, young and blond and strong-armed.”

Her mind reeled
. “Garrick . . . what are you saying?”

“I’m
full-blooded Irish, Maeve. There’s not a drop of poisoned English blood in me.”

Her heart
stopped and then, a moment later, throbbed painfully. She imagined she felt an answering throb of life in her womb.

It all came to her in a blinding rush.

My son won’t be English.

My son
can end the curse.

Garrick rose to his full h
eight, bringing her attention back to a world now forever changed. “Now, my lass,” he said, “I have handed you the weapon of my own destruction. You have the means to go to the earl and strip me of my lordship. You could be rid of me, forever, and rule yourself as The O’Madden.”

“Why would I make you leave this place,” she said,
quivering with incredulity, “when by doing that, I’d be inviting some Englishman to take your place?”

“Noble blood doesn’t run in these veins.”

“Noble blood has brought me nothing but grief.”

“What I hold, I hold by ruse—
”

“And a fin
e ruse on an Englishman it is.”

“I’m a man of no name, Maeve
. I always have been, for all my mother’s trickery.” He took a step closer and placed his hand on her abdomen. “But if you’ll have me, I’ll be proud to give our son the name he deserves:  He will be the O’Madden.”

Tears blurred her vision
. She placed her hand over his. She held it, tight, feeling her heart open wide.

“D
on’t keep me guessing, woman. Tell me yes—”

“Yes.”

Maeve threw herself upon him
. She felt his arms wrap around her, felt his hands curl against her back, felt his breath against her throat. She closed her eyes as tears fell over her cheeks. He raised his head and kissed them away as he tugged at her clothing again, as eager as she to finally make love on a bed.

She
’d chosen well on Samhain. Aye, she’d chosen well.

And i
n the middle of the kissing, as he drew her across the room, Maeve heard a sound, a soft sound, a familiar high-pitched whine.

Only later did she notice
the bedroom door sagging open on its hinges.

***

“Come along, Garrick, you’re dragging your feet like a boy being brought to the barber to have a tooth pulled.”

“I’m not
dragging my feet.” He tugged her to a stop and rolled her into his arms. “It’s the sight and smell of these woods that’s got me slowing down. That, and the memory of you in them, not so many weeks ago.”

“Listen to you
. Did you not have your fill of me last night?”

“Nay.”
He ran his lips against her brow. “And I’m thinking of having a bit of you now, here, while the mood is upon me.”

“
No, you’ve got to make a wife of me now.” She pulled out of his embrace. “And for that, you’ve got to meet the approval of Glenna first.”

Maeve skittered away
from the swipe of his hand and then laughed as he trailed her in mock sullenness. Though the air sang crisp, she felt no cold. Warmth suffused her from the inside, warmth born of the second night of their joining. Warmth born of the knowledge that there would be many nights to come, if Glenna cast her blessing upon this union.

Maeve hugged her skirts to her breast and pushed a sapling out of the path. She had little doubt Glenna would give her approval. After all, it was Glenna who had encouraged Maeve to seek out Garrick that Samhain night. How full of secrets that fairy-woman always was. She’d have made everything so much simpler, if she’d only told Maeve the truth of Garrick from the first, rather than hiding these past weeks and keeping Maeve in a state of agony. But Glenna had always s
aid that truth never comes easy and a person will only believe it if she discovers it herself.

No doubt, th
is was another of Glenna’s lessons in action.

Maeve frowned as she neared Glenna’s h
ut. Always, Maeve passed Glenna’s old bow-backed cow munching amid the forest before reaching Glenna’s hut, but the cow was nowhere in sight. The cow must be pasturing on the other side of the woods, Maeve thought, though in all her life she’d never seen Glenna herd it to the north.

A cool finger of light paint
ed the clearing with swirls of mist. Maeve quickened her step as she approached the familiar old hut. The door lay open.

Garrick said, “It looks
like the house of a fairy-woman.”

“I grew up here. I s
pent my life playing in this very clearing.” She frowned at the ivy which had grown over the thatch and hung nearly to the ground, obscuring the building and making it look like a part of the oak behind it. “I never noticed how overgrown it had become all these years.”

“You come back here a woman today,” he said, “and no longer look upon it with child’s eyes.”

She touched his arm. “Wait here. Let me warn Glenna of your presence.”

Maeve ducked
her head beneath the portal and brushed a cobweb out of her way. The house smelled of damp, rotting wood and the pungency of dried and crumbled herbs. Cobwebs feathered the rafters. Her feet scraped a path in the rug of leaves that had blown in and gathered in the corners. Bird’s feet trails made designs through the patina of dust.

Maeve
stilled. She couldn’t even smell Glenna, that distinct smell of crushed wildflowers and fresh herbs that always hung about her clothing. She couldn’t understand what she was seeing. There was no sign of a fire in the hearth, no sign of food, and no sign of life at all. It looked as if no one had lived amid these walls for generations, though she herself had slept here as recently as a few months ago.