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

  “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 laundress 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 height, 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 fine 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.

  “Don’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 in 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 said that truth never comes easy and a person will only believe it if she discovers it herself.

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

  Maeve frowned as she neared Glenna’s hut. 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 painted 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 spent my life playing in this very clearing.” She frowned at the ivy which had grown over the thatch a
nd 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.

  A flash of light brought her attention to something gleaming on the table. Maeve brushed off a scattering of leaves and caught her breath. There, amid the dust, lay two rings wrought in the finest, reddest gold Maeve had ever seen. Maeve took them in her hand. They pulsed warm against her palm.

  Her heart turned over as she closed her fingers over the tribute. Such a token as this could mean only one thing. Such a gift as this was no other than a goodbye gift from a fairy-woman who felt she was no longer needed. Maeve had made the right decision with Garrick. The curse was broken.

  Maeve held the rings to her heart. She glanced one last time around the old hut and whispered a silent thanks. Then, clutching the rings, she stepped out into the sunshine, into the warmth of Garrick’s smile, and opened her heart to her destiny.

  I hope you enjoyed THE O’MADDEN!

  Don’t miss the other books in the Celtic Legends Series

  TWICE UPON A TIME: Book One

  THE FAERY BRIDE: Book Two

  THE O’MADDEN: A Novella

  Also available—the Novels of Lisa Verge Higgins

  THE PROPER CARE AND MAINTENANCE OF FRIENDSHIP

  ONE GOOD FRIEND DESERVES ANOTHER

  FRIENDSHIP MAKES THE HEART GROW FONDER

  RANDOM ACTS OF KINDNESS, coming March 2014

  SENSELESS ACTS OF BEAUTY, coming March 2015

  More coming soon from Lisa Ann Verge!

  DEFIANT ANGEL

  BLAZE OF PASSION

  MY LOVING ENEMY

  THE HEART’S DISGUISE

  HEAVEN IN HIS ARMS

  WILD IRISH ROSE

  SWEET HARVEST

  LOGAN’S WAY

  LOVING WILD

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  Enjoy this sneak peak of TWICE UPON A TIME, Book One in the Celtic Legends Series

  TWICE UPON A TIME

  By Lisa Ann Verge

  Prologue

  France, 1223 A.D.

  It was a time for dying.

  The ocean roared against the cliff, boiling up a mist as dense as steam. On the high ledge, crosses bristled against the leaden sky. A cluster of villagers huddled in the lee of a thatched-roofed church, watching a priest brace himself at the head of a grave. The old cleric muttered wind-stolen words to the wooden cross at its head.

  Conor stood apart from the others, thrusting his chin into the gale. Cold seeped into his tunic and drained the heat from his blood. He watched as the priest ceased his chanting, ceding the battle to the coming tempest. The grave diggers gouged their shovels into the earth at the final sign of the cross. The villagers mimicked the motion, and then rustled like a flock of ravens as they turned away.

  Aye, that is always the way of it. Conor curled his fingers into his palms. Go, then. Go to your hot stew and your loaves of thyme bread. Go sell the fish rotting in baskets on the shore. There’s never time to mourn the dead while the business of the living continues.

  His footsteps crunched across the ground. The grave diggers paused, their shovels dribbling sod. Conor pitched to one knee and clutched a handful of soil. He crumbled it between his fingers and sifted it into the pit.

  Sleep easy, my old friend. May the sun shine warmly on your face.

  The church bell clanged from the bell tower. The discordant chime bellowed through the fog.

  If you find her where you’re going, tell her to wait for me at the doors of Tír na nÓg one more time again.

  The villagers’ gazes weighed upon his bent head. It was long past time for their suspicion and fear, he supposed. He should have known better than to linger in this tiny hamlet until all his seafaring friends lay scattered in the ground beneath him, their flesh eaten, their bones dust. But she had taught him too well. A healer could not leave a single man suffering. So he had stayed to ease the pain of the passing of the last of his aged companions into death.

  Yet still he lived, still he lived—if one could call such an existence life. No warm hearth crackled for him in the hamlet at the base of the cliff. No soft-voiced woman peered out a crack in the door, or strained her ears for his footfall. No grandchildren sprawled on the hearth to plead for stories. And now there was no longer anyone with whom to swap tales while the rain seeped through the thatched roof. No one with whom to reminisce about voyages to Venice and Rome, to Syria and Egypt. No one with whom to share a simple meal or a simple memory.

  It was a good time to die.

  Conor heaved his broad-shouldered frame to its full height, not bothering to stoop and waddle as he had for so many years. Let the wind scour the ash from his hair. Let the sea mist cleanse his face and hands of soot to uncover his unlined skin. Men saw what they expected to see. If today they finally saw him as he was, there was nothing he could do to disguise the truth. That was the way of the world.

  His fog-soaked cloak snapped behind him as he turned his back to the villagers and strode into the mists. The milky vapor engulfed him in odd, welcoming warmth. He paused at the tip of the cliff and squinted down toward the white-capped sea carving the shores of Marseille. Above, rain-burdened clouds jostled in the sky. Soon, he thought, the twilight between light and dark would come—soon, the mist would be neither rain nor seawater, nor river nor well water. It would be the time between the times, as the Druids had once taught him, when the walls between the worlds grew thin.

  He nodded once to the glory of the ocean. He would choose a sea-death today. He would row his fishing boat into the tempest and challenge the water’s fury. He closed his eyes, imagining the course of his coming death. The sting of liquid salt gorging his lungs. The flex and stretch of his muscles as he struggled against the inevitable suck into the ocean’s womb. The last white-hot flash of agony before the blood stopped pulsating in his temples and an unearthly warmth and darkness cradled him in silence.

  Then he would see the light. He would approach it, drawn irresistibly to the glow of love and warmth and joy, like the welcoming arms of some primordial mother. He would hear the birds singing softly and the outline of a tree would emerge—a silver tree bathed in golden light. And he would know that this was Tír na nÓg, the beloved Otherworld.

  He would hear the bells, tinkling like fairy music. He would race toward the chimes, race toward her, thinking this time it would be different, because hope was a tenacious plant which grew back no matter how many times it was cut. But just when he glimpsed the edge of her robes, just when he saw the tips of her fingers, outstretched for him, just when he detected the fragile scent of rainwater and honeysuckle that had always clung to her hair—the door would slam shut.

  Then he would awaken, buried in the chill earth with dirt clogging his nostrils and a winding sheet stifling his movements.
Still smelling her, still sensing her presence, clinging to the feeble threads of the memory until the screams of his earthly body stripped him of the last fiber and left him with a different agony. Cold. Hunger. Pain.

  Wretched life.

  Conor swathed his cape around his body and spun away from the cliff. He plodded through the cemetery, past the half-full grave. He no longer mourned the dead. His old friend had slipped through the door to a land of warmth and peace and pleasure. Now Conor mourned for himself, for the hell the gods had forced upon him—the loneliness, the deceit, the fear in the eyes of men. It would always be like this. He would fool himself that he could be like other men, but then another lifetime would pass, the lies would begin, his disguise grow thinner, his friends die one by one. He would try, once again, to leap the precipice that kept him from where he belonged, only to find himself bound to life again, forced to leave for another place, another existence, like a dozen lives before, all the same.

  All but one.

  A bolt of lightning cracked open the sky. Rain pelted his shoulders and sluiced down the dry riverbed of his face. He had relived that single life until the fabric of the memory frayed like a storm-chewed fishing net. He wished he could forget. But the memories seized him in moments of distraction. Such was the fate of a man whose heart lay in the grave.

  He would never—ever—lose himself like that again, no matter where the road took him in the years ahead. For now he understood: He would have been better off if he had never known her. He would have been better off if he had never given away the full of his soul.

  But it had been his first life, and he had been too young and too ignorant to guard his heart.

  He had loved before he knew he was immortal.

  And thus forever alone.

  excerpt from TWICE UPON A TIME, Book One in the Celtic Legends Series, copyright 2013 by Lisa Ann Verge

  Buy TWICE UPON A TIME

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  About the Author

  Lisa Ann Verge is the critically acclaimed RITA-nominated author of sixteen novels that have been published worldwide and translated into as many languages—quite a switch for this former chemist. She began her career writing romance about hot men and adventurous women and now she also writes women’s fiction under the name Lisa Verge Higgins. Lisa is a five-time finalist in Romantic Times’ book awards, her novels have won the Golden Leaf and the Bean Pot, and twice she has cracked Barnes & Noble’s General Fiction Forum’s top twenty books of the year. She currently lives in New Jersey with her husband and their three daughters, who never fail to make life interesting.