The O'Madden: A Novella (The Celtic Legends Series) by Lisa Ann Verge Page A

collapsed into a ball and tumbled across the ground. A flock of women descended upon the boy to quench the fire with their skirts.
    Then Maeve saw him .
    A blond giant of a man stood at the outer edge of the light, wearing a well-fitting tunic and a belt of studded leather, clearly no soft-cheeked boy. Bristle darkened the line of his jaw. She watched him as he made some sidelong comment to his companion and then raked his hand through his long hair. Hooking a thumb under his belt, he laughed at his companion’s response.
    She could not hear his laughter across the blaze of the flames, b ut she sensed the vibrations as if his chest were pressed against her own. Beneath the cover of her cloak she ran a hand down her belly, down to the drape of her belt across her hips. An odd sensation spiraled in her abdomen, a slumbering, tingling awareness.
    A branch snapped be hind her as Glenna leaned in, bringing with her the smell of crushed greenery and wildflowers from years of making the herb-potions of her livelihood.
    Glenna murmured, “Now there’s a fine-looking man.”
    Maeve watched as the giant pulled a cork out of an ale-bladder. “Do you know him?”
    “He’s not from Birr or anywhere close. I’d remember such a sight as that.” Glenna leaned forward and squinted toward him. “A traveler, by the look of those boots. Maybe he’s one of the pilgrims sleeping up at the monastery tonight.’’
    A traveler. A tall, strong-armed, barrel-chested stranger. Here today, gone tomorrow.
    Perfect .
    Maeve cou ldn’t stop looking at his face, at the easy drift of a smile across his lips, at the humor in his eye as he watched the antics of the villagers. “That man is good Irish stock, no doubt of that.”
    “ There’s no knowing the truth until you hear the Gaelic coming from his mouth.” Glenna tugged the tail of Maeve’s hood until the cloth crumpled onto Maeve’s shoulders. “Go on now. Do you think a man like that will be standing around the fires without a woman for long?”
    Glenna lodged her walking stick between Maeve’s shoulder blades. Maeve stumbled forward. An uncertain shame rippled over her as the light fell upon her face. She’d traveled far from her own home for this. She’d spent months thinking about it, planning it, deciding it. Yet with all her careful plans, she’d always skipped over this part in her mind— hoping that when the time came, she’d just somehow know what to do to entice a man to her side.
    Now she stood as frozen as a statue on a nook in the church. Maeve knew she wasn’t hard to look at, but she’d never used her face or her figure in such a way as she needed to use it now. Even the finest-honed bow and the sharpest arrows were useless in the hands of the innocent, the untrained.
    The walking stick wedged between her shoulders again, and she found herself nudged into t he madness. The fire breathed its own hot wind, lifted the ends of her hair and swept the dark strands across her face. He was just a man, she told herself. Finer of figure and face than she’d ever dreamed of, when she’d dared to dream of such things. And he knew nothing of her, nothing of her secrets, and nothing of the significance of this act they would commit tonight. Here, for the first time in all her life— and probably for the last—she could be Maeve the woman . And nothing more.
    She let the power of that knowledge suffuse her. She willed the strength, and as she did, his brow furrowed as if he sensed her watchfulness. He cast his gaze around the clearing. Despite the curtain of ashes raining between them, despite the shimmer of heat and the dart of excited young bodies, despite the roar and cackle of the fire and the shriek of voices, their gazes met and locked.
    That sleepy swirling in her abdomen tightened to a fist. For a moment nothing else existed—not the dry rustle of late autumn leaves in the trees, not the villagers around them, nothing but the fierce intensity of their silent