Born in Fire (Born In Trilogy #1)

“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.