The Irish Warrior

She was alone in the world, and far too easy to take advantage of.

Too stunning in spirit, too comely in form to trust his motives around. He might lose his wits, go mad like his father, let her tromp all over him, rip his heart out one day when she decided someone else had more of whatever it was she wanted.

Women wanted. ’Twas their nature. Their duplicitous, fomenting, desirable nature. He’d learned that the long, hard way. No more lessons, ever again.

Chapter 27

They sat quietly in the growing darkness, Senna sitting with her knees clasped between her arms, Finian flat on his back as twilight took its flat, pale shape.

Shades of pearly gray and pale blue slunk across the bowl overhead, but under the trees, it was darkly shadowed. The birds had stopped chirping. A frog could be heard in the distance, searching for a mate.

An owl swept low over their clearing, his big round eyes reflecting moonlight as he searched for prey. A tiny bat skittered and clicked in a jittery trajectory overhead.

“What made ye come to Éire, Senna?” Finian asked, breaking the silence.

Senna jumped at the sound of his voice, although he’d spoken quietly enough, in that low, resonant voice which did not carry far into the air, but deep into her. Like it was made of earth.

She’d felt it the other night, too—it seemed a year ago—when he’d stood beside her in the bailey, his hand hooked over her shoulder. He’d murmured to her in that soil-voice, and it felt like he was breathing for her.

“Business,” she replied. “I came for business.”

He’d been leaning forward, and his arm paused in its reach for a stick on the ground, muscles stilled in their silky slide beneath his skin. He continued reaching forward. “Ye mean money. Ye came for money.”

“Why else would someone do such a thing as this?” she replied in a flat voice, carefully leeched of any emotion.

“Why indeed.”

“You don’t understand,” she said angrily. Angry she felt the need to explain herself. Angry that he did not approve.

“I understand ’twas a piss-poor notion.”

She gave a snort of derisive laughter. “You’ve no idea. My family is famed for piss-poor ideas. We ought to have a chamber pot on our coat of arms.”

He sat back and uprooted a small plant near his hip with much more force than was necessary. Small clumps of dirt went flying. She listened to them land, tiny, swift, muted thumps falling on soft leaf fronds. A miniature army in sudden retreat.

It was getting harder and harder to keep the emotion from her voice. She snatched an innocent stick off the ground and began peeling it, cutting into the soft flesh under the bark with vicious stabs of a fingernail.

She felt Finian studying her face. “Had ye heard of Rardove, Senna? His violence?”

She waved the stick through the air. “No. Not enough to know all…this.”

All this indeed. How could anyone ever know what awaited her outside the door? It was a dangerous business, stepping out into the wide world, and she was sorely sorry she’d done so. Whether it was done to save the business, or her father, or her wretched, empty life, she was all sorrow now.

But mostly, at the moment, she was sorry for the way Finian was looking at her, with something akin to disappointment in his eyes. She squared her shoulders in the steely gray light filtering down through the trees. “You do not understand.”

An edge of his mouth lifted, but there was nothing amused in the grating voice he answered with. “Oh, I understand, Senna. My mam had the same choice to make.”

“What choice?”

“The one women always have to make.” He stared into the dying fire. “Her heart or the money.”

Senna almost couldn’t see the earth below her anymore. Her eyes were filling up with shocking tears, fed by unfamiliar, impotent fury. What would he know about the choices a woman had to make, in the dark, when the papers were sitting there in the fading light, and no one spoke a word? When no one cared for the lifetime of moments before the decision, simply the consequences that followed behind?

“How fortunate for your mother,” she snapped. The emotions would not be contained anymore. Sharp and fast, they shot out. “To have a choice. Many women do not enjoy such liberty. So tell me, when she married your father, was it for love or his money?”

“She did not marry my Da,” he said in a cold, impossible voice.

Senna went still.