Hero is a Four Letter Word by J.M. Frey Read Free Book Online

mind. She tells Karen that she’s been seeing someone, and that he is far more serious about it than her, and her friend yells “finally!” and pours them both another glass of wine and turns off the telly and adds, “So, details!”
    “None really,” Jennet says. They are taking it slow, oh so slow, because Jennet still hurts behind the smiles. Because she feels guilty for finding joy when her Da is dead and in the ground.
    But Liam is kind, and clever, and quick. He moves like a ballet dancer and smiles like the sun, and he is everything that grief-damp and sorrow-grey Jennet has feared she would never feel again. She is a full decade his senior, and yet he makes her giggle and blush.
    And on their third meeting, when he brushes a sweet kiss across her cheek and asks her to meet him in the woods tomorrow for a walk, she turns positively crimson and agrees.
    So here she is, being honest to goodness wooed as she walks the woods.
    “I like it when you visit me here,” Liam says, guiding her over a split rock in the path. “It feels like our secret.”
    “Not much of a secret,” Jennet says. “My family’s been meeting lovers in the woods for centuries.” She realizes what she’s just said, what she’s just insinuated, and covers her face with her hands, positive her blush is phosphorescent.
    Liam laughs at her discomfort and pretends he didn’t hear it in a gentlemanly manner. “Oh, how those robust, virile Carterhaugh men loved their women. So many children they had, so many little heirs running about, but the families got smaller and smaller. The men loved their women just the same, though.”
    “True,” Jennet allows, still mortified, but unwilling to let her male ancestors have all the bragging rights. “And the women their men.”
    “Look, here,” Liam says, leading them to a gentle stop beside a lump of weed and bracken about twice wide as his own shoulders. “Do you know what this is?”
    “… dead ivy?” Jennet answers.
    Liam grins and crouches down, yanking on the dead vines until a small circle of grey stone is revealed.
    “Oh, a well,” Jen says, kneeling on the moist leaf-mold to peer down it, hands braced on the ground rather than the rim, in case it’s unstable.
    “The well from which Tam Lin was reborn.”
    Jennet laughs. “Oh, no, you know the song, too?”
    Liam laughs with her. “And the tales. But it’s not a tale, Jennet. It’s true. ‘Twas your own ancestor Margaret clung to Tam Lin as the Faery Queen transformed him into a lion, and an adder, and a rod of red-hot iron. She flung her lover into the well and he became a man again, reborn in the waters of a woman. They cleaved to one another their whole lives after.”
    Jennet rolls her eyes. “Which is, you have to admit, the prettiest way to talk about what was probably a road-side tryst. A length of red-hot iron? The waters of a woman? Sounds a lot like shagging to me.”
    “Why Jennet,” Liam says, voice pitched to mimic a particularly offended maiden aunt, and slides down to sit beside her, one of his thighs pressed along her hip. “Your mind is positively in the gutter today. Was there something you wanted to proposition?”
    “ My mind is in the gutter?”
    “We could take a roll here, like the heroes of the great tales. Make love in nature. Declare ourselves under the stars, all that romantic nonsense.”
    She is tempted. God she is tempted. It’s been two years since her last serious boyfriend, and there is only so much batteries and fingers could do, but she has no condom and Liam is already dangerously infatuated. What would a twenty year old man allowed to have sex with an older woman think?
    She lets him put his hand on her thigh, fingernails scratching the denim puckering around her knees. Here is the moment of truth. Does she say yes, or no? Or later?
    “What is a hero, really?” Jen muses, instead of answering herself. The coward’s way out, but she needs to think. Not if she’s sleep with Liam,