Maire by Linda Windsor Read Free Book Online Page B

thought of him as a man, Maire now had his full attention. She wriggled beneath him, a provocative smile curling on her lips. From the corner of her eye she saw Eochan block Declan, whose fist was tight about the hilt of his sword. If her brother broke the terms of the contest, shame alone would emerge the victor.
    The long, thin blade of her stinger came loose and her oppressor was none the wiser. What he mistook as an intendedembrace became, with a practiced flash of metal in the torchlight, her triumph.
    “We marry in name only, of course.” More color claimed her face. If more was to come of the marriage, as it had in her mother’s… well, that remained to be seen.
    She pressed the razor-sharp blade against Rowan’s skin, where a vein swelled with the flow of his life spirit. His wince was barely perceptible, but it told he’d felt a taste of the stinger’s deadly potential.
    “May I ask why this sudden proposal?” He grated the words out, careful not to strain against the knife in his evident battle between hostility and bewilderment.
    The crowd closed in no more than a body’s length from them in hopes of hearing the negotiations whispered for each other’s ears only.
    “I need a husband to be rid of a troublesome suitor. You need your head.”
    Rowan clearly didn’t care for either rationale. Had there been real steel to his cutting gaze, her eyes would be gouged out by now.
    “Then I don’t see where I have much choice.”
    “I’d have your word in your god’s name,” Maire added, somewhat offended by his decidedly reluctant concession. After all, it was
he
who’d admitted aloud she was comely.
    “You have my word in the name of God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth, that I will take you as my wife.”
    Maire shook her head. “That I will take you as my husband,” she corrected, gaining satisfaction at his deepening scowl. Here was a man unaccustomed to a woman’s dominion. He’d get used to it, being married to a queen.
    “However you wish to put it, milady.”
    “Then give me your sword… carefully.” She kept the stinger pressed against him as he reached over her head to retrieve the weapon he’d dropped to break his fall. “Place it in my other hand.”
    Her fingers closed about the hilt of Rowan’s sword. It was still warm from his grasp. A surge of nearly lost triumph welled in her chest as if to explode like heaven’s own thunder. Praise her mother’s gods, she’d won!
    “You may get off me now, sir.”
    “Aye, for now.”
    Maire allowed the taunt to glance off harmlessly, unanswered. It was her moment. It was Gleannmara’s day. The bards would sing of this in centuries to come, after all. She was just gone eighteen. She’d beaten a seasoned warrior in battle. She won Gleannmara a tribute fit for a king. Further, she found the answer to Morlach’s threat and secured the tribute with the same blow, taking Rowan ap Emrys as husband and hostage. Brude had been right all along.
    She flashed the druid a smile as she held up Rowan’s sword to the ecstatic approval of her clansmen. Her vigor returned, renewed with each shout of her name and of Gleannmara’s. Floating on a cloud of triumph, Maire was unprepared when Rowan suddenly seized her in his arms and kissed her soundly on the lips. His sword fell from her hand, disabled as she was by shock.
    As he released her, only the rising heat of embarrassment thawed her frozen state. Indignation grew to a roar in her veins, but before she could land a retaliatory blow on his smirking face, the Welshman caught her wrist and raised her arm along with his own as if they shared the victory.
    “Mother and friends, I give you my bride-to-be! God keep us all.”

FOUR
    W ith no time to exult in Maire’s disconcertment, Rowan sprang from her side to catch his mother before she collapsed on the ground in a full swoon. Lady Delwyn had stood during the contest, refusing the chair her servants brought her. Rowan had heard her