excerpt
She sat down on the old milking stool, stared at the burning turf and relaxed in the warmth from the fire. Deep in thought, she realised that her life had changed dramatically in the past week. Her father was gone, and she missed him. His death had put an end to his awful, secret suffering but it had not eased her own. It had added sorrow to the sum of her troubles but had not taken away the guilt she felt at having betrayed her father by becoming a convert to the Church. In the dark pit of sleepless nights she heard her father from his fresh-dug grave pour disdain upon her.
His soul will never rest, she had convinced herself, while I remain true to the faith he denounced.
Caitlin’s thoughts then turned to Padraig. That morning in the church; after she and Padraig had had sex together, all of her long-suppressed feelings of love for the tormented priest had burst out of their prison and escaped into the mists on the mountains. She would never recapture them. Their going had left her empty. Only her feelings for Michael could fill the void, and when he had discovered her among the crags on Slieve Donevan, Caitlin’s love for him possessed her with a passion it had lacked before. It filled her to overflowing. It staunched even the emotional drain of her father’s death. In the torturing days and guilt-racked nights since her father had died, Caitlin had greater need of Michael’s love than he could ever have imagined.
The brief but ardent affair with Padraig, the last blaze from a fire he had kindled a dozen years before, had died to cold ash. The heat of that old passion, Caitlin realised with a shudder, had almost destroyed her love for Michael. But that love, like the three Hebrews, had emerged from the midst of the fire unharmed.
Caitlin’s heart fluttered like a schoolgirl’s when she heard Michael’s step outside. She rose from the stool as the door opened and Michael entered the warm room.
“So this is where you are,” he said. He took off his navy-blue coat and hung it on a nail behind the door. He looked around the room, and his mouth lifted in a smile of pleasure. He appeared almost boyishly shy. “You’ve been busy, I see.”
He stepped towards her with his arms out, and Caitlin met him in a tight embrace. They kissed and looked, smiling, into each other’s eyes. Then they kissed again, more passionately. Michael held her to him and gazed over her shoulder at the brightly burning fire.
Libros Libertad 