The Sisters O'Ryan 4
Maire
Maire O'Ryan, an independent Carolinian bent on living life as she sees fit, is hurt on the Arizona desert, alone and miles from her colleagues. Her only comfort is the presence of a circling eagle above and the sense of a warm fur wrapped around her at night. After two days, delirium keeps her from knowing whether her rescuers are real or dreams. Either way, they're delicious.
John Eagle and his best friend, Gus Brannigan, were led to the white woman on the rock by John's totem, the eagle, but he doesn't know why. He understands only that he's now responsible for the green-eyed beauty. When a crisis erupts, John is surprised by Maire's determination to come with him and Gus as they cross the desert in search of a murderer. Long before their search ends, the men commit their hearts and bodies to the woman. And she has reciprocated.
Genre: Ménage a Trois/Quatre, Western/Cowboys
Length: 38,306 words
MAIRE
The Sisters O’Ryan 4
Jenna Stewart
MENAGE EVERLASTING
Siren Publishing, Inc.
www.SirenPublishing.com
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A SIREN PUBLISHING BOOK
IMPRINT: Ménage Everlasting
MAIRE
Copyright © 2012 by Jenna Stewart
E-book ISBN: 978-1-61926-885-2
First E-book Publication: September 2012
Cover design by Les Byerley
All art and logo copyright © 2012 by Siren Publishing, Inc.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: This literary work may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic or photographic reproduction, in whole or in part, without express written permission.
All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.
PUBLISHER
Siren Publishing, Inc.
www.SirenPublishing.com
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DEDICATION
For Jack. You know why. And for mama because you are the role model every woman should aspire to. I love you both.
MAIRE
The Sisters O’Ryan 4
JENNA STEWART
Copyright © 2012
Chapter One
Maire O’Ryan’s screams echoed across the rocks, through the canyons, and into the desert evening air. In her stupidity—or maybe arrogance, although at the moment they appeared one and the same—she had ridden too far from camp. Then, after falling from her horse and watching the damn fool thing run away, she had foolishly attempted to walk a shortcut back to the village where the ethnologists lived. Her wrist hurt from where she’d landed on her fall, and her head ached not only from hitting the hard desert floor, but from spending hours in the Southwest sun.
Now, after all that, she’d fallen through a crack in the rock face she traversed. The crack was narrow at the top, yet still wide enough for her hips to jam. Below where her hips stuck, her left foot had also been caught, and she couldn’t move it.
The fall hadn’t hurt her, merely frightened her at first in its unexpectedness, but now she fought panic. She took stock, trying to wiggle her foot. It didn’t come out from where it had slid so easily a few moments ago. She thought of a time in her childhood when she had put her hand into a jar in order to retrieve the final glob of molasses. Once in, her hand wouldn’t come out, and her mother had had to break the glass, all the while delivering a stern lecture on where little girls’ hands should not go. Well, now she knew where feet shouldn’t go either. She tried to lift herself, but the pain flaring through her wrist stopped that before it made any difference.
“Oh!” She fell back into the crack, a not uncomfortable position, but not one she wanted to stay in any longer either. She tried again, remembering that she had always been the self-sufficient sister of the four, the independent, “I don’t need anyone to help me” daughter.
Of the four girls, Regan, Anya, Siobhan, and herself, Maire wasn’t the prettiest, the smartest, or the most obedient. Those positions she ceded to her sisters. But she was the sister who took pride in being able to do things herself, without relying on the others or their father, or—she decided after watching the others hurry off to marry—on a man. She had gotten herself in this mess, and she would get herself out.
Faster than she could have imagined, the sun began its descent. The lovely sunsets she’d admired since her arrival—so wild and yet so safe viewed from her camp chair beside a roaring fire—now threw shadows across the rocks. Shadows that inched closer with each passing minute. With the setting sun came darkness, at once all encompassing and terrifying, unknown to Maire before. Pride rushed before the setting sun.
“Help!” She couldn’t be that far from her fellow researchers, and sound carried a good distance in the desert. “Help!”
The sun sank another foot behind a far mountain. Maire screamed for someone to come until no sound came from her throat. Bracing her elbows on the rock to each side of the crack, she tried leveraging herself up. With a sharp twist, her hips gave a fraction of an inch. Her foot remained hung up on the rocks below, however. Exhausted from her efforts, her cries for help, and the panic of knowing she was totally alone on the Arizona mesa at nightfall, she sank back and took deep breaths to calm herself.
The sun fell lower yet. The edge of night crawled across her hand, resting on the rock face. In moments it slithered up her arm and across her shoulder. Then, amidst her whimpers and trembling body, it engulfed her.
The roar of thousands of beating wings erupted into the open sky from below her. Bats! She c
overed her head, remembering the old wives’ tale that said bats would tangle in a person’s hair. She needn’t have worried. The tiny mammals spread out as dark dots against a starlit sky, paying her no mind.
Maire continued her struggle until she collapsed. She knew little about the Southwest night. In truth, she knew little about night anywhere. Even in her hometown of Asheville, she rarely ventured out in the evenings, choosing instead to read or write letters at home. Then, in the last few years, she had the care of her father, and socializing of any sort had taken second place in her life, day or night.
A coyote howled somewhere off to her left, sending bone-numbing fear through her. That sound, which she’d heard since arriving a month ago and dismissed as being far off and unhazardous, now, inspired an ominous feeling. Every other night, she’d had the warmth and protection of a fire and comrades to talk to. Tonight she faced the animal’s feral call alone.
She had nothing with which to defend herself. Leaving the village that afternoon, she’d worn only her pelisse and hat. She’d also taken a canteen of water, now lost somewhere in the desert with her spooked horse.
“Dear God, please protect me and deliver me safely to my friends.” As though God answered, the coyote’s howling stopped and silence descended on the mesa once more.
Millions of stars scattered across the sky mesmerized her, and the rise of a crescent moon made her feel better. Even a small bit of light was welcome.
Over the next several hours, Maire slipped in and out of sleep. At times she didn’t know whether she dreamed or recognized things as they were, but once she imagined a furred animal wrapped around her, protecting her from the worst of the night’s chill.
When she woke fully, she noted the change of the moon’s position and that the stars had moved in the heavens. Night creatures she didn’t recognize skittered nearby, but amazingly, none of the rock's residents bothered her. She shivered, her chattering teeth making the only sound. The temperature range in the November desert high country had surprised her when she first arrived, but now it worried her.
When the first rays of sunlight crept over the eastern horizon, Maire breathed a sigh of relief. Surely she had been missed and her companions would search for her today.
“Thank you, Father, for getting me through the night.”
Her stomach rumbled, and she realized it had been nearly twenty hours since she’d eaten. She’d taken nothing with her to nibble, thinking she would be gone only a few hours and back at the village long before dinner. Water became more important than food as the heat of the day took over.
The sun rose high in the sky, dazzling light that backlit a circling eagle. Maire tried every so often to release her foot, with no success. When the sun reached its zenith and no one had come, she began to cry. She was hungry and thirsty enough to drink the French Broad River dry. She was tired of being stuck in a rock and wanted a bed.
Her pity party didn’t last long. She’d never been one to give in to a crisis, and the futility of her tears frustrated her. Struggling against the literally rock hard surface, she twisted her ankle left and then right, all the while straining to pull herself out. She stopped abruptly when a piercing pain radiated from her ankle up her leg and a dull ache pounded in her head.
When she caught her breath, she said, “They’ll come. Any minute now, Will or Hannah will come over that crest and see me.” The words spoken out loud held such conviction, she nearly believed them. Her throat was too dry to scream any longer. She could barely gather enough saliva to lick her cracked lips. Dizziness struck whenever she tried to focus, so she closed her eyes against the searing, unbroken sunlight.
She must have dozed. When she once more opened her eyes, the ache in her head had become a throbbing, pounding agony, and she was hot, burning from the inside as well as out. Even blinking became an effort, and it was easier to close her eyes against the omnipresent desert than to attempt to focus on anything.
Finally, the sun began its downward arc, turning the mountains a stunning lavender color that she couldn’t appreciate in her current situation. That situation was potently clear. She was trapped somewhere on a mesa in the Arizona desert, far from anyone who knew her. And she would probably end her life there.
She could see the obituary in her hometown newspaper. A spinster and fiercely independent woman, Maire Bridget O’Ryan, died alone in the Arizona desert, October 25, 1879. Cause of death was stupidity in thinking she understood the Arizona desert after living in the area a mere month.
The irony wasn't lost on her, though any semblance of humor was. I don’t want to die here all alone. I don’t want to die!
But she feared she might. Already, she had difficulty forming a cogent sentence in her mind. The blazing heat of sunburned hands and face, and the lack of water were taking their toll. Another day out here and she would not be saved—she would be buried.
Unbelievably, once more sunset draped her in darkness and in virtually the same position as yesterday, except this time with waning hope. As warm as she had been with the sun bearing down on her, she now grew chilled without its light. She tried to conserve her energy by keeping her arms close to her body, but her teeth clacked with each shiver. Goose-bumps covered her arms.
Sheer fatigue overcame her, and she succumbed to a fitful sleep. Coyote howls infected her dreams, and she imagined things crawling over her, biting her, and scuttling across her hands. Then she warmed, as though wrapped in fur, and her dreams settled on food and water, whole rivers of water.
She came awake slowly, stroking her lips with a dry tongue. Hunger ate at her, and thirst nearly drove her wild. “Water,” she whispered.
“Father said you couldn't have any water,” Regan, her eldest sister said. “He said you had to learn a lesson from being so foolish as to stray out alone.”
Maire's eyes flew open. It had been a dream after all, a horrid, terrible dream. She was home, safe and sound in the parlor with her sisters. They all peered at her with the family's green eyes and sharp, alert expressions. Regan sat across the room needlepointing a pillow. But surely it was the same pillow she had finished before she ran off and married and then disappeared into the West.
“Yes,” added her sister, Siobhan, the prettiest O'Ryan sister. Everyone said so, not just Maire. But sometimes Siobhan was full of herself, knowing her own beauty. “You went off without a hat. What bright Southern girl does that, Maire? You were foolish to the extreme.”
“Aren't you married and in California?” Maire asked her.
“Never you mind about me,” Siobhan said with a flounce of her skirt. “You have enough to worry about. Even though you're the baby of the family, this time you are in real trouble. Father wants to see you shortly, and you know what that means.”
Maire struggled to figure it out. Father was dead, wasn't he? Was that why he would see her soon, because she was so near death herself?
Maire's third sister spoke up, timid as always. “You can have my water, Maire.” Coming forward with a pretty striped cup brimming with the precious liquid, she set it on a piecrust table, near enough for Maire to reach.
Maire tried to focus on the colorful stripes circling the cup. They seemed to move until they resembled a coil. “How pretty,” she murmured, and reached for the cup. In a lightning flash, the coil struck, sinking fangs into the side of her hand before slithering off.
“Oh.” Blood seeped from two tiny punctures. Suddenly, the parlor disappeared and she was once again in the desert, but now too far gone to be worried. She watched an eagle circle overhead. The same one? Her eyelids drifted shut and she felt herself flying, flying higher and higher in the sky. She floated on the air currents without a care in the world.
“Miss? Miss, are you awake?”
Maire looked up into black eyes, examining her. The eyes belonged to a face browned by more than the sun. He had the features of the Indians the ethnologists worked with, but he spoke English as well as she did.
“Are you a dream, too
?” She wanted to reach out and touch his cheek, but couldn't force her hands to respond to the command.
“She sounds delirious,” a second voice said. “Let’s get her out.”
The Indian slipped his hands under her arms and lifted, but she didn’t budge. Maire moaned.
“Well, that’s it,” the second man said. “She’s stuck good. Must be her leg or foot.”
The Indian said, “I know where the entrance to the canyon is. I’ll see if I can free her.”
When she opened her eyes again, he was gone. But another man leaned down to examine her, his blue eyes so friendly and calm that she immediately felt at peace. “Don’t worry, ma’am, we’ll get you free.”
Don’t worry, ma’am. That was funny. But maybe she wouldn’t die there, far from home and anyone who loved her, after all.
“Don’t want to die,” she whispered.
“What’s that you say?”
She tried to wet her lips but couldn’t muster up the spit.
“Here. Want some water?” The mystery man held a canteen to her lips and drizzled water into her mouth. She tried to gulp, but he wouldn’t let her. “Just a bit at a time. We don’t want you getting sick.”
She nodded. “Thank you,” she said.
Someone grasped her foot and turned it slightly left and down. Then he pushed up, and her foot slipped right through the gap that had kept her trapped for almost two days.
“Pull her up, Gus.” The voice came from below her.
“Okay, ma’am. I’m going to put my arms under yours. Hold on if you can.”
Maire [The Sisters O'Ryan 4] (Siren Publishing Ménage Everlasting) Page 1
