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since she’d torn out of this very barn yesterday, spurning his marriage proposal.
    Maeve strode past him as he rose from his crouch . “We’ll have to milk the cows anyway, else they’ll stop making milk altogether.” She slid back the bolt of the opposite door and pushed it open. Morning light poured through the barn. “The girl who usually milks the cows ran off without a word this morning. By the time we realized the cows weren’t being milked, we’d already sent out another milkmaid who knew nothing of the curse. It gave her quite a scare.”
    “The curse.”
    “Aye. It has begun again.” She leveled him with a gray-eyed stare. “I’ll send a girl to buy some milk from the villagers. They’ll have enough to spare, for now. Unless you have a taste for cursed green milk.”
    She swiveled on a heel and disappeared around the edge of the portal. Garrick moved to run his fingers through his hair but caught himself. He stared at his splayed hand, rubbed the green milk on his cloak, and then stepped out into the light. He caught sight of Maeve striding straight-backed toward the henhouse.
    He let his gaze trail over the curving lines of her lovely figure as at least one part of his body stirred from a fitful sleep. It had been a restless night for more than one reason. Now he’d woken to discover her behaving as if a marriage proposal from the castle’s lord was as unremarkable as cows giving green milk.
    He strode into the pen and clacked the gate closed behind him. Her s houlders flinched at the sound. “So,” he began, leaning back against the loose post of the hurdle. “Tell me about this curse.”
    She flung open the doors to the henhouse and the birds burst out in a flurry of feathers and clucks. “Didn’t your father see fit to warn you?” 
    Garrick swallowed a bitter laugh . The earl saw fit to visit his by-blow once a year or so. For the fleeting moments of the Earl’s critical perusal, Garrick as a boy had to undergo days of scrubbing, snipping, and coaching. Mostly, Garrick remembered the way the Earl’s man had shoved the documents for these lands into his mother’s hands— then galloped away, peering nervously into every dark alley of that part of Wexford that rarely saw such a fat mark.
    “The Earl,” he said drily, “was remarkably unforthcoming on the details of this manor.”
    “Then you don’t know about The O’Madden.”
    “Who?”
    “The person destined to break the curse and drive the last Englishman off this land.”
    Garrick straightened . He could stomach a tumbled-down wreck of a castle. He could stomach a tiny glitch of a village, a bow-backed herd of cattle. Those things could be changed and improved. A manor could grow. But he’d had no inkling that the ownership of this land was contested.
    “These lands are mine now.” Garrick braced himself in the portal of the henhouse as Maeve stepped inside to peruse the nests. “Any man who contests my hold will have to deal with me.”
    “Steel is useless against a widow’s curse.” She slipped a basket off a hook just inside the door and slung it over her elbow. “I see I will have to tell you the full of it.”
    “It’s high time you told me the truth about something.”
    She flinched. Her gaze skittered away as she groped for eggs in one of the nests. “I never lied to you.”
    “Didn’t you, Maire ?”
    “I had good reasons for that.”
    “I t’s those reasons I’m still seeking. No.” He could tell she was summoning up another half-truth. In love and fighting all was the same: There were times to attack, and there were times to retreat to better ground. “You’ll tell me when it pleases you. That’s the way of women and I have more patience than most. For now, tell me more of this O’Madden.”
    She had the dignity to blush. She rolled an egg into her basket. “ Before the English came,” she said, “these lands were ruled by the O’Maddens. It was a fine clan, a strong clan, and the lands were