Border Bride. Deborah Hale

given to impulsive action, like he was. And once she’d made up her mind, she clung to it with calm tenacity that no amount of reasoning or arguing could sway. Often enough, Con had thought the elfin slip of a girl more stubborn than any massive ox he’d ever coaxed to plow a furrow.

      Picking up his harp, Con spent a few moments tuning it. Then, with his eyes fixed on Enid, he began to play and sing.

      “Blackbird, oh, blackbird with your dark silken wings. Blackbird with your beak of gold and your silver tongue. Fly for me to a distant shore and ask there how my beloved does.”

      Whenever Con ap Ifan had crooned this ballad during his long voluntary exile from the land of his birth, Enid’s face had always been the one to rise in his mind.

      This spring evening, as he plucked his harp by her fire and drank in her slender, dark beauty with a thirsty heart, the words of the second verse took on a more urgent meaning for him.

      “One, two, three things are past my skill. One, two, three things I cannot master. How to count all the stars in heaven on a winter night. How to polish the silver face of the moon. How to fathom the mind of my beloved.”

      He’d known Enid longer than he’d known any other woman, yet she remained an enigma to him. Perhaps that was part of the spell that had held him in her power for so many years. The woman was a challenge and a mystery wrapped within an enchantment.

      As the last note of the song died away, Enid’s face paled to the cast of winter moonlight while her eyes darkened to the bottomless black of the night sky between the stars.

      Why?

      Perhaps if he could puzzle out the riddle of her, aided by his hard-won knowledge of the world and his pleasantly acquired understanding of women, he could free his heart from her gossamer hold. But did he dare run the risk that she would snare him so tight, he might never want to escape?