Born in Fire Read Online Free PDF

high-blown fantasies of her father. Perhaps there was a tug of sentiment and regret for the hillocks and fields she had once raced over with all the arrogance and innocence of youth. But that was past. Indeed, she wanted no part of the working of it, the worrying over it. She had little of the love of growing things that stirred her sister, Brianna. True, she enjoyed her garden, the big defiant blooms and the scents that wafted from them. But the flowers grew despite her periods of neglect.
    She had her place, and anything beyond it was out of her realm, and therefore, most usually, out of her mind. Maggie preferred needing no one, and certainly needing nothing she could not provide herself.
    Dependence, she knew, and the longing for more than what you had, led to unhappiness and discontent. She had her parents’ example before her.
    Pausing there, just past the open door into the chilling rain, she breathed in the air, the damp sweetness of it tinged with spring from the blackthorn blossoms that formed a hedgerow to the east and the early roses struggling into bloom to the west. She was a small woman, shapely beneath the baggy jeans and flannel shirt. Over her shoulder-length, fiery hair she wore a slouch hat, as gray as the rain. Beneath its bill her eyes were the moody, mystical green of the sea.
    The rain dampened her face, the soft curve of cheek and chin, the wide, melancholy mouth. It dewed the creamy redhead’s complexion and joined the gold freckles scattered over the bridge of her nose.
    She drank the strong sweet breakfast tea from a glass mug of her own design and ignored the phone that had begun to shrill from the kitchen. Ignoring the summons was as much policy as habit, particularly when her mind was drifting toward her work. There was a sculpture forming in her head, as clear as a raindrop, she thought. Pure and smooth, with glass flowing into glass in the heart of it.
    The pull of the vision beckoned. Dismissing the ringing phone, she walked through the rain toward her workshop and the soothing roar of the glass furnace.
    From his offices in Dublin, Rogan Sweeney listened to the ring of the phone through the receiver and swore. He was a busy man, too busy to waste his time on a rude and temperamental artist who refused to answer the sharp knock of opportunity.
    He had businesses to see to, calls to answer, files to read, figures to tally. He should, while the day was young, go down to the gallery and oversee the latest shipment. The Native American pottery was, after all, his baby, and he’d spent months selecting the best of the best.
    But that, of course, was a challenge already met. That particular show would once again ensure that Worldwide was a top international gallery. Meanwhile the woman, the damn, stubborn Clarewoman, was crowding his mind. Though he’d yet to meet her face-to-face, she and her genius occupied too much of his mind.
    The new shipment would, of course, receive as much of his skill, energy and time as it required. But a new artist, particularly one whose work had so completely captured his imagination, excited on a different level. The thrill of discovery was as vital to Rogan as the careful development, marketing and sale of an artist’s works.
    He wanted Concannon, exclusively, for Worldwide Galleries. As with most of his desires, all of which Rogan deemed quite reasonable, he wouldn’t rest until it was accomplished.
    He’d been raised to succeed—the third generation of prosperous merchants who found clever ways to turn pence into pounds. The business his grandfather had founded sixty years before flourished under his leadership—because Rogan Sweeney refused to take no for an answer. He would achieve his goals by sweat, by charm, by tenacity or any other means he deemed suitable.
    Margaret Mary Concannon and her unbridled talent was his newest and most frustrating goal.
    He wasn’t an unreasonable man in his own mind, and would have been shocked and insulted to discover