A Love by Any Measure by Killian McRae

before.
    He could not break her twice. He could not hurt her that way again.
    He could not hurt that way again.

Scoring Time
    Like a true apostate, Maeve threw her Bible in the corner with as much might as she could muster, and felt right silly soon after. It was no fault of the Good Book that she had been staring at the same page for fifteen minutes, reading and rereading, taking nary a word from it. It was not the book’s fault that she could not soothe the burning sensation boiling on her body in all the places he had touched the previous night.
    “Oh! Bring yourself to your senses, Maeve!” she yelled out to the empty cottage, realizing her hand was tracing delicate lines over her cheek bones, trying to replicate the titillation Grayson had caused.
    She needed a distraction and a swift kick in the shins to drag her back to her senses. She would not let Grayson’s touch be construed as something other than what it was. And what was it really, but his self-satisfying manipulation of her for his pleasure?
    His pleasure.
    “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, you’ve got to stop thinking about him, silly girl! Think about Owen instead!”
    Though he had rejected her plea to move in with him, looking back she realized it had been a silly idea. Engaged or no, a firm date wasn’t even fixed. What sort of scandal would ensue if she had pressed the issue? Owen had seen it for what it was. He cared enough to tell her no, to protect the good name she seemed so determined lately to sully.
    That’s what a real man did: protected his woman. Grayson was a little boy, playing a game with a borrowed toy.
    But Maeve wasn’t exactly opposed to being played with a wee bit. Guilt was too often brushed aside as something undesirable, as something to be rid of at the first opportunity. Maeve knew better than that. Guilt was an opportunity for the improvement of the soul, and she needed a good dose of it. What better a place to find it than exposing herself to the only one who seemed to know of the arrangement?
    The note she left for her da said she’d be at the O’Keefes. Maeve grimaced as she left, catching sight of the lantern burning in the window at Shepherd’s Bluff.
    She knocked three times on Patty and Patrick’s door and heard a scattering of foot steps behind. Patty opened it after a few moments, bobbing up and down with baby Mary on her shoulder.
    “Maeve?” she asked, a little taken aback. “Good heavens, you look all flustered. Is something wrong?”
    Aye, something’s rightly wrong. “May I talk to you?”
    Patty smiled sweetly, but her eyes belied the otherwise warm welcome as they scanned Maeve from tip to toe, almost as if she could see the blight upon her through her dress.
    “Of course,” she sighed, opening the door further and allowing Maeve to step in from the cold drizzle coming down outside.
    The middleman’s cabin was hardly bigger than the O’Connor cottage, but it did have the luxury of two fireplaces and two bed chambers. Being an only child, Maeve had never minded that her bed lay in a cramped sleeping loft, but she could imagine in a house full of children, the additional space would be most welcomed. Patty had claimed from the age of fourteen that she would have ten young before she turned thirty. She had married Patrick right after her eighteenth birthday, and Mary was born a year later. As her gently-rounded belly evidenced, she was on schedule to fulfill her wish.
    “Would you like a cup of tea?”
    Maeve nodded wordlessly and sat at the table. Patty handed little Mary Bernice off to her guest as she poured the hot water from the kettle and into the pot, adding a spoonful of leaves. Mary reached to pull down Maeve’s curls, her chubby little cherub hands surprisingly strong despite a mere six months of life. Maeve kissed each of her angelic knuckles, dreaming of having her own leanbh not so far off in the future, a little girl perhaps with dark hair and bright green eyes.
    Green eyes? She admonished