Category Archives: BOOKS

Paranormal Romance, LGBTQ

Date Published: July 15, 2022

Publisher: Changeling Press

Dublin Museum Curator Bee McBride’s research tour is interrupted by a
shady stranger with a broken harp — and a broken heart.

When Bee, the stranger, and the harp are kidnapped by art thieves, Bee
discovers the dusty instrument is the legendary magic harp of the ancient
Celtic god Dagda.

Can her buzzing fervor find a way to unlock the harp’s music and the
stranger’s ardor before Midsummer Night?

EXCERPT

All rights reserved.

Copyright ©2022 Siondalin O’Craig

July 1

Kevin O’Donnell called the place where he’d been resting his
head these last couple of years the Marble Arches, after the caves in
Fermanagh. These caves under FDR Drive weren’t etched into limestone,
however; their side walls were crumbling concrete from an early era of
Manhattan development. Bits of shell and round stone sloughed off onto the
floor each time he brushed by it. The supporting pillars were concrete of a
more modern vintage, but in the same rotted condition, stained by runoff
from the road above, broken flakes exposing lines of rusted rebar.

The back wall was raw Manhattan bedrock, and in this heat it had the
advantage of staying cool, and while the drought was doing murderous damage
elsewhere, it meant the floor of the Marble Arches stayed blessedly dry for
the moment. Sitting with his back against the bedrock, Kevin could look out
across the docks and over the East River to Brooklyn, watching the yachts,
the tour boats, and the giant freighters that taunted him with their ability
to leave this place and bring their sailors back to homes and families far
away.

* * *

For ten days, Kevin had been trying to coax sound from the harp. He sat
with its base tucked between his legs, cushioned by the neatly folded wrap
of linen, its soundboard held tight to his chest in a lover’s embrace.
Sometimes his fingers floated silently over the strings. Other times he just
held it close, feeling energy flowing from it into his body.

Kevin cleaned the wood slowly, carefully, using a bandanna he found in the
gutter, and the water from a dozen half-full plastic water bottles he pulled
from garbage cans. Rich carving emerged from the grime. Clasped in the
dragon’s claws were two large roses, so lifelike that it appeared
fresh drops of dew spangled their petals. The roses were bundled with oak
leaves, and acorns tumbled down the pillar.

“Daur da Bláo,” Kevin whispered. The Oak of Two
Blossoms.

He had stopped in at the sailor’s mission on the Bowery and begged a
pair of nail clippers. He clipped his ragged nails straight across, slightly
longer than the tips of his fingers. Plucking the strings of an ancient wire
frame harp was done with the fingernails.

He found enough change on the street to buy a cup of tea at the coffee shop
across from the Strand bookshop and used the foaming pink soap in their
restroom to scrub the layers of grime from his hands. He pumped more soap
into his empty paper teacup and took it back to the Marble Arches. He bathed
the wire strings in the soap and let them soak, then poured clean water over
them and rubbed them down with the bandana.

He’d been right. The corr, or pinboard, was brass, embossed with
four-stranded knotwork. The tuning pins were also brass, burnished to a
sheen, their leaf-shaped heads inset with silver triskeles. But the strings
themselves were pure gold. The harp of legends, he thought. This can’t
be real.

His perch under the roadway suddenly felt confining, stifling. He wrapped
the harp and walked out onto the Brooklyn Bridge. The sun was burning hot
and blindingly white, but the air over the East River was stirring. The
tourist crowd was subdued in the heat, and the joggers who usually occupied
a steady lane of the walkway were completely absent.

He found an unoccupied bench in the shadow of the bridge’s dark
limestone towers. He wrapped his arms around the harp. A breeze wove between
the strings, and he thought he heard a faint, high-pitched hum. He pressed
his ear to the frame and listened. Yes, there. So fragile. So distant. But
the harp did have a voice, inside the soundbox. The harp was alive.

He put his fingers to the strings, his left hand reaching out to the high
strings nestled in the point of the frame, his right hand over his thighs,
spread over the bass strings. The hand position was the opposite of that on
modern harps, but this was the way frame harp playing was depicted in the
ancient carvings and medieval manuscripts, and so it was how frame harps
continue to be played by the small handful of people in the world who had
any familiarity with them.

He bent his head as if in prayer, pressed close against the soundboard. He
plucked a string with the middle finger of his right hand, then with the
ring finger, silently playing the pick-up notes to Pretty Maid Milking a
Cow. The lyrics had emerged in the nineteenth century, but the origins of
the hauntingly poignant harp tune underneath the ballad was lost in
antiquity.

His hands bloomed into motion, the ghost of the soundless tune echoing in
his mind. A living vine of energy began to grow between his body and the
ancient harp, its gold strings glittering.

The notes in his mind tangled with the breeze rising from the water, and
swirled into visual images. A woman’s hands, her wrists, her forearms
bare, in dim light, glistening with water. Her shoulders, rising from a dark
lake. A curve of hip, strong legs, bare feet on a stony shore. Drying her
auburn hair. Looking at him with soft brown eyes. Eyes that were full of
warmth. Eyes that were full of love. Full of desire.

He stopped and straightened his spine, hands reaching to damp the strings
by habit, though they had yet to make a noise. He felt a current coursing
through his body, from his fingertips up through the long disused muscles of
his forearms, muscles that used to pop with sinewy definition when he played
ten hours a day. The power ran down his spine and through the long lean
muscles of his legs, taut from walking countless miles of lonely
sidewalks.

Kevin realized, as if he were watching himself from a distance, that his
cock was pressed rigidly against the harp. He froze, motionless, as if his
erection were a wild bird that he did not want to frighten. He took his
hands away from the harp, resting them on his thighs. His body came back to
the bench on the Brooklyn Bridge, but something inside of him had
changed.

I am Kevin O’Donnell, he thought. Kevin O’Donnell, the
harper.

About the Author

Siondalin O’Craig writes romance with the slow burn of a peat fire on an
autumn night deep in the woodland hills. Sip a glass of Irish whiskey, turn
the page, and let the magic overtake you. Siondalin lives in the mountains
of New England where she walks under the trees celebrating the wheel of the
year, grows a luscious garden full of magical herbs, and plays a wicked
Irish fiddle. Follow her on Facebook and email her at
siondalinocraig@gmail.com to sign up for her newsletter.

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