THE IRISH COTTAGE CONTENTS
Prologue: Mags
Chapter 1: Ireland
Chapter 2: Connor Bannon
Chapter 3: The Irish Cottage
Chapter 4: Mona Porter
Chapter 5: The Pub
Chapter 6: Irish Traditions
Chapter 7: On The Cliffs
Chapter 8: The Fall
Chapter 9: In Town
Chapter 10: Unexpected Encounters
Chapter 11: The Irish Festival
Chapter 12: Universe Kisses
Chapter 13: Lough Rhiannon
Chapter 14: Letter #4
Chapter 15: A Royal Surprise
Chapter 16: The Castle
Chapter 17: Fungie
Chapter 18: Kait, Kil & Shaun
Chapter 19: Gangnam Style
Chapter 20: A Lady?
Chapter 21: St. Patrick’s Day
Chapter 22: Trapped
Chapter 23: Weapons
Chapter 24: Under The Full Moon
Chapter 25: Confessions
Chapter 26: On The Road
FREE Chapters: Excerpt from The Irish Cottage, the women’s fiction bestseller by Juliet Gauvin. Are you ready for some women’s fiction romance? Ready to go to Ireland? Sit back and start your journey into the book many are calling Nicholas Sparks meets Nora Roberts with a dash of JK Rowling…
Prologue: Mags
Dear Lizzie,
If you’re reading this it means I’ve gone off into the great unknown. My last great adventure. I’m writing this on the first day of the New Year. The doctor said I have a few weeks, maybe.
I suppose I should apologize for not telling you, but you know it isn’t in my nature—especially since I’m rarely wrong. And as usual you have been incredibly busy, I don’t want our remaining time to be spent on specialists and hospitals and you trying to fix everything. I’m just old Lizzie, almost 90 is, well, almost 90. We had a good run kiddo, but this letter isn’t for communicating pleasantries from beyond the grave.
This letter is for three things: 1) explaining the other letters 2) kicking your ass and 3) apologizing for keeping a promise.
I have written you seventeen letters including this one. You know I was never one to hold anything back—always told you exactly what I was thinking. The thing is, I think I did hold back just a little, either because I didn’t think you could hear me or because I thought you would find your own way eventually. But here I am at the end, I don’t know if you will find the way out by yourself—while you’re still young. So here I am stacking the deck, making sure you do. Think of the letters as guiding posts. You may not think you’re lost, Lizzie, but you are.
Winning isn’t everything. Living is everything. I’ve been disappointed to see all the color drain from your life. You haven’t been able to separate who you are from what you do as a divorce lawyer. You used to be so full of life, so vibrant, so fun, so fearless. Your opponents might think you’re fearless, but I know better, Lizzie. You’ve been lost and scared for a while now.
Here’s the part where I apologize. There were promises I made a long time ago. I swore to keep those secrets from you, against my better judgment, and for that I am truly sorry. Looking back, I think this whole ruthless lawyer thing might be my fault.
Ever since you were a girl, you believed certain things about your parents. You believed that your father divorced your mother and took everything; that she fell apart and left you, and that’s why as your only remaining family, I came to raise you when you were five. I think you became such a formidable attorney because of this. You thought your mother was weak and abandoned you. You thought your father was a bastard for ruining your mother and also abandoning you—it doesn’t take a genius to see where your issues with men come from. But none of what you know is strictly the truth, Lizzie.
I promise to tell you how it all happened and the truth behind how you and I became our own unit of two. There’s a plan to these letters. I know you must be furious with me for not telling you that I’m sick and for not telling you the truth I’ve been keeping for the last thirty-five years—and for not just spitting it out in this first letter—but I always did my best by you, trust in me one last time.
Mags
P.S. Just because I’m dead, it doesn’t mean I’m going to take it easy on you. Whether you know it right now or not, you’ve made quite a mess.
Chapter 1: Ireland
The green was everywhere. The hills, the trees, even the tiny country road appeared to grow grass through the gravel. Ireland seemed intent on washing the black and gray out of her mind and replacing it with green.
There hadn’t been a sign in miles. No way to tell if she was lost or going the right way.
“Damn it!” She slammed her hand against the rental car’s navigation system. It kept losing its GPS signal.
There was a clearing one hundred feet ahead. She pulled to the side and parked. The car purred to a stop as she turned the key in the ignition. Her knuckles were bone-white as she gripped the wheel.
“Breathe Beth, just breathe,” she said to herself, letting her hands fall from the steering wheel and onto her thighs with a muted thud.
Her head fell backwards against the headrest, her eyes closed as she focused on the feeling of her chest rising and falling.
The images flooded her senses, the light of the day illuminated her closed lids creating a green screen for her memories. Mags lying there looking emaciated, showing every bit of her eighty-nine years. All her vibrancy, her tenacity, her life ending.
And that look she had given Beth—wanting desperately to communicate something vitally important, but no longer having the capacity to speak. It was a look of love and hope and something else…pity.
The tear trailed slowly down her cheek, electrifying her skin as it went. And another.
The funeral had been bright with color, almost vulgar. Mags hated black and gray, “Anything but that!” she used to say. “Give me red, green, orange, purple—whatever, just give me something I can work with.” Her friends had remembered. She was buried on a Saturday.
By Sunday Beth had received the box. It was blue with a red ribbon and held seventeen letters. Each in its own bright envelope. Mags’ ornate writing labeled them all. Start Here Lizzie identified the first. It had left her breathless and reeling—sucker punched her with no defendant to hold responsible, no legal recourse to make her whole, no escaping the mirror Mags had held up and forced on her. No one to hold onto as Mags had told her that everything she had come to believe about the parents who abandoned her, could be wrong.
She hadn’t realized it until the letter, but she had become a lawyer to feel strong, unlike her mother. She had become a lawyer to stick it to all the bastards like her asshole father. In the last decade, she had inadvertently based her entire life on a series of assumptions about the two people who had created her, which apparently were wrong. A path subconsciously chosen because of secrets and lies.
She wasn’t due back in the office until Wednesday, but she was there on Monday morning resolute in her decision to leave. Bill had tried to convince her to take a couple of weeks. She needed longer. He had turned almost purple enough to match his silk tie, the firm would sorely miss their lethal shark for however long she would be gone. But what could he do? Nothing. She was the best divorce attorney in San Francisco and she knew it.
The partners at Livingston & Bloom had always had to go along with her decisions. When it came to Beth, they had a proverbial gun to their heads. They were usually happy to oblige since she had made them millions.
“How much time do you need?” Bill had prodded.
“I don’t know. At least a couple of months maybe more. I’m taking an extended leave.”
“Come on Elizabeth, you’re grieving, just don’t make any life decisions right now.” He held up his hands like he was trying to calm a wild animal. “Take the month. We’ll shuffle the clients around temporarily and then get you up to speed when you come back.”
“No, assign them permanently to Kayla, Mike, and Ben. They’re perfectly capable of handling all my current cases. It could be an entire year before I’m back.”
He opened his mouth to argue. She narrowed her eyes at him. Her contract was ironclad. She didn’t need his permission. His job was to keep her happy, keep her with the firm. He quickly composed his features, only the bright magenta color of his skin betrayed his true thoughts. He wasn’t happy about losing her for an indefinite period of time, but she had him by the balls.
“Of course.” He relented. She could still see through him. He thought her reaction to her great-aunt’s death was wildly out of proportion. After all, Magdalen had lived a long and happy life.
It was more true than Bill could know. Mags hadn’t wasted a second. But it wasn’t about Mags, it was about Beth.
She opened her eyes, leaving the blacks and grays of her life behind, and looked out the window on her right. Ireland was greener than green. She restarted the car, the GPS signal was back.
♥♥♥
The trees gave way to a small oval of gravel at the base of the cottage. She stopped the car, relishing in the arresting of all movement. The stillness.
It looked like there were two stories. Double semi-lancet arched windows flanked a bright red front door. The pitched roof was a dark black-gray color with a chimney. Quintessentially Irish. It looked like a place where peace might be found. Maybe even enlightenment. A few weeks here and she would have her head on straight. Her need to leave, to escape the life she had so carefully created over the course of a decade would be a distant memory, and everything could get back on track.
She would process Mags’ death, reaffirm her desire to be the star attorney with the flawless track record, go back to her sleek San Francisco apartment overlooking the Marina, recommit to John…well maybe not everything had to go back to the way it was. Mags had never liked John. She thought he was dull and much too boring for a thirty-five-year-old.
The corners of her mouth turned up slightly as she remembered Mags’ disapproving expression.
“Honestly Lizzie! You’ve been seeing him for what, a year? It’s no wonder you haven’t said I love you yet, he’s awful! And a total bore, I almost slipped into a coma listening to him. Not bad to look at, but really. I think you may have gone a little cray cray with this one.” Beth laughed out loud at the memory. That was Mags. She loved language, loved knowing what the young people were saying, she even watched The CW Network. An 89-year-old whose speech patterns oscillated between twenty-two and forty-five.
She never had any problem being blunt and John had talked about the weather for most of the hour. Beth tried to change the topic more than once, but was more amused by Mags’ bewildered expression and his incredible ignorance to her knitted eyebrows and pursed lips. He had spent the rest of their meeting at the café in Union Square talking about eyeglasses. John was an optometrist.
She sat there in front of the cottage trying to remember how she had even come to date him. He was a workaholic, like her, and low maintenance. That was it, he was low maintenance. She liked that she could ignore most of what came out of his mouth and he wouldn’t notice. The sex wasn’t bad, he took direction well, especially when she compared the sensitivity of the cornea to…other parts of female anatomy.
It had felt good to walk straight past his receptionist, into his office, say she was leaving and that they were done. There was no screaming, no drama beyond her entrance. No passion. Mostly, he looked confused.
The wind picked-up, making the tall trees on either side of the cottage sway in greeting. The February sky had turned purple with near certain rain. The amethyst brought out the green that existed everywhere. It was time to survey her Irish haven. Her thin t-shirt was less than adequate, the chill of the air bit into her bare arms and chest making her feel more than a little topless. Leaving the car she grabbed her high collar, wool cardigan. She drew it around herself and walked towards the right side of the house where she had seen the lake.
Her fingers grazed the house as she passed, taking notice of the windows without looking inside. She would save that, taking in the inside all at once, like unwrapping a present. The backyard was simple. There were two white, wooden lawn chairs like those you would expect to come with a quaint cottage. There was a small table too and a spectacular lake.
Lough Rhiannon was considered to be a small lake, almost tiny in Ireland, but it was more than enough lake in person. The water was calm. There were cracks in the blue-violet clouds, giving way to golden rays that lit the lake in no particular pattern, setting the waters on fire. The golds, greens, and violets took her breath away.
There was magic here in this beautiful, secluded place. She drew in a deep, cool, healing breath and closed her eyes. The wind picked-up slightly and the brisk air brushed her face, refreshing her senses. She was ready for whatever needed to happen here.
Her hands moved to the back pocket of her dark jeans where the next letter waited to be opened. She took it out and inspected the small yellow envelope. Save for the first, each letter had been marked in Mags’ elegant script with just a number, this one had a large 2.
It would seem appropriate to open it now when she had just reached the end of her sixteen hour journey from San Francisco. But here at the beginning of her own personal quest, her chest tightened and her throat started to constrict as she thought about the next words that Mags would thrust upon her from beyond the grave. Would she tell her the truth about her parents? Doubtful. Was she ready to hear? No, she would get settled, shower and open it with a glass of wine. Her grief at losing Mags and her anger at being lied to her entire life threatened to swallow her whole.
Her eyes refocused on the lake. It looked to be fairly round-ish, maybe a mile in diameter. Trees bordered the shores, obscuring the view of what lay beyond. She glimpsed part of a stone-colored house further up the lake. It looked like part of a larger structure, but she couldn’t make out much from this distance.
The decision to vacate her life was only a couple of days old. She had made all the arrangements in a very short period of time, including the cottage. The only one that was available on such short notice and would be hers for as long as she wanted.
Others were available today, but were booked in the future, cutting her time into two weeks, a month, and so on. This cottage didn’t have any reservations on the books…at all. The contact person she had spoken to yesterday had assured her that it was through no fault of the cottage, which was in excellent condition, and only a ten minute drive to Dingle.
She had believed Shaun Morgan, mainly because of the price. It was nearly five times the price of other comparable houses, situated on similar lakes. The price was so high it was almost as if the owner didn’t actually want it to be rented out.
Shaun explained that the cottage had belonged to a woman named Rhia Bannon, the current proprietor’s mother, and hadn’t been rented since it first came on the market two years before. He had assured her that it was a fully updated, impeccably maintained, fashionable rental. She hoped he was right.
She ought to have negotiated the price down, but she just didn’t have any fight left in her after the funeral. She’d only seen two pictures of the property and didn’t even know if she would have any neighbors. It was the least prepared Elizabeth Lara had ever been in her entire life.
A few drops of rain fell against her cheeks. It was time to get her things from the car and settle in. She walked the length of the yard towards the other side of the house. Carefully, she walked the narrow patch of grass that separated the outside wall from the tall trees, stepping over small fallen branches and piles of compacted leaves. She took notice of the first window as she had before, trying not to look inside and spoil the effect of walking in through the front door.
She was passing the second large window when she caught a flash of movement and instinctively turned to look. A large white bathtub sat in front of the window, a shower in the far corner and a very fit, very naked man stood gaping at her. Her eyes found his washboard stomach first, his hands on his hips, partly obscuring the sharp cut of a V beneath his hips, down to his…
It happened so fast she didn’t have time to process what she was seeing in time to look away. Her mouth dropped and for a moment they stood staring at each other.
♥ xoxo, Jules ♥
