Cara McKenna - Her Best Laid Plans

Experience Ireland—the dramatic beauty, the warm hospitality...and the smoking-hot local guys!

Imagine nursing a pint in a cozy, authentic country pub, far from Cork’s busy city pulse. Getting here took you a plane, bus, taxi and...um, bicycle. But just as you’re resigning yourself to drinking beside grey-haired farmers, you see him—a man with the looks and charm to soothe any heartbroken girl.

He’s your bartender. Your really, really gorgeous bartender.

For American Jamie Webb—recently dumped and housesitting for two weeks—Connor Kelleher is like a six-course feast after a 23-year starvation diet. But it’s gotta be casual. She’s just begun rerouting her life after a three-year man-related detour. Still, a sexy romp (or twenty!) with Sexy McBartender?

But what happens when Jamie’s best laid plans for no future plans with any man begin to change?

Contemporary, sexy stories for sassy women.

Cosmo Red-Hot Reads from Mills & Boon

www.millsandboon.co.uk/cosmo

Dedication

For Ireland, where I learned everything I needed to know about snooker, roundabouts, Euros, weird toilets, left-hand-drive Fiat hatchbacks, cheese chips and hot young butchers who made me wish I’d been single.

Dear Reader,

Welcome to my what-could-have-been love letter to Ireland!

When I visited with a girlfriend when I was younger, I was in love with a guy back home who, in retrospect, probably didn’t deserve the gig. Looking back...damn! To be twenty-two again, with a chance to do that trip over. So many shameless, sweet, occasionally unintelligible young men! Writing this story, I got to gift my heroine with the circumstances I wish I’d had—newly single and eager to make the most of it. I hope you’ll enjoy Jamie’s adventure, and the brazen bartender who gives her exactly what she’s after. And then some!

Happy reading!

Cara McKenna

Her Best Laid Plans

Cara

McKenna

Contemporary, sexy stories for sassy women.

Cosmo Red-Hot Reads from Mills & Boon

www.millsandboon.co.uk/cosmo

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Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter One

Jamie slid onto a stool and dug her wallet from her messenger bag. As the bartender approached, she mustered a smile. “Guinness, please.”

Without a word, he started her pour. He was handsome enough...for a guy her dad’s age. She stole a sidelong glance down the bar at her fellow patrons—all gray-haired old men nursing identical pints, eyes fixed on the TV mounted above the bottles.

This was so not the vacation she’d envisioned.

But it’s only the first night. And Jamie had arrived at an Irish pub just like the ones she’d been daydreaming about. Arrived by plane, bus, taxi and bicycle, though for such an epic journey...yeah, this was all wrong.

For one thing, Kate wasn’t here. At the last moment, Jamie’s best friend had snagged a summer internship, turning a girls’ trip into a solo excursion. That in itself wasn’t the end of the world. Jamie needed an adventure, badly, and she could go it alone. But since she’d landed, nothing about Ireland had matched her expectations.

She was staying at her mom’s best friend’s house, which, as it turned out, was the only structure for miles in any direction, aside from the lonely Crossroads Pub. The farmhouse was old, and too quiet, and a touch creepy. Still, free lodging was free lodging, and since Donna was away for all of June, Jamie had the use of her car. There was a pulse in County Cork—she’d just need four wheels to find it! Find the bustling stone streets of a romantic old walled city, and all the hot Irish guys who traversed them.

Only the second she’d opened the driver’s side door, she’d found tragedy in two words.

Stick shift.

Driving on the wrong side of the road, on the wrong side of an unfamiliar car, in a foreign land crisscrossed with narrow country roads...yeah, Jamie would’ve been down for that. She’d learned to drive just outside Boston, after all. But a stick? She was only half-confident she knew which pedal the clutch was in an American car.

In the end, she’d ridden a bicycle to the pub. Ten minutes’ bumpy journey down a rutted lane that left her favorite jeans and Chuck Taylors splattered with mud, but hey—sometimes a girl really needed a beer. Her smile turned genuine as the barman set a glass before her.

“Thanks.”

You’re here. You’re in Ireland, in a pub, with a Guinness in front of you and soccer on the telly. Authentic, if nothing else. You’re doing what you wanted this summer—winging it. No plans until the fall.

And no Noel.

No Noel, not since he’d dumped her three months ago. He’d had a plan—a ten-year plan—and Jamie had known her place in it. She’d trusted his road map enough to hit pause her own grand designs, to put her architecture education on hold in her sophomore year to follow him to Los Angeles and work her butt off to pay their bills while he attended med school. The plan was that once he’d graduated and the income was flowing, it’d be her turn to finish college.

Except two and a half years in, Noel had decided to write Jamie out of his master plan, leaving her boyfriendless, degreeless, and pretty damn near savingsless.

Plans. Noel’s plans, and the ones she’d put on ice for him. Her dad’s plans when she’d been little, the ones that had made him a stranger to her from ages three to thirteen. Everybody seemed to have some awesome plan. But Jamie never quite managed to fit into them.

She sipped her stout.

Screw plans. She was free, and happily adrift until she returned to college in September. A new job awaited her when she got back home, but she had nothing on her agenda for this trip. Maybe she’d let Google be her driving instructor out on these quiet country lanes. Why not? No witnesses. She could lurch and stall and curse all she wanted! She’d teach herself to drive well enough to reach a city, with real bars and restaurants and activities and guys. Irish guys. No med students. And no plans.

Of course, this in itself was a plan.

Shit.

Oh, well. She’d figure it out tomorrow. For tonight she had her phone to keep her occupied, and she could feign interest in the soccer. And there was a pool table—or whatever pool was called here. She was good at pool. She’d spent entire summers at her dad’s place outside Atlantic City playing at the bar and grill in the bottom floor of his apartment building, blowing time while he was working.

Still, she hadn’t traveled across an entire ocean to feel as if she was back on the Jersey Shore.

Jamie pulled out her phone, needing proof she hadn’t wandered into some cruel joke. She typed a message to Kate, her first since she’d landed in Shannon.

I think I’m at a bar.

The answer came almost immediately: You think?!