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