Her Best Laid Plans

By Cara McKenna

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

Imagine nursing a pint in a cosy, 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?

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Apr 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781743649954

Cara McKenna

Meg Maguire has published nearly forty romances and erotic novels with a variety of publishers, sometimes under the pen name Cara McKenna. Her stories have been acclaimed for their smart, modern voice and defiance of convention. She was a 2015 RITA Award finalist, a 2014 RT Reviewers' Choice Award winner, and a 2010 Golden Heart Award finalist. She lives with her husband and baby son in the Pacific Northwest, though she'll always be a Boston girl at heart.

Book preview

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?!

Unconfirmed. Could be a retirement home.

!!!LOL. So much for our visions of raunchy Irish flings!

I seriously won’t be shocked if somebody announces it’s bingo night. So what are y—

Her fingers froze midtext. A man had materialized behind the bar. A different man. A man born in the last three decades.

And sweet Jesus, what a man.

She deleted the message and tapped out a new one.

Hang on. An oasis just appeared. Must ascertain whether it’s a mirage or not...

???

She ignored Kate’s text but kept her phone in hand, holding it casually before her, the perfect excuse to keep her eyes aimed in the mystery guy’s general direction. The earlier barman gave him a clap on the shoulder, and she detected a resemblance—father and son? The older man bade his replacement and the regulars a good night.

Jamie watched as the new guy poured someone’s pint a few feet to her left. Holy shit. Were forearms an accepted fetish object? Because his were perfect. Muscular but lean, like the rest of him, she’d bet. He was tall, maybe six-one? A good six inches taller than she, at any rate. And long—the solidly slender sort of build she associated with swimmers, and graceful hands to match. His hair was light brown and overdue for a trim, glowing blond at the edges from the overhead light. He was in need of a shave as well—not a complaint—which, coupled with his rumpled short-sleeved button-up, open at the collar, lent him an air of supreme relaxation. As though he’d rolled out of a bed one floor above, dropped straight through the ceiling and landed behind this bar.

A customer made a joke Jamie didn’t catch, and the new bartender laughed, his smile seeming to crack his handsome face wide open and drop Jamie’s IQ fifty points.

Drink fast, a voice in her head commanded. Sooner you finish this one, the sooner you’ll have an excuse to talk to him.

She downed the pint in four gulps.

The new barman spotted her empty glass as she slid it forward, approaching with lazy, effortless steps that matched every single one of her preconceived notions about him. His gaze seemed to catch on hers, telling her he was equally surprised to have stumbled across a peer in this geriatric pub.

Hello, stranger. How’s the form? Oh, that voice. That accent, gentle and wicked at once. He might as well have asked her if she’d like to wake up tangled in his sheets tomorrow morning, to judge by the way her body flushed. Another Guinness?

Yes, please.

He caught her own accent in those two syllables, smiling differently now—curious. States? he asked as he set a glass below the tap. Or Canada?

States.

Whereabouts?

Boston. I just moved back after a few years in California. And thank goodness. Noel and his broken promises had wrecked palm trees for her permanently.

Boston. I hear your lot stole a fair few of my ancestors, her barman teased, crossing his arms as her stout settled. No ring. Prove there’s a God and tell me you’re single.

Jamie pursed her lips, holding in a scheme for just long enough to decide it was genius. Would you mind if I took your picture, while you’re pouring that?

One of his shapely eyebrows arched.

My friend was supposed to be on this trip with me, she explained, but she ditched me at the last minute. I’m dying to show off that I’m drinking a Guinness in Ireland while she’s stuck in an office back home.

He smiled at that and nodded to her phone, waiting as she opened the camera app. Far be it from me to deny a lady her revenge. Just say when.

Jamie scooted back to frame the shot, making sure those forearms were front and center, and that gorgeous

Reviews for Her Best Laid Plans

[bookaholiccat · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

My Verdict: 3 ½ Stars

After a really bad breakup Jamie Webb decides to take some time off and travels to Ireland for a 10-days vacation. She’s hoping to have “fun” and forget about her ex, but when she arrives to the place where she will be staying she realizes the only pub around is one where all the patrons are her father’s age or older. When she’s ready to give up on her plans McHottie Irish Bartender aka Connor Kelleher walks into the bar for his night shift. Sparks fly between them and they decide to share more than couple of Guinness.
Jamie knows she only has couple of days to “enjoy” what Ireland has to offer and does her best to take advantage of time she has. She also knows that nothing will come from their fling; in couple of days she’ll be flying back home leaving Connor and many great memories behind.
What they weren’t expecting was to fall for each other in such a short time, but with an ocean between them their future is uncertain.

I have only read couple of books by Cara McKenna, but something that I always expect from her books is the unexpected. She always gives us unique characters with unpredictable twists in her stories; I was expecting to find that when I started to read Her Best Laid Plans, sadly that unique something was completely missing in this novella. Her Best Laid Plans although well written and highly entertaining, was an ordinary read.

Her Best Laid Plans is a sweet, hot and fun novella with cute characters and many smexy times. If you want a quick, well-written, light and hot read Her Best Laid Plans is the novella you will want to read.