Riding Irish (2 page)

“Ye’re a sweet thing,” he said, “But I’ve got to get on the road.”

Her mood changed from one of bliss to anger in a flash. “So,” she insisted, “You’re just going to leave, then?”

“Aye.”

She let out an angry sound and rolled over onto the bed in time to see him lacing up his boots. No matter what she said or did, he continued dressing. As he was putting on his toughened leather jacket, she screamed at him, “You’re never gonna have someone better than me, you know. You’re never gonna have the life I can give you.”

Ronan glanced around the small apartment. Was this a life? He didn’t think so. Without another glance at Nadia or Natalie or whatever her name was, he grabbed his keys from his pocket and walked towards the door of the apartment. The large patch on the back of his jacket was the last thing she saw before he walked out of her life forever. “Fucking Druids,” she cursed at him as he closed the door behind him.

Ronan mounted his bike and turned the key in the ignition, feeling the familiar and comfortable hum of the engine beneath him. As he pulled away from the apartment building, he couldn’t help but think that while it wasn’t here, perhaps there was another life for him out there somewhere. The struggle between his desire for freedom and his desire for stability would always be a part of him. If only he could find a way to bind the two together. If only he could find a woman who would help to show him the way.

I came to Ireland the way nobody wants to – to bury a loved one. My dear grandmother Brighid had lived her whole life on the outskirts of Dublin. Over more than ninety years, she’d seen everything in her life. I wish that I could say I loved her dearly, but the truth of the matter is that I never knew her. She and my father had become estranged before I was ever born. He’d never gone to visit and she had no desire to ever set foot in America. When the letter arrived telling me that she’d passed, I didn’t know quite what to do. My father had died years earlier and evidently I was her closest remaining relative. If I’d known, maybe I would have found a way to reconnect with her. As it was, I was too late.

My sense of loss was tempered somewhat by the extended contents of the letter informing me of her death. As she’d outlived three children, her husband and all of her varied brothers and sisters, she had left behind a sizable estate. She wasn’t rich by any means, but the letter explained that in addition to her home, there was a sizable amount of property and money that I would inherit. However, I would have to make my way to Dublin to oversee matters.

I drafted a letter to my boss explaining the situation. I told him that I would be out of the country for an unknown length of time. Truth be told, I needed a good long vacation, and it sounded like I would be fine financially without my paychecks. With dreams of inheritance swimming in my head, I booked a flight for Dublin and packed my bags.

My flight to Dublin was uneventful. I managed to sleep for most of the eight hour trip. Groggy and bracing myself for serious jet lag, I stepped out of the airport and hailed a taxi. When my bags were loaded in the cab, I got inside and read the address off of a scrap of paper. I silently thanked my good fortune that my grandmother had been Irish and not from some country deep in Europe – at least they spoke English here. The cabby cocked an eyebrow when I told him where I was going. I didn’t know why, but half an hour later we pulled up in front of the house and I understood why.

When I’d received the letter, I had dreams of fabulous wealth but in reality I knew it would be something far less. Estranged or not, my father would have mentioned if his mother had been wealthy. While the house I now stared at was hardly a mansion, it certainly put my tiny apartment back in Baltimore to shame. A long fieldstone wall extended around the house, covered with moss that made it look like a hedge. Through the iron gate at the front of the wall, I could see the house. It was everything
I ever wanted to see in an Irish cottage. I had feared my grandmother might live in a worn down old shack or something, but this was a well-maintained and extensive home. From the white shutters to the deep brown shingles, everything about the place seemed warm and inviting.

As the cabby helped me to unload my things from the car, a man in a charcoal gray suit walked down from the red painted door of the house. I knew this must be Mr. Carlisle, the man the bank had said would be meeting me at the house. I paid the cabby – giving him a generous tip because I was certainly put in a good mood by the sight of the house – and was greeted by Mr. Carlisle.

“Catrina Flynn, I presume?”

“Yes,” I told him, “and you must be Mr. Carlisle.”

“Thank you for coming on such short notice, Miss Flynn. Especially with international concerns, these matters of estate can often lurch on for weeks and months while we try to get the heirs where we need them to be,” he said.

“It’s no trouble. Thank you for meeting me here.”

He produced a large ring of keys from his pocket and handed them to me. “There’s still a good deal of paperwork that needs to be done at my office,” he told me, “but I’d hate to force you to stay in a hotel with this lovely home of yours only a few signatures away. I’ll help you get your things inside and then we can sign a few forms. The rest can wait until later in the week, once the funeral has been taken care of.”

True to his word, he did most of the heavy lifting for me, carrying my bags into the parlor at the front of the house. I had to stop myself from laughing a little when I saw the interior decorating my grandmother had been responsible for. Lovely or not, this was definitely the house of an old lady. On every table there were doilies and old photographs in silver frames. Every piece of furniture seemed to double as a display rack for a variety of colorful quilts.

I signed a couple of pressing forms that Mr. Carlisle had for me – mostly concerning funeral arrangements – and agreed to meet him in his office later in the week once everything had been attended to. I took his business card and set it on one of the many small tables covered with doilies.

“Thank you again, Mr. Carlisle,” I told him

He retrieved his hat from a rack just inside the front door and gave it a tip as his put it on. “Welcome to Dublin, Miss Flynn,” he said. With that, he left me alone in my new house. I slowly walked through the rooms, investigating everything. It was strange enough to think that I now owned a house in Ireland. Even more strange was the knowledge that I owned all of the odd nick-knacks and photographs that seemed to fill the place. I walked the halls looking at row after row of old photographs of people I had never met before. Were they my extended relatives? Were they old friends? For all I knew, these were the pictures that came in the frames, and my late grandmother was simply a hoarder.

I made my way to the kitchen and looked through the cupboards. It was mostly bare. What there was consisted mostly of products I’d never heard
of.
I knew my grandmother had been in poor health for some time before she passed, and I can’t imagine she had been spending much time in the kitchen in her last days. With only a poor imitation of breakfast I’d been served on the plane in my belly, I was getting quite hungry. I wasn’t going to find anything in the house though, so I decided to head off into Dublin to find some dinner. I had to double check the clock on the wall before I realized that it was, in fact, dinner time. I was still on Baltimore time, but I had to get used to being five hours ahead eventually.

My new house was in a residential area that seemed to be composed of many charming cottages. Although I could see the tall glass towers of the modern Dublin skyline in the distance, here on Grey Lane things were still much more pastoral. On the taxi ride in, I’d seen some businesses nearby and I figured at least one of them must be a restaurant of some variety. I grabbed my purse and the ring of keys Mr. Carlisle had given me and headed out the door. It wasn’t a long walk to the area I’d seen, and I wanted to get a feel for the neighborhood anyway.

Ten minutes later I was beginning to get bored with the residential outskirts of Dublin. Happily, I stumbled upon an inviting pub called the Bleeding Hart. The pun in the name was enough to sell me on a visit to the place, but it was charming enough that I didn’t really need a second reason beyond my growling stomach. I stepped inside and smiled. This was everything I’d always thought an Irish pub should look like. Low tables filled with friendly looking locals were everywhere. A long bar that looked like it had seen hundreds of years of drinks pushed across it dominated one side of the room. Behind it, an older, white haired man stood chatting with a patron across the bar. He was smoking a wooden pipe. In places like this, smoking bans and modern concerns went out the window. This was a place for locals and it always would be.

I got a few stray looks as I walked in, but fortunately I fit right in here in Dublin. I had my father’s fiery red hair and fair skin – a gift he’d gotten from his mother, from the looks of her old photographs – and if it wasn’t for my accent, I was sure that I could have been taken for a local myself. I glanced at the tables but ultimately decided I’d be better off at the bar. I sat on a stool and the bartender made his way over to me, setting his pipe on the bar as he went.

“Welcome to th
’ Hart, lass, what’ll it be?” he said in a thick brogue.

I was so enchanted with the place, that my fantasies got the better of me for a moment. “Give me a pint, and have you got any food ‘round the place?” In my head it sounded like just the thing someone would say in an Irish pub, but with my accent it was practically laughable.

He merely smiled, and I was glad he didn’t mock me for what I knew was a poor impression of Irish manners. “I’ll see what I can find for
ye
,” he said and went to fetch me a pint. He set the foaming glass down in front of me and went off to the kitchen through a tall door. I took a few sips of my beer, but I knew that I should wait. Drinking a pint of beer on an empty stomach was a good way to find trouble fast.

A few minutes later a server came up to me with a plate. It was piled high with roast beef, potatoes and cabbage. I didn’t know whether the kitchen had been humoring the American girl with a stereotypical Irish meal or if this was genuinely what was for dinner that night in the Bleeding Hart, but I was too hungry to care one way or another. I dug into my plate with abandon, drinking my beer down quickly as I went. Over the course of the meal, I ordered another beer and drank it as well. As I sat back on my stool, feeling full and comfortable, the bartender brought me my third.

“Ye’ve
quite an appetite tonight, lass. Did ye
jes’ fly in, then,” he asked as my fingers curled around the frosty glass of my third pint.

“Yes, my grandmother died recently and I inherited her house. She lived just a few minutes down the road.
Brighid Flynn was her name,” I told him, before taking a long sip of beer.

“Oh, you’re a Flynn, are ye? Terrible sad about
Brighid, but she’d had a good long run of it, aye,” he said. I nodded along, taking another long sip. “Ye’ll
be her granddaughter then?
Catrina.”

I nearly spit my beer across the bar at him. How had he known my name? “Er, yes,” I told him, “How’d you know?”

“Oh, Brighid
and I’ve known each other a long time. She told me plenty o’ times about her son and his daughter in the states.”

“Honestly,” I told him, “I’d never even met her. I had no idea she even knew who I was.”

He nodded as if he’d expected me to say it. “She found out about you when
yer
father died. She told me she was trying to get the gumption to write to you, but she took ill and never got around to it I suppose.”

I found that to be so sad. Here was this lovely old woman, thousands of miles away, who had wanted to reach out to me, and never had the chance. I knew right then that I wanted to stay in Ireland. After all, what did I really have to go back to? I had a crummy apartment and a crummier job. The few friends I had were nice enough, but not enough to keep me from spending a good long time here on the Emerald Isle.

In my contemplation I noticed that much of the pub had cleared out. I glanced at my phone and saw that it was only 8:30. It seemed a bit odd to me that the place should be so empty at this hour. Only a couple tables of older fellows remained and I was now alone at the long bar. I was just about to ask my new friend the bartender what the deal was when I heard a low rumbling in the distance outside the pub. As it grew louder, I recognized it as the unmistakable sound of motorcycles.

The bartender scurried around behind the bar. I heard the bikes outside cut their engines and noticed that he was already pouring pints which he was lining up on the bar. I caught his eye for a moment with a confused expression. He quickly dodged my glance and went back to filling glasses. The front door of the pub swung open and they began to enter. One by one they streamed in, taking seats at the bar. Each one of the bikers was wearing a black leather jacket with a variety of patches and insignia sewn onto it. As the last of them entered he turned to close the door behind him and I caught sight of the large patch on the back of his jacket that said ‘Druids’.

I’d never seen a real motorcycle gang before. I’d certainly seen the type in movies and television shows, but this was suddenly very real. The
bunch of them were
as rough looking as any crowd I’d ever seen. Their jackets were dusty and cracked from constant use. Here and there amongst them I saw scars on their hands, arms and even their faces. This was no Hollywood imitation – this was the real thing.

The man who had come in last walked down the length of the bar and took the first available stool. As it happened, this was the stool right next to my own. He didn’t spare me a second glance and grabbed the pint that the man to his right had pushed in front of him. I knew I must look like a deer in headlights as I stared at him. He had the rough look that they all possessed, but there was something more. He had dark hair – nearly black – that was cut short. Black stubble coated his face. His skin looked weathered but well cared for. While some of the men looked like they hadn’t bathed in a week more, he seemed to be cut from a different cloth. After he’d taken a long draw off his pint, he set it back down on the bar and began removing his fingerless gloves. Without taking his eyes off of the bar in front of him he said, “A look is free, lass, but any more and
ye’ll
have to buy me next pint.” He grinned without looking at me and the man to his right laughed loudly. I quickly turned away from him, blushing fiercely.