Cognac & Couture (The Passport Series Book 2) Read Free

thud and talking in the background.
    “Hello?” said a different voice.
    Time to try again. “Hello, I’m a friend of Mikkel’s. My name
is Kathleen. May I speak to him, please?” My voice sounded calmer to my ears.
    My mother continued to smile encouragingly.
    What followed was an unnatural plunge to earth. I heard him
speak the words, but they didn’t register with my brain or my heart. I lowered
the phone to my lap, unwilling to hear more, then grasped for my mother,
anxious to hold onto something real. Surely, the words I’d just heard could not be real.
    My mother picked up the phone. I forced myself to listen.
“I’m sorry, could you please repeat that?”
    A brief conversation followed; my mother’s words sounded
soothing. When she said goodbye, she wrapped herself around me, where I had
curled into a ball on the floor. Will it swallow me?
    Tremors passed through me as mournful keening escaped my
lips. My mother tugged me close, holding me like she had when I was little,
when I’d needed a barrier between me and the world. But her kisses and
whispered words of reassurance were not going to fix what had happened this time.
    Piercing pain hit. It stole my breath and my voice but
curled around my heart and snaked into my soul where, once tethered, it
exploded, flinging my hope and joy carelessly aside.
    The house was pitch black when I awoke, stiff, my head
throbbing almost as much as my broken heart. My mother, beside me, gripped my
hand tightly when I finally managed to ask, “How do you ever fall out of love
with someone who dies?”

Five Countries, Five Lives at the Same Moment
NOON, Monday, August 12
Seven Years Later
     

Marian
Connolly
    “DECLAN, YEAH, IT’S ME, Marian. I’ve got a table at The Long Hall, all the way in the back,” Marian
shouted into her cell phone. “Okay, see you soon.” She rang off and looked around
the crowded bar, hoping that they would be able to hear each other once the
lunch crowd returned to work.
    The Long Hall was everything an Irish pub ought to be:
noisy, yeasty-smelling, and bedazzled in décor from the late 1800s. The walls
and ceiling were painted the color of merlot, accentuating the oak woodwork
throughout. Chandeliers hovered above the long wooden bar, where patrons of all
shapes and sizes waited for their orders. Bottles of drink lined shelf upon
shelf, and the barmen pulled three and four lagers at once.
    When Declan walked in, he waved hello to a few men at the
bar as well as the barman, himself, and made his way to Marian. “Hello,
gorgeous!” He leaned in to give her a quick kiss on the cheek. “What would you
like to drink?”
    “ Er , don’t mind. Large. Very cold!”
    Declan’s cologne mingled quite pleasantly with his natural
scent, overwhelming Marian’s senses. While he stood at the bar looking manly in
a pair of well-worn jeans and white fitted shirt that was buttoned a little
insufficiently, she wondered at the impairment to her power of speech when he
was around . She went all… girly.
    When Declan returned with a perfectly pulled pint of
Guinness and a spectacularly large frosted glass of white wine, Marian smiled
up into his gorgeous brown eyes and said without preamble, “What the feck is wrong with Henry Conyngham? He went arseways, didn’t he? Complete eejit!
This is our weekend. We should be wildly drunk, dancing like maniacs to the
Rolling Stones, Iggy Pop, or Coldplay! He’s gone and completely fecked up our
annual clandestine hook-up!” Her girlish ways were forgotten.
    The Marquess Henry Conyngham, often referred to as the
Rock-and-Roll Aristocrat (as a result of the very successful rock concerts held
on his estate), had neglected to book acts for the concert at Slane Castle.
Since escorting their grandmothers seven years prior, Declan and Marian had
enjoyed all manner of indulgences with each other, one weekend per year, ever
since. They’d kept their assignations private, since they didn’t want either
granny pestering