The Bachelor Takes a Bride (Those Engaging Garretts!) by Brenda Harlen

Author:Brenda Harlen [Harlen, Brenda]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2015-08-31T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

For as long as she’d worked at O’Reilly’s—and probably a lot of years before that, even—Wade Denton had been talking about retirement.

He’d bought the pub from the previous owner, Sean O’Reilly, for little more than a song. It had been the Wexford Arms back then, but because it was the pub owned by O’Reilly, it was more widely known as O’Reilly’s Pub. Wade tried to give it a new image and a new name, but he was more successful with the former than the latter. Sean O’Reilly’s pub had offered customers the choice of sitting at the U-shaped bar or square tables designed to accommodate four. If groups larger than that came in, he simply shoved two or more tables together.

The lighting was dim, the menu limited, but his customers were loyal. So much so that there had been grumbling and resistance when Wade installed booths around the perimeter of the restaurant, changed the light fixtures, installed a couple of televisions over the bar and expanded the menu to offer more than cottage pie, lamb stew, and fish and chips. And while the shiny new sign on the front might have said Crown & Castle, the locals still insisted on calling it O’Reilly’s.

After four years, Wade finally gave up, changing the sign again to officially adopt O’Reilly’s as its name. Eighteen years later, little else had changed. And while the customers were still loyal, they were hardly numerous, and from month to month, the pub’s books shifted between black and red.

Then Jordyn Garrett saw a help-wanted sign in the window and walked through the door.

She told him to get a satellite dish so customers could follow Premier League soccer, arguing that if they wanted to watch American football or basketball, they were going to drink their beer at the Bar Down. She introduced daily drink specials to bring in new customers and advertised those specials in the campus newspaper. Wade grumbled about spending money on advertising—until the college kids started finding their way to O’Reilly’s. He grumbled about sponsoring local recreational sports teams, too—until the players made O’Reilly’s their regular postgame stop.

And in October, it would be the twenty-fifth anniversary of Wade’s ownership of the pub. He liked to say that a quarter of a century was a good run—a long run. “More than long enough.” He planned to have a big party to commemorate the milestone event, and then he would be happy to walk away from the day-to-day responsibilities of pub ownership.

In the past six months, he’d begun talking more and more about his impending retirement and his desire to find someone to take over the business. He’d suggested, on more than one occasion, that Jordyn might be the right person, and she was looking forward to that opportunity.

So when Wade called her into his office, she figured he wanted to talk about either the twenty-fifth anniversary party or his retirement. She didn’t expect that their conversation would cause her own plans to begin to unravel.

* * *

“Of all the flower shops, in all the towns, in all the world, he walks into mine.

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