Cursed Castles & Irish Cream Chapter 1
By the time the bus stopped moving for the third time in eleven minutes, I’d learned three things about Ireland.
One: the roads were “agreements,” and the hedges had veto power.
Two: rain arrived—politely, relentlessly, and directly onto my collarbone.
Three: my hairpins were not going to survive County Clare.
I’d started the morning in Shannon Airport with a chignon engineered like a bridge. Seven pins. A travel-sized can of hairspray. A silent prayer I hadn’t said since boarding school. Now I had… I didn’t know how many, because I refused to look like a woman conducting an inventory of her own unraveling in public.
But I could feel the loosening. The way the damp made everything in my life less certain: hair, silk, the concept of “schedule.”
Brenda from Sarasota, Florida, leaned over the armrest with the cheerful intimacy of someone who treated strangers as unfinished projects.
“It’s therapeutic-grade,” Brenda announced.
Before I could flinch, an amber bottle appeared near my neck, as if she was about to anoint me into a cult. She didn’t spray, thank God—she dabbed, and the lavender landed on me with the confidence of a woman who had never once been told no in a retail environment.
“You seem tense,” she said.
“I’m fine,” I said.
“You say that, but your jaw is doing a thing.”
“My jaw is just… existing.”
Rob, her husband, was in the seat across the aisle—cargo shorts, sunglasses on top of his head despite the total absence of sun, and the mild, confused stare of a man who’d expected Ireland to look like a Guinness commercial at all times. He aimed his phone out the window like the countryside owed him content.
“We’re not even moving,” I said.
“It’s B-roll,” Rob replied, as if he was a documentary filmmaker and not a man with a Florida flag phone case.
Brenda twisted the bottle cap off and on again with the idle rhythm of a person who had made wellness her personality and now needed the rest of us to agree this was normal.
“I travel with six oils,” she said. “Something for every situation.”
“What situation is this?” I asked.
“A crowded bus,” she said, sincerely. “With negative energy.”
I looked out the window.
A funeral procession crawled along the narrow road ahead of us. Dark wood coffin. Silver handles. White flowers trembling with the vibration of tires on wet tarmac. Eight people behind it, heads down, coats not built for this kind of rain.
The bus idled.
No one spoke for a full five seconds, which on a group tour is essentially a moment of silence.
Tiff—Tiffany, corrected immediately to Tiff—sat two rows behind me and leaned into the aisle as if her face alone could create reception.
“Oh my God,” she breathed. “Is that a real funeral?”
Patricia, who had introduced herself in the airport with the brisk competence of a woman who had run a school building like a ship and now traveled with her own name tag, said, “Yes.”
“I mean—obviously,” Tiff said, already defensive. Her voice had that upward lilt like every sentence ended with a poll. “I just… it’s so… cinematic.”
Patricia turned her head slowly.
“It’s a person who died,” she said.
“I literally said it was sad.”
“And then you said cinematic.”
“Those two things can coexist.”
Brenda leaned forward between the seats like she was about to officiate a conflict resolution workshop. “Okay, let’s just all be mindful that grief has a frequency—”
“Brenda,” Rob said, without looking up. “Stop.”
Brenda blinked, wounded. “I’m trying to help.”
“You’re trying to essential-oil the dead.”
“Lavender supports transition,” Brenda insisted.
I pressed my forehead lightly to the window. The glass was cold and faintly fogged from body heat and damp wool. The stone wall outside was close enough to touch if I’d been reckless.
Which I wasn’t. Reckless was not my brand.
Not in Rhode Island. Not ever.
But I hadn’t flown to Ireland to keep doing my brand.
The bus jolted forward a foot. Stopped. Jolted again. Stopped.
A hairpin slid, caught on my collar, and vanished into the gap between seat cushion and window frame with the quiet finality of a thing that would never be recovered. I didn’t react. I didn’t reach for it. I simply let it go, because if I started rescuing small metal objects from the abyss, I was going to spend the entire week crawling on floors in public and no man deserved that kind of satisfaction.
A voice came from the front of the bus.
“Right,” she said. “Everyone breathing?”
The guide had the posture of a woman who’d spent her life learning how to stand her ground in a world that constantly asked Irish people to perform Irishness for tourists. Compact. Efficient. Dry-eyed. She wore a navy raincoat that looked like it had never once been decorative.
Her name was Maeve Kearney.
She hadn’t smiled at Shannon baggage claim when she held up a card that read: CASTLE SPIRITS TOUR. She’d looked at us like we were a group of toddlers about to sprint into traffic.
Now she looked at the funeral procession and then back at us.
“This,” Maeve said, “is your first lesson in County Clare.”
Brenda perked up. “Oh, I love lessons.”
Maeve ignored her with professional grace.
“County Clare has a long tradition of making visitors wait,” she said. “This is not a delay. This is orientation.”
Someone in the back laughed, relieved. Patricia made a pleased sound. Rob muttered, “See? This is what I’m talking about. Real Ireland.”
Maeve tipped her head, as if acknowledging he’d spoken without granting him any reward for it.
“Also,” Maeve continued, “if you’re filming the funeral, I will haunt you personally.”
Rob froze mid-tilt.
He lowered the phone an inch, then looked around as if he hadn’t realized we had eyes.
“I’m not filming,” he said.
Maeve stared at him until the lie grew embarrassed.
“What I’m saying,” Maeve said, “is that we are guests here. You’re not in Epcot. That’s a person’s family. Put the phone down.”
Rob shrugged like a man who had never experienced consequence in a rental car. But he did, grudgingly, lower it into his lap.
Brenda whispered loudly, “That’s so respectful, Maeve. Love that.”
Maeve nodded once, as if she’d been complimented in a language she didn’t speak.
“Now,” Maeve said, turning her body slightly so the bus itself became her classroom, “since we have time—and because the road’s decided we’ll be friends—let’s do a few ground rules.”
Groans, but light. Everyone loves rules until they’re about them.
Maeve held up one finger. “Rule one: if you call it a ‘castle,’ you’re allowed. If you call it a ‘vibes temple,’ I’m allowed to push you into a bog.”
Tiff’s mouth dropped open. “Is that—”
“It’s a joke,” Maeve said. “Mostly.”
She held up a second finger. “Rule two: we are not doing ‘car bombs.’ If you ask for one, Alfie Byrne will throw you out of his pub and then I’ll throw you out of my bus.”
Brenda blinked. “But—”
Maeve’s gaze slid to her like a blade. “No but.”
Rob whispered to Brenda, “We can just call it something else.”
Maeve, without looking at him, said, “You cannot.”
Patricia coughed into her fist to hide a laugh.
Maeve held up a third finger. “Rule three: if you are lost, you do not wander into someone’s driveway and ask for directions while filming them. You knock. You say hello. You accept that the answer may be ‘go away.’”
Tiff raised a hand. “Okay but, like, what if it’s a cute old cottage and the lighting is perfect—”
Maeve’s eyes flicked.
Tiff lowered her hand like it had been slapped.
“And rule four,” Maeve said, “because I need you to hear me before the whiskey begins: we are not—not—climbing anything that has a warning sign in Gaelic.”
The couple in matching fleeces—catalog soulmates—nodded earnestly. The bald man behind me, Derek, I’d finally caught his name at baggage claim, said, “Fair.”
Maeve glanced out the windscreen. The funeral procession had moved ahead enough that the road now existed again as a concept.
“Right,” she said. “We’re moving.”
The bus lurched forward. The heater sighed as if it hated us. The diesel smell threaded through the crack of the window that refused to close.
Brenda dabbed her lavender again. “This is going to be such a healing trip,” she said, as if she’d booked me an emotional arc.
I stared at the coffin disappearing around the bend and wondered, briefly, what kind of person died on a day like this. The sort of person who lived here. The sort of person who didn’t.
Then the bus turned sharply, my stomach shifted, and my hair did a subtle surrender I refused to acknowledge.
We made it another eight minutes before the next stop, which was not a stop.
It was a hesitation.
The bus slowed at a crossroads where a man stood in the rain holding a duffel bag on one shoulder and a tripod case on the other. He waved like the bus was a taxi and he’d always belonged on it.
Maeve braked. The wipers beat a steady, irritated tempo.
The man jogged up, swung the bus door open, and climbed aboard with the confidence of someone arriving late to a party and still assuming he was the entertainment.
“Morning!” he called.
The tripod case clipped Patricia’s walking pole on the way in. The duffel nearly took out Brenda’s shoulder. He stopped immediately, crouched, and put a hand near Patricia’s elbow—not touching, just offering.
“Jesus, I’m so sorry. Are you alright?”
Patricia’s eyes narrowed. “I’m fine.”
He held the gaze the exact right amount of time, the way people do when they know they’re being watched.
“Patricia, right?” he said.
Patricia’s expression shifted half a degree. “Yes.”
“I’m Declan,” he said. “And I promise I’m not usually a hazard.”
Derek snorted from behind me. “That tripod’s a weapon.”
“It’s a Manfrotto carbon fiber,” Declan said, like that explained everything.
“It’s still a weapon,” Derek replied.
Declan laughed—quick, charming, calibrated for group approval. He moved down the aisle, the tripod swinging like he had no idea physics existed in tight spaces.
I didn’t move for him. Not on principle. I simply didn’t. The aisle was narrow, my knees were tucked close, and I had done my entire adult life being the person who made room.
I was on vacation.
Declan’s equipment bumped my seat as he passed. My compact slid off my lap and bounced onto the floor.
“Of course,” I muttered.
Declan didn’t notice. His attention was already on the front, the group, the collective.
I leaned into the aisle. His hip was precisely where my head needed to go. I paused. I recalculated. I leaned at a different angle and retrieved the compact from the rubber floor mat, my fingers brushing the ribbing slick with tracked-in rain.
When I sat back, the vent beside the window blasted cold air directly at my cheek with the enthusiasm of a petty god.
Declan dropped into the seat across the aisle from Brenda and Rob, which was not empty, but he made it into a communal invitation by sheer force of personality.
“Who’s excited for castles?” he asked.
Brenda raised her hand like she was in church. “Me!”
Rob grinned. “Hell yeah.”
Tiff leaned forward. “Obviously.”
The matching-fleece couple nodded. Even Derek looked up, suspicious but amused.
Declan’s eyes landed on me.
“And you?” he asked.
I looked out the window at stone walls and wet fields stitched together by sheep.
“The masonry is fourteenth century,” I said. “It’s better company.”
A beat. A small shock of laughter from somewhere in the bus.
Declan’s mouth tilted like he hadn’t expected resistance to be funny.
“Fair,” he said. “But I’m going to win you over.”
I didn’t look at him. “That’s a bold plan.”
“It’s my brand,” he said.
“That’s… unfortunate.”
Brenda leaned toward him, delighted. “Are you, like, a celebrity?”
Declan’s grin widened. “Depends who you ask.”
“Are you on TikTok?” Tiff demanded, eyes brightening as if she’d smelled blood.
Maeve’s voice cut through from the front. “If any of you ask me for a selfie before noon, I’ll turn this bus around and take you back to Shannon.”
Tiff slumped back with theatrical suffering.
Declan lifted both hands in surrender. “No selfies, Maeve. I’m a changed man.”
Maeve’s eyes met his in the rearview mirror. Something passed between them—recognition, mild contempt, familiarity disguised as professionalism.
“Are you?” Maeve asked.
Declan’s grin held. But his throat bobbed as he swallowed.
“Yes,” he said. “I am.”
I watched that. I hated that I watched that.
The bus moved. Rain continued. The countryside widened into low grey-green fields with stone walls like stitches holding the land together. Sheep appeared in clusters, unbothered by our existence, which I found aspirational.
Brenda leaned back toward me.
“I love him,” she whispered. “He has such good energy.”
Rob snorted. “He has such good abs.”
Brenda smacked Rob’s arm.
Declan heard anyway. He winked at Rob without shame, like he’d been complimented in the language he preferred.
I shut my eyes for a second, because if this trip became a week of Americans thirsting at a man on a bus, I was going to walk into the Atlantic and let nature decide.
You have been reading Cursed Castles & Irish Cream...
Carrie Hawthorne doesn’t do reckless. She does seven hairpins, a chignon engineered like a bridge, and a family foundation she’s held together since her mother died. She definitely doesn’t do group tours of Irish castles with strangers who call things “cinematic.”
But when her brother’s embezzlement detonates her carefully managed life mid-trip, and a no-nonsense Irish tour guide confiscates every phone on the bus, Carrie finds herself stranded in a dead-zone cottage on the Atlantic coast with Declan O’Rourke — a fitness influencer who does handstands in castle ruins and treats charm like a contact sport.
Three days. No Wi-Fi. No audience. No rules except the ones they make.
But what happens in the dead zone doesn’t stay in the dead zone. And the real battle is waiting back in Rhode Island, where Carrie’s family wants her compliant, the press wants her scandal, and Declan has to prove that the man who showed up without a phone is the same man who’ll show up in a suit.
Cursed Castles & Irish Cream is a wickedly funny, deeply romantic novel about two people who built their lives on performance — and the three days that burned it all down.
