A Baby for St. Patrick's Day, page 1
A Baby for St. Patrick’s Day
A Love Story for the Holidays, Book 5
Standalone romance series connected by setting and friendships.
Copyright © 2021 Jamie Knight
All rights reserved.
Books in A Castle Falls Love Story for the Holidays Series
The holidays are here in Castle Falls and this series of standalone steamy holiday romance books about friends who live there are sure to warm your heart… and your sheets!
1): A Second Chance for Christmas (Molly and Jeremy)
2): A Fiancé for Christmas (Kayla and Salvador)
3): A Baby for Christmas (Alex and Nico)
4): A Baby for Valentine’s Day (Lucien and Lenore)
5): A Baby for St. Patrick’s Day (Sean and Hera)
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Contents
Chapter One - Hera
Chapter Two - Sean
Chapter Three - Hera
Chapter Four - Sean
Chapter Five - Hera
Chapter Six - Sean
Chapter Seven - Hera
Chapter Eight - Sean
Chapter Nine - Hera
Chapter Ten - Sean
Chapter Eleven - Hera
Chapter Twelve - Sean
Chapter Thirteen - Hera
Chapter Fourteen - Sean
Chapter Fifteen - Hera
Chapter Sixteen - Sean
Chapter Seventeen - Hera
Chapter Eighteen - Sean
Chapter Nineteen - Hera
Chapter Twenty - Sean
Epilogue - Hera
Chapter One - Hera
I stared out at the pre-dawn blue color that glowed from the small, raised window just above the sink, which seemed to be perfectly placed there so that I could look out of it.
There were no dishes to be done at this time of day, and the stove glowed a similar hue of blue as the sky, while propane licked at the bottom of the skillet, heating things up. The impressive piece of cooking equipment was heavy and old-fashioned, just like my grandma herself, who had passed it down to me.
She’s still alive, but in all fairness, at the time she gave it to me, I was about to be married, and she was just thinking ahead, Heidi Hallgrimsdottir being nothing if not practical. In fact, her bone-level pragmatism had extended to family names, her only son being named Halgrim, in that case a Hallgrimssen, making me similarly a Hallgimsdottir.
There was something to be said for symmetry, even in a culture that technically didn’t have surnames. But that theme that stopped with my daughter Sarah.
Her father was only willing to give leeway on her given name, and insisted she be christened with his surname. Considering it was Clump, she would have been better off with Hallgrimsdottir, which it turned out it was soon enough, anyway.
The skillet reached critical mass, causing the iron to really start singing, signaling the best, and only time, to add the meat. The bacon hit the skillet with a sizzle and was soon joined by eggs and fine sliced mushrooms, which left ample space to accommodate any late additions to the meal.
Grandma had given me the biggest skillet for such a purpose, allowing me to cook everything at once.
The glow of the TV came from the still-dark living room as things became edible. Sarah was already up and ready for school.
I had been a holy terror when it came to school prep. Dad literally had to lift me out of bed right up until my teens. To say I wasn’t a morning person was an understatement. That trait seemed to have skipped a generation, as my mother Heidi was an early riser.
Sarah was similar to my mom in that way, yet similar to me in other ways— and similar to all of the Hallgrim women, really. Already tall for her age, she was getting her curves early, looking closer to a teen despite only being 12, which was just the curse of our blood by the looks of it.
She was also almost too clever, having read most of the classics before she was ten, and she was pleasant as all get-out. Most who knew her well joked that she was more like a grown-up than a kid, like a reverse Benjamin Button.
From the other room, riding on invisible Horses of Hell came the voice I loathed so well. David Mother-Effinn’ Starkey. He was quite possibly the most pretentious toe-rag I’d ever encountered, and I’d been to art school.
“What’s that goblin doing on the tube?” I demanded to know from Sarah.
“C’mon, Mom, he’s not that bad.”
“Not that bad? He—”
“I know, he also knows his Tudors, has a degree and everything. He might not have the best takes on the past, but he knows truckloads about history.”
“Where he’d be a lot more comfy,” I sniffed.
“Probably,” she said. “Lucy Worsley is on later if it makes you feel any better.”
It did but there was no point in letting Sarah know, which would be too much like giving the game away. Instead, I went into mother mode.
“Will you still be here then, or will you be at school?”
“At school,” said my poor little dumpling in a tone that sounded nearly deflated.
“I’ll tape it for you,” I said, ruffling her recently acquired pixie cut.
“You’ll tape it for me? What the heck does that mean?”
“Don’t get sassy; we both know how old I am, okay?”
After we let the matter go, the harbinger of pomp disappeared, replaced by a blank screen. As if on cue, my first and only born child marched into the dining room like she was part of a military parade. It might have come off as sarcastic from any other kid but her.
Once we were seated, Sarah held her knife and fork held properly. She could teach a seminar on which order silverware was meant to go in. The little one, though not as little as expected, ate her worth of the offered food, the rule of our house being that you didn’t have to eat what you didn’t like.
The idea of ‘cleaning your plate’ of food in your mouth rather than in the sink sounded like the most draconian of dictums. How anyone was fool enough to follow, let alone enforce it, is a question for the ages.
With our bellies full, we headed to the car and down to the posh private school that was still paid for by Sarah’s dad, despite his rather permanent departure. He had always been a better father than husband.
Posh to the point of threatening, St. Catherine’s School for girls was in no way shy about its gothic roots, and the wall and gate themselves were enough to make Bram Stoker blush. Sarah had cried the first time she had seen the school, which was jarred by all the jagged points and flying buttresses, but she soon got used to the ghoulish place once her friends got involved.
It might be a bit much to say Sarah was popular, but she was never short of company. Most of the other girls at the school, who were aged 6-12, found her interesting enough to hang around, even if none of them could pronounce her last name. I was just glad she had eventually started liking school, and no longer cried about having to go.
I parked the car in the school parking lot, and we got out. Then I helped her put her backpack on as other parents, mostly moms, did the same with their daughters.
A standout in the sea of estrogen was the tall chap in the three-piece tweed suit who was tending to his own offspring, and not only because of his shoulder length Kool-Aid blue hair. He looked like an escapee from an English Chamber Pop band. It was rare, even in these enlightened times, to see a dad being so involved with his kids, particularly with a girl.
“Don’t do anything I would do,” I called as Sarah dashed to the arched and foreboding doors.
After leaving my kid in the care of those I paid to educate her, I aimed the lumbering vehicle toward the salt mines. Never one to look a gift hearse in the mouth, my uncle was left with the impression of excitement when he handed over the keys to the big, black beast.
We needed a car and he gladly obliged, the funeral home recently revamping its fleet. A quick paint job turned mourning black to electric white and transformed the car to look like an old limo, which was far less embarrassing to be seen in at the school gates.
As I listened to Spooky & Sin on the radio, the white boat cut its way through the ceaseless flow of traffic, which was heavy. It seemed like every other member of society was out at the same time, following the usual rituals. I followed along with them in accordance with all the traffic laws, although I started to wish I could just forget about them.
Had those in power tried to impose fasting, tithing and a touch of human sacrifice, I wasn’t quite confident there would be much push back. It would just need to be introduced gradually, with constant reminders that it was supposedly for our own good.
What other way was there to explain the general acceptance of The Patriot Act, the War on Drugs, or civil asset forfeiture?
After driving for a while through the boring modernist buildings, I was able to find a parking garage to park in. The nearby street parking was reserved for deliveries and valet parking, leaving normal people like myself to have to park quite a distance from our jobs.
Once I had parked and locked my car, it was a matter of waiting to see just how late I would be. It was less a matter of timing than geography, with Sarah’s school being on the opposite side of town from my office. Her father had chosen the school as part of our custody arrangements, and that was probably his last, laughing victory.
How I wished circumstances could be different. I imagined an alternate reality w here the father of my child and I had a romantic relationship, or at least a civil one. Obviously, it would have had to have been with someone different than Sarah’s actual father, though, since such things were impossible with him.
Still, these circumstances may not have been ideal, but they had brought Sarah into my life, and for that I was thankful. There was no use living in a fantasy world when I could enjoy part of it— being a mother to Sarah— in real life. And especially not when I should be focusing on that reality, which necessarily included doing a good job at work so that I could keep affording our bills.
“You got in right under the wire,” my co-worker Cyril said, passing me a coffee on his way to parts unknown.
“Thanks!” I told him.
With fifteen seconds to spare, I sat down in the chair at my workstation, half ready to start another day.
Nearly old enough to have been the inventor of glass marbles, Avalon Toys had offices all around the world, dating back to before America had even properly become a nation. It was of little surprise, considering that there were still tapestries all over Europe that were older than the Mayflower.
As old as 1776 might seem now, it had nothing on 1066. Founded in the Netherlands when it still had an empire, the trickle to other parks of the fledgling Democracy we called home took a bit more time.
The little business that could, chugging uphill with considerably more baggage, Avalon was no match for the Parker Brothers or Hasbro in terms of sheer sales, not least because of the latent xenophobia compelling my countryfolk to buy domestic.
Instead, they started the idea of the Unique Selling Point, long before the concept of such marketing had ever been conceived.
They may not have sold like jetpacks, but their toys were certainly unique.
More creative than commercial in their bone-marrow, the muses had whispered a strategy to them that could give them an edge: Hire artists to design things no one had ever seen before and release them on limited runs, thereby manufacturing scarcity.
And listening to the muse had paid off. Some of the weirder designs from the 30s and 40s still went for more than a new car on eBay.
Like a choir of angels heralding the return to life, the screen gave off an ethereal light as the computer booted up, which was a little ironic, considering that it was an Apple.
Once I had my Stylus and drawing tablet, and the two devices connected by the miracle of Bluetooth, which I had learned from Wikipedia had likely been named after the 10th Century Danish king Harold Bluetooth, I began my day’s work.
Chapter Two - Sean
As I awoke from a night of dreams, the clicks of our old grandfather clock echoed like bomb ticks from just down the hall. Once I located my glasses, things became clear, my formerly distinct wobble between realities beginning to settle itself.
At first, I was confused about my surroundings, but then as I took everything around me in, things started to make more sense. My daughter and I had been playing chess before we’d fallen asleep.
My eyes settled on the bishop first, white and sleek, with a ridiculous top. I wasn’t sure what those pieces had to do with anything, when I really thought about it.
Even the knights made more sense, the ‘rooks’ clearly short-hand for ‘rookery.’ ‘Pawn,’ on the other hand, was a thing to really ponder: Which had come first, the term for a hapless victim or the piece in a chess game?
The surviving pieces were scattered across the board, with most of their brethren on the table at either end.
I’d won the first game, eventually, but not as handily as I should have, considering that I had 23 years’ worth of more experience in life and chess than Ida did. My daughter was a strange one, but in the most wonderful way. She had clear eyes and a perceptive intelligence that made her seem older and wiser than she really was.
I’d meant to clean up the game, but she’d wanted to play another round, and then we had both fallen asleep in the middle of it, our marathon chess sessions leaving us both battle fatigued.
My angel slept in an awkward position, her head on her folded arms, as if desperate times had called for desperate measures. Neither of us had wanted to give up the game, so sleep intervened, insisting on lulling us into the rest that we’d been missing out on and had clearly needed.
Now, with a creak and a pop, I found my feet, along with my way around the table. Taking her long, white-blond braid near the roots, I gave it a gentle tug.
“Toot, toot; the train is coming into the station.”
“Checkmate!” she yelped, with a jerk to wakefulness.
“Only in your dreams, darling.”
“Oh, who won?”
“I did, at least if you mean the last game we managed to finish,” I said, peeling a stray pawn from her cheek.
“Oh, right, the Karloff gambit?”
“Yep. But you were on track to beat me in the rematch. If only we both could have stayed awake.”
Ida also rose to her feet, and then our morning routine could begin in force, with the two of us parting ways to go to our respective tasks. As she changed into her school uniform, I cooked up a banquet of a breakfast. Her hunger had become insatiable once she’d hit the double digits in age.
As the pan touched the heat, I had a memory of Maggie sitting at the table reading to five-year-old Ida, who could already read by herself by then, but humored her mommy just the same. She was sweet like that, not only able to understand what other people might need but also being able to give it to them, even at the cost of her own pride.
Maggie was never great at cooking, one of her many weaknesses, all of which she stated as her only one. (‘Bad cooking is my one weakness’ or ‘prawns are my one weakness,” she would say. After sitting down and counting them up, my blushing bride turned out to have roughly 27 ‘one weaknesses’ at any given time. This didn’t make her bad, or even flawed, just human— if only she didn’t go to such efforts to downplay it.)
One thing she definitely excelled at, though, was organization. She had an admiral’s head for tactics and the intense personality of a private school administrator, so there were no excuses to be made when there was something to be done.
Being stringent but fair, and making sure that things ran well, seemed to be the purpose of life for everyone in Maggie’s family of origin, who were descended from an ousted family of aristocrats used to telling people what to do, never quite able to get it through their heads that America wasn’t a monarchy. (In my opinion, it was closer to a plutocracy, considering how much it cost to run for office, and the fact that the best-funded and richest candidates won 90 percent of the time, but that was beside the point.)
Once both Ida and I were ready to start our day, we squeezed into the Beetle and booted down to the first port o’ call. It was always clear when we were getting close to St. Catherine’s, or “St. Cats,” as Ida and I liked to call it.
The spires were on full display from several blocks away, and even the church’s decision to replace Mother “The Wrecking Ball” Illuminata with the far more reasonable Sister Francisca did little to mellow anyone’s first impression. The architecture landed somewhere between Canterbury Cathedral and Castle Gormenghast.
“It doesn’t get any prettier, does it?” Ida asked me.
“That depends on your perspective, poppet,” I said.
“Don’t call me that,” she pouted, “I’m not a baby anymore.”
“Right, noted.”
“But you’re right. Although it looks pretty, it still looks a little overdone,” Ida observed, as I helped get her backpack on. “Almost as if it’s trying too hard.”
Despite her insistence that she wasn’t a baby, I still found it hard to let my little girl grow up, and probably gave her too much assistance and not enough independence. But that backpack of hers was heavy!
The amount of homework the school gave out bordered on the absurd, but I could only imagine that the educational professionals of this private Catholic school knew what they were doing. The price they charged implied that, anyway.
Once I was sure the bulky backpack was on Ida’s back in a way that was as comfortable as possible— although I still worried it would give a spine fracture or something— I looked around at the other parents milling about while they dropped off their own kids or helped them carry in large homework projects, or the heavy backpacks of the students still too little to be able to do so on their own.
