Saving Christmas in the Little Irish Village (The Little Irish Village #5)

Chapter 1

1

Hannah’s eyes closed as she envisaged the roaring open fire at the Shamrock Inn. Then, picturing the welcoming warmth of the kitchen in the Kelly family quarters attached to the pub, her nose tingled. She sniffed, breathing in the cinnamon, citrus, cloves and ginger aromas that signalled Nan was baking up a storm for Christmas. What was truly special about home, though, was the sense of belonging as she barrelled back through the door.

The realisation that things would be different this year made her eyes pop back open, and she was almost surprised to find herself not in Emerald Bay but in the Cork City branch of Feed the World with Bees.Instead of delicious home baking, the office space smelled of coffee and damp wool. Through the half-misted windowpane beside her desk, Hannah could see the sparkling Christmas decorations lighting up the streets beyond. Inside, someone had half-heartedly draped tinsel around its frame. She decided it was probably Sonya, who’d been wearing cute little candy cane earrings in a nod to Christmas yesterday.

Hannah’s gaze settled longingly on her colleague Dylan. He’d just asked her when she’d begun to feel passionate about the environment because he wasupdating the staff profiles on the Feed the World with Bees website. She’d told him the story of her ‘Save Ireland’s trees’ one-child protest,andas he input this into the computer, she admired the determined jut of his jaw, signalling a kindred spirit.

‘OK. So you tied yourself to the signpost, and what happened then?’ Dylan’s fingers had temporarily stopped flying over the keyboard, and his cocoa-brown eyes locked on Hannah. ‘Did you stop the villagers cutting down the tree?’

‘No. I wasn’t made of as strong stuff as I am now. I eventually got cold and hungry and howled for Mam to come and snip the skipping rope because I couldn’t undo my knot. But don’t you dare put that under my bio! You’ll ruin my tree-hugger street cred.’

‘So you gave in?’

‘I did.’ Hannah nodded, even now not liking the sense of failure. ‘And I felt bad about it for a long time. I cried myself to sleep every night in the lead-up to Christmas that year and vowed to help make the world a better place when I was bigger.’ She remembered her eight-year-old self standing in front of the bathroom mirror, giving a solemn Brownie salute as she promised to always stand up for her beliefs.Hannah liked to think it was a vow she’d kept.

Dylan went back to his typing, and she shifted in her seat. Her bum was going numb. What she needed was one of those standing desk yokes like he had there, but the problem was she couldn’t be arsed with all that standing. It was a conundrum. On her desk in front of her, packets of wildflower seeds were scattered along with a sky-high stack of Christmas cards featuring a bee with a Santa hat on. Today, her task was to stuff a seed packet inside each card and put it in an envelope ready for purchase.

The seeds and cards were a great money spinner when it came to saving the bees, and the non-profit organisation also did an Easter and birthday range. That was Hannah sorted on the present-buying front for the year! She glanced at the box full of envelopes she’d already stuffed. Was RSI imminent? she wondered, flexing her fingers, and rather than continue working, she said, ‘My mam says I feel things more deeply than others.’

That piqued Dylan’s interest, and basking in the glow of his attention once more, she continued.

‘I was always the kid who’d bring the dead bird home and insist on a proper burial ceremony.’ Nora Kelly also said she was one of life’s blurters who would do well to think before she spoke occasionally. Right at this moment, for instance, she desperately wanted to blurt, ‘I think I might be in love with you,’ to Dylan because at least then he’d know how she felt. This bubbling sensation of things hovering between them unsaid was so unsettling. It took a determined effort to zip it for the sake of her job, and she was grateful when he intruded on her thoughts.

‘Byline?’ he asked, fingers hovering over the keyboard.

‘Erm.’ She thought for a moment. ‘Why don’t you say something like, “Hannah passionately believes that healing our sick planet is not an ideal; it’s a necessity”?’

Her reward was seeing Dylan’s impressed, slow nod. It warmed her insides like she’d been given a cinnamon-sprinkled hot chocolate with marshmallows floating on top. His opinion of her mattered because he was the real deal in her eyes. While he worked with her at Feed the World with Bees during the day, he was also the frontman for the Climate Guardians action group he’d established in his student days.

Hannah stared out the window again as he typed this in. The building where she worked had once served as a home.It now served as a second home –well,third home for her if you counted the Shamrock and the flat she currentlyshared,given how much time she spent here.The office was one of many in a colourful row converted into businesses in the city centre.

She watched a woman laden down with shopping bags hurrying past, and her mind snapped back to Christmas. Usually, she’d count down December’s days until the twenty-fifth, a habit stemming from the advent calendars of her childhood. This year, though, the anticipation that would be building about now had deserted her because she would be the only one of her five sisters without a partner to snuggle up to over Christmas. Hannah would be the odd one out, but what made her even sadder was knowing she was just as loved up as her sisters. She stole a glance at Dylan. Only hers was a pathetic one-sided affair.