Hi guys! We have two authors popping in today to celebrate their new holiday stories, first we have Christine Danse with A Touch of Brogue and then her fellow NineStar Press author Valentine Wheeler with Check Baggage, we have great excerpts from both books and there’s also a brilliant $10 NineStar GC giveaway, so check out the post and enter the giveaway! ❤ ~Pixie~
A Touch of A Brogue
Christine Danse
Eric Rossi isn’t a bad person. But he’s been talked into doing some pretty regrettable things by the man he thought he loved–like write a fake review of a pub he never stepped foot in for a food magazine that makes or breaks restaurants in Portland. He’s since dumped the boyfriend, but he can’t undo the review or the damage it’s done to the Irish Sisters and its passionate owner, Colm.
When Colm paid to have his family pub shipped from Ireland to Oregon, he put his savings, his heritage, and his sanity on the line. Now he gets so few customers, he notices each one. Especially the sweet, shy man who is dragged into the pub by his pink-haired niece. He calls himself Mark, and he is a chef’s dream, a man who completely enjoys everything Colm cooks. What Colm doesn’t know is that the man he’s falling for is the critic who’s almost cost him everything.
Eric didn’t mean to fall in love with the Irish Sisters or its blue-eyed, Irish-American owner. He definitely didn’t mean to lie about his identity. He’s already done enough damage, after all. Now he must make things right for the restaurant and disappear from Colm’s life before Colm learns the devastating truth, because the last thing Eric wants to do is destroy the chef’s heart, too.
.•.•.**❣️ NineStar | Amazon US | Amazon UK | Smashwords | B&N | Kobo ❣️**.•.•.
Checked Baggage
Valentine Wheeler
A Thanksgiving Romance
When Faris has to take a trip back to his family’s home in Lebanon to handle his grandmother’s estate, he finds himself caught between the world he left and the world he’s built himself in the United States. After an exhausting stay with his boisterous extended family, all he wants is a quiet trip home and a chance to rest before Thanksgiving with his parents in Massachusetts. But the weather has different plans for him.
Charlie’s father left when he was a toddler, and he’s never gotten a chance to connect with his paternal roots. A trip to the village his grandparents left in the 1930s gave him the facts but left him yearning for a connection he still didn’t feel.
When both men are stuck in Beirut for the night unexpectedly, can they find the feeling they’re both missing and make it home in time for Thanksgiving?
Excerpts!
A Touch of a Brogue, Christine Danse © 2018, All Rights Reserved
Chapter One
“‘The food aspires to be gourmet Irish but succeeds at neither being gourmet…nor authentically Irish?’”
Colm had been able to maintain calm till then, but his voice pitched with the last words. He gripped the magazine tighter.
“‘While the setting was evocative of a traditional pub, the food was not as sure of its identity, and the confused menu could not be saved by the tired gimmick of shipping a historic building overseas.’ Gimmick?” Colm’s voice rose an octave, and he didn’t care that Robin was here to witness. The establishment had been in his family for three generations. He’d shipped it to the Pacific Coast of the United States—at great expense—to preserve his heritage. A gimmick?
“No way,” Robin said.
He twisted the magazine in his hands and slammed it into the trash bin. It wasn’t even worth recycling.
Robin knelt and retrieved it. She flipped through the bent pages as if she wouldn’t believe the review herself until she saw. Colm could have told her not to bother. He’d just read the whole thing aloud to her. Although it did satisfy a small part of him to see her scanning through the article with an expression of disbelief on her face.
“Well, that’s just shit,” she said. “Did he even review the right restaurant? This is complete shit.”
Colm made a sound that wasn’t a laugh. He agreed with her. The review felt uncomfortably like a personal attack, but he didn’t recognize the critic’s name, and there was no author picture for him to check.
“What a butt-licking douchebag,” Robin said, and Colm almost laughed for real then. She stared at the byline. “Did I serve this asshole?”
Colm turned away. He was having trouble breathing, as if he’d been punched. In a sense, he had. He dropped onto the office chair, which nearly spun away before he’d landed.
“Oh, friend.” Robin draped her arms around his shoulders. He didn’t tell her off.
His reaction was stupid, of course. It was just a review. But it was the first professional critique he’d received, and it was in Portland Eats, the city’s premier food publication. The truth was it cut him unexpectedly deeply. He had poured himself and his money into the restaurant, sometimes working upwards of 100 hours a week, week after week, with an eye to details. The restaurant was supposed to be unique, a step above the rest. Of course he was upset. Understandably so.
Robin rubbed his arm in what was supposed to be a comforting manner.
“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “This idiot obviously doesn’t know what he’s talking about. It’s just one review. It doesn’t mean anything.”
But six months later, they were languishing.
It was only one review. Of course, it wouldn’t shut them down. But its words had acted as an ill omen.
Robin worked extra hard to keep him in good spirits and the restaurant afloat. She came up weekly with new schemes to draw business. Colm was discovering in her a near inexhaustible supply of optimism and a teeth-gnashing loyalty. He felt a little in awe of his luck in having her, although he suspected her to be motivated largely by a sense of self-preservation, considering she now called the restaurant home.
Colm had found her less than a year before, huddled in the doorway off the alley. The restaurant had only been open for a few months then, and he’d only just finished moving his things into the small apartment above the restaurant. It still gave him an odd sense of displacement, seeing and smelling this building from his childhood. Home, but here in Oregon.
It’d been the coldest March Colm could remember. It’d already snowed twice that month, and a frozen mix was expected again that night. Colm opened the door to take a bag of garbage out to the dumpster and nearly tripped over the small form bundled in the deep doorway. For an instant, he thought someone had left a heap of trash, topped with a blanket, on his doorstep. Then the heap moved, head tilting back to reveal a pale face and eyes blinking in the sudden light. Young. She looked so young, and clean, and fragile. He didn’t think she’d last the night.
So, of course, he wasn’t able to leave her there.
Robin was her name, and she came with a cat. Or rather, the cat arrived the next night, taking her place in the shelter of the doorway. It ran in as soon as he opened the door. Unlike Robin, who’d given him a long, measuring Are you a creep? look.
He must have passed her scrutiny, because she came in after several minutes. She was taller than he expected, although she sloped her shoulders in an unconscious defensive posture. He gave her the spare room in the apartment. On the second night—the night the cat arrived—he woke to find her in his room. Woken, and nearly died of a heart attack to find her standing over him. She’d been gathering her courage to pay him back for his hospitality with the only currency she thought she had, until he wheezily corrected her misconception.
No. And no. And in any case, no.
The episode shocked him, and he sat up, feeling violated and unclean, into the bleak hours of morning. When he finally clomped downstairs, he found her in the restaurant, dressed sharply and with hair pulled into a glossy bun. He hadn’t asked her to work. He still hadn’t decided if he wanted to let her stay. After the night before, it seemed like a bad idea.
“I can do an Irish accent,” she said in the worst attempt at a brogue he’d ever heard. He grimaced and said, “No.”
But only to the accent. He assigned her to bus the tables.
As if by some magic, the suspicion burned away from her, reservation replaced with bubbling chatter. She had no mute feature. The customers loved her.
Although Robin never gave him a full account, she shared her story in pieces. Colm put them together. Before taking up in his doorway, Robin had been nearing the end of her accounting program when her parents kicked her out of the house. Not that it was for him to judge, but she didn’t strike him as the kind of kid you kicked out. Sober, honest to a fault, hardworking. Colm had his suspicions, but he never pushed her for the circumstances behind the dispute with her family.
She refused a wage, at first. “You’re putting me up. Feeding me. That’s enough.” But he insisted. She would need money to finish school. To pay for clothes, a cell phone. And she could use the work history on her resume.
Soon, she began preparing his books for him. That was another surprise. He found her in his office and was outraged at first, because she’d previously offered, and he’d declined her help. But before he could say a thing, she showed him the work she’d done already. The numbers embarrassed him into silence. She may have very well saved the restaurant from tanking in its first months.
Then the review had been printed in Portland Eats, and they began sliding closer and closer to a pit they would not be able to climb out of.
And so Robin worked madly alongside Colm to save the restaurant. Fact was Colm had miscalculated. Badly. He shouldn’t have opened his restaurant three blocks from an existing pub, the Crooked Kilt. He’d thought he’d done his research, though. The other establishment was more of a standard American brewpub serving burgers with Gaelic names and hosting folk acoustic bands of the contemporary American type. Colm’s own Irish Sisters served a large selection of beers from the British Isles and a full menu of traditional Irish fare. Granted, with a modern twist. And they worked hard to book a lineup of Celtic music acts. There really shouldn’t have been any competition. In Portland, it was standard for brewpubs to operate next to each other, all doing good business.
Colm worried. Robin continued to host trivia nights and Celtic karaoke. They held on. The review in Portland Eats faded into bad memory. And, little by little, the restaurant started to pick up.
Then the poor Internet reviews started to pour in.
Colm had a habit of checking the review sites. Yelp. Trip Adviser. Google. Not the healthiest behavior, but he restricted his checks to once weekly and told himself it was good business to be aware of what the reviews said. And that Sunday, they said the restaurant was dark and dirty, with poor quality food and bad service. Colm framed his face in his hands and stared at the computer screen. It was like the article in Portland Eats all over.
Later, Robin caught him checking the reviews on his phone. She took it from him.
“Don’t worry about them. They don’t mean anything.”
~~
Within a week, business was flagging again.
“I’ve got an idea,” Robin said, arriving unannounced in his office.
The cat had taken a perch on Colm’s desk. He’d been petting its back. Now he and the cat looked at her.
“We’re going to throw an Irish Christmas extravaganza.”
Colm quietly placed his forehead against the desk.
Checked Baggage, Valentine Wheeler © 2018, All Rights Reserved
Faris’s suitcase wheel caught in a rut between the carpets, so he yanked it harder, cursing under his breath. The woman turning the next switchback of the long, snaking check-in line gave him a dirty look from under her hijab. Faris glared back as she turned the corner out of view behind a large, loud family. Frustration simmered in his stomach after a few minutes in the airport. He wasn’t looking forward to the day of travel ahead of him.
He pulled his T-shirt away from his chest, grimacing at the sweaty feel of the cotton. Beirut was too warm in November. Not Charleston-summer hot, sticky and burning like a slap to the face with a wet towel. It wasn’t steamy or boiling or anything so extreme. No, Beirut was a comfortable sixty-eight degrees on November 19th, and Faris hated it. He missed the pinprick pain of ice peppering his face, the driving Boston wind, the coats and scarves and hats that would be starting to layer everyone, making them all the same size and shape and color against the reds and golds of the fall foliage.
When Faris was young, they flew to Lebanon every spring to his parents’ hometown, landing in the early morning and finding Teta at the arrivals sign ready for the drive up the long, steep highway to her house on the outskirts of Aley. At least up in the mountains, it was a little cooler than in Beirut. If he closed his eyes now, he could imagine it was one of those trips. The airport sounded the same. It even smelled the same, scuffed carpet and sweat and allspice and tahini—
Faris’s stomach growled, reminding him he hadn’t had much breakfast. He opened his eyes and caught sight of the source of the smell: the man he was passing now across the stanchion belt was digging into a plastic container of rice and meat. Faris looked away before the man could catch him staring, and instead, caught the eye of the airline employee directing the line. The uniformed man waved him forward impatiently, and Faris grimaced and muttered an apology for holding up the line.
Faris handed his suitcase to the agent behind the desk, watching the familiar battered, red leather case disappear through the slot in the wall. She handed him his boarding pass, then shooed him politely along to follow the crowd to security.
He was ready for his home, his bed, and to be away from the crush of people he’d been stuck in for what felt like months. Coming to Lebanon without Teta waiting for him in her immaculate old Renault hadn’t felt right.
And Teta was gone, interred a week before he’d made it to Aley. Such an incredible force in his life, even from across the Atlantic—the only driving force of the family, really—and she was gone. His great aunts—the ones who were still strictly observant, not pragmatically secular like Teta had been—reassured him through tears that she was already in a new life, already reborn. The whole time he’d been there trying to clean and divide possessions, the house had been full of crying great-aunts and pushy second cousins and town biddies who wanted to know how he was holding up. He’d finally had to kick them out when the realtor came by with the papers, moving the whole group next door to Aunt Farida’s. There, they’d sat around platters of meat pies and fatayers and reminded him over and over death isn’t the end, isn’t even sad, but maybe they thought he was such a terrible agnostic that he was planning to make some sort of great sobbing scene. He wasn’t. He was fine. He was done. He wasn’t going to speak to another human for the next twelve hours.
Faris collected his backpack from the X-ray machine and slung it over his shoulder before pushing through the crowd. For a moment he thought this must be Thanksgiving crowds before remembering nobody here was going home to an inflatable lawn turkey like his dad’s, because Thanksgiving was something nobody here cared about. These were just people going wherever they were going on a Tuesday: no group exodus home like he’d be seeing when he landed at Logan. He stopped in front of the monitor listing arrivals and departures and scanned for his flight. “Copenhagen, Copenhagen,” he muttered, squinting at the tiny letters. A pang of guilt tried to rise in his gut as he skimmed past the Arabic script to read the English translation instead, but he ignored it. He’d been living in English for twenty-two years. Three weeks in Lebanon wasn’t going to make him switch back to favoring the tongue he barely used anymore.
There it was, his first flight of the journey, at the very bottom of the screen. He was early; one of those overly personal second cousins, Najib—Teta’s sister Farida’s grandson—had dropped him off on the way to work, hours before he needed to arrive. He didn’t mind having a few hours at the airport, though. He had needed to get out of Teta’s house. No one’s house, now, he supposed. His dad’s house for the next few hours until the sale went through. At least it would give his dad a little wiggle room financially, let him pay off a bit more of their house in the States. That was maybe the one good thing coming out of this trip.
The listing for his flight flashed twice, then turned red abruptly. It took him a moment to refocus—his eyes had gotten worse since his last pair of glasses. With all the confusion around Teta’s death, he’d had to cancel his ophthalmologist appointment, and now he was stuck with this old pair until he could get back and reschedule. The headaches and blurry vision weren’t improving his mood.
“Oh no,” he whispered as the new status came into focus. “Canceled? What?”
It couldn’t be canceled. He couldn’t stay here any longer. He couldn’t go back to Aley. He wouldn’t be allowed in Teta’s house, anyway, not now that it was technically under contract. He certainly wasn’t going to go to Najib’s place, either, or Aunt Farida’s. He didn’t mind his cousin—he was family and all that—but his four roommates were a lot to take for a few hours, let alone a whole night. And his aunt already had three adult grandkids living with her. He’d be on the couch in the living room there.
Another listing flashed, then another. The speakers crackled overhead, garbled Arabic piping through. Faris strained to hear it over the din of other travelers, fighting to translate the unfamiliar accent.
“Due to weather conditions, flights to Northern Europe, including Hamburg, Berlin, Copenhagen, and Gothenburg, may be impacted. Please see a gate agent for more information.”
“What?” He scanned the board again. “All of them?” He stumbled as a crowd of people began shoving past, flinching at their invasion of his personal space. He pushed up on his toes to look over the mass of people to try to locate the gate he’d been originally scheduled for. The booth at A-2 was dark, empty, and he groaned and squinted over the masses of travelers to find the information desk for Atlantic Air.
It was a few hundred feet down the terminal, and it was mobbed with people. He groaned and started toward it, settling himself at the end of the massive line that had formed from the people he’d let pass.
“Excuse me?” said a voice behind him in mangled Arabic. The accent—so thick it was barely intelligible—sounded American, so against his better judgment, Faris turned to look at the speaker. “This is where to wait to change tickets?”
The man was tall and slim, with a long, pale face freckled across his nose and below hazel eyes, and with hair so dark it was nearly black, standing up in uncontrolled tufts. He clutched a ticket in one hand and a cell phone in the other. His muscular arms were smooth and pale, with a hint of sunburn. He was cute—really cute, not in that bulky way Faris usually liked his men, but attractive as heck—and he looked exhausted.
“Yeah, I’m the end of the line,” said Faris in English, and the man’s face relaxed, breaking into a relieved smile.
“Oh! Thank fuck,” he said, then winced. “Sorry. It’s been a long day, and my brain is all out of Arabic, to tell you the truth.”
“American?”
“Yeah, though it looks like I’m not making it back anytime soon,” said the man with a frazzled smile. He blinked, focusing on Faris. “Hey, your English is awesome.”
Faris grimaced. “That’s good since I’m from Boston.”
The man blanched. “Oh, sorry, man. I assumed—well, sorry, anyway. You speak Arabic, though?”
Faris nodded. “I was born here,” he said, giving the guy a break. “Your flight canceled too?”
“Through Hamburg, yeah.” He sighed, running a hand through his disaster of a hairstyle. Faris was intrigued to see it popped right back up into the same disarray.
I’m just missing Grindr, he told himself firmly. And he’s probably straight, anyway. I’m not going to pick up a dude in the airport. That’s too cliché.
“I’m Charlie,” said the man, holding out a broad hand. “Thanks for the help, and sorry I’m a dipshit. It’s been a long day.”
“Faris.” He took his hand. “And it’s fine.” He shook it, then turned back to the line. He could barely see the gate agent up ahead, a tall man in a jubbah waving his hands dramatically as the man behind the desk shook his head impassively.
The line moved forward inch by inch.
Something behind him crinkled loudly, and he glanced back at Charlie, who was digging through his bag. He pulled out a half-crushed box of pistachio marzipan and opened it, picking out a piece and popping it in his mouth. Faris tried not to think about the baklava his aunt Adele had offered to send with him the night before. He should have taken her up on it. He focused on the women in front of him, trying to pick out the few Hindi words he knew from their conversation, instead of paying attention to the sweets. He’d get something in the terminal as soon as his flights were sorted out.
“Hey,” said Charlie, holding out the box and offering it to Faris. “Want some? I don’t think they’re going to let me take it through security.”
Faris turned back toward him. “What?”
“The candy,” said Charlie patiently. “Would you like some?”
“Why?” Faris stared at him. “They’re not going to confiscate it. It’s allowed in the terminal.”
Charlie shrugged and picked up another piece, inspecting it. “Hey, your loss, man. Apparently this is the same kind my grandparents used to buy, so I figured I had to try some. It’s delicious.”
“Your grandparents?” asked Faris, then cursed silently. He wasn’t curious about what this American was doing in Beirut. And he didn’t want to get into a conversation with him. “Do they live around here?”
But apparently he did want to know about this guy’s life, and he couldn’t help smiling a little when Charlie lit up at the question. “No, but they were born here and lived most of their lives nearby. I never met them, so I’m here doing some research,” he said.
“What, for a book or something?”
Charlie shook his head. “I wish. No, I had a bunch of time off saved up and I’ve always wanted to come out here. My dad’s parents came to the US right before he was born, and I never met them. I wanted to see where they were from and maybe learn something about their lives.”
“Did you?”
Charlie sighed, deflating a bit. “Man, I don’t know.” He glanced forward. “Hey, the line’s moving.” He turned back to Faris. “You sure you don’t want a piece?”
Faris sighed. It did look appealing. What the hell.
Charlie grinned, hazel eyes sparkling, as Faris took a particularly sweet-looking piece and popped it in his mouth, trying not to moan at how good it was. “See?” said Charlie, “I told you it was good.”
Faris didn’t fight his answering smile this time.
About Christine & Valentine!
Christine lives with her writing partner in the wilds of urban Oregon, where they raise weeds, worms, and eyebrows.
Valentine is a latecomer to writing, though she’s always been a passionate reader. Through fanfiction she found her way to an incredible community of writers who’ve taught her to love making stories.
When she isn’t writing, she’s making bad puns, yelling about television, or playing with her small child.
Her life’s ambition is to eat the cuisine of every single country. Find Valentine on Twitter.
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