Megan Barry had a problem. Well, lots of them actually. The biggest was the bus stop. The listing one on the far side of McCormack's Cross where the curve of the road opened to offer a view of the Caha Mountains. She couldn't get beyond it for the life of her. Strangely enough, of all her troubles one would have thought this the easiest to overcome. Not so.
With a cardboard suitcase and her head full of visions of the future, she purposely made her way to the aforementioned bus stop the day she got her leaving cert. As fate would have it, news of her grandmother's turn for the worse reached her before the bus did, and suddenly she was back in the clutches of a community which had little more to offer than a dismal future in the local fish factory yanking the entrails out of mackerel. Or marriage, of course which, considering the pickings, was not necessarily a better lot.
The bus stop scenario, sadly, repeated itself over and over again. Something always threw a spanner in the works; if not her grandmother's dodgy health, then the clandestine affair with skinny-arsed Brogan, the local teacher (there comes a time in every woman's life when virginity becomes as pesky as a dose of athlete's foot and requires eradicating for once and for all).
A woman with a secret affinity for rags-to-riches novels, Meg had, nevertheless, no illusions of grandeur. She just wanted what most women did: a decent job, a decent life and a husband who didn't wear Wellingtons to work and smell of fish.
On her last try she nearly made it, too. Well into her thirties, she'd finally buried her grandmother, given up her job at 'The Launch In' luncheon inn on the quay and marched out of Scullymór. If the bus hadn't been late Connor Gorman, a local landowner, wouldn't have offered her a lift. She, on the other hand, wouldn't have accepted it had he not been the most gorgeous creature on earth and the object of every local woman's naughty fantasies. In fact, he looked like he'd just stepped out of a bodice-ripping novel; wealthy, good-looking and up for grabs. Acutely aware of her peroxide frizz, thickening waistline and sagging cardigan, Meg was slightly baffled to find herself being driven back to the village having accepted his proposal to work for him as the housekeeper of Killgorman estate.
Now, four years later, she's still kicking herself, and her frustration, in the face of unattainable affluence, is rampant. When Connor, one day, returns from a golfing trip with young Helen Featherstone hanging off his arm, the last of Meg's scruples vanish. There were some things in life she wanted and, come what may, she was going to have them: freedom, excitement and Connor Gorman's thirty-two foot sloop. Never having set foot on a yacht in her life, Meg naively believes that studying the 'Sloop Skipper's Notes' borrowed from the local mobile library will suffice to see her to foreign shores, golden beaches and a pineapple cocktail. Two weeks later, while Connor and Helen are away on holidays, she absconds with the boat and determines it does not...
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