Samantha Young is a New York Times, USA Today and Wall Street Journal bestselling author from Stirlingshire, Scotland. She's been nominated for the Goodreads Choice Award for Best Author and Best Romance for her international bestselling novel On Dublin Street.
Visit Samantha Young online:
www.authorsamanthayoung.com
https://twitter.com/AuthorSamYoung
The On Dublin Street series
On Dublin Street
Down London Road
Before Jamaica Lane
Fall from India Place
Echoes of Scotland Street
Moonlight on Nightingale Way
Castle Hill
Until Fountain Bridge
One King’s Way
Hero
One King’s Way
An On Dublin Street Novella
Samantha Young
PIATKUS
First published in the US in 2015 by InterMix, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Piatkus
Copyright © Samantha Young, 2015
Excerpt from Hero © Samantha Young, 2015
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
ISBN 978-0-349-41100-2
Piatkus
An imprint of
Little, Brown Book Group
50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DZ
An Hachette UK Company
www.hachette.co.uk
www.piatkus.co.uk
Contents
About the Author
The On Dublin Street series
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Craig
Rain
Craig
Rain
Rain
Craig
Rain
Craig
Rain
Rain
Craig
Craig
Rain
Rain
Rain
Craig
Rain
Craig
Excerpt from Hero
For Amy, Georgia, Rachel, and Shelly.
An ocean may divide us . . . but what’s a little water between the truest of friends.
Craig
Snoring woke him.
The abrasive noise filtered into Craig’s unconscious and ripped him right out of sleep. He blinked against the faint light filtering in from the purple curtains hanging at his bedroom window.
Wait a minute.
Craig tensed.
I don’t own purple curtains.
The memory of last night slowly pushed to the forefront of his brain.
Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.
Turning his head in tiny increments for fear he’d wake the snorer beside him, Craig glimpsed a pale face peeking out from the mass of red hair splayed all over the pillows. This wasn’t his bedroom. This was . . .
Donna’s bedroom.
No, that wasn’t right.
Danielle “call me Danni.”
Craig sat up unhurriedly, his muscles locked with tension, worried that any slight movement would cause the snoring to stop and those bright blue eyes to open. Danielle “call me Danni” had hung around until he finished his shift at Club 39, the popular basement bar on George Street in the heart of Edinburgh’s city center. He’d been bartending there full time for five years and there were women who came regularly to the bar just to be served by him.
Some of them to be served by him.
Like Danni.
She’d been coming to the bar for the last few weeks—every Thursday night without fail with her friends on student night. She was a postgrad. And she was fucking gorgeous. Craig could hardly let her down.
But sticking around in the morning?
Nah. They both knew what this was.
Or at least they both would when she woke up in the morning and he was gone.
He winced, hoping she was really all about casual like she’d promised she was last night. Craig never fucked a woman if he thought she might be clueless about the rules of a one-night stand. Ninety-nine percent of the time he read a woman right. There was the occasional one percent who always made him feel like a bastard afterward.
Shattered, and wanting his own bed away from the snorer, he slid carefully out of Danni’s bed and dressed quickly and quietly. He usually waited until a woman had fallen asleep after sex and then he’d leave, but last night he must have been more exhausted than usual because he’d drifted off too.
This was a close call.
He was just tiptoeing down the hall of the flat when a door to his right opened. He stopped in his tracks as a fresh-faced young woman gazed at him from her bedroom doorway.
She cracked a smile at his deer-in-headlights expression. “If you want to stay I can give you some earplugs,” she whispered.
He smirked at her joke and whispered back, “Thanks, but I need to get going.”
She nodded. “Don’t worry, Danni won’t be mad you left.”
“Good to know.”
“She would have thrown you out if you didn’t leave yourself.”
He grinned. “Is that right?”
“Oh yeah.” Her roommate grinned back. “She’s my hero. She’s better at this shit than any manwhore.” With that she shut the door in his face and Craig left the flat feeling amused and more than a little relieved.
* * *
“Pick a girl and settle down, Craig, before you catch a terrible disease. You know your dad was the same until he met me. Slept with anything with a vagina.”