“What’s the point? I’ll give it to you, anyway. Be it money, a snog, a shag, a kidney, a liver. God, I hope it’s not my liver you’re after. Unfortunately, mine has seen some mileage. Come on now, Aurora.”

“Rory.”

“Rory,” he amends, dragging his straight teeth over his bottom lip. “Much more fitting. You don’t look like a princess at all.”

I arch an eyebrow. I don’t know why his statement annoys me. He’s right. I look nothing like the princess my mother wanted me to be. My best friend, Summer, says I look like a suicidal pixie.

“You look like the more beautiful stepsister in a Disney movie. The underdog who gets the prince at the end. The one who wasn’t born with the title, but earned it,” he explains.

I can feel myself turning red, thinking that ironic, as I just found out I do have a half-sister.

“Oh, she is blushing.” He raises a fist in the air through the window. “All is not lost. I still have a chance.”

“Actually, you don’t.” I douse his enthusiasm in cold water. It makes him laugh harder, because he already knows. The bastard knows he is winning me over.

“I won’t have a one-night stand with you,” I say.

“Of course, you won’t,” he agrees easily. Freely. Not believing a word.

“I mean it,” I warn. “Over my dead body.”

Laughing harder, he taps the passenger door.

“Chop-chop now, Princess.”

Mal directs me out of Dublin in his own peculiar way (“Take a left. No, your other left. Never mind, the original left”), and though I’m terrified driving on the other side of the road, and despite the fact I don’t have an international driver’s license, I still find myself behind the wheel.

Maybe it’s the setting that unchains me from any type of reasonable logic. Maybe it’s Mal himself. All I know is I’m eighteen, newly orphaned by a dad I didn’t know, and I feel like I’m suspended in the air, like a marionette. Between sky and earth. Nothing to lose, nothing to gain.

We roll into a small village, tucked between green hills a stone’s throw from Dublin, with a white wooden sign announcing our arrival in Tolka, Co Wicklow. There’s a river to our right, an old stone-arch bridge over it, and old houses with bright red doors edging the town’s entrance. It’s more like a main street with a few houses scattered around it, like spots of hair on an otherwise bald head. We drive down Main Street, passing a bright blue house, a church, a row of inns, pubs, and a little cinema Mal tells me offers actual individual seats, and the people operating it still use traditional reels.

The road winds, snaking up and down, and my heart feels strangely full when I park the car, as instructed by Mal, a few buildings down from a pub called The Boar’s Head.

When we exit the car, I stop and take my camera out. The pub is painted stark white, with green windows decorated by flowerpots with marigolds and cornflowers spilling out of them. The Irish flag hangs on a pole by the door.

It looks like something out of folklore, a tale my late father would have told me in another life.

“What’s keeping you, Rory?” Mal turns around mid-stride into the pub and catches me crouching down on one knee, squinting and aiming the camera at him.

“Make love to the camera, gorgeous,” I say in a creepy, old-man voice, expecting him to tell me to quit it.

Instead, Mal breaks into a huge grin, covers an imaginary blowing-in-the-air dress, and sends a kiss to the camera, a la Marilyn Monroe. Only his dripping masculinity makes it look one hundred percent hilarious and zero percent feminine.

Click. Click. Click.

I stand up and walk over to him. He offers me his arm. I take it, too tired to resist.

“Is this where you live?” I motion around us. “In this village?”

“Just under that hill.” He runs his fingers through my hair to pull it out of my face, and my spine tingles in unexpected delight. He smiles, because he notices. “With all the arsehole sheep I told you about earlier. You’ll meet them in a bit.”

“I have a flight to catch tomorrow.” I clear my traitorous throat, which keeps clogging with all sorts of emotion.

“So?”

“I can’t stay long.”

He stares at me with a mixture of confusion and mirth. I think this is possibly the first time he’s been rejected. Then he does the unbelievable and reaches to run his thumb over my birthmark, staring at it, mesmerized.

“How’d it happen?” he asks, his voice so soft, it sounds like it’s fading.

I feel so warm I can practically sense the sun beating down on my skin, even though it’s cold and gray out.

“It didn’t. I was born with it.”

“You were, huh?” His thumb drags from my temple to my lips. Was he expecting some crazy story about a car crash or a freak accident?

I pull away.

“Anyway, I can’t stay. I have a hotel booked in Dublin.”

“I’ll drive you back to check out.” He snaps out of his weird trance. “You’ll be staying with me tonight.”

“I’m not going to sleep with you. Over my dead body, remember?”

He cups my cheeks in his hands. They’re rough and confident, an artist’s hands, and my heart thunders with newly found pity for my mom. Now I get why she slept with my dad. Not all Casanovas are slimy. Mal isn’t.

“Don’t let your feelings get in the way of facts.”

“Meaning?” I frown.

“Just because you don’t like the fact that you’re going to sleep with me doesn’t mean it’s not going to happen.” He brushes his thumb over my lips. “And just because we’ve only met doesn’t mean we’re strangers. Do we feel like strangers?” he asks, jerking me to his body.

No. No, we don’t. He feels like he’s never left my side. Like I carried a tiny part of him with me from the moment I was born, and now that he’s here, we can fit the part I kept with the rest of him, like finishing a puzzle.

I gulp, but say nothing.

“Exactly. Now, you’re cocking up our perfect meet-cute. Geena Davis is rolling in her grave.”

“Geena Davis is not dead, Mal!”

“Come, Madame Semantics. Let me feed you.”

Three corned beefs and a shepherd’s pie later, Mal points at me with his half-finished Guinness pint—his fourth. I’m still nursing my first vodka Diet Coke.

“You wanted to ask me something.” He squeezes one eye shut, like he’s zeroing in on me with a gun, licking the white foam of the Guinness from his upper lip.

Here goes…

“I came to Drury Street on your granddad’s advice. He knew I was Glen O’Connell’s daughter. He said you’d be able to tell me more about him.” I study his face carefully.

He takes my hand, flips it, and trails the lines on the inside with his finger. The little hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.

“I used to go to Granddad’s church every Sunday when I was a kid. Glen lived behind it. He’d let me listen to his records. He taught me a few notes and helped me string a sentence together when I started writing songs. Taught me how to bleed onto a page. So, yes, we knew each other quite well. Well enough for him to tell me he’d kill me if I ever touched his daughter.”