Aoife Winters

Holiday Romance

A Very Grumpy Christmas

Aoife Winters

The year the lights went wrong, Niamh Kelly was nine. The tree in the corner of the sitting room leaned slightly to the left, draped in tinsel that shed on the carpet like metallic cat hair. The fairy lights blinked on and off in a slow, sleepy pattern, one bulb already gone dead so there was a dark patch near the top, like the tree had closed its eye. Voices seeped out from the kitchen, low and sharp.

Holiday Romance

Christmas at Lighthouse Point

Aoife Winters

The lighthouse lamp failed twelve days before Christmas, and the first person to notice was the woman everyone in Emerald Harbour had learned not to pity. Mara Keane stood at the end of the pier with a box of donated paper angels under one arm, a municipal clipboard under the other, and the taste of old panic at the back of her throat. Across the black water, Lighthouse Point should have been breathing its steady white pulse over the bay—three seconds of light, three seconds of dark, the town’s oldest reassurance.

Holiday Romance

Emergency Contact Ex

Aoife Winters

Emergency Contact: Ex Aoife Winters Emergency Contact Ex · Book 1

The first time Maeve Callaghan became someone’s emergency contact, she was half drunk on cheap prosecco and completely sober about the disaster she was marrying. Not that she was marrying him, exactly. Not then. Back then, Finn O’Rourke was twenty-eight, beautiful in a way that annoyed sensible women, and standing in the corridor outside Studio Three with a bleeding eyebrow, a microphone lead round his ankle, and the kind of grin that could get a man forgiven before the crime had even finished introducing itself.

Holiday Romance

Killarney Christmas

Aoife Winters

Killarney Wakes Killarney wakes in a hush that tastes of pine and the sea, a breath held between weather fronts, and Niamh Kelleher sets her shoulder to the morning like it’s an old friend. The fairy lights along the front parlour window blink in a slow heartbeat while she ices trays of cinnamon buns, a flurry of sugar settling on the oak like first snow. Radio Kerry chimes the forecast—“a cold snap, mind yourselves”—and in the pause before the kettle clicks, she hears a taxi’s tyres hiss past the guesthouse and splash the kerb.

Holiday Romance

Wrong Chat Right Man

Aoife Winters

Molly Hayes knew the exact sound a lie made when it arrived in a town that still pretended gossip was community care. It came in bright little pings. It came dressed as concern. It came while she was flipping Sunday pancakes one-handed, holding her phone between chin and shoulder, and telling seven other mothers that yes, of course she had remembered the raffle tickets, the gluten-free buns, and the permission slips for the children who were allergic to everything except chaos.