Free Wait for Me by Cora Blu Page A

light. It poured over bistro style table with four tall stools tucked beneath. “Here, see this room?” he asked, pointing toward a stain door shielding a wall of wine, priceless whiskey and a second door. The stain held the family crest set in water, wavy ancient and elegant. “Special bottles of Connemara whiskey are kept in here. Although it’s available to the public, I’m partial to some of the first bottles being made in this region.”
    “Is Connemara a city or providence? I’ve never heard of it before,” she queried, turning her gaze around the room.
    Her curious attention had him staring at his woman and wondered why it felt so good to have her admire his family. His heritage.
    “It’s not an administrative entity like a town or county. It’s the name given to the western portion of county Galway. It lies between lough Corrib and the Atlantic.
    “Hmm…Wine too?” she asked, surprised, opening the door to step inside the vault. Smoothing the dress beneath her hips accentuated her curves. His body reacted jerking behind the zipper of his pants. “Jonathan these are seriously old bottles of wine. Is this your collection?” brushing a finger over the label peering back over her shoulder.
    He nodded. “At one time they used this room for family meetings. The wines were gifts between families. They’re kept behind that door as part of Blakemore and McGhee heritage. Signaling a time when they families worked together. I think they’re too important to drink.”
    Jonathan relaxed trailing Kenya’s finger stroking over the old weathered wood of the wine riddle rack. To think this delicious woman was handed to him on his doorstep just over a month ago and here he was showing her his family home. Women like her don’t usually go for men like him. They went for gentler men and gentle he wasn’t. 
    “The door,” she acknowledged, “where does it lead to?”
    “A private room and a vault with a hidden panel. Family papers and irreplaceable items are kept in there. That also leads deeper into the mountains. - It was built as a smuggling shelter to import shipments coming off the Atlantic.”
    “Illegal liquor?” she asked.
    He corrected, “Stolen—liquor, guns, mainly whatever they wanted to go untaxed, and unnoticed into the country.”
    “They?”
    “Back then they were pirates. The McGhee’s shut it down when they acquired the land hundreds of years ago. My Great-great-grandfather McGhee wanted to set it up as an underground lodging in one of the tunnels under the mountains for fisherman coming to shore.”
    “Sounds like a good idea and a profitable one if he charged a small fee. What happened?” Kenya padded leisurely around the room brushing dust off labels and shaking her head, murmuring to herself. “Jonathan, I don’t know the value on aged wine or whiskey, but these have to be worth quite a bit of money.”
    “Quite a bit, yes,” he confirmed. The bottles held history and he would never sell his heritage.
    Standing in the doorway Kenya asked. “Why didn’t the plan work?”
    “It worked for many years. If you go farther back down in the private room behind you, there’s tunnels that were rooms for the men to set up camp for the night, away from the castle. Not many, but then gambling, murders…a number of illegal activities went on. When he shut down all illegal dealings, they lost money, sending the family into debt. Then there was a fire burning down the family home.” 
    “And how did Blakemore get involved?”
    “They lived on the other side of the mountains and agreed to help restore the land. That’s when the contract came into play. Future children were to get married and combine the families.”
    “Oh…Brian wants to get all that money flowing again through liqueur and gambling?”
    “Aye,” he agreed.
    “So how did shareholders come to be a part of the family?”
    “Shareholders are mostly extended family on the Blakemore side, but the land is more valuable