Page 15 of Tee’d Up For Trouble

“I had some beers with Paddy at his garage,” he explained, winking at me.

CHAPTER5

Jax

I’d gone to see Paddy to check up on Nikolai’s car and found that the people of Ballybeg were wrong. Paddy had worked on a Porsche once before.

“It was 1963,” Paddy reminisced, leaning back against a wall, wiping his hands on a rag that was already filthy. “Belonged to a fella who got lost on his way to Dublin. Took me three days to figure out how to open the bloody bonnet. And by the time I had it fixed, the eejit complained he’d have already walked halfway there.”

“So…you fixed it?”

Paddy shrugged, his face dead serious. “Well, not properly. He had to push it the last mile out of Ballybeg, but I got her runnin’.”

I stared at him, unsure whether to laugh or cry. “That’s reassuring.”

“Ah, don’t worry, lad.” Paddy slapped my back. “That was years ago. I’ve gotten better since then. I can probably have your man’s car done before next Tuesday…if the parts arrive on time, of course.”

“Next Tuesday?” I repeated, eyebrows shooting up. “It’s only Thursday.”

“Exactly. You can’t rush these things. Porsche repairs are an art, not a science.” He pointed his grease-covered finger at me. “Besides, aren’t you stayin’ at The Banshee’s Rest? Not the worst place to wait, if you ask me.”

I chuckled, rubbing the back of my neck. “You’re right about that. Now, since I’m stuck here, what can you tell me about the…ah…well, Dee?”

He grinned, his teeth surprisingly white against his soot-covered face. “Oh, lad, now you’ve done it.”

“I have?”

The good news was that in a small village where everyone knew everyone’s business, there were no secrets. The bad news was that I’d had to listen to the stories of several people, not just Dee.

He’d given me the lowdown on the evil Cillian and his new, even more evil fiancée.

“How anyone can hurt Dee is beyond me.” Paddy handed me a bottle of beer. “Now, don’t get me wrong, she’s something fierce, she is, our Dee, but she won’t hurt a soul.”

That’s when I learned about how Dee had taken care of her sister, who had died of cancer. They’d run the pub together, and Maggie had been the cook before Ronan.

“That bloody gutless bastard tells Dee when she finds him with his pants down with Aoife that it’s Dee’s fault for being too busy with her sister and he had needs.” Paddy scoffed and took a long pull of his beer. “Broke her heart.”

No surprise there. They’d been together for three years, and that was a long time. So, when I walked into the pub and found the bloody bastard who hurt Dee fawning all over me, I knew I had to find a way to knee him in the balls without getting the garda involved.

One look at him, and I could see that Cillian O’Farrell was the kind of man I loathed—smug, entitled, and so polished his shit practically glowed.

What Dee saw in this asshole, I didn’t know, but what I could see now was that she was done with him. Not only that, she was disgusted by him.

And let’s not even get started on his fiancée, Aoife. She was every bit as irritating as her name was hard to pronounce, all sharp smiles and sticky compliments, and what was with all that grazing her tits against my arm?

“Well, we really wanted to talk with you,” Cillian told me, despite it being clear that I was not interested in whatever this jackass was selling.

“Talk about what?” I asked as if confused. “Dude, I don’t even know you.”

“He thinks you’re one ofthem,” Dee informed me.

The bulb went off. Paddy had told me about a development company trying to open a big resort with spas, restaurants, golf courses, and you name it, which wasn’t a bad thing—after all, tourism was an earner in Ireland. But the resort was going to be all but in Ballybeg, smack in the middle of its fields and hillsides, where the sheep grazed, the rivers ran clear, and the ancient dry-stone walls told stories older than memory.

It wasn’t just the resort itself. They planned to carve up acres of the surrounding land for luxury villas and “eco” cabins—though there was nothing “eco” about bulldozing the rolling hills or the nesting grounds of rare birds that made this area unique. Worse still, an airport was being proposed in the neighboring town to funnel tourists in and out, and that alone would wreak havoc on the entire region. The quiet lanes of Ballybeg, where you’d see maybe one tractor or bicycle in an afternoon, would become clogged with rental cars, tour buses, and gawking tourists holding up traffic to snap photos.

The peaceful fields and greenways would be replaced with parking lots and access roads. Runoff from construction and new infrastructure would pollute the rivers, which locals still fished from. As for the cliffs in the distance, the developers were already making noise about glass-bottomed walkways and souvenir shops perched on the edge.

But the worst of it, according to Paddy (and I agreed) was that the resort would rip the soul right out of Ballybeg. This wasn’t the kind of village that could handle thousands of people a week trampling through its pubs, its farms, its lanes. Ballybeg was made of its people and their history—the craic in The Banshee’s Rest, the local bakery with its generations-old recipes, the whispered superstitions about fairies and stones, and specific fields you shouldn’t walk through after dark. Overpriced coffee shops and tacky merchandise stalls would drown out all of that.

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