Teaching the Groundskeeper

Elodie Kavanagh is twenty-three, four weeks into teaching English at a boarding school on the Irish coast, and not good at it yet. The groundskeeper is the only person there who talks to her like a person. Fergal Brennan is forty-six, a widower, and keeps the hedge cut short so her window doesn't scrape. She brings him tea. He doesn't ask why she never mentions her surname. Then a storm takes the east wing's roof, her classroom floods, and the only dry room on campus is his potting shed. Six weeks of paraffin heater and seed trays. Then her uncle — the headmaster — finds out, and makes Fergal an offer he isn't allowed to refuse. An age gap academy romance set on the west coast of Ireland.