Total pages in book: 121
Estimated words: 111775 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 559(@200wpm)___ 447(@250wpm)___ 373(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 111775 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 559(@200wpm)___ 447(@250wpm)___ 373(@300wpm)
Shay Riordan notices her the very first time he takes the bus. She’s captivating, a beauty who moves through the world like no one else can see her, but she’s far from invisible to him. He wants to sit next to her, introduce himself, but it’s hard to do when you can’t speak.
Then, late one Friday evening they both board the bus, and an unexpected occurrence plunges Maggie into Shay’s world, and Shay into Maggie’s.
Quiet Types is a standalone contemporary romance and is book #1 in L.H. Cosway’s Quiet Love Series.
Tropes & Themes
~Strangers to lovers~
~Mute hero~
~Maid heroine~
~Introvert~
~He protects her~
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
“We sit and talk,
quietly, with long lapses of silence
and I am aware of the stream
that has no language, coursing
beneath the quiet heaven of
your eyes
― William Carlos Williams, Paterson.
1.
Maggie
Anyone who’s lived in a busy city has, at one time or another, witnessed someone walking down the street crying their eyes out.
I saw them frequently, these poor strangers, often while I stared out the window of the bus I took to work each day. I’d wonder what had happened to cause such a public display of emotion, walking the streets with stress and grief written all over their faces. I wanted to ask them what went wrong because I sympathised with them, but I didn’t truly understand their plight until I was the person crying as I walked down the street.
I needed to clean myself up before I reached the bus stop; otherwise, he might notice. The man I saw each day, who I thought about often. He was a stranger I knew nothing about, a stranger who always watched me. I didn’t want him to think I was a blubbering mess who let her boss drive her to tears, but that was exactly what I was.
Normally, I could tolerate Mrs Reynolds’ meanness, letting her cruel and stinging words wash right over me, but today was different. Today, those words managed to penetrate my armour.
I cleaned houses for a living, and I liked most of my clients well enough, but she was a different story. By all accounts, Mrs Reynolds had the perfect life: a successful husband, three healthy children, and a large house on Shrewsbury Road, one of the wealthiest neighbourhoods in Dublin.
Despite all this, she still found it necessary to make life harder for the woman who kept her home spotless. That woman being me, Maggie Lydon, the thirty-one-year-old who lived alone in a studio flat and whose picture would never grace the society pages of glossy magazines or news websites like Sariah Reynolds’ picture did.
I was nobody, a scraping-by quiet type who didn’t bother anyone and didn’t blame others for my minuscule lot in life. But that didn’t matter to Mrs Reynolds.
It hadn’t always been this way with her. The first few weeks I worked for her, she was reserved but polite towards me. Then slowly over time, her mask came off, and the needling set in. Her criticisms were never personal, at least. They were always about my performance as her cleaner, but because none of my other clients complained as she did I soon realised I wasn’t the problem. No matter who cleaned her house, Mrs Reynolds would find a way to criticize that person, even if they were nothing but a loyal, conscientious worker for her. Sometimes, I’d wonder why she was like that, but perhaps the answer to that question was simple.
She enjoyed the power.
She found things to critique about the way I cleaned—like spots of non-existent dust I missed or how the end of the toilet rolls I folded weren’t quite sharp and pointy enough. How the couch was a millimetre off when I pushed it back in after pulling it out to vacuum behind it.
I’d come to consider her commentary part and parcel of the job. Mrs Reynolds liked to complain, and I was more than certain she found a perverse sort of release in laying those complaints at my doorstep. I tolerated her because not everyone was lucky enough to have a nice boss. And besides, I didn’t have to deal with her every day because I only cleaned for her once a week.
I used to work for an agency but made the change to self-employed a few years back. It was better in a way because I got to set my own schedule and not work such gruelling hours for less pay, but it also meant I had to keep the people I worked for happy. I no longer had an agency to find me a new gig if someone decided to drop me.
As established, Mrs Reynolds was the toughest client to keep happy. Normally, I was very good at persevering through her tirades. I’d mastered the art of stoicism, taking her passive aggressiveness on the chin, but today was more than I could handle.
I was in the kitchen, kneeling on the floor as I cleaned the oven, when I heard her arrive home with the kids. She had twin ten-year-old boys, Tadhg and Ben, and a seven-year-old girl named Marla. I didn’t interact with the children much, and they typically ignored me, which was fine, but today, I’d neglected to put enough kitchen roll on the floor to catch the brown, watery liquid that dripped from the oven as I cleaned it. I hadn’t expected anyone to come into the kitchen, but then one of the twins appeared and stepped in some of the oven juice.