Roped In (Strings Book 2)

  Roped In

  Strings #2

  J.C. Hayden

  Contents

  Title page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Trademark Acknowledgements

  Dedication

  Roped In

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Roped In is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the authors imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2018 by J.C. Hayden

  Published in the United States by J.C. Hayden All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  TRADEMARK ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of the following trademarks mentioned in this work of fiction:

  Harry Potter series

  La Bohème

  Netflix

  Facebook

  Judge Judy

  Instagram

  Bridget Jones series

  BMW

  Toyota

  Bailey’s

  Kaluha

  Milanos

  Boston Public Radio

  XBox

  The Little Mermaid

  Disney

  The Addams Family

  Hey! Arnold

  Superman

  Wicked

  Law & Order

  The Wizard of Oz

  Moana

  To all the women I know who have had their hearts broken before. Don’t be afraid to love again.

  Roped In

  J.C. Hayden

  Chapter 1

  Good set tonight, Talia.”

  I looked up at a set of bright white teeth set in a wide, pink mouth surrounded by smooth dark brown skin.

  Don’t you dare blush, Talia, I warned myself. And don’t answer him in that stupid, high-pitched voice you always use every time he talks to you.

  “Thanks, Eric,” I breathed, in that stupid, high-pitched voice I always used every time he talked to me. My voice was so high I sounded like that actress who plays Moaning damn Myrtle in Harry Potter.

  “Cat didn’t come by tonight?” Eric, the bartender at Standards asked, wiping a glass with a white cloth before putting it somewhere underneath the bar out of my line of sight. “Love the hair, by the way,” he said as he leaned on his elbows on the bar, his smile warm and welcoming.

  Eric was absolutely my type, despite that fact that I didn’t even believe I really had one. But so many of the dudes I’d dated were just like Eric. Big, sexy, cocky, and utterly unavailable. I glanced briefly at the gold wedding band on his finger before shaking my head and taking a deep breath to get myself under control.

  It wasn’t like I really wanted to be with him, especially since he was easily fifteen years older than me and had four kids, but he was just so charming and sweet that I turned into a pathetic mess around him. I was like a preteen with a crush on her cute teacher because even though I knew nothing would ever come of it, I could still stare at him and think he was dreamy.

  Get a grip, Talia.

  “Thanks,” I said, grateful for the dimness of the bar covering up the completely unlike me blush at Eric’s compliment. I ran a hand through my recently cut hair, trying to get used to the shorter cut. I’d been growing it out since college, but when I went in for a trim about a week ago, my stylist—who was actually my cousin Raven—convinced me to lop a bunch of it off. It was at my shoulders and not nearly as short as it was six years ago while I was at Klein, but it was still an adjustment after growing it down to the middle of my back over all this time. “But yeah, no, not tonight. She has rehearsal early tomorrow morning.”

  “What show is she doing now?” Eric asked politely, his eyes focused on me. He was always so attentive and genuinely interested when he asked a question. Hence, the stupid crush.

  The venue the band and I were at tonight was one we played often. They hired us to come every Wednesday night to play our usual bluesy set. My best friend, Catrina Murphy, often came to the shows, but since she had to be off book by tomorrow morning, she was holed up in her apartment with her husband, Brody Galen, not actually rehearsing and probably letting him distract her with his pouty grin. Catrina and I had been best friends since we were freshmen in college at a small liberal arts university called Klein that was in the suburbs of Boston. We’d both majored in music, and while Catrina went on to become, basically, a world-renowned Broadway and Opera star, I was still playing mostly local gigs with the band I’d been in since the year after we left school while also working as a waitress at a small Italian restaurant in my neighborhood.

  “La Bohème,” I told Eric. “The opening show is in three weeks so they’re definitely in major prep mode. But she’ll be great in it. She’s always amazing.”

  Just then, I felt my phone vibrate in my pocket, and I pulled it out to look at the screen before I showed it to Eric.

  “Speak of the devil,” I said.

  “Tell her I said hi,” Eric said with another sexy grin before I grabbed the glass of pinot noir he’d put down for me and turned to lean against the bar before answering my friend’s call.

  “Hey, Kitty Cat.”

  “Hey, Tal—”

  “Hi, Talia!” I heard shouted in the background.

  “Brody says hi,” Cat said, a smile apparent in her voice. Sometimes—and I was totally secure and self-aware enough to admit this—I envied the relationship Catrina had with Brody. They’d started seeing each other while we were seniors at Klein and after some of the typical twenty-two-year-old drama, they’d been inseparable ever since. Even when Cat and I had continued to live together after college, Brody was a regular fixture in our lives, so much so that he and I had even grown close over the years. Every time he looked at my best friend I could see how much he adored her, and every time they were together in my presence I was reminded about the profound love those two had for each other. I would watch the quiet, unspoken moments between them—how they could communicate so clearly without words. I would watch the subtle displays of love and affection—a touch on the arm, a tucking of hair behind the ear, a hand on the lower back—and some deep, hidden part of me would wish I could find something like that.

  Even if I didn’t believe that existed much beyond Cat and Brody.

  “What are you guys doing?”

  “Just finished an episode of that docuseries on Netflix you told me about,” Catrina said. I could hear the rustling of something that sounded like a bag of popcorn. “Brody’s been helping me run lines all night and both of us are pretty over La Bohème at the moment.”

  I laughed, and Cat continued, jumping straight to her purpose in calling.

  “You aren’t going to go home with Isaac, are you?”

  Isaac Blake, the drummer in our band, Flora and Fauna, was a tall, slende
r hipster who I’d been hooking up with on and off for the past year or so. It was casual and I knew it would never be anything more than that, but Catrina had made it clear many times over that she didn’t approve. She thought Isaac was a slimeball I was wasting my time on while I could be out there finding the guy I was meant to be with. Her words, of course.

  One thing I hated about my best friend—ever since she’d fallen in love with Brody, she had become a hopeless romantic who believed everyone’s perfect mate was out there just waiting for us to come along.

  I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I didn’t think that was in the cards for me.

  “Not tonight,” I told her, trying to keep the edge out of my voice. "So stand down, sergeant.” I loved Cat, but her judgment over whatever thing I had with Isaac always made me bristle.

  “Anyway, how was the show?” she asked a moment later.

  “It was good. Usual crowd. Wish you were here, though.”

  Catrina sighed. “Me, too, Tal. I hate missing your shows.”

  “Sorry, I didn’t want to make you feel guilty,” I said, suddenly feeling weird and vulnerable. “I just like having my bestie here, that’s all.”

  There was a pause for a moment when I almost told Catrina I had to go, but then she said, “Everything else okay?” I heard more rustling and assumed she was getting up to go into another room so Brody couldn’t hear.

  One thing I loved about my best friend—how much she valued our friendship and respected stuff that was just between us despite being married to Brody for almost four years.

  I wasn’t even planning on telling her about what had happened last night, but hearing her voice made me change my mind. Ever since I’d started playing shows with my band there was something about throwing myself into the music that always left me feeling raw and exposed. If Catrina was there for a show I could come back to myself from just talking and laughing with her, but without her here to ground me I felt flayed wide open.

  Catrina was right to guess that something was going on with me. I’d planned to take what happened, shove it to the back of my mind, and never think about it again, but now the need to tell her was an ache in my gut.

  “Jack messaged me.”

  There was a long pause.

  “Catrina?”

  “Jack,” she repeated blankly.

  “Jack,” I reiterated with a bit more emphasis.

  “Wait, Jack Harding?” She sounded shocked, but also like she was trying (and failing) to temper her reaction.

  “Yeah.”

  Back at Klein, Jack Harding and I had casually dated—or casual as I thought—for almost a year. He was everything I wanted in a guy. He was huge—at least ten inches taller than my five foot four with a body that was so big and muscley that he made even Brody, who was also tall with wide shoulders and muscles, look small. He was cocky at the right moments and sweet in others. He laughed at all my stupid jokes and, in turn, made me laugh so hard that I could hardly breathe. Not to mention that in the six years since I’d ended things a few weeks after graduation, I’d never had sex as good as the sex I’d had with him. It was like he knew every bend and curve of my body, every erogenous zone, every place that made me out of my head with lust. Even at twenty-two he could read me like a book. I could only imagine how much better he’d gotten over the years.

  But I couldn’t imagine it. Because I refused to let myself ever think about him. Ever.

  Because Jack was also everything I never wanted. He came from money. Like a lot of it. His family was the Harding family. Like Warren G. Like the twenty-ninth President of the United States. Those Hardings. I was raised by a single mom who owned a diner in Vermont and who, before that, was a waitress in Queens who had been on food stamps. Jack might have been kind and funny and sweet and fantastic in bed, but he and I had never been meant for each other.

  “What did he say?”

  “Hang on,” I said, walking away from the bar away from possibly listening ears. “I’ll read it.” I found a small high top table in the corner of the bar and slid onto a stool as I pushed the speaker button on my phone.

  It only took me about five seconds to pull up the Facebook Messenger app to open what Jack had sent me. He’d actually sent the message three weeks ago, but since he and I weren’t Facebook friends, it had gone to a separate inbox that I didn’t look into all that often. It wasn’t until last night that I’d finally opened it and been in a tailspin ever since.

  “‘Hey Talia,’” I started reading. “‘I hope this message doesn’t completely catch you off guard. I’ve just been thinking about you a lot recently and wanted to send you a message to see how you are. I saw Flora and Fauna’s page a few months ago and I’ve listened to a ton of your music. You guys are seriously awesome. I’m so happy for you. Maybe this is out of the blue and maybe even inappropriate, but I’d love to take you out to lunch sometime. Just to catch up. If you don’t want to, I understand. If you don’t, I just want you to know how much I care about you and how much I valued our friendship. Take care, Talia. Jack.’”

  I didn’t say anything after I finished reading it. The shock of the message hit me all over again, and for a moment, I felt like I couldn’t catch my breath.

  “Wow,” I heard Cat say.

  “Yeah,” was all I could manage to choke out as my eyes scanned over the message again before I took the phone off speaker and pressed it to my ear.

  “He sounds really sincere,” Cat said quietly.

  He did. Of course he did. Jack had always been one of the most genuine people I’d ever met. He almost never minced words. He said exactly what he meant and expressed exactly what he wanted. When he’d wanted to get more serious and exclusive in college, it was the only time he wasn’t upfront right from the start, and that was only because he knew I’d get spooked. Which, of course, I had. But even then, I’d wanted him more than I wanted to keep a distance between us, so I let it go on until I felt myself slipping—slipping into something I hadn’t fallen into since I was eighteen. Since I’d been deceived and royally screwed over. Since I’d vowed to myself I would never let a guy take advantage of me like that ever again. When I felt myself start to slip, I ended it for good.

  And I hadn’t seen or heard from him since.

  “Well, it doesn’t matter.” I tried to shake myself out of my melancholic thoughts. There was no use dwelling on the past, on what could have been, on choices I’d made six years ago.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s not like I’m going to message him back.”

  Catrina made an indignant noise. “What? Talia, why not?”

  “What could there possibly be to say?” I felt a tightness in my chest that had me instinctively bringing my hand up to it.

  “That you care about him, too. That you appreciate what he said about Flora and Fauna. That you want to catch up, too.”

  “Catrina—”

  “He…”

  She cut me off like she wanted to say something, but then trailed off. I frowned.

  “What?” I said. “He what?”

  “He got engaged last year.”

  Her words were like an icy knife to my heart. Fuck. Even after all this damn time there was something about him that still got to me. I rubbed my chest again and tried for a nonchalant tone.

  “Great, so you want to me to have lunch with an almost-married guy.”

  “They broke it off two months ago.”

  The icy knife twisted. I didn’t know why, but just knowing that terrified me.

  “Talia,” Catrina said, her voice quiet and urgent. “Maybe this is fate. Maybe he’s messaging you because he misses what you had. Maybe he broke it off with his fiancée because he still has feelings for you—”

  “Catrina, stop,” I said quickly. My chest was getting tighter and tighter, the ache of her words was starting to radiate out from my chest to my limbs and I couldn’t stand it. “You sound delusional. We haven’t seen each other in six years. He hasn’t bee
n pining over me. He doesn’t even think about me.”

  “Well, that message tells you that he does.”

  “He probably just wants to fuck,” I said, hoping to get Cat off this topic. She hated when I spoke so bluntly about sex. “He broke up with his fiancée and he wants to get laid, and he thinks, ‘I know who’s D.T.F.’—”

  “Stop it.”

  “It’s true. You know how men are—or I guess you don’t since you’ve got a hubby now, but Cat, men are trash. All they think about his sex. And all I ever was to Jack was a good fuck—”

  Cat scoffed. “You and I both know that’s a lie.”

  Dammit. She always had my number.

  “Whatever.” I looked up from the table I was sitting at to see our drummer, Isaac, looking in my direction. Leering, really. Yes. That’s what I needed. He would be the perfect distraction. I flashed him a smile, and as he started walking toward me, I wrapped up my conversation with Catrina.

  “Look, I gotta go. Isaac’s walking over and—”

  “Don’t hook up with him, Tal—”

  “Take off your judgey pants, Judge Judy,” I said, feeling the ache in my chest start to settle now that we were no longer talking about my ex. “We’re still on for girls’ night tomorrow night, right?”

  “Of course,” she said, voice getting a bit softer. “I’m kicking Brody out at seven, so be here then.”

  “Okay,” I said, just as Isaac got to my table, his look of intent clear on his face. “Love you, Kitty Cat.”

  “Love you, too, Tal.” Then she raised her voice, almost yelling through the phone when she said, “And don’t sleep with—”

  I hung up the phone before she could finish.

  Isaac continued his leering and flashed a smirk.

  “Don’t sleep with who?”

  God, Catrina was so fucking right. Isaac was a total slimeball, despite being a talented as hell drummer. Most of the time he was my friend, but when we hooked up, I realized how gross he could make me feel. He wasn’t even that good looking. He was cute enough, but his face and nose were too long, his facial hair was unkempt, his hair was kind of stringy, and he was thin in a way that I hated in bed—nothing to grab onto when he was moving inside me, no ass, no muscles, nothing. But he was decent and definitely willing, and sometimes I just needed to scratch an itch.