ROARING FORK ROCKSTAR

Releases June 26, 2025

Preorder Kindle |  Preorder Other ebook Retailers

He gave up his rock star dreams for a family obligation.
She’s hiding a four-year-old secret behind the bar.
Together they’ll discover that some songs are written in whispers, not spotlights.

HOLT
I had it all—world tours with CB Rice, my songs on the radio, everything I ever dreamed of. Except now it’s my turn to fulfill the requirements of a family trust I’d foolishly hoped wouldn’t involve me. If I don’t spend three hundred and sixty-five days straight in my hometown of Crested Butte, Colorado, my siblings and I will lose our inheritance along with our family legacy. What else is the secret trustee forcing me to do? Play gigs in a local bar and donate my earnings to a kid’s charity. It’s not the money I’m worried about, I’m making plenty of that from royalties. Instead, it’s watching my shot at stardom slip away. The only bright spot of playing night after night at the Goat is its owner, Keltie Marquez who serves up mysteries I can’t resist. Like why the rattling cough of her tiny daughter, whose wild dark curls frame her face like her mama’s do, haunts my dreams.

KELTIE
The last thing I need is Holt Wheaton asking questions about my daughter. He’s supposed to be on tour with CB Rice, not playing at my bar, not looking at my little girl like she holds answers to questions he doesn’t even know to ask. Every time he picks up that guitar, I see pieces of a puzzle that could shatter everything. His family’s past and my daughter’s future are tangled in ways that could break both our hearts—or maybe heal them. If only I could tell him the truth.

1
Holt

The strings of my Gibson hummed under my fingers, a familiar comfort in the chaos of the last twenty-four hours. From my perch on the worn stage of the Goat, I could almost pretend this was just another Thursday night in Crested Butte. Almost.

But the envelope in my back pocket said otherwise. The one with CB Rice’s official logo and tour schedule—forty-eight cities, eighteen countries. The kind of tour I’d dreamed about all my life. The kind that makes songwriters legends. The kind I couldn’t be a part of.

My phone buzzed again—probably Remi, CB Rice’s manager, asking for the hundredth time if I’d lost my mind. How could I explain that sometimes the biggest dreams come with invisible strings? That sometimes the past reaches out and snags you just when the future seems brightest?

The trust had been clear: stay in Crested Butte for three hundred and sixty-five days, or my siblings and I would lose everything. Simple math, impossible choice. My share of tour earnings would have given me the means to launch my own tour. Record my own music. Now I had to watch my dream tour slip away while donating half my local gig money to a children’s charity I’d never heard of.

“Your usual, Holt?” Keltie Marquez’s voice cut through my thoughts. She stood at the edge of the stage, a glass of whiskey in her hand, looking at me like she could see right through my carefully constructed calm. That was the problem with small towns—everyone thought they knew your story.

But they didn’t know about the trust. About the way my father’s voice still echoed in my head: “Music won’t feed cattle, boy.”

The stage lights dimmed, casting shadows across the bar’s worn floorboards. From here, I could see the old photograph of the Goat’s original opening day. Something about it nagged at me, like a wrong note in a familiar song.

“What’s wrong?” Keltie asked, after sliding the whiskey closer that I downed in one gulp.

“Nothin’,” I replied, running my fingers across the guitar strings once more. The melody that emerged was unfamiliar, something sad and sweet and ancient, like a lullaby half-remembered from childhood.

Keltie stilled, her eyes widening just slightly. “Where did you learn that song?”

“I didn’t,” I said, but my fingers kept playing, muscle memory I shouldn’t have. “It’s just…there.” Like a secret someone had whispered, almost too quietly for me to hear.

There was something I was missing with the trust—obvious like a word on the tip of my tongue but that I couldn’t pull out of my head. All I knew was that whatever it was would shake me, my brothers, and sister to our collective core. I couldn’t explain the premonitions that starting coming to me when I was a kid. The first was that my mama was going to die. To this day I hadn’t told anyone that at seven years old, I knew his mother had cancer before she or our father breathed a word of it.

I looked up at Keltie, who like me appeared lost in thought, but before I could thank her for a drink or order another one, a feeling of dread came over me that was so powerful, it made me sick to my stomach. “I need a minute,” I said, setting my guitar on its stand and racing out of the bar’s back door.

“Hello, who are you?” said a little girl who I almost knocked down when I barreled outside.

“I’m Holt Wheaton,” I said. “Who are you?”

“I’m Luna. My mommy owns this bar.” I should’ve known she was related to Keltie. Just like her mama, the girl’s dark curls were wild around her face and her brown doe eyes bored into mine like she could read my every thought.

“Vaya para adentro ahora, pequeñín,” said the older woman with her who I didn’t recognize. Since I spoke Spanish fairly well, I knew she’d said something like, “Go inside now, little one.”

It was nice to meet you, Mr. Wheaton,” Luna said, holding out her hand for me to shake. It felt tiny and fragile when I grasped it. But worse, the feeling I’d had that sent me outside in the first place intensified. Something was wrong with her, something bad. I was as certain of it as I was my own name.

Releases June 26, 2025