Heartstrings
Heartstrings
A Rock Star Romance Novel
by
Hadley Danes
Kindle Edition
Heartstrings
A Rock Star Romance Novel
Written by Hadley Danes
Copyright
©
2013 by Hadley
Danes
All rights reserved. Without
limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication
may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or
transmitted , in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of
both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. This is a work
of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either
the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author
acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products
referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission.
The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or
sponsored by the trademark owners.
The following story contains
mature themes, strong language, and sexual situations. It is intended for adult
readers.
Cover art:
Stock photography: Dreamstime
Graphic Artist&Designer:
Hadley Danes
This book is dedicated to my
loving husband Chris. Thank you for all your love and support over the years.
Table of Contents:
Chapter One
* * * * *
For the first few moments after I awake from sleep, I lay
very, very still. If I just stay wrapped up in my comforter, eye mask firmly in
place, I can almost forget that the day is about to begin. I know that the
alarm on my cell phone will start blaring through my ear plugs at any second, but
this tiny stretch of time is all mine. Stretching languorously, I let the
faintest smile play across my face as I pretend that it’s my day off, or my
birthday, or any day in the history of the world that doesn’t involve a twelve
hour shift at the hospital.
I groan as a cheery pop song starts blasting through my
bedroom.
Time to face the day
. I roll across my bed and slap at my cell
phone until it shuts up. Not the most sophisticated way to handle gadgetry,
sure, but I’ve got no patience when it comes to alarm clocks. I pluck out my
ear plugs and pull my eye mask away from my face, blinking at the ceiling.
Warm, late afternoon sunlight is dappled across my bedroom walls, turning the
cozy space into a little cocoon. The last thing I want to do is leave.
“Come on,” I coach myself, “One foot in front of the
other...You can do it...”
Yawning, I swing my legs over the side of my bed and consult
the clock. Four in the afternoon—the start of a long day. When I was younger,
sleeping until four was a luxury, an indulgence following a wild night out.
There were certainly some hung over Sundays in college that didn’t see me
rolling out of bed for an entire day and night. But these days, my nighttime
hours are hardly recreational. I landed my first job out of school as a night
shift nurse, and have therefore joined the ranks of the nocturnal.
Now, my days begin at four in the afternoon and end at eight
or so the next morning. I really don’t mind working nights, truth be told. The
pay is substantially better, my coworkers are agreeable, and at night, there
are no family members hanging around asking a thousand questions and getting
upset with you on a personal level. The hospital is still far from peaceful,
but there’s a sort of comfort that comes along with working nights. It’s like
we’re all at a sleepover together...except once in a while, someone’s internal
organs start to fail. But besides that, it can be great.
I pull myself out of bed and shuffle across the carpet. It’s
late May, and from the little patch of the outside world I can see beyond my
window, it looks like it was a gorgeous day. If only there was some way I could
enjoy it before work. But I’ve got housework to finish and a ton of coffee to
drink before I head in. The outside world will have to wait. I turn on the
shower and wait for the water to warm up, shrugging off my pajamas in front of
the bathroom mirror.
“Looking OK there, Julia,” I mutter, giving myself as
forgiving of a once-over as possible. I just turned twenty six, and in those
twenty six years, I have been fortunate enough to skirt past most of the
body-hating that so many of my peers have to contend with. I’ve always been
comfortable in my skin, and able to accept my looks as just another component
of my overall self—rather than the defining factor. The men in my life have
always referred to me as “cute” or “pretty”, rather than “hot”, and that’s just
fine with me.
I run my fingers through my long strawberry blonde hair…
my
mane needs a good conditioning, STAT
. At work, my locks are always drawn up
into a ponytail or bun—I can’t even remember whether I still own a hair dryer.
I let my eyes travel down, trying to determine whether there’s any truth to my
grandmother’s claims that I’m “getting too skinny”. I’ve never been too skinny
in my life. My hips, ass, and chest are curvy, and athletic – yes, athletically
curvy. I have always loved to be on my feet and moving around as much as
possible, which is probably one of the reasons why nursing was so appealing to
me to begin with. I would die if I had to sit in an office chair all day long.
That was hardly the only reason I chose this profession, of
course. As I step into the hot stream of water, I let my mind cast back to that
terrifying moment at the end of high school, when everyone else had seemed to
know what their next steps were, everyone except for me. I had done perfectly
well in high school, and was accepted into a handful of great East Coast
colleges. But all of a sudden, at the brink of adulthood, I realized that the
path I was setting out on had nothing to do with what I actually wanted out of
life. I loved science, and had applied to biology programs exclusively. But I
didn’t want to be stuck in a lab all my life, I wanted to do something that
mattered in the moment, something that would have an immediate positive
influence on the world.
So, instead of packing up and heading off to become a bio
major, I decided to take a year off. That stretch of time was the first
breather I had had since kindergarten, and I discovered that there was a lot of
soul searching to be done. I waited tables and tended bar to save up some
money, and really got to the bottom of what I wanted to do with my life. One
day, as if the idea fell from the sky directly into my lap, nursing occurred to
me as an option. And from the moment it presented itself as an option that was
it. I knew what I wanted to do. I was going to go to nursing school. I would
become an RN and begin a long career of helping others. As soon as I made the
choice to pursue nursing, it was like my life snapped into focus.
Nursing school had hardly been a breeze. I was fortunate to
get accepted into one of the best programs in the country, and I was determined
to establish myself as a competitive candidate. The four years of undergrad
flew by at breakneck speed. I certainly managed to make some great friends, and
even date a little, but the main priority was always studying. And by the end,
it had paid off. I earned the highest marks and honors of anyone else in the
program, and graduated with stars in my eyes—thinking that I’d be able to waltz
into any hospital and get a job.
That was, of course, wishful thinking. I hit a brick wall
after graduation that seemed absolutely insurmountable. At every hospital I
applied to, I was told that I needed more experience. What no one seemed ready
to tell me was how I might go about getting this experience! It was the same
catch-22 that all new graduates were going through, but some little part of me
had hoped to be spared the run-around. I spent a solid year back at my parents’
house applying to job after job. The quest seemed never ending.
Finally, around the time of my twenty-third birthday,
something finally came through. I was offered a night shift at a nearby
hospital. The pay was great, the commute was short, and I was thrilled to
finally be offered a position. I was told that I would be working with
geriatric patients, which seemed like a fine enough gig. After all, how much
trouble could a bunch of sleeping grandparents be?
Little did I know that my actual patients would, for the
most part, be confused, agitated, and downright hostile. Nor did I realize
that, come nighttime, those patients would tend to wake up without any idea as
to where or who they were. It was incredible—the second the visitors left for
the day and the nursing shifts switched, it was like a switch was flipped or
something, it’s called “sun-downing syndrome”. And for the next twelve hours,
it was my job to care for a handful of elderly patients who often turned to
cursing, hitting, biting, and spitting on me. I earned more bruises during my
time at that job than I would have had I been a roller derby professional. When
I got a black eye from an older woman who thought I was her husband’s mistress,
I decided it was time to look for another job.
Luckily, an ER post opened up right at that exact moment,
and I pounced. The hospital agreed to transfer me, and though the environment
was chaotic, it was a vast improvement to the work I had been doing. You really
do see everything in the ER, and so you never really get bored. It was hard
watching the elderly night after night—hard not to get depressed or fatalistic.
But in the ER, I didn’t have time to intellectualize what I was seeing and
experiencing. It was pure action—just the way I liked it.
I have been working at the same hospital for three years now
and I’ve stuck with night shifts the whole way through. The extra money goes
right to my student loans, and I’m used to the lifestyle now. I usually work
four nights a week, and have the rest of the time to myself. My mother’s always
nagging me about how bad it must be for my body to be jerked around like this,
something about circadian rhythms, but my body doesn’t seem to be complaining
so far. Besides the irregular sleep cycle, I’m a pretty healthy person. I
hardly ever drink, I’ve never smoked, and I try and go running a couple of
times a week. All things considered, I’m a pretty stable, normal girl. Can’t
complain about that.
