Songbird Series Book 1: Songbird

“Len, baby, come on. It was an accident.”

I clenched my eyes shut and pinched the bridge of my nose between my thumb and index finger. “No, Brad, forgetting to pay the cable bill is an accident. Impregnating my best friend is a string of definite choices.”

“What am I supposed to do, Lennie?! I can’t handle this rent by myself! You know that! You wanted this place, not me!”

“Maybe you should’ve thought of that before YOUR DICK ENTERED MY BEST FRIEND!”

I was definitely going to have to readjust to small-town Georgia life.

“I can’t believe you just left, after all we’ve been through…”

“I didn’t just LEAVE, Brad. I told you I was helping Maggie with the bedandbreakfast this summer, just like I always do. Then I found you in bed with Ellie…so I moved out. Do you perhaps see the correlation there?”

“Lennie…”

“What happened to the bed-and-breakfast? Why would you need another job?”

“None of your business. Goodbye, Brad, good luck with the baby and…all that shit.”

“Lenore, don’t hang up on me.”

“What? Sorry, can’t hear you. Cutting out. Damn small town. Byeeeeeee!”

Okay, so maybe I didn’t have a job interview, but my ex didn’t need to know that. I, Lennie Tyler, was officially single and ready to…go into the nearest country bar and drown my sorrows in a bucket of whiskey. Or whatever it was of-age people did here.

I’d left when I was eighteen. I had no idea.

Weird part? I wasn’t even that sad about Brad. More annoyed than anything else. The rose-colored glasses of dumb love had come off a long time ago.

Bradley Richards was not my forever. I knew it, he knew it. If I’m honest, we moved in together more out of convenience than anything else.

We’d been “together” five years. I was thirty-three. Not like I was getting any younger, so…might as well try, right?

Wrong. So very wrong.

Ladies: Don’t push these things…and don’t settle. It’s not worth it. You’ll end up miserable and then come home from a songwriting session to find him in bed with your so-called best friend, and all those warning bells in your brain that told you he wasn’t the one will become deafening.

Honestly, the only reason he was upset was because it meant paying rent on the new two-bedroom, ritzy apartment in Nashville that we’d literally just re-signed the lease on.

Oh shit. That was under my name. Mental note to call my lawyer ASAP.

I know what you’re thinking, but don’t worry. I wasn’t the girl who ran back home because her ex is a cheating douchebag. It actually was a happy accident.

My Aunt Maggie was the woman in charge of our family’s long-running bed-and-breakfast here in Snyder, Georgia. Snyder wasn’t a tiny town, but it wasn’t real big either.

We were large enough for three stoplights on Main Street and a few restaurants and, of course, some hole-in-the-wall country bars, and we were just close enough to the bigger Georgia cities that the bed-and-breakfast had been a lucrative family business for years.

My parents ran it for a while, before opening their own place in some Florida retirement town. I couldn’t even tell you the name. My parents and I weren’t really close. Never had been. Even when I was a child, it had always been a constant battle of trying to get their attention. I’d been left to my own devices the second I could pour my own cereal.

My Aunt Maggie was my mother’s littlest sister, a good twenty years younger. She was the “Oops!” baby for my grandparents and was a mere twelve years older than I was.

She was more like my older sister than my aunt, and every summer I came back to help out during the busy seasons—plus it was a great excuse to leave city life and be home for a while.

I might’ve moved, but I’d always be the small-town Georgia girl at heart. Take the girl out of the country but not the country out of the girl and all that.

Maggie’s daughter, my cousin Makayla, had just graduated high school and was gearing up to move to Nashville like I had done over fifteen years ago now, so it seemed like an even better idea to be here this summer.

Hopefully, I could help Makayla make a few fewer mistakes than I had. Lord knows I had made a laundry list of them.

I had moved to the country music capital of the world with big dreams and no real idea how to accomplish them. I knew I wanted to sing, but more than that, I knew I wanted to write songs, and I knew Nashville was the best place for me to do so.

I got a job as a server at the infamous Bluebird Café, stood onstage, and played my little heart out one open mic night, and no less than three weeks later, had a songwriting deal at a major label. Compared to some, I’d put very little effort into getting “seen” by the music bigwigs, but all that did was cement it for me. Songwriting was my calling. It was what I was meant to be doing.

I had hit songs all over country radio for the last ten years, won myself a few awards, and made a pretty penny doing it. I liked life behind the scenes, though I did take to a stage every once in a while.

My personal band, The Chasers, had never really made it big. We did a few tours as opening acts, had a few mild hits, but mostly we just played in Nashville and the surrounding towns. It was fine. I wasn’t necessarily sad about it.

I realized after signing my writing deal that writing was where I really stood out anyway. And the best part was I could write from anywhere, even a little bed and breakfast in Snyder, Georgia.

This afternoon, I was meeting my childhood best friend, Cora, at Snyder’s most popular bar, Culprits. Her family owned it, and even when we were kids, it was where we hung out. Cora was a schoolteacher, but since summer vacation had begun the past week, she was mostly free, aside from when she was helping with the bar. Though I’d guessed they weren’t going to be real busy at two o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon.

It was exactly the dirty kind of hole in the wall that you’re imagining, and that was part of its appeal. You didn’t have to dress up, and you didn’t have to be anything but what you were.

It welcomed you, no matter what. They hosted karaoke at least two nights a week, and you could buy a bucket of Bud Light for ten dollars. Didn’t get much better than that in the South.

I walked in, immediately relieved by the feel of the air conditioning blasting against my sticky skin. It was already hot in Georgia, and it was only mid-May. There were a few people, scattered throughout the place and one behind the bar, but from one glance I could tell Cora hadn’t arrived yet, so I found my favorite bar feature, a jukebox, and headed toward it.

I could feel the eyes on me like I was some sort of mythical beast. I knew from experience not many new faces just wandered into Snyder, and to these people, I was new. Even if I had known some of them in childhood, they likely wouldn’t recognize me. But I was used to looks, so I did my best to just smile and ignore them.

“Can I get you something, sugar?” the pretty, dark-haired lady behind the bar asked.

I beamed. “Just a water for now. I’m waiting for someone.”

“Coming right up.”

I listened to the light chatter as I perused the song choices. There was the usual small-town talk, the weather, farming, when it was going to rain. All the things you’d hear walking into any homey bar anywhere. It immediately brought a smile to my face. It was so different from Nashville. So different, and to be honest, I kind of missed the simplicity of it all when I wasn’t around.

Within seconds, a glass of water and ice already sweating with condensation was sitting on the small table next to me.

“Careful,” the bartender warned with a wink. “They can be pretty picky about the music around here.”

I chuckled. “Don’t worry. I like the crowd pleasers.”

“Just don’t go playing any of that pop radio stuff, and they might let you live.”

I laughed brightly. “You’re safe from that, scout’s honor.”

The second the sounds of Randy Travis’s twangy timbre started floating through the air, every occupant of the bar groaned. I glanced around with my confused eyes narrowed.

“Got something against Randy Travis?”

The bartender smirked in my direction as if she knew something I did not. “It ain’t us, sugar.”

As if summoned, I heard stomping boots getting closer. The next second, a tall, dark-haired, truly angry-looking man appeared, and without sparing me a glance, he stormed right up and yanked the cord of the jukebox right from the wall.

“Jesus Christ. For the last time! NO. RANDY.”