Second Line After Midnight

By: Sage Hayes

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Each book in this series features a different couple and a complete happily ever after.

Nia Brooks can do a lot of things. She can make an entire construction crew laugh on a Monday morning. She can broadcast live from a half-gutted building with a generator for a soundboard and beignet powder on her shirt. She can keep the conversation warm and the mic alive and never — not once — let anyone hear what is actually happening inside her. She is very, very good at this.

Celeste Rowan is a disaster-recovery counselor who sees through people for a living. She is calm, precise, and not even slightly charmed by a good joke when a good joke is doing the work of a closed door. She clocks Nia's performance within the first conversation. This is the worst thing that has ever happened to Nia.

They become friends in the seams of the work — midnight beignets on the venue's back steps, confessions between soundchecks, conversations that start professional and end somewhere neither of them planned to go. Their chemistry is undeniable. The real threat is bigger: Nia has been performing her whole life, and Celeste is the first person who wants the version she is afraid to show.

The venue restoration forces a reckoning. This building saved Nia when she was twenty-two and had nowhere else to go. Restoring it means facing everything she turned into material instead of memory. When the project threatens to fall apart, Nia has two choices: disappear the way she always has, or tell the truth for the first time.

Celeste holds the door open and waits.

A friends-to-lovers sapphic romance set in a legendary New Orleans music venue, about two women who help everyone else — and have to learn to ask for it themselves.