Read an Exclusive Excerpt From Kate Golden’s Contemporary Romance Debut If Not For My Baby

If you know the name Kate Golden, it’s probably for her Sacred Stones trilogy (A Dawn of Onyx, A Promise of Peridot, and A Reign of Rose), the popular romantasy series that featured a captivating, slow burn love story set in a world of warring kingdoms and magic. (If you haven’t read it yet, this is your moment!) But for her next trick, the author is shifting gears entirely with If Not for My Baby, a contemporary romance that pairs a swoon-worthy Irish rockstar with his new backup singer. 

Featuring a heroine who has sworn off messy things like “relationships” and “romance,” a dreamy hero who likes talking about the feelings he puts in his songs, and some entertaining conflict by way of the tour manager who isn’t exactly a fan of their relationship, One for My Baby is something altogether different from what we’ve seen from Golden in the past. (Plus, that cover art! Swoon!)

Here’s how the publisher describes the story.

Clementine Clark isn’t looking for love. Growing up with a single mom who weeps over a new guy each week tends to have that effect on a girl. But Clementine doesn’t mind being the rational one—she’s even buried her musical dreams so deeply within herself that she hardly notices the hole it’s left in her life.

That is until her best friend calls her with a life-changing opportunity: to join Irish megastar Halloran on his first US tour as a backing vocalist. Clementine wants to reject the offer, but the pay is enough to change her and her mom’s life. Overnight, Clementine goes from serving enchiladas at the Happy Tortilla to belting high notes before a cheering crowd.

But the whiplash of trading small-town Texas for sold-out stadiums is nothing compared to the rush of performing with the enigmatic Thomas Patrick Halloran. Poet, introvert, and lyrical genius, Halloran quickly gets under Clementine’s skin. The two couldn’t see the world more differently. And yet, over the course of the next eight weeks on tour, the romantic rockstar might just strike an unforgettable chord in Clementine. But will it be enough for an encore?

If Not For My Baby won’t hit shelves until August 5, but we’ve got an exclusive first look at the story for you right now. 

Eight

Halloran is shirtless and barefoot. Just in those long gray sweats, clutching a leather-bound notebook in one hand.

“Sorry.” His face contorts into something between a frown and a grimace as if to say, You were going to realize I was here one way or another. “I’ll leave you—”

“Where’s your shirt?” I blurt out.

Halloran nods at my robe. “You might be missin’ some apparel yourself.”

I constrict the offending robe tighter across my middle, mortified.

“Jesus Christ,” he says, wincing and pushing a hand through his hair. “I’m kiddin’ ye. I couldn’t find a pen.” Then he holds the notebook out at me as if that explains anything at all.

“And eavesdropping,” I add, a little snippy. Probably because I’m so humiliated and I know he already doesn’t like me. And because it’s a good distraction from the clean lines of his lean, defined chest and the light dusting of brown curls that start beneath his belly button and lead down to—

“I really didn’t mean to, I swear it.” He looks genuinely guilt ridden.

“It’s fine.” I’m the one who had the ridiculous conversation in the hotel hallway in the first place.

“At the risk of bein’ rude . . . could I ask you somethin’?” I sigh. “I think I’m an open book at this point.”

Halloran releases a rough chuckle, which does something inexcusable to my body. So much so, I fold my arms across my chest just in case he can tell. The robe is pretty thin.

“Why don’t you cut the lad loose?”

“Oh, God.” I’m getting lightheaded. Maybe I’ll faint— that would be an excellent way out of this conversation. “It’s none of your business.”

“That’s true,” he concedes, hands up. “Absolutely true. But you did allow me the ask.” Strangely, Halloran makes no move to leave. In fact, he leans against the wall right across from me, propping one bare foot up behind him to his comfort and crossing his defined arms across his chest.

“I gotta say . . . You haven’t struck me as the personal conversation type.” My mind drifts back to the first night we’d met. He’d been kind of cold. “In Memphis . . .”

“I’m sorry about that. Truly. Press, meet and greets, the show . . . I was well past wilting by the time we met.”

And here I’d thought he was upset I’d missed a few lyrics.

The levels of my insecurity never cease to amaze.

Halloran presses his fingers into his notebook. “If I’ve come across as closed off, I apologize. I’m often more comfortable talking with one person than making small chat with a group.”

“And my personal life is interesting to you?”

“It was a rare phone call to overhear, if I’m being honest.” He shrugs, palms up in forfeit. “Caught my attention.”

“I can’t cut him loose. He’s one of my only friends. And my boss . . . And my ex-boyfriend.” With that I let my head fall backward into the vending machine in misery. Maybe it will swallow me whole and I’ll be reborn as a light blue Gato-rade. A punishment preferable to this. 

“Ah,” Halloran says, thoughtful. He’s not poking fun.

“I don’t really . . . sleep around. So if I’m interested in texting someone, he’s a safe bet. I know we’ll both enjoy our- selves, and he’s not going to be a creep about it. I trust him, you know?”

“Sure. But he isn’t interested in being your safe bet any longer?”

“Apparently not.” 

“Does that bother you?”

I can’t believe I’m talking about this with world-renowned megastar Halloran. I choose my next words carefully. “It doesn’t bother me, I just don’t know what to do next. I don’t want to be together, which I think he kind of knows. I also don’t want to lose him in my life. He’s not being very fair.”

Halloran shrugs, no judgment in his eyes. “I doubt he can be when he’s in love with you.”

My face contorts involuntarily at the words, and Halloran’s lips twitch. 

I narrow my eyes at him. “What?”

He’s amused, for some reason. “I’ve said nothing.” “Come on,” I press. “You were the one who wanted to play therapist.”

“I feel for the lad is all. He’s in agony.”

“Oh my God,” I groan. “I didn’t know he was suffering!” 

“Course you didn’t. Nobody should blame you, least of all him. He’s hidden his feelings from you despite the heartache because he’d rather have some of you than none at all . . . It’s a terrible situation. Made only worse by him not knowin’ how to speak to you about it and then grumblin’ over a sext. But there’s no brakes on the car your man’s in. He can’t unlearn how to love you. I doubt he’d want to even if he could. That’s the beauty of it, tucked inside the sorrow.”

“Wow.” I can’t help the way my mouth tugs at the corners. “Inspirational. What next? Are you going to tell me ‘They may take our lives, but they’ll never take our freedom’?”

Halloran releases an actual laugh. The first I’ve ever heard from him. It’s a husky, jovial sound that splits from his chest as if by accident. His broad white teeth are as glorious as the curve of his lips and warm crinkle of his eyes. A laugh like that should be illegal. “That’s Scotland,” he says.

“Whatever.” I’m fighting my own grin. “You get my point. It’s phony.”

Halloran’s eyes widen. “Phony?”

“Kind of. People obsess over the importance of romantic love only to weaponize it to explain everything from having an affair to making single women feel badly about themselves on national holidays. Look at what your precious love is doing to a perfectly good friendship as we speak.”

“Fair play, but neither your ex-turned-boss’s intolerable predicament nor the patriarchal pressure put on women to marry is really what I’m such a stout believer in.”

“Then what? Soulmates? Destiny? Come on.”

“Nah, none of that. Not airy-fairy, saccharine apparitions. What of Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Jane Austen, I dunno”— he shrugs—“Nora Ephron? I don’t think it’s coincidence that the greatest art and literature since the Old World have mostly been inspired by the complicated, all-consumin’ feckin’ rhapsody of romantic love.”

I roll my eyes, but can feel the swoon I’m fighting to keep at bay. People don’t really speak like that where I’m from. I have a feeling they don’t really speak like that anywhere. “I get it. You’re a hopeless romantic.”

His eyes warm on mine. “I’ll concede I’m susceptible to lovesickness. And, perhaps, the errant bout of excruciating yearning. And you?”

“And me what?”

“You’ve never been in love?”

I shake my head, ready for him to tell me what I’m missing or that I’m just too young. I have my counterargument about oxytocin locked and loaded.

But all he says is, “Ah.”

He has such a gentle presence. It’s rare to meet men who don’t see arguing with women as foreplay.

“What did you need a pen for anyway?” I ask, gesturing toward his notebook with my chin.

He’s still leaning against the other side of the hall, and yet he’s tall enough that I have to crane my neck up a bit to keep my eyes on his face. “Some lyrics came to me as I was dozin’ off. I wanted to jot them down but my room was clean out of writing instruments.”

I check my phone and try not to balk at the 1:37 a.m. that blares back at me. “Are you nocturnal or something?”

Halloran laughs again and I’m hit with the strangest urge to store all his laughs somewhere safe. Cram them into a little treasure box and bury them in my backyard.

“I work best when it’s quiet and I can’t be bothered by anyone. Except frisky ex-girlfriends, of course.”

For a moment I balk, before I realize now he is poking fun at me. Then I have to fight to contain a hideously girlish grin. 

“You’re one to talk,” I say, narrowing my eyes at him. “All your songs are about . . .” I raise my brows as if to say, You know what.

Halloran’s smirk could light me up like a matchstick. “Are they, now?”

“Oh, come on,” I scoff, willing myself to stop blushing. “You must know what you’re doing. You’re

giving teenage girls across the country carpal tunnel.”

Halloran coughs on nothing in sheer horror and I can’t help how hard I laugh. He’s so cute when he’s flustered.

“Christ,” he sputters. “I’d pay you handsomely to remove that mental image from my mind.”

“It’s true. You’re some kind of sex god to most women. What will you do with all that responsibility?”

Against the low hum of the ice machine, Halloran runs a hand across his mouth in thought. “Cave under the crushing weight of impossible expectation?”

Too humble, too charming, too talented. The stark fluorescent hallway light paints his jaw and pecs in shadow and I can’t help the way my eyes travel the same path. I think my robe is trying to crawl off my body.

“I’m not ashamed to write songs about lovemaking,” he concedes after a beat. “It’s as powerful as anything else I could be singin’ about.”

I’d never felt that way specifically, but it’s no great leap of the imagination to assume Halloran is having better sex than I am. 

“What I find interesting is how often people think the songs of mine that aren’t about sex are, and the reverse. Not that I particularly mind.”

“Really?” I remember the lyrics that had me sweating on that Greyhound bus. “So, ‘Consume My Heart Away’?”

“Nah.” He shakes his head. “Not to me at least. Though every song is fulfilled by the listener. It’s complete only as they understand it, right?”

“I guess that’s true,” I say, parsing through what he’s just said. I’d never thought of music in that way before. That the listener is the last step in the craftsmanship. “Can I ask what it’s about? If not innuendo?”

His eyes spark a little. “I haven’t a clue to what you are referring.”

I think of quoting the lyrics to him, but it feels too intimate. Not just their blatant eroticism, but speaking words directly back to the man who wrote them. So I sing the verse instead, the consistent rumble of the ice machine my metronome. “Whenever she first met me, my intentions bare and pure, the seeds I’d sow—a garden, the net I’d cast—a lure.”

Halloran’s voice is a little husky when he tells me, “Keep going.”

If Not for My Baby will be released on August 5, but you can pre-order it right now. 

Lacy Baugher Milas is the Books Editor at Paste Magazine, but loves nerding out about all sorts of pop culture. You can find her on Twitter and Bluesky at @LacyMB