Notes of Passion
A Paranormal Romance
by Ames Willow
📖 Free with Kindle Unlimited
Pairing: MF
Heat: 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 Inferno
Series: The Gifted #1
Tropes: Soulmates, Found Family, Second Chances, Hurt/Comfort, Ghost Romance
She can hear music no one else can hear. He’s been dead for twenty-two years.
Clara Hartley has spent her entire life hiding her gift—the ability to hear the music beneath everything. When she discovers an antique banjo in a moonlit barn, she doesn’t expect to find a ghost trapped inside. She definitely doesn’t expect to fall in love with him.
Jamie Bell was a musician with a promising future until fever took him at nineteen. For over two decades, he’s existed in the spaces between things—watching the world, unable to touch it, waiting for someone who could finally hear him.
When Clara runs from an arranged marriage with nothing but Jamie’s banjo and a desperate hope, they discover that their connection goes deeper than either imagined. But the Order of Silence—a centuries-old organization that hunts the gifted—is closing in. And the only way to truly be together may require a sacrifice neither of them is prepared to make.
Notes of Passion is a sweeping paranormal romance about love that transcends death, music that heals the soul, and the extraordinary courage it takes to fight for impossible happiness. This standalone novel features a guaranteed HEA and explicit content intended for adult readers.
📖 Read Chapter One Free
CHAPTER ONE: The Barn
Willow Creek, Colorado — Summer 1869
The music found Clara in the barn, the way it always did.
She wasn’t supposed to be here. Father had made that clear enough—the old Miller barn was rotting, dangerous, full of God-knows-what that could hurt a proper young lady. But Father was in town negotiating grain prices, Mother was supervising the summer preserves, and Clara’s fingers had been itching all day with a melody she couldn’t name.
So here she was, seventeen years old and trespassing, picking her way through dust motes that danced like golden notes in the afternoon light.
The barn had been abandoned for years—ever since Old Man Miller died and his children scattered to the winds. Now it belonged to no one, which meant, in Clara’s mind, it belonged to everyone. Or at least to anyone brave enough to slip through the gap in the fence and push open the crooked door.
She paused just inside, letting her eyes adjust to the dimness. Straw and shadow. The smell of old wood and older secrets. And underneath it all, that strange humming sensation that had drawn her here in the first place—a vibration in her chest, a whisper in her blood.
Music.
Not real music, not the kind other people could hear. Clara had learned that lesson early. When she was five, she’d asked her mother why the river sang different songs in spring and winter. When she was eight, she’d tried to explain to her father that the wheat field was composing a symphony. When she was twelve, she’d made the mistake of telling her Sunday school teacher that she could hear colors.
After that, she’d learned to keep her mouth shut.
But she couldn’t shut her ears. Couldn’t stop the music from finding her in quiet moments, couldn’t ignore the melodies that lived in things other people thought were silent. The creak of wagon wheels. The rustle of wind through corn. The heartbeat rhythm of her mother’s rocking chair.
Everything sang, if you knew how to listen.
And right now, something in this barn was singing loud.
Clara moved deeper into the shadows, following the sound the way a moth follows flame. Past the empty stalls where horses had once stood. Past the rusted tools hanging on their pegs. Past the ladder leading to a hayloft that probably couldn’t support a cat’s weight anymore.
There.
In the corner, half-buried under a canvas tarp, something glowed. Not with light—not exactly—but with presence. With the kind of intensity that made Clara’s gift sit up and take notice.
She knelt down, brushed away years of dust and mouse droppings, and pulled back the tarp.
A banjo.
Old, but not ruined. The wood was dark with age, the metal hardware tarnished to a soft bronze. Five strings, still somehow intact despite what must have been decades of neglect. And carved into the neck, so small she almost missed it: a pair of initials. J.B.
Clara reached out to touch it.
The music exploded.
* * *
Continue reading to discover what happens when Clara meets the ghost bound to the banjo…
🔥 Want More?
Get an exclusive bonus scene featuring Claire and Jamie’s first night together after the resurrection—uninterrupted, uninhibited, and absolutely unforgettable.
❓ Reader FAQ
Is this book spicy?
Yes! Notes of Passion has explicit intimate scenes and is intended for adult readers. Heat level: 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
Is there a happily ever after?
Absolutely. Claire and Jamie get their HEA, and it’s worth every tear along the way.
Is the ghost actually dead?
Without spoiling too much: Jamie starts the book as a ghost who died in 1847, but his story is about finding his way back to life—in every sense of the word.
Content warnings?
This book contains: death of a loved one (off-page, historical), arranged marriage (rejected), kidnapping/captivity, physical violence, and explicit sexual content. The overall tone is hopeful with a guaranteed happy ending.
Is this part of a series?
Notes of Passion is the first book in The Gifted series and can be read as a complete standalone. Future books may explore other characters from the River School.