Strummin' Up Love

by Erin Wright

  “Juan Miller,” the boy said, hesitantly shaking Zane’s hand and then whipping his hand behind his back. “I am Dr. Whitaker’s assistant,” he added proudly. “This is my second year of being paid to work here, and I say no kid rides Midnight except for me.”

  “Is she your favorite horse?” Zane asked, delicately feeling out the reasoning at play here.

  He shrugged. “I like her. But mostly it’s because she’s not always nice. If she gets riled up, she’ll throw her rider. Skyler isn't good enough to ride her yet. He just started riding earlier this week.”

  Zane nodded thoughtfully and then turned towards his son, who had his bottom lip stuck out so far, it’d probably collect water in a rainstorm.

  “But I want to ride her!” Skyler yelled. “If he can ride her, I can ride her.”

  Right. This wasn’t going well at all.

  Zane looked around for Adam, hoping to spot the tall veterinarian close by so he could come to his rescue. Alas, he was busy saddling up another horse for a little girl with pigtails. Why in the hell did Zane pay all of this money for this camp if his son wasn’t even going to be taken care of? Adam needed to hire more employees – there needed to be more than just him and a little kid running the joint.

  This camp had seemed like such a good idea when Zane had first spotted an article about it online. Horses? What kid didn’t just love horses? And since Skyler’d already been kicked out of a music therapy camp and an art therapy camp, Zane had been looking at a summer calendar empty of anything even vaguely entertaining for Skyler to do. A horse therapy camp out in the middle of nowhere?

  Why the hell not.

  But now…

  “IIIII wwwaaannnnttttt tttoooooo!!!!” Skyler was really working up a head of steam now. Zane looked back at Juan desperately, but the kid’s jaw was set as hard as stone.

  “Can’t you just have Skyler sit on the horse’s back while you lead it around?” Zane hollered over the noise. Anything to get his son to stop yelling. “Just right here in the paddock. The horse can’t do much here.”

  He was practically pleading a twelve-year-old boy for permission to ride a damn horse. What had his life come to?

  “What’s going on?” Dr. Whitaker asked, unruffled, as he joined the little group. Juan and Skyler fought to talk over each other and get their side of the story out, but Zane just closed his eyes with relief. Dr. Whitaker could take care of the situation. He’d know what to do.

  Zane walked away, heading for the shade of the barn and rubbed his temples, trying to smooth a pounding headache away. Suddenly, this Louisa chick sounded like a gift from the gods. As long as she passed a background check, he’d hire her sight unseen. Anything – anyone – was better than this. She had to know how to deal with Skyler better than he did. God only knew it wasn’t possible to know less.

  Chapter 3

  Louisa

  Checking her phone for directions again, Louisa turned right onto a deeply rutted road and began bouncing along it, gritting her teeth in an attempt to keep from accidentally biting her own tongue from the sheer force of the jerking of the car. Why, for heaven’s sakes, did one of the biggest stars in the country music business live on a road like this? Didn’t he make enough from his record deals to be able to pay for a road grader to come fix this mess?

  She’d signed a summer-long contract sight unseen, which meant she was stuck in this job for the whole summer. How many times would she drive this road in the next 105 days? Did her contract cover car repairs, like her transmission falling out of the bottom of the car after it hit its 19th pot hole? Somehow, she didn’t think it did.

  After what seemed like an eternity – or seven – her phone began chirping excitedly that she had arrived at her destination just as a monstrously oversized house came into view. Louisa couldn’t help gaping at it as she slammed on her brakes to stare up through the windshield.

  This was…

  She used to make fun of the McMansions – huge, grand houses out in the middle of a farm field; farmers or ranchers doing their best to show off how very big they were in their very little pond – but this house was more than a McMansion. It was a mansion. Who would build a house this big outside of Franklin, Idaho, for heaven’s sakes? Her parents were from Sawyer and even she only barely knew where Franklin was at. A house like this should be in the hills of California, not on the outskirts of a tiny mountain tourist town.

  Finally realizing that parking smack-dab in the middle of the open parking lot in front of the mansion probably wasn’t appropriate, Louisa slowly crept forward into a parking spot and killed the engine. In the silence, she could hear birds chirping and squirrels chattering as they swooped from giant pine to giant pine, busy with their lives, industriously working away.

  Squirrels can find a purpose in their lives. Why can’t I?

  Shaking off the thought, she pushed herself out of her car and began walking briskly towards the front door, up the paving stone path laid in a curve that ended at the oversized wooden front door. As she went, she instinctively kept track of the accessibility of the place, noting with surprise that there were no steps for someone in a wheelchair to struggle over, nor was the path too skinny or bumpy for a wheelchair to be able to easily navigate. From what Louisa had been able to gather, Zane had just shown up in the last week or so, and was only in Long Valley for a horse therapy camp for his son. Surely he hadn’t had this mansion built for him beforehand.

  Which meant that he’d somehow managed to rent (or buy, she supposed) what appeared to be a handicap accessible mansion in the wilds of Idaho.

  What are the chances that something like this would be on the market?

  If you had enough money, you could make almost anything happen, she guessed.

  She rapped on the dark wood, the decorative carvings so elaborate that her eyes had a hard time figuring out where they should rest, and then the door swung open noiselessly. There stood Zane Risley. Louisa knew it was him because she’d done a quick Google Image search after she’d been informed that she’d been hired, wanting to know something about the man she was about to go work for, and the man in front of her…

  It was definitely him. Blond hair that ran in curls and waves to his broad shoulders, and bright blue eyes that had been so captivating on her computer screen, she’d been sure that they’d been enhanced through Photoshop.

  But now she knew they hadn’t been. She’d never seen such intense, such brilliant blue eyes in her life and every bit of her professionalism, her training, seemed to drain away in the face of it. This was a bad idea – a very bad idea. He looked much too much like Matthew. When she’d looked at the pictures on Google, she’d thought maybe it was just a trick of the camera, of the angle, but now that she was standing in front of him, she realized he could easily pass as Matthew’s long-lost brother, but an upgraded version.

  While she’d always thought Matt was a cute guy, next Zane…well, Matt’s hair had been a little shorter; his eyelashes not as thick; his eyes a more dull blue; his shoulders not quite so broad; his legs not quite so long. He quite literally paled in comparison to this handsome god in front of her.

  Speaking of God, this had to be God’s reminder that no matter how handsome Zane Risley was, she wanted absolutely nothing to do with him. She wasn’t that dumb.

  I’m listening, Dios mío. I won’t make that mistake again. I am here for his son, not him, no matter how blue his eyes are.

  He spoke first. “I’m Zane Risley,” he said, putting out a hand to shake. Instinctively, she reached out too, and it was this automatic movement that jolted her out of her trance.

  “I’m Louisa Vargas,” she said, shaking his hand quickly and then dropping her hand back down to her side.

  Zane stepped back and swept his arm in a welcoming gesture, letting her walk by him. She instantly felt a wall of stifling perfection wash over her as she stepped through the doorway. This had been decorated by a professional designer, she was absolutely sure of it. There was roug
hly a zero percent chance or so that the man standing in front of her had picked out the gilt-framed paintings or the dark wood furniture or the oppressively ornate curtains. It looked like the lair of a seriously rich 95-year-old white man, not the 30-something-year-old country music singer standing in front of her in a wife beater, ripped jeans, and bare feet.

  Oh, and blond hair down to his shoulders.

  No, this house did not fit this man, not at all.

  Before Louisa could ask any questions and piece together the mystery, the dark-paneled elevator doors slid open and out wheeled a boy on the cusp of becoming a teenager, his blond hair so light, it looked like ripe wheat just before harvest. He rolled to a stop, expertly maneuvering in his wheelchair without a thought to making it happen.

  He’s used to the wheelchair now. He isn’t wanting out of it. The drive, the desire…it isn’t there. He’s resigned himself to it.

  She’d asked for Skyler’s medical records before accepting the job, signing an NDA before receiving it stating that she wouldn’t reveal its contents to anyone, and then poured over them, trying to piece together what’d happened, understanding the medical terminology in the records as easily as she understood English. Skyler’s T12 vertebra had been crushed in the accident, all of the force of the accident hitting him in that exact spot, like someone had taken aim at his spine. He’d had other damage, of course – a broken arm, contusions, cuts – but all of that had long ago healed. It was only the spinal cord damage that’d had long-lasting effects.

  Well, that and losing his mother in a car wreck, but those were the kinds of wounds to the heart that no nurse could heal.

  “Hey, Skyler,” Louisa said quietly, smiling just a little, wanting to appear friendly and kind without being overwhelming. “I’m Louisa Vargas, your new nurse.” She put her hand out to shake, and with a quick glance at his father, Skyler shook her hand, his fingers delicate and limp and small inside of hers. He jerked his hand back and then stared up at her, not saying anything, just assessing. She stared right back, not saying anything, waiting for him to finish his assessment of her. She wasn’t in any rush. She could wait for him to make a move.

  “You’re a nurse?” he finally asked, his skepticism blazingly obvious. She apparently didn’t fit his idea of what a nurse should look like.

  “I am. Have been for a while now. I’ve never had just one patient, though. I usually have a whole floor of patients that I’m in charge of. So you could say that I’m new to being a one-at-a-time nurse.”

  He took that in and then nodded slowly, abruptly wheeling over to sit by his dad, saying without words that his loyalty laid with him.

  Zane looked down at Skyler, the surprise crystal clear on his face.

  He isn’t used to Skyler siding with him. I wonder how close they really are…

  “You…uhhh…you want me to show you up to your room?” Zane asked, stammering a little, still staring down at the top of his son’s head as he asked the question.

  “Sure, thank you. And I need you to show me where to park. I only saw the open parking area out front – is there parking out back for staff?”

  “Yes, although I don’t have many here. Staff, that is. You, a chef who comes out once a day to cook dinner, a housekeeper who comes three times a week to clean, and then the gardeners and groundskeepers are all managed by the rental property company. I don’t see them at all.”

  Well, that answered at least part of that question – this was a rental, not a purchase.

  Zane headed for the stairs, Louisa right behind him, her overnight bag slung over her shoulder, the rest of her luggage in the car. She’d get oriented in the house and then work on getting settled. Behind her, she could hear Skyler rolling off into the elevator, the doors sliding closed behind him with a quiet ding.

  “He seems to be taking this well,” Louisa said quietly as they walked, mostly just to fill the silence that was piling on between them, growing thicker by the moment. Did he have to look like an upgraded, five-star version of her ex?

  This really isn’t fair.

  “Yeah, he is,” Zane said, and there was that surprise again. So she hadn’t been imagining it – he hadn’t expected Skyler to react quietly to getting a new nurse.

  And she really didn’t want to think how that boded for the rest of her summer.

  Chapter 4

  Zane

  From the moment that Louisa stepped through the front door, he felt like someone had sucked the oxygen from the room. She wasn’t what he expected – not at all. She was young. Like, younger than him, and that wasn’t right. She was supposed to be old and wrinkled and able to quell Skyler with just one look and be so terrifying, his son would never even dream of being a back-talking asshat again.

  He should’ve realized how young she was based on the dates of her college diploma, which she listed on her resumé, but he’d thought she’d gone back to school after the kids left home. Why had he been so pigheaded about this? Why had he so stubbornly clung to the idea that Louisa was an old woman?

  Actually, that was an easy answer: Her name. He didn’t know anyone their age with the name of Louisa. It was an old woman’s name – something a grandmother would be called.

  If it had just been her age, he would’ve been fine. He met people all of the time his age, obviously. He normally didn’t hire them to be his son’s nurse, but he’d get over that.

  No, it was her looks that’d practically struck him mute. Dark, stick-straight hair almost to her waist, huge brown eyes, milk chocolate skin that begged to be kissed and licked. She was tall for being Hispanic – maybe 5’9" or so, which made her the perfect height to bend over and kiss…

  He shook his head like a dog shaking off water after a dip in the river. She’s an employee. You don’t get to touch employees any more than you get to turn back time and make your wife and child sit with their seat belts on. That simply isn’t an option.

  “Where did your parents get the name Louisa?” he asked casually as he stopped to push the door open to the bedroom she’d be staying in that summer. It was just two rooms down from Skyler’s bedroom, and three rooms down from his.

  Suddenly, he wished he’d thought to put her in the guest quarters over the garage. That distance seemed much safer for his sanity, but it was too late now.

  “My grandmother,” Louisa said, shooting him a little smile as she passed by him and into the room. She smelled fresh, like spring after a long, hard winter. He tried not to breathe in too deeply. “My mother is the youngest girl out of four, and somehow, out of all of my cousins, no one had been named after my grandmother, so my mother snatched up the name and used it for me. Americanized it by adding in the O, though. In Spanish, there is no O. Lovely room.”

  “Oh. Thanks.” He looked around quickly, registering the room for the first time. When the housekeeper told him that she’d cleaned a room for Louisa, he’d just said thanks and went back to scrolling through Facebook. It hadn’t occurred to him to actually look at the room, but now that he did, he wasn’t happy. It was dark and masculine and not at all suited to the woman who was now standing in it. “We can re-decorate if you’d like,” he offered. “Since you’ll be staying here for 3 months, it—”

  “No, no, I’m fine,” she assured him. “It’s nice, really.”

  She hated it. He could see it in her eyes. Why hadn’t the housekeeper told him that the room was better suited to a stuffy old grandpa than a gorgeous woman?

  Because you never asked. And because you didn’t know she was a young gorgeous woman anyway. And—

  “Well, okay then,” he said lamely. “I’ll just leave you to it. Oh, wait! You have other luggage. I’ll help you carry it up here.” Inwardly, he cursed the fact that he’d passed on taking his security guard, Andrew, with him out to Idaho. Andrew’s wife’d just had a baby and Zane hadn’t wanted to uproot them and move them to Idaho for the summer, and after all, nothing ever happened in Idaho. He’d be fine without the security out here.


  But now, just when he could’ve pawned this off onto Andrew and gone on with his life, Andrew wasn’t there. If Zane let a woman carry her own luggage in, his mother would have a heart attack. She wasn’t good for much, but making sure her son had manners was definitely on the short list.

  “I’m all right,” she said brightly as she moved about the room, opening up the curtains and letting the filtered sunlight in. “I’ve been sitting for a while – long drive from Pocatello. It’s good to stretch my legs. I’m not used to sitting.” She flashed him a smile as she brushed past him and back into the hallway, the clean spring smell trailing behind her. He felt his dick tighten at the glimpse of straight, white teeth, her lips a perfect pink bow.

  He was well and truly screwed.

  Chapter 5

  Louisa

  Louisa sat in bed for a while after waking up, enjoying the chance to just lie there and read a book. When was the last time she’d done that? Working 12-hour shifts at the hospital meant she left for work early and came home late, so lounging around in bed for hours was ridiculously decadent. Like swimming through a pool of dark, rich chocolate, but even better.

  Finally, around 8:15 or so, she heard some stirrings down the hallway and figured that the Risleys were coming alive for the day. They weren’t awake at 5:15 like she was but hey, 8:15 wasn’t terrible. She wasn’t sure if she’d be able to work for a family who slept in until noon each day. Every day, she’d feel like her whole day had been wasted, and that was nothing short of hell on earth. She liked being busy and productive.

  She set her latest book off to the side – The Pursuit of Happyness – and headed for the hall where she met a very sleepy and rumpled Zane. His eyes were only open to half mast, and he looked like he’d just rolled out of bed.