Strummin’ Up Love (Musicians 0f Long Valley Book 1)

by Erin Wright

  They drew up to the day-use area Louisa had been hoping to use and found it packed to the brim with hoards of screaming children. Skyler watched them longingly, and Louisa knew he was wishing he could run and play tag with them. I’m so sorry, cariño. But I will do my best to make you better, if you’ll just help me along the way.

  “How about if we head down to the next pull-out?” she called out, deliberately playing it cool, as if she couldn’t read the haunting disappointments and what-if’s etched on Skyler’s face. “Then we can pull out our picnic.”

  “We have a picnic?” Skyler brightened right back up, his pain falling away in the face of the promise of food. “Did you pack dessert?” he asked eagerly.

  She mentally patted herself on the back. Skyler had been picking at his food from day one, and she’d been sure it was because he just didn’t get enough physical exercise to build up a healthy appetite. Getting sun on his skin and a hunger in his belly was part of his healing process, even if it didn’t directly relate to him walking again.

  “I had Chef Ralph make up a picnic for us, and I told him I wanted it to be a surprise,” she answered. “So your guess is as good as mine.”

  “Ooohhhh…” Skyler breathed, even more excited at the thought of the spontaneity of it all. “I hope he remembers I don’t like bread with the nuts in it.” He scrunched up his nose. “He’s always trying to get me to eat sandwiches with the yucky bread.”

  “How about you?” Zane asked, paddling up on her other side as they began working their way down the shoreline. “Do you like the yucky bread with the nuts in it?”

  She laughed. “I forget sometimes that bread exists. I usually use tortillas for everything. There aren’t any nuts in my tortillas, though, so I don’t know if I’d like nuts in my bread.”

  “Speaking of tortillas,” Zane said, his muscled arms pulling the paddle through the water with ease, “guess who invited us to dinner at their house?”

  “Who?” she asked blankly. Who did Zane know in Idaho to invite him to dinner?

  “Stetson Miller. Your aunt works for him, right?”

  “Yeah, she has for years. But how on earth did you meet Stetson in order to be invited over for dinner?”

  “Declan came over to the therapy camp several weeks back and invited me out to the bar with the guys. Had some beers with the Miller brothers and two firefighters named Levi and Moose.”

  “Moose?” she repeated blankly, certain she’d heard him wrong.

  “Yup. Hand to God, he introduced himself as Moose. His real name is Deere, as in John Deere, but everyone calls him Moose.”

  “Someone named their child after a tractor?” She wasn’t sure if she was more or less surprised to hear that, versus someone naming their child after a large herbivore. “Idahoans sure are weird,” she muttered under her breath.

  “Hey, you’re the one who’s from Idaho!” Zane said, laughing.

  “I know! That’s why I can say that. I know first-hand just how weird Idahoans can be.” She shot him a laughing smile, and then called to Skyler who’d paddled far ahead of them, “Sky! Look to your right! You’re passing the take-out spot!”

  She upped her pace, wanting to catch up to Skyler and make sure that his transfer out of the kayak was safe. He was a pro at getting on and off the couch, and even on and off a horse now, but in and out of a kayak, he still needed her.

  She pulled up onto the concrete ramp and hopped out of her kayak, splashing through the cold water to pull her kayak up on shore and out of the way, and then pulled Skyler’s kayak up onto the ramp. Working together, they managed to get Skyler out of the kayak and onto the bank with only a minimal amount of splashing. Not too shabby.

  She looked up to see where Zane had gone off to, and saw that he was floating a little offshore, a weird look in his eyes. She tilted her head to the side, trying to read that expression, and he caught the movement. “I’m coming!” he called, and just like that, the weird look was gone. He pulled up beside Skyler’s kayak and climbed out, wading through the water with ease. She had never seen him in shorts, and now that she had a good look at his legs…

  Wowsers. They were just as muscular and defined as his arms. No wonder all of the girls went crazy over him.

  She’d done a little more research since starting the job, wanting to know her employer a little better, and if half of the things she’d read online were true, he’d had no shortage of women throwing themselves at him over the years. More than a few articles had said that this was why he and Tamara were having so many problems – everyone had seemed to think they were on the edge of divorce – but then when she died, every article suddenly started to treat him like a tragic figure mourning for his dead wife. No mention was made again about almost divorcing Tamara.

  She still didn’t know which of those stories to believe, or if either of them were true, or something else entirely, but this was an itch she wasn’t going to be able to scratch. Zane was not about to open up and tell her everything.

  You’re just the nanny. No matter how great his legs are. Never forget that.

  Zane turned to Skyler with a smile. “Where should we eat lunch?” he asked his son, scooping him up into his arms from his perch on the rocky beach. Louisa was surprised – she’d expected she would have to carry him around since they hadn’t been able to pack a wheelchair onto the kayaks, and she had not been looking forward to it. Having Zane carry him instead was unexpectedly lovely.

  “Let’s go over there,” Skyler said, pointing to a clump of pine trees.

  “Good call,” Zane said, and with Louisa following behind with her backpack slung over her shoulder, they wandered over to the trees. Louisa quickly pulled a blanket out and spread it on the ground, and then Zane carefully placed Skyler on it.

  Skyler picked up his legs and arranged them on the blanket and then looked up at Louisa with anticipation. “Let’s see, let’s see!” he said.

  “I am going to start calling you mi gordito,” she said with a laugh as she began unloading the backpack. “Ohhh…it looks like he packed you a sandwich made with the whitest bread you ever did see.” She tossed it to him.

  He caught it but was still looking at her with a quizzical look on his face. “What does mi gordito mean?” he asked as he unwrapped his sandwich.

  “Literally, it means my fatty, but in the Hispanic culture, it’s a term of endearment.”

  “Term of endear…what?” he asked around a mouthful of sandwich, spraying her with partially chewed food.

  “Cariño!” she said, swiping at the bits of food on her swimsuit. She tried not to remember Alex doing just that only a couple of months ago. Oh, how she missed her brother.

  “Sorry,” he said abashedly after he swallowed the food in his mouth. “What does cariño mean?”

  She picked out a piece of watermelon from the Tupperware container and took a small bite, making sure not to spray him with food while she talked, as much as she was tempted to seek revenge. “First off, ‘term of endearment’ is a fancy way of saying a nice nickname. Like, sweetie. Or honey. Or dipshit.”

  Zane choked on his food as Skyler let out a howl of laughter.

  “Perhaps it was only my mother who liked that particular term of endearment,” Louisa said sweetly. “And cariño is Spanish for sweetie. My mother alternated between cariño and dipshit.”

  The two of them let out another howl of laughter while she smiled at them angelically. Nothing was more fun than shocking the hell out of people. They always made the mistake of looking at her sweet face and smile, and never saw it coming.

  “What is dipshit in Spanish?” Zane asked, leaning back on one hand as he ate with the other. She focused her gaze on his fingers, spread out against the dark dirt of the forest floor. They were much safer to look at than his mesmerizing blue eyes.

  But then, she found herself thinking about what those fingers could do, and switched her gaze to his elbow. Even she couldn’t find anything sexy about Zane’s elbow.

&
nbsp; “I can’t tell you that!” she replied in mock horror. “What kind of example would it set to swear in front of your son?”

  Skyler was laughing so hard, he was rolling around on the ground, holding his sandwich against his stomach as he howled.

  “Of course,” Zane said solemnly, a tiny quirk of the corner of his mouth giving it away. “I’d hate for my delicate flower of a son to ever hear any swear words.”

  “Of course,” Louisa repeated, but this time, she did it while instinctively meeting his gaze and wham! It was like a punch to the stomach. She didn’t want to look away. She couldn’t look away.

  She tore her gaze away.

  Employer. Bad. No touchy.

  “C’mon,” Skyler said, wheedling. “Just one swear word. No one will even know it’s a bad word when I say it.”

  She raised her eyebrows at him, and with that one swift look, he knew she wouldn’t budge on the topic. “Now, since you don’t have any siblings,” she said primly, “I will tell you what it is like to have them. Just in case you ever thought it might be fun to have siblings, you can remember my stories and know that no sane person would ever want them.”

  “Tell me about the twins!” Skyler exclaimed. “I always wanted a twin. Then no one would ever know who they were talking to.”

  “That, unfortunately, is a very true statement,” Louisa said with an exaggerated sigh. “As soon as their pudgy little hands would let them, they’d swap their colored headbands, the only way my mom had of trying to keep them straight. Then they’d spend all day laughing while she tried to guess who was who. They were naughty, but everyone loved them. You couldn’t help it. Big brown eyes, long thick eyelashes, and cute-as-a-button noses.” She leaned over and tapped Skyler’s nose with the tip of her finger. “They’d bat those big eyes,” she fluttered her eyelashes, “and smile so angelically,” she put her hands under her chin like she was praying, “that you’d forget that they’d just used a whole stick of butter on the bathroom floor. They claimed it was a science experiment – they wanted to see if it’d make people slip and fall. My youngest brother, Alex, landed right on his butt and started howling. My mother made them scrub the floor on their hands and knees.”

  “What are their names?” Skyler asked eagerly, like he was trying to soak up every bit of this family knowledge that he could.

  “Francesca and Isabel, but everyone calls Isabel Izzy, and then, it just became Frizzy for the two of them. That way, we never have to be able to tell them apart. They’re just Frizzy. They go everywhere together. The school administration, sick of them playing pranks on the teacher, decided to split them last year. Wouldn’t let them in the same classes together anymore. Suddenly, Frizzy were too sick to go to school. You’ve never seen such sick teenagers in all your life. I think they were sticking their fingers down their throats and swaddling themselves up in blankets with heating pads underneath, because they were puking and sweating…it wasn’t pretty. This lasted for a week. Everyone knew they weren’t really sick, but every time Mom hinted about them going to school, they threw up all over her shoes. Finally, she went to the principal and said,” and here, she used her best thick Hispanic accent, “‘Either you let my daughters back in the same classes again, or I will go stark-raving mad. I cannot keep washing all of my shoes.’ Frizzy went back to school the next day, fit as a fiddle. It was magic,” and she snapped her fingers right in front of Skyler’s nose.

  He laughed so hard, he snorted. “I want to meet Frizzy,” he said plaintively when he finally stopped laughing. “Would they come over here and visit us?”

  He looked so eager, so anxious to meet them, that Louisa’s heart hurt a little at the look on his face. Here was a kid who’d grown up with only staff to take care of him, and no siblings to tease or torment or love. She wanted to look up at Zane, to ask him with her eyes, Do you see what your son needs? More than just you and a giant house and servants and the occasional pony ride. But she didn’t, because his eyes would suck her in and she wouldn’t be able to look away.

  “It’s pretty far from Pocatello to here,” she said after a moment’s pause. “But maybe.”

  Skyler didn’t believe her. She could see it on his face. Her comforting lie – but maybe – wouldn’t happen, and he’d been disappointed enough in his life to know it. She tore her eyes away from his too-mature gaze and looked at the tip of Zane’s nose instead. “What about you?” she asked, trying to lighten the mood. “How many siblings do you have?”

  “A baby sister,” he said after a moment’s hesitation. “She died when she was just a toddler, though. Fell in the pool when no one was watching. I was four years older than her. My…my parents never really got over it.”

  “Her name was Holly,” Skyler announced, and she could tell he wanted to add something to the conversation. Feel older and important.

  Louisa nodded, not sure what to say. Her attempt to inject levity certainly hadn’t succeeded. She met Zane’s eyes and he smiled wanly, reassuring her without words that it was okay.

  Still, she tore her eyes away from his and back to Skyler. “Ready to head back?” she asked overly brightly. She was trying too hard; she knew that. But she just didn’t know what else to do.

  My parents never really got over it.

  “But I didn’t eat all of the cookies!” Skyler protested, bringing Louisa back into the moment, swiping another two of the delicious snickerdoodles from the container. “We can’t go back with leftovers.”

  “Mi gordito,” she said, shaking her head at him. “Just wait until Carmelita meets you. She will spend all of her time doing nothing but feeding you cookies and saying that you need to fatten up.”

  Eyes brilliant as the sun at the thought, Skyler looked pleadingly at his dad. “Can we go visit Carmelita?” he asked without missing a beat. “Please?”

  “I’ve been told she’s quite the cook,” Zane said, ruffling Skyler’s hair, the light blonde strands swirling around the boy’s face. “We should probably test this rumor out for ourselves. Just to make sure.”

  “Yes!” Skyler said, pumping his fist into the air, and Louisa laughed.

  No, it wouldn’t be hard at all to fall in love with Skyler.

  But a much bigger problem was, it wouldn’t be hard at all to fall in love with his father either. And that was where Louisa would get into trouble.

  CHAPTER 14

  ZANE

  Z ANE LEANED against the arena fencing, watching as the kids rode by in an endless parade, waving to parents or family members while also trying to stay in the saddle while the horse did something Dr. Whitaker had informed him was “trotting.” Personally, Zane thought it looked like a great way to ensure that the males in the group never had children of their own. The way they were bouncing up and down in the saddle with every jarring step made Zane cross his legs protectively. If he did end up riding a horse while here, he was definitely going to skip the trotting stage.

  Just then, the oldest Miller boy came up – William? No, Wyatt – and leaned against the arena fencing alongside Zane, watching the kids. “My son’s out there,” Wyatt said after a quiet moment. “He’s sure lookin’ good today. Smooth ride, even while the horse is at a trot, and that ain’t easy to do.”

  “Your son, eh?” Zane said, his eyes automatically scanning the group for a dark-haired, blue-eyed miniature version of Wyatt. He couldn’t see any who had Wyatt’s stubborn tilt to his jaw or his thick eyebrows, but maybe the kid took after Wyatt’s wife instead.

  “Yup. He’s my boy.” They stood there for a moment longer, and then Wyatt said with a twinkle in his eye, “So, which one do you think is mine?”

  “I was guessing him,” Zane said, pointing at a rail-skinny boy with dark brown hair and pale skin. He looked much too skinny, like Skyler, and Zane could tell the kid had spent most of his life indoors, too ill to do much else. Also like Skyler.

  “Nope,” Wyatt said with a small smile and shake of the head. “I’m not even sure who he is, actually. I think
he just started coming recently.”

  “Huh.” Zane scanned the rest of the group, but wasn’t finding any boy even remotely close to Wyatt’s build and looks. There was a girl with what appeared to be Down Syndrome who looked the closest, but he’d said son, not daughter, so… “All right, I give up,” he said finally. “Which one’s your son?”

  “Him,” Wyatt said, pointing at the gangly Hispanic boy Skyler had tangled with when he’d first started attending camp. “Juan is his name.”

  “Oh!” Zane said, and shot Wyatt a laughing smile. “I didn’t realize your wife is Hispanic.”

  “Oh, she ain’t,” Wyatt said, a grin of pure pride spreading across his face. “She’s as white as I am. No, we can’t have kids, so after I got thrown in jail – Abby was my jailer, by the way – I got assigned a bunch of community service on the way out of the clink. Served it here at this camp. When I first started working here, you shoulda seen it – Juan had a chip on his shoulder the size of Texas. You looked at him sideways and he was liable to punch you, just for looking at him funny. He couldn’t walk three steps down the hallway at school without getting into a fight. He was with a foster care family and they did their best, but the system just isn’t supported like it needs to be, and…some kids get lost in it.” Wyatt shrugged, his jaw set, looking like he had a lot more he could say on the topic, but was choosing not to. “I was just like him when I was a kid. Angry at the world. We might not look the same on the outside, but on the inside…I knew what he was going through. After I married Abby, we started in on adopting him. We’re in the middle of getting set up to do another kid – a girl this time, we think – so we can foster-adopt her. These kids need someone to know they care.”

  Skyler bounced by again, holding onto the horn of the saddle for dear life, looking like he’d rather be dropped into a pit of snakes than continue this horse ride. Zane waved cheerfully, trying to give him some encouragement. Skyler didn’t seem too impressed.

  Zane’s eyes sought out Juan again, and as he watched him ride, the gait much smoother than any of the other kids, Zane thought back on what Wyatt’d just said. Thrown in jail, eh? He couldn’t help his surprise at the thought. The night they’d all met up at the bar, Wyatt’d been the designated driver for the Miller brothers, and hadn’t touched anything stronger than a Coke all night. Was that why he’d ended up in jail – driving drunk?