Strummin' Up Love

by Erin Wright

  He was starting to think she wasn’t exaggerating.

  “Well,” Stetson said after a while, pushing his hat back and scratching his forehead before pulling the brim back into place, “if you ever decide that you want to see a real working ranch in action, you just let me know. I’m not a big horse person, not like Wyatt or Declan here, but they can bring their horses on over and we can tour my place on horseback anytime you want. Hell, then you could meet Carmelita, Louisa’s aunt, and have some of the best damn cooking you’ve ever tasted in your life.”

  At that, there was a round of, “Amens.”

  “Oh, her homemade bread,” breathed Wyatt, rubbing his stomach.

  “Her pies,” Declan put in. “All of ‘em. There isn’t a bad pie amongst them.”

  “Gravy,” Stetson said seriously. “Her gravy is to die for. Anyway, you oughta come on over. Bring Louisa and Skyler. Carmelita would love to have someone new to cluck over.”

  “Or come on down to the fire station,” Moose put in. “We don’t have horses there, but we do have a pretty lookin’ fire engine that we can take out for a joy ride. Hell, we’ll pretend Mrs. Gehring got her cat stuck up in a tree again. We live in a small town and not much happens, so sometimes it’s fun to take the engine out for a spin, just to liven things up.”

  That had to be the most hick thing Zane had ever heard. If his friends back in Nashville heard someone say that, they’d laugh their asses off. But was that really so bad, compared to going down to a high-end bar and getting smashed on $9 beers? At least taking the fire engine out for a spin didn’t leave you wishing you were dead the next morning.

  The topic drifted from there onto the cost of beef on the hoof – whatever that meant – and how silage was going up in price – whatever the hell that was – but Zane was only half listening. Stetson and Moose had meant what they said, Zane was absolutely sure of it. Neither had said it in that generic way that was socially acceptable but not meant in the slightest, the way that Zane was so used to hearing it said.

  “You should come over sometime!”

  “Oh, you too. You can come to my place for dinner.”

  Did either person mean it? Hell no. Would it happen? Never.

  But Stetson meant it. Moose meant it. There was a reality to them – a down-to-earth demeanor – that Zane had somehow missed in his adult life. When you were a superstar; when you could fill huge stadiums with screaming fans, people didn’t stand around and talk to you about the price of beef on the hoof. Everything revolved around Zane – his thoughts, his next songs, where he was going on tour, how high his album was charting.

  Not having anyone ask him what it’s really like to be famous; not having anyone elbowing others in the ribs to get closer to him; not having anyone even asking for his autograph…

  It was weird. He wasn’t going to lie – it was just downright bizarre, really. When was the last time he’d gone to the bar as just a normal Joe Schmoe? Before his first major hit, he’d guess. After A Honky Tonk Life went double platinum, everything had changed. He’d gone from being able to run down to the corner store in his sweatpants and ripped t-shirt and not having a soul pay attention to him, to paparazzi following him, hoping to get that unflattering shot that would prove he’d already reached the pinnacle of his career and was sliding down the backside.

  Did he miss that limelight? Did he miss being the center of attention?

  Yeah, probably.

  But on the other hand, it was damn nice just being a normal guy once again. If this was what every trip out into public was like in the Long Valley area, Zane could get damn used to it. Just being himself, not what people expected…

  As the evening went on, he tipped back a few more beers, saw a few people take pictures of him discreetly from across the bar, signed a bar napkin for the bartender to frame and hang up on the wall, and listened to a group of guys who were all about his age or so, talking about work and crop rotation and wives with morning sickness and getting the bills paid on time.

  Was this what his life could’ve been like, if he hadn’t met Tamara? They’d been toxic for each other, there was no doubt about that, but when they’d first met, it was she who was the rising star, not him. She was making it as a regional star, with real hope of hitting it big, and it was through her connections that Zane had met an agent who was willing to take a chance on him and push him to the top.

  But while his star had been rising, hers had begun falling, and she never did have that breakout hit. She became just Zane’s wife in all of the news stories. That hurt her in a way that she never really recovered from.

  If they hadn’t met, if Zane had given up on his dream of making it big and just went to work down at the corner store, would he still have been happy?

  Questions I’ll never have answers to…

  “You ready to head out, Zane?” Wyatt asked, jerking him back to the present. Shit. How long had he just been standing there, holding his empty beer bottle like a dumbass?

  “Yeah,” he said, and flashed a grin to the group, trying to cover for his wandering mind. “Thanks for letting me hang out with you guys tonight.”

  “Sure, sure,” Wyatt said. “But if you don’t mind, my wife will kill me if I come home tonight without a picture with you. She’s one of your biggest fans. Can we take a quick shot?”

  “Absolutely,” Zane said with a genuine grin, and then trotted out his well-worn line. “Just as long as you tell your wife that I’m even more handsome in real life than I am on TV, I’m happy to take all the pictures with you that you want.”

  As he knew they would, the group bust up laughing at that one.

  Some things never change.

  Chapter 9

  Louisa

  Skyler was in his wheelchair as Louisa bent over him, her hands around his hips as they worked together to transfer him to the recliner. She paused, though, deciding on the spur of the moment to deal with a problem that’d been simmering for a while.

  “Hold on, Skyler, let’s ease back into your chair.”

  He sat back and looked up at her, surprised. After her being there for a couple of weeks, his overt hostility had disappeared for the most part, but he still didn’t trust her. No, they were a long ways from that.

  “Turns out, you’ve been transferring wrong all of this time,” she said, hoping her smile would take some of the sting out of her words. No one liked being told they were doing something wrong. “It’s been a while since you started transferring yourself from one place to another, so I’m gonna guess it’ll take a while for you to unlearn and then relearn the right way, but if you do, you’ll find that it’s a hell of a lot easier to move from one spot to another all by yourself, and also when someone else is helping you.”

  “What am I doing wrong?” he asked suspiciously. “I move all of the time by myself, so I can’t be bad.”

  “You’re making it work, for sure,” Louisa reassured him. “But it’s like going uphill in your wheelchair with the handbrake halfway in place. Sure, you can do it, but you’re putting in way too much effort for that gain. Here’s the trick: You need to start leaning away from where you want to move, not towards it.”

  At this bit of instruction, Skyler gave her a clearly skeptical look, and she laughed. “I know, I know, it sounds weird, but it works a hell of a lot better. Let’s practice for a minute.”

  She put her hands down at his hips and together they transferred to the recliner and then back again. It took him several tries, but soon, he was transferring like a pro. She shouldn’t have been surprised by how quickly he picked up on it – unlike adults, kids weren’t stuck axle deep in how it was always done.

  “Wow, Louisa, this is so much easier!” he crowed, his face lighting up with excitement. “Why didn’t anyone else show me this?”

  Louisa just flashed him a smile but tactfully chose not to answer him. Honestly, chances were damn high that they had shown him the right way when he was in rehab, but when he’d shut down on the physical
therapists and had refused to work anymore, she guessed they’d given up trying to rectify mistakes he was making. Why try if he wasn’t?

  But here was a mark in the win column. This, along with a hundred other tiny wins, would add up, and Skyler would start trusting her that she knew what the hell she was doing, and he would start believing her when she told him he could walk again.

  One baby step at a time.

  Once he was actually settled in the recliner where he’d wanted to go, she asked him the question she’d been working on in the background for a while now. “How would you feel about kayaking down at Wolf’s Bend Lake?” she asked casually. “Go out, kayak around, get some sun?”

  He hesitated. “I…I don’t know how to swim without…” He gestured at his legs, thin and knobby and useless as a pair of pick-up sticks. “What if I fall in?”

  “Well, a couple of things. First off, you’ll have a lifejacket on, so even if you do fall in, you’ll be able to bob along until we can fish you back out again. But that’s just the back-up plan – I called and made sure that the kayak rental place has outriggers, which are basically these big floaties that stick out from either side of a kayak like airplane wings,” she held her arms out to demonstrate, “which makes a kayak super stable. I’m not gonna say that it’s impossible to flip a kayak over with outriggers on it because if you want something badly enough, you can almost always make it happen, but you would have to really, really want it, and be trying to do it. Plus,” she leaned forward like she was revealing a secret she didn’t want anyone else to hear, “I was thinking about asking your dad to come along. What do you think about that?”

  The skepticism and doubt disappeared, and a huge flash of excitement took its place. “You think you could make him come?!” Skyler squealed in that high-pitched boy’s voice that would disappear all too quickly with the onset of hormones. “I don’t know. He doesn’t…” As quickly as it appeared, though, the excitement faded away, replaced by pure disbelief. “Well, if you can get my dad to come, I’ll come,” he said in a bored voice as he picked up the remote from the arm of the recliner and clicked on the TV.

  There was a part of her that was irked by his high-handed dismissal of her – she was the adult here, after all – but she smothered that down. She knew what he was doing. She knew that he didn’t want to show how much he really wanted his dad there, because if Zane didn’t show up, it would hurt all the more. Better to act as if it didn’t matter one way or the other to him. He was an old hand in this battle for affections, and was damn used to losing.

  “I’ll let you know,” she promised him as she headed out of the room and back up the stairs. He didn’t bother to look away from the TV as she went.

  Now, she just had to convince Zane to take more than a passing interest in his own son. Basically, an impossible task, but she liked the challenge.

  Chapter 10

  Zane

  He sat in the study, the oppressive dark maroon and forest green colors swallowing him whole. It was a study straight out of a Victorian novel – dark wood, dark fabric, too-formal furniture. Not his style, any more than the rest of the house was.

  Handicap houses aren’t exactly a dime a dozen, especially in the middle of Nowhere, Idaho.

  He ought to just count his blessings that one was available so close to the therapy camp – just the next town over – but after living in his custom-built home in Nashville, this place just felt…

  Not like home.

  He twirled his whiskey glass in his hand absentmindedly as he stared into the dancing flames of the electric fireplace. No heat – it was too warm in the middle of summer for heat, even up in the mountains of Idaho – but the flames were nice to look at. They made him think, and tonight, his thoughts were certainly drifting.

  What did he want out of life? Did he want to start singing again? Touring again?

  Yes!

  Even through the pleasant haze of alcohol running in his veins, his soul was jumping up and down at the mere thought of getting back on the road again. To tour, to sing for screaming fans…

  Yes, that was absolutely what he wanted.

  His head thumped against the tall back of the chair and he stared up at the ceiling, groaning. He couldn’t go back to touring. He knew that. What if they got into another wreck on the way to another awards ceremony? What if it killed Skyler that time? It was bad enough to lose Tamara, but they’d been headed for divorce anyway. They both knew it. Not that she’d deserved to die or that he’d wanted her to, but he also couldn’t pretend that the great love of his life had died that night.

  But the only reason they were in that car was because of Zane’s career. If Zane were just a salesman or firefighter or computer programmer, Tamara never would’ve died.

  Because of Zane, his son had lost the one person in his life who knew what the hell to do with him, and Zane sure hadn’t stepped up his game since then. He knew he was failing his son, but he just felt so damn lost. He’d heard that you often mimic your parents when you become a parent, even if you didn’t mean to, and the way Zane figured it, that was damn spot-on. You couldn’t find two more worthless people as parents than Zane’s had been.

  And that was exactly how he was turning out to be as a father – worthless.

  When Tamara had been alive, the raising of Skyler had been one of their biggest flash points. Nothing started off a fight faster than discussing their son. Zane had been so damn sure that if it’d been up to him, he’d be doing all of the right things – making completely different choices than Tamara was making.

  Well, he got half of that right – he was definitely making different choices than Tamara. She would’ve died rather than let someone else raise her son. There at the end, being a mother was all she wanted to do. Being a trophy wife rankled her soul, because it was supposed to be her up there. It was supposed to be her making it big. And by God, if she wasn’t going to make it big in her own right, then she could at least be a damn good mother.

  No, being a trophy wife wasn’t for her, although she sure as shit didn’t mind spending money like one.

  He stared blearily down at his whiskey glass, realizing thickly that it was empty. That wasn’t possible – he’d just poured some a minute ago. Hell, maybe he’d only thought he’d poured some. Maybe he’d gotten sidetracked and hadn’t actually done it.

  Comforted by the thought, he sloshed some more into his glass and settled back into his chair, letting the flames mesmerize him.

  Louisa…

  The thought of her drifted, unbidden, to the forefront of his mind. Now there was someone who knew how to raise a child. She was the kind of person who should have five kids, and who would make the raising of them look effortless. She’d mentioned, several days after it’d happened, about the honey on her hairbrush. Instead of hysterics and demands that he make Skyler pay or else, Louisa had simply laughed about it, and had told him about her “revenge.” Getting his son into better shape was her idea of revenge? Not that he was complaining, he was just confused. Revenge to him were live snakes in bed, or turning off the hot water when someone was taking a shower, or switching the contents of the salt and the sugar containers.

  And then, as if the mere thought of her had somehow made her appear, she was standing in front of him, talking to him about Skyler.

  “When’d you come in?” he asked, talking over whatever she’d been saying, his words coming out weirdly slurred. That wasn’t right. He wasn’t drunk – he knew he wasn’t. So why was everything so hazy? And why wasn’t his tongue working right? He took another sip of whiskey, just to wet his mouth. Maybe that was his problem – dry mouth. Nothing more than that.

  She heaved a sigh and then started again, ignoring his question. “I want your permission to take Skyler to Wolf’s Bend Lake and go kayaking with him. I think being out in the sun would be a really good idea for him. When we aren’t at therapy camp, he’s inside, hiding in front of the TV or the game console. I think that—”

  Bu
t he wasn’t listening anymore. His mind was wandering into more…delicious areas of thought as he watched her tits bounce up and down with every exaggerated sweeping movement of her hands. She liked to talk with her hands. He rather thought that if someone tied her hands behind her back, she’d instantly go mute. Incapable of talking without them.

  Incapable…

  What a funny word. He moved it around and around in his mind, prodding at it like it was some creature about to come to life. Funny words. Was he funny? He felt funny. Hot. Flushed. Blurry around the edge.

  It couldn’t be the alcohol, though. He’d barely had anything to drink. Maybe he was coming down with something.

  Funny, funny, funnnnyyyyy…

  “So what do you think?”

  His eyes snapped up to hers. Well, more like sloshed their way up to hers. He was moving through liquid, and that was just…weird.

  “What?” he croaked, and then cleared his throat. “What?” he asked again.

  She planted her hands on her hips and glared down at him. “Did you hear anything I said?” she demanded.

  “Yes. Ummm…boating. You wanted to go out boating. On a lake.” He was rather proud of himself for pulling that out of his ass. He toasted himself and took another sip of his whiskey as a reward.

  “Kayaking,” she corrected, clearly peeved. “On Wolf’s Bend Lake. I would like you to come, too.”

  “Me?” he asked blankly. If she’d asked him to climb onto a rocket and fly to the moon, he couldn’t have been more surprised. He didn’t go hang out with his son at the lake. Or anywhere else for that matter. This was why he hired Louisa – so she’d take care of Skyler. Leave Zane to…