Strummin' Up Love

by Erin Wright

  “Really?” Jennifer said, surprised. She’d given up on trying to hand-feed Flint and was letting him do the job now. He looked like he’d taken a bath in crumbled cookies…and was completely delighted about it. She was sitting back in the kitchen chair, watching Louisa closely. “So what do you think that means for Skyler?”

  “Not much at all if I can’t convince him it’s true,” Louisa said with a dispirited shrug. “Nothing matters more than how much a patient wants something, and Skyler gave up way back when he was still in the hospital. He didn’t think he’d get any better, therefore, he didn’t get any better. We’ve started doing exercises together every day before going to camp – I hold the controller for the console hostage until he does them with me – but he’s only half-hearted at best. If I can just get him to believe…”

  Carmelita hugged her tightly. “Mi sobrina,” she said quietly into Louisa’s hair, and then pulled back. “You have always cared so much about other people – it is one of your biggest strengths. You are in Skyler’s life for a reason. Do not question Dios. He knows what He’s doing. Now,” she said in a happier tone of voice, “let us carry some of this food outside. I am sure everyone is ready to eat, eh?”

  With a woebegone look at the platter of cookies, Louisa picked up a hot bowl of green beans with bacon bits, plopped a serving spoon in it, and carried it outside to the buffet table set up off to the side. It was a bright summer’s day, which also meant a hot summer’s day, and Louisa was glad to see that the Millers had thought to set up canopies to shade them from the sun. There were a few pine trees at the edge of the lawn but with the sun coming straight down on them, there wasn’t any way to scoot under them to find some shade.

  With reluctant groans, Skyler and Juan left the sandbox behind, covered almost head to toe in sand and grit, and went inside to clean up. Louisa looked at her aunt and noticed the tight corners of her mouth, and grinned to herself. She was probably counting down the minutes until everyone would leave and she could clean up her doubtlessly dirty floor.

  After all of the food had been carried out of the house and placed on the groaning buffet tables, everyone began serving up. Louisa spotted a petite woman with fiery red hair maneuvering around with a cane in her hand, which brought Louisa up short. She was much too young to be using a cane, and Louisa wondered what her story was, and which Miller brother she was married to. She also saw a larger woman – not fat, but lots of work muscle on her – juggling two plates. One was Declan’s wife and one was Wyatt’s wife, and Louisa entertained herself while waiting in line by guessing who was paired up with whom.

  After she filled up her plate to the brim with only a small portion of the food her tia had laid out, Louisa carefully carried it back to a table and slipped in beside Jennifer. Skyler and Juan were at a table by themselves, eating and making what appeared to be farting noises to each other, laughing uproariously together. She pretended deafness. As long as they weren’t fighting, Louisa could put up with almost anything.

  “Louisa,” Jennifer said while carefully guiding a spoonful of mashed potatoes into Flint’s mouth, “this is Abby,” the dark-haired woman raised her hand in greeting, “and this is Iris.” The redhead farther down the table next to Declan raised her hand in greeting. Well, that answers that question. “Abby and Iris, this is Louisa. She’s helping take care of Skyler this summer. Abby is married to my oldest brother-in-law, Wyatt, and Iris is married to Declan. None of us women have killed our husbands yet, and thus we consider ourselves to be highly successful in our marriages.”

  “Hear, hear,” said Declan, raising his glass in a mock toast. “As one of the men in question, I appreciate my wife’s tolerance, and the fact that I’m on the green side of the grass. Thanks, sweetie.” He popped Iris a kiss on the lips as everyone roared with laughter.

  Louisa sat back and listened as the talking flowed around them, enjoying the food and the company and the warmth of the summer day. It would be back to snow soon enough. For right now, she was happy to revel in the high 80s.

  She caught eyes with Zane who was sitting further down the table next to Carmelita, and he gave her a silent toast with his beer bottle, a happy grin on his face. Instead of being overwhelmed by the sheer number of new people who were there, he was in his element. He was clearly such an extrovert that it made her wonder again why he was spending so much of his time out of the spotlight and away from people. This was where he was happiest – why torture himself by secluding himself far away from everyone and everything?

  You, Zane Risley, are one big mystery, and I absolutely cannot unwrap all of your protective layers to ‘solve’ you, no matter how much I’d love to…

  And that was something she could not let herself forget.

  Chapter 16

  Louisa

  She picked up the baby bib from the craft market display and laughed to herself. I’m the world’s cutest tax deduction was embroidered across the front of it. This would be perfect for Jennifer’s baby, Flint, considering she was an accountant for small business owners. Louisa was debating between that one and My fingers may be small, but I still have my grandma wrapped around them when a small ruckus broke out behind her. She looked around and saw Zane being piled on by a ton of tourists, squeals and high-pitched laughter ringing out from the aggressive group.

  Dammit.

  They’d been having such a lovely morning down at the Franklin crafts fair, just browsing, Skyler trying to find the perfect present for Carmelita’s upcoming 70th birthday party, but now…

  Zane was signing a few autographs and posing for pictures, but she knew him well enough by now to know that he wasn’t happy. He looked up and caught her eye and mouthed, Sorry, as if it were his fault that he was being mugged by people who had no concept of personal space.

  Impulsively, Louisa put the two bibs down – she’d pick something out later – and strode over to the group.

  “Okay, okay, that’s enough,” she said, trying to put a happy face on while still being blunt about the reality of the situation. “Mr. Risley here needs his privacy. Let’s give him some space.”

  She made shooing motions with her hands, trying to brush them off, when a male voice behind her muttered, “What’s with the spic thinking she can boss us around?”

  Louisa spun on her heel, her cheeks flushing red with anger, trying to find the person who made the comment but whoever he was, he was too much of a coward to meet her eye and own up to what he said.

  Bastard.

  She looked at Zane and the thunderous look on his face…she knew he’d heard it too. Zane finished his signature on the piece of paper a woman was thrusting at him and then pushed his way out of the crowd even as people surged forward, trying to get closer. “Skyler,” he barked, and then took off at a trot for the Audi. Louisa swept in behind Skyler, grabbed the handles of his wheelchair, and began following on Zane’s heels, running over one person who’d gotten too close and refused to back off.

  “Hey!” the woman yelled. “That was my foot!”

  “And that was my peaceful Saturday morning!” Louisa yelled back. “So we’re even.”

  Skyler lifted himself into his seat in the Audi, Louisa collapsed the wheelchair down into the carrying position, slid it inside, and hurried around to the driver’s seat as the woman yelled back, “You can’t talk to me like that! I wasn’t doing anything wrong!”

  Louisa slid inside the SUV and slammed the driver’s side door shut, blocking out all sound before she could be tempted to do something that’d make the headlines of every gossip rag in the country. She threw the vehicle into reverse and tore out of the parking lot.

  She gripped the steering wheel like her life depended upon it, feeling the anger grow larger with each passing moment instead of subsiding. Spic? Spic?! How dare they—

  “How are you, Skyler, are you okay?” she asked, her voice deliberately calm, as if they were out for nothing more than a Sunday afternoon drive. Nothing was wrong. Nothing bad was happening. Ev
erything was fine.

  “What happened?” Skyler asked, his voice high and reedy like it always was when he was scared. Louisa blew out a breath. She was causing him to panic. That wasn’t okay.

  She purposefully relaxed her shoulders and the grip on the steering wheel. “Someone—” she said at the same time that Zane started, “There was—”

  They both stopped.

  Zane sent her a sideways glance. “It was you they were calling names,” he said quietly. “Would you like to explain? Or would you prefer I do it?”

  “Someone back there called me…called me a…a spic.” She couldn’t believe she’d just said that word. She’d take the Lord’s name in vain before she said something so foul, and that was really saying something.

  “A spi—”

  “Don’t say that word,” Louisa said savagely, and she realized that the world was watery and dammit all, she was crying. She pulled over onto the shoulder of the road, flipped on the emergency blinkers, and took a few shuddering breaths. Why was it that she cried when she wasn’t sad? She was pissed. She was angry. She had a ball of fire and anger boiling inside of her.

  She was not sad.

  “Sorry,” she said into the silence. She unbuckled her seat belt and turned in the driver’s seat to look back at Skyler. He looked horrified. Crushed. Even when he’d put salt in her coffee and honey in her hairbrush, she’d never yelled at him. “I’m sorry,” she said again, softer this time. “I’m not mad at you. I want you to know that. You haven’t done a damn thing wrong. That…word is a very, very bad word. It’s a really awful way of saying that I’m Hispanic. There’s a similar word for black people that starts with an N – if I ever catch you saying that word, I’ll paddle your ass so hard, you won’t be able to sit for a week. You hear me?”

  Skyler nodded, his brilliant blue eyes, just like his father’s, were huge. Distraught.

  “When people call a Hispanic person a…that word, they’re saying that I am less than them. I am less important. I don’t matter, not really. In their small little brains, this makes them feel better, because I feel worse. But truthfully, I probably have more years of education than that bastard back there. I’m sure I make more than him. Hell, I probably made more than him when I worked down at the hospital. We had people transfer in from all over the nation just to get our specialized care in our hospital, the kind of care they couldn’t get anywhere else, because we were damn good at what we did.” The anger was rising again, threatening to boil out of control. “I’m smart, dammit,” she yelled, pounding her fist on the steering wheel. “No one gets to call me a—”

  She stopped herself. She was breathing hard, like she’d just run a mile. She wanted to scream at the injustice of it all. A little bit of extra melatonin in her skin, and she was somehow sub-human?

  “I’m sorry, cariño,” she said softly. “I have a lot of pride in my heritage. People who look at me or Tia Carmelita and only see the color of our skin are not people I want to ever be around. I guess it’s better if they say terrible things about me so I know who they really are, and can avoid them, right? Makes it easier to spot ‘em.”

  “I wish I’d heard him,” Skyler said savagely. “I woulda punched him in the nuts.”

  Zane let out a choked laugh. Even Louisa felt herself smile just a bit. “Although I appreciate your willingness to punch a full-grown man in the nuts for me,” she said dryly, “my mom would say that violence never helped anything. There are days when it’s awfully tempting, though.”

  She felt a little calmer, a little more capable of driving, and so she put the SUV into gear and pulled back out onto the road. “The truth is, Sky, most all of us face discrimination in one form or another. Me, because I am a woman and Hispanic. You, because you’re in a wheelchair. You’re going to have people who can’t look past the wheels and will think that you’re stupid or deaf or something, because your legs don’t work. Be prepared to explain to people that just because your legs don’t do what you want them to doesn’t mean your ears can’t still be in fine working order.” She could tell he wanted to interrupt – probably to talk more about punching people in the nuts – and so she hurried on to the important part, before they could get sidetracked into when it was appropriate to hit people and when it wasn’t.

  “You want to know what the best revenge is, Skyler?” she asked, and then plunged on before he could answer. “Doing awesome things with your life. If someone thinks you are less than because of the color of your skin or the usefulness of your legs, you prove them wrong. You go to school for years, and you work hard and graduate in the top 1% of your class, and you get a job at one of the finest hospitals in the nation, and you get promoted because you’re good at what you do, and you don’t let anyone ever tell you what you can or cannot do. The only boundaries you have in life are the ones you set on yourself.”

  She felt like a football coach in one of those dramatic sports movies, right before the team runs out onto the field and makes a comeback to win the game, but she couldn’t help herself. She wanted Skyler to know this – no, needed him to know this, for himself.

  She pulled into the garage of the mansion, the lights turning on automatically, the garage door closing behind them, but still, it was quiet inside of the SUV. After her rah-rah-rah speech, Louisa wasn’t really sure what else to say. Skyler didn’t move for a little while, just thinking, and then finally he said, “Okay.”

  She smiled at him in the rearview mirror. “You ready to go inside?” she asked, more than ready herself to lighten the mood.

  He pushed the button on the door, waited for it to open silently, shook open the wheelchair and placed it just outside of the door, eased himself into it, and then looked up at Louisa with a taunting grin. “Beat you inside!” he crowed, and sped off through the mudroom door and into the house.

  “You cheater!” she called out after him, fumbling with her seat belt and finally flinging it off. She tore off after him but of course, he’d already made it to the kitchen by time she got inside.

  “Since I beat you inside, can I go play on the Xbox?” he asked hopefully. Those gorgeous blue eyes were trained on her again, and she knew she was a goner. She couldn’t believe how susceptible she was to them. Where was her tough-stuff exterior that she’d always used with her brothers and sisters?

  “Yes,” she said with a sigh, and he whooped with delight, tearing off for the elevator before she could change her mind.

  “You did good,” Zane said quietly behind her, and she clutched at her heart as she spun in a half-circle.

  “Dios mío,” she muttered under her breath. Somehow, just for a moment or two, she’d forgotten about Zane, which considering how he normally set her nerve-endings on fire whenever he was in the same zip code as her, was really saying something.

  “You want something to drink?” Zane asked, heading for the fridge and pulling out a longneck for himself.

  “No, I’m okay,” she said, waving off the offer. It was only 11:30 in the morning – a little early to start drinking in her opinion – but then again, what they’d just gone through would probably drive the pope to drink.

  “Why did you quit the hospital?”

  The question fell like a bomb in the quiet between them.

  Chapter 17

  Zane

  He knew he was kind of a bastard for pushing Louisa like this, especially after such a rough morning – screw that, I am a bastard – but after listening to her passionate speech about all that she did at the hospital, and it being the finest in the nation…

  There was something there, something huge, and he wanted to know what it was. As her employer, maybe it wasn’t any of his business, but as her friend…

  He needed to know.

  “I wanted to spend more time with my family,” Louisa said, her gaze slipping away from him like a soap bubble sliding over the surface of the water.

  “Bullshit,” he said bluntly. Her eyes snapped up to his and that now infamous Latina side of her cam
e swinging into action.

  “Are you calling me a liar?” she demanded.

  “I am,” he said calmly. “At least about this. I looked it up on Google Maps – Salt Lake City and Sawyer are equidistant from your hometown of Pocatello. If you really wanted to spend more time with your family, Sawyer isn’t any closer to Pocatello than Salt Lake is. And don’t try to give me any bullshit about how Carmelita is family also. She is, but you sure as hell didn’t quit your job at the hospital with the expectation that I would hire you and move you over to this side of the state. I didn’t even know that I needed to hire you, considering I came here with an aide on the plane sitting next to me. I didn’t expect to hire anyone at all. So tell me: Why did you quit the hospital?”

  She ground her teeth furiously, her brown eyes brilliant with anger and some emotion he couldn’t identify. She looked like she was ready to punch him.

  He was pretty sure that if she did, he’d probably deserve it.

  But still, he kept eye contact with her, refusing to look away, refusing to back down.

  “Dr. Matthew Funk,” she finally said, pronouncing each word like she’d pronounced spic. “He was my boss…and my boyfriend. I was that stupid, naïve nurse who fell in love with the doctor.” She shook her head disdainfully. “You two look a lot alike, by the way,” she said in an off-hand tone of voice, as if mentioning that day’s weather to him. Zane’s eyebrows snapped together. He did not want to look like this douchebag. He knew virtually nothing about the man, but he did know that. “I almost didn’t take this job because of it. Freaked me out a little. But I’d signed a contract, and…” She waved the thought away. “We weren’t supposed to be dating, of course. He’s my boss, for heaven’s sakes. It breaks every rule in the book. But I made him into a better man and completed him and la-di-da. You know the bullshit line you feed a woman when you want to get into her panties.”