She giggled, and her breath went through him like shock therapy, making the hair on his arms, legs, nape, and crown stand on end. Healing him.
“I never told you, but I have a camping mattress I think will fit perfectly in this little darkroom.” She squeezed her legs around his hips.
“If we make it out of the shower . . .”
“Eeeewww.” A voice hoarse with sleep made Abby freeze in his arms.
She buried her head in his shoulder and groaned, then slowly unwrapped her legs and slid her feet to the ground. “I was just going to ask if you thought the little demon children heard us.”
“You two are revolting.” Dawson stretched and shifted, peering at them with half a face showing from beneath the blanket.
“Good, then we’re practicing proper parenting techniques.” Abby touched Gray’s cheek and turned with calm toward his son. As always, he marveled at her innate skill with him.
Dawson, with brows furrowed, looked like a gopher poking out of his hole. “My mom would have yelled at me for hearing what you guys just said. Kind of the no-sex-I’m-British thing. This is why I want to stay here. It’s more, I dunno, real.” He scowled. “Even if it’s really disturbing.”
“Think how wonderfully disturbed he’d be if you’d been his mother all along.” Gray couldn’t help himself. He was too immersed in his dream to be politically correct. “No offense to your real mother.”
Dawson shrugged, unconcerned. Abby batted him with a firm hand.
“You need to be kinder to Ariel. She isn’t a horrible mother, or you’d never have left your son in her care. And he’s a good kid—look what he did for Kim.”
“I’m right here,” Dawson mumbled. “My ears work.”
“You still want to stay?” Abby asked him.
Gray’s heart pumped nervousness into his system. The thought of duking it out with Ariel was still a weak spot for him, but before he could counsel caution, Abby and Dawson were negotiating.
“You know I do.”
“Well, you should know I want you to stay, too. I’d love you to go to school here, get your driver’s license, play baseball. I’m not your mother, Dawson, but I love you anyway. I’ll help your dad negotiate with your mom if you promise to understand there are probably just as many rules here as there were in England.”
“Abby, I . . .” Gray looked from Abby to his son, still not certain this promise was a good idea. He had no idea if Ariel would allow this without a fight.
“I’ll do rules.” Dawson dropped the blanket and changed from timid gopher to scrappy wolverine. “Dad. I just want to stay here. With you.”
What the hell could he say to that? With a sigh he realized Ariel didn’t hold every single good card in the deck. “I want you to stay, Son. Very much.”
Abby turned her bright aquamarine eyes on him with joy. “That’s all it takes from you, Gray. You are a master of public relations. You need to turn some of your charm on Ariel and let the animosity go. Don’t treat her like an enemy. She has to be an ally. If you do that, I think she’ll fall all over herself letting him stay here for the school year. I do.”
“Yeah, Dad. Be nice to her instead of being a jerk.”
Now the kid had gone from wolverine to pathetic, begging spaniel. For the barest instant his words and Abby’s stung. Then he laughed out loud. Abby was right—as right about him as he’d been about her. Lord, how they needed each other.
“Fine,” he said, staring deep into Abby’s smiling eyes, talking to Dawson. “I’ll banish the jerk. I’ll make it work for you to stay. Now, is that all or will you go back to sleep now, so we can shower and go to bed?”
“Oh, man!” Dawson threw the quilt over his head and disappeared.
“Goodnight, Dawson,” Abby called, laughing. Silence. She lifted her lips to Gray’s ear. “I’m impressed, Mr. White Knight. You seem to have saved the day again.”
The compliment burrowed deep into his heart, as he led her out of the room. He’d told her he had patience—he’d lied.
Patience had never been his strong suit.
Chapter Thirty
MAX YASGUR HAD nothing on Chuck Tupy when it came to land contribution for a music festival. Music reverberated across Chuck’s farmland adjacent to the state park. No rain, no naked hippies, no smashed guitars—but this had Woodstock beat hands-down.
Abby swiveled her head trying to burn Kabbagestock images into her mind. An ocean of bodies undulated like tropical waves over a beach of blankets spread edge-to-edge. Kids, parents, and grandparents stood, sat, stomped, clapped, whistled, and called, all united temporarily over the same music. Teens who’d escaped security hung like monkeys from surrounding trees, toddlers and grandpas alike danced across what, days before, had been a Guernsey pasture.
Gray and his band struck the last chord of what had started as Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. A pulse-destroying cymbal crash carried into the crowd to be swallowed by eight-thousand cheers. Part of Gray’s unique claim to fame was playing, at each show, a classical music piece. He could coax symphonic sounds from his band while he showed off his early training with a variety of musical instruments. But then he would slowly ratchet up the tempo and let his musicians rock out on Beethoven, Mozart, Tchaikovsky.
Rock’s Rachmaninoff.
Kennison Falls kids who’d never known classical music could be cool cheered like crazed soccer fans. The oldest residents, dutifully showing solidarity by being there, stared glassy-eyed at the corruption of sacrosanct classics.
Abby turned to Karla and threw her arms around her friend in a triumphant embrace. To say the camp, held for three days before the concert, had been a success would have been like saying the tornado had caused a little damage.
“My gosh, he’s amazing,” Karla hollered as the crashing chords wound down.
Abby looked to the stage and caught the full force of Gray’s smile. Her heart banged in her chest like a bongo out of sync. More than amazing. He was weak-in-the-joints sexy. No spangles adorned him today, just his thousand-dollar jeans encasing his long legs, a well-fitted, black T-shirt, bearing pictures of the Beatles from the White Album, and his scuffed Nikes.
Abby raised her camera, twisting the telephoto lens to close in on the sweat-curled ends of his shaggy hair and the embroidered guitar strap straining across his shoulders. She’d already exposed three rolls of film in ninety minutes trying to preserve the hot motion in still photos.
She didn’t care if he ever wore a sequin again—this plain, body-hugging look got her blood pumping fast and hot. Or was it the sexy voice? Or the depth of his skill? Or the way he managed to make his gaze sear into her until every other person in the wild crowd disappeared?
She swung her lens away from him and focused on her daughter, who, along with three of her best friends, hovered stage-left, giggling like hyenas on banned substances. They’d been christened “Lunatic-ettes,” and given the status of official band go-fers by Spark. Seeing Kim over-the-moon rather than moony-eyed was an indescribable relief.
“I guess we’ve done enough damage to the classics, what do you think?” Gray called when the song ended. “How about something nobody has ever heard before? Would you let me debut a new song here at Kabbagestock?”
The crowd’s raucous approval continued, and Gray found Abby’s eyes once more. After working with him side-by-side for the week, and falling more deeply in love with his amazing spirit and drive, she’d come to believe she could read his emotions. This time she sensed an unusual nervousness in his eyes, and she formed a silent question with her brows.
“This is a collaboration with my son, Dawson, who helped with the arrangement.” Abby glanced behind the crowd, knowing Dawson was with the sound techs. “It’s a little bit of a new sound for us. See what you think.”
She hadn’t heard the tune in six weeks, but it was as familiar as if it played on the radi
o ten times a day.
“A storm-eyed girl took my hand one day . . .”
The music soared, and an unusual, hard edge drove the chorus, even though it was a soft love song. The melody poured over Abby like thunderstorms and sunshine. His promise to her kept in a song. Her song.
She made no attempt to hide her tears. She’d never wanted to live in someone’s shadow again, but she remembered what Gray had told her the day after the tornado. “If you don’t believe you’re good enough, I’ll spend the rest of my life convincing you.”
Without a doubt, she knew he would.
When he finished, the crowd surged to its feet. At first she didn’t hear the low chant rumbling beneath the applause. Then it burst into clarity—sending heat and chills, embarrassment and pride dancing through her body.
Ab-by! Ab-by! Ab-by! Kim and the Lunatic-ettes revved the crowd like circus barkers.
“Ladies and gentlemen, if you haven’t guessed, that song goes out to Kennison Falls’s very own Abby Stadtler. Abby, I think you need to come up and take a bow.”
Mortified, she shook her head. The song had made an unequivocal-enough statement. She’d shout “I love you” back at him this minute, but no way was she ready for front-and-center.
Placing the microphone in its stand, Gray grazed the crowd with his hot-ice eyes and urged them with a “come-on” wiggle of his fingers, garnering more roaring encouragement. When she shook her head again, fighting a trill of excitement and a knot of fear the size of Micky’s bass drum, Gray cupped his hands around imaginary oars and made a rowing motion.
The ball was hers to play. Then, like a last-chance angel offsetting the devil of doubt, Ed appeared at her side. “Go on up there, Abigail. I think he’s got something for you.”
“I . . . but . . . What if . . . ?”
“Nobody can answer the ‘what ifs,’ honey. But if you’re waiting for someone to promise it’ll be all right, then fine, I promise it’ll be all right.”
“You do? Ed?”
He pressed a kiss on her forehead. “It’ll be like having James Bond for a son-in-law.”
Son-in-law? She stared at him as if he’d escaped his padded cell, but he only shooed her toward the stage.
Next thing she knew, Gray reached for her hand. The happiness in his eyes pulled like a tractor beam. When she stood in front of the crowd—in front of him—an unexpected calm descended, and the drumming of fear in her stomach subsided. The surroundings blurred. The man did not. Wasn’t that the key? That, for them, the crowd would always be there, but in the background?
Gray pulled his Les Paul’s strap over his head and handed the guitar to Spark. Without preamble he sank to one knee. The crowd went berserk.
Unamplified, his voice carried to her alone. “I once thought Fate had it in for me. Turns out, I’m her favorite child. The proof is you, Abby. I told you I want you to be the rest of my life. Like it or not, I’m here to prove it in front of all these people. I’d like to be your future, too. Will you marry me?”
He held a gold circlet between his thumb and forefinger, and for a moment her fingers trembled over her mouth, waiting for disbelief to dissipate. Finally, she reached for the ring, and their fingers collided. She yanked on his hand to make him stand.
“Yes,” she whispered, laughter diluting her tears. “I think my rowboat just came in.”
He hauled her into his arms. Just before she closed her eyes, she caught his thumbs-up to Spark onstage and Elliott offstage. Sound from the wild crowd enveloped her.
And the whole world watched as she kissed him.
About the Author
LIZBETH SELVIG lives in Minnesota with her cradle-robbing husband and a border collie that inspired the character Dug “Squirrel!” the Dog in the Disney movie Up. After working as a journalist and editor and raising an equine veterinarian daughter and a talented musician son, Liz entered and won RWA’s Golden Heart®contest in 2010 with her contemporary romance, The Rancher and the Rock Star. In her spare time, she loves to hike, quilt, read, horseback ride, and play with her nearly twenty four-legged grandchildren. You can connect with her on Facebook, Twitter, or her Website: www.lizbethselvig.com.
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Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE RANCHER AND THE ROCK STAR. Copyright © 2012 by Lizbeth Selvig. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition MARCH 2012 ISBN: 9780062134646
Print Edition ISBN: 9780062134653
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