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

by Erin Wright

He stacked his hands behind his head, listening contentedly to the sound of running water as Louisa readied herself in the bathroom. Last night was amazing. Stupendous. Mind blowing. Better than he could’ve ever imagined. He and Louisa were compatible on so many levels. All of the levels.

  Sadly, he was too organized, and he just didn’t have time for Round Four that morning before Buttons showed up, which was really too bad, because he’d been wanting to spend time sucking and licking the inside of Louisa’s elbow. He was curious if it was as sensitive as the back of her knees were.

  Just one more thing he needed to discover about Louisa.

  With a grunt, he pushed himself out of bed and threw on a pair of jeans and a t-shirt. Buttons would be there any minute – punctuality was one of her best features – and as much as he liked her, he still didn’t parade around in front of her in only his birthday suit.

  The doorbell sounded just then, and Louisa let out a squeal of panic as Zane padded out of the room and down the stairs. Right on time, like always.

  He opened the front door and pulled Buttons in for a hug and an air kiss on each cheek.

  “Look at you,” she said admiringly, pulling back and peering up at him square in the face. Even though he knew it wouldn’t be there, there was still a part of him that was surprised when the cloud of smoke didn’t follow her like it always had. She’d finally quit that spring after 42 years of smoking like a chimney, and honestly, it was a not-so-small miracle that no one had died in the process. “I think you’ve got yourself a tan. Finally spending time outdoors?”

  “I am. Horseback riding, kayaking, short hikes around…”

  “Good, good,” Buttons said, but she was already peering around him, looking for Louisa. “Jeffrey, Cade,” she barked. “Bags, please.” The two men behind her, who hadn’t said a word yet, turned and headed back towards the rental SUV. “Not enough coffee yet,” Buttons said by way of explanation. “They’ll wake up in a bit. If you’d had the good sense to try to find yourself while a little closer to civilization, the plane ride wouldn’t have been so long, but I get it. I bet there are a lot of sexy cowboys in Idaho. Maybe I should try to find one–oh my.”

  She cut herself off and headed for the stairs, meeting Louisa partway up them. “Hi, I’m Alice but Zane here calls me Buttons,” she said, holding her hand out to shake Louisa’s. “I don’t even think he knows my real name,” she said in a stage whisper. Zane opened up his mouth to defend himself – he knew her name; he just thought Buttons suited her better – when she continued briskly, “You, dear, are even more gorgeous in real life than you were in the photos that Zane sent me.”

  Louisa looked past Buttons and down to Zane, the surprise clear on her face. “You sent her pictures of me?” she asked, startled. “When did you take pictures of me?”

  “He had to on the sly. That way, I knew which dresses to bring. I can’t bring my whole business here, not even for Zane. It would take weeks just to pack everything up. Where are we doing the fittings?” This question was directed to Zane even as she continued to look Louisa over, her eyes darting over every curve and muscle, taking her all in. “The teal one is all wrong, all wrong,” she muttered to herself. “Don’t even know why I brought it. But the gold one…yes, yes…”

  “There’s a walkout basement downstairs,” Zane said, cutting across Button’s mumblings. “You can have the whole level to yourself. I’ll stay up here until y’all are done.”

  “Excellent,” she said, pleased. “That way, we can spread ourselves out.” And in a whirl of expensive perfume and bags upon bags of dresses and makeup and jewelry and clothes, Buttons and Louisa disappeared into the elevator, Jeffrey and Cade dutifully carrying in yet more bags from outside.

  Zane helped them bring the remaining items in, but then found himself with nothing to do, since he’d promised not to do the one thing he wanted to do more than anything – go downstairs and watch the transformation take place. It would be more dramatic if he didn’t see her until Buttons was done, of course, but a part of Zane ached with the need to be close to her. Why, he hadn’t even had a chance yet to decide if her hair was the color of midnight or obsidian yet.

  Eventually, making himself crazy with the desire to do something, he found himself in his studio, his guitar in hand, picking at the strings, a new song bubbling up inside of him. Not just a change to an old idea, not just a variation on an old song, but a completely new melody teasing him around the edges, tickling his mind, begging to be written.

  How long had it been since he’d been able to compose from scratch? Not just edit and modify but start from nothing and build a song? Too long. Longer than it’d been since he’d gone without drinking, he was sure of that.

  He strummed the guitar and sang the refrain again. Yes. Yes, this would work.

  He was writing again. Something he’d started to think he’d lost forever had come back.

  He wanted to weep in gratitude but instead, he found a paper and pencil and began scribbling down the main chords, the refrain. He had to capture this on paper before it disappeared again.

  CHAPTER 34

  LOUISA

  L OUISA DISCOVERED EARLY ON – roughly 45 seconds in or so – that there wasn’t much to keeping up a conversation with Buttons. Talking was definitely not required, and in fact, she rather thought Buttons would consider it to be an intrusion on the flow of conversation. All Louisa had to do was say, “Ohhh…” and “Uh-huh” occasionally, and let Buttons do the work from there.

  It would be exhausting to be around Buttons for any length of time, but in the short term, Louisa found her nothing short of fascinating, because here was a woman who knew Zane in his element. She knew him back when he was married to Tamara. She knew Tamara. She knew Skyler when he could walk. She knew Zane when he was packing the stadiums and selling out and his records were going triple platinum.

  And somehow, Buttons and Louisa were in perfect agreement – Buttons only wanted to talk about Zane and what he used to be like, and Louisa only wanted to hear about Zane and what he used to be like.

  Not surprisingly, Buttons’ view of Zane’s alcohol consumption was vastly different than it would have been if she’d been in close proximity to him since the car accident. She mentioned a couple of times how Zane was thought of as “the clean and sober one of the bunch” and when the rest of the band would go out drinking and doing drugs, he rarely joined in.

  “I think he realized that it inhibited his creativity,” she said with a shrug, flitting around Louisa, speaking around the pins in her mouth with apparent years of experience in doing so.

  Louisa wanted to ask more questions – probe a little deeper – but Buttons was whinging off again, this time retelling a story that had that patina of having been told many times. The drummer’s girlfriend had gotten into a wreck, and Zane flew the drummer back home in his private plane so he could be there when she went into surgery.

  “Zane will never tell you these stories,” Buttons said in a confidential tone of voice after delivering the end of the story: The good news that the girlfriend made a full recovery. “He is much too modest. Don’t delude yourself into thinking that he’s perfect, though, because he most certainly is not. After all, it was his stubbornness that almost destroyed his career.” She said this last line with the air of someone who fully expected her audience to know just what she was talking about.

  “It did?” Louisa asked, because really, she had no clue what Buttons was talking about.

  “Oh yes. It was all over the news at the time. Did you miss it?” She was gaping at Louisa, stunned that she could’ve missed something so fundamental, but Louisa could only shrug. This didn’t seem the time to mention that she hadn’t even heard of Zane Risley before taking the job. Honestly, she’d never intentionally listened to country music before meeting him, and was only just starting to warm up to the genre. It was definitely an acquired taste for her.

  “Well, Zane got into an argument with his lead guitarist, Dan. Th
ey’d been together since the beginning, and Zane referred to him as the brother he never had. They were tight. And then, they started arguing about the direction of the band and which gigs they should say yes to and which ones they should turn down…it was nasty. Dan ended up leaving the band and taking part of the musicians with him. Zane refused to apologize. Said it was his damn band and he was the only one who could make decisions about it. Of course, news about this ends up in the gossip rags and soon, former backup singers and studio musicians with an ax to grind were all talking to reporters, happy to badmouth him. You can’t get as high as Zane has gotten in the music business without stepping on some toes. Some of it was deserved; most of it was not. But still, in the end, Zane got the reputation that he was a bastard to work for. He is a hard driver, but that’s because he’s a perfectionist. He expects perfection out of himself, and out of everyone else. It doesn’t make him an easy boss to work for, but he is fair, so there’s that.”

  Louisa found this all to be mind-blowing. Zane? Hard to work for? She’d never had such an easygoing boss in all her life. Of course, she’d never had such an easy job in all her life, either. Taking care of one sweet, special, amazing child? She’d been right that this job was going to be a vacation for her.

  She’d been wrong that she’d be able to keep her hands off Zane.

  She let out a long sigh.

  “What was that sigh for?” Buttons looked at her inquisitively, and Louisa was sure the older woman could see straight into her soul.

  “Nothing,” she said airily. “Just thinking about life.” And how I seem destined to make the same mistakes over and over again.

  Except – and this part she didn’t want to admit, not even to herself – this time didn’t seem like a mistake. Was she only fooling herself? Deluding herself?

  Probably.

  “You ought to know – I’ve never seen Zane act like this around a woman. Or, anyone at all,” she added as an afterthought. “Him and Tamara…it was painful to be in the same room as them. They were sticking together for the good of Skyler but if you asked me, they needed to divorce for the good of Skyler. Watching your parents constantly going after each other, bickering and fighting and sniping at each other, can’t be good for anyone. If she hadn’t died in that terrible car wreck, they would’ve divorced – I would bet my business on it. They weren’t good for each other. In fact, they were downright toxic for each other. But you…he’s smitten with you.”

  She leaned forward, all cheerfulness gone from her voice as she stared Louisa threateningly in the eye. “If you toy with his heart,” she said, enunciating every word carefully, “I shall crush you like a bug beneath my foot. Now!” she said, clapping her hands together once, acting for all the world as if she hadn’t just threatened Louisa with death and destruction, “are you ready to see yourself in the mirror?”

  Louisa felt a bit like she’d just suffered a mental whiplash but the idea of finally seeing how the dress looked on her pushed all other worries out of her mind. She nodded, breathing in deep, trying to keep the panic under control. She felt like Cinderella, getting all dressed up for the ball and her prince, but she wasn’t Cinderella, she was Louisa, and for the millionth time, things like this just didn’t happen to Latina girls—

  With a flourish, Buttons pulled the sheet off the mirror the guys had set up earlier and then grinned with obvious self-satisfaction when Louisa gasped. Then she gasped again because the straight pins in the sides of the dress stuck into her – ouch! Damn, that hurts! – but she couldn’t focus on that right now.

  The dress was stunning. She was stunning. Where was Louisa Vargas? The woman in the mirror was not her.

  The beauty of the dress was in its simplicity. The shimmering gold fabric skimmed her curves and then fell to the floor in graceful waves of shine and texture. Somehow, she looked sophisticated and ingenuous; regal and artless at the same time. She had no makeup on and her hair fell down around her, straight as a sheet as always, but the sharp dissonance between her and the dress was easy to ignore, at least for the moment, because all she had eyes for was the dress. She turned and twisted, swinging her hips back and forth lightly, watching as the dress clung and then fell from her curves. She realized there was a brush of cold air against her back and she could feel her hair, tickling at her spine, and so she turned, her back facing the mirror, craning her neck around as she tried to see.

  “Oh,” she whispered.

  Her father would kill her if he saw her in this dress. There wasn’t a back to it, at least none to speak of. There were two lightly glittering strands of gold that criss-crossed each other, holding the sides of the dress together but otherwise baring her back to the air. It wasn’t that so much, though, as how low the back went. The small dimples of her back, right above her ass, were in easy view, and Louisa was sure her ass crack would show if she moved wrong. Her eyes flew to Buttons’ face.

  “My butt,” she croaked.

  “I know, right?” Buttons’ eyes gleamed with satisfaction. “Zane is going to die of lust. He better check on his life insurance policy before he sees you in this dress. Now, before we wiggle you ever-so-carefully out of this dress so I can get to work on adjusting the seams, you need to pick out a pair of shoes to wear. Then the caterer will be here with lunch so you can eat and I can sew, and after that, the hairdresser shows up, and the makeup artist after that. I can only hope I get the alterations done in time. Jeffrey, Cade! Shoes!”

  CHAPTER 35

  ZANE

  T ODAY WAS the longest day on record. He was sure that the scientists were all going to make headlines on the evening news, talking about the fact that the earth had slowed in its revolution around the sun and an extra couple of hours had been somehow shoved into the day. He’d managed to keep himself occupied for a while in his music – finally composing again was the sweetest feeling in the world – and then a phone call to Skyler – who’d spent the whole time trying to convince Zane that they needed to get a dog “just like Maggie Mae” – but after that, he was struggling to occupy his time.

  Why hadn’t he taken up oil painting? Or chainsaw art? Louisa could be gussied up while he went outside and attacked tree stumps with a chainsaw. It seemed like a manly-man sort of thing to do, not to mention that there were enough tree stumps around to keep him occupied for a very long time, and then he could sell his creations at charity auctions for ridiculously high prices. It was about time he got back at his friends, considering they’d done just that to him many a-time. There was a horrific oil painting packed away in a box somewhere that he’d bought from the lead singer of a rival country music band, and he was sure the singer had painted it while blindfolded, just to see how much money he could scalp off his fellow singers.

  A chainsaw bear would be a terrific dose of revenge, since it wasn’t something that could be hidden away in an unused room or the attic. No siree bob, it had to be placed outside, right in the middle of manicured lawns and patches of perfect blossoms. Nothing like spending tens of thousands of dollars on something that hurt the eyes to even look at.

  The elevator door slid open and Buttons stepped out, her eyes filled with mischief even as she solemnly asked, “How does your life insurance policy look?”

  “What?” he asked distractedly, trying to see around Buttons and into the elevator, but there was some sort of dark fabric hanging in midair – or at least that’s what appeared to be happening, which just couldn’t be right – and he couldn’t see Louisa anywhere.

  “Is it up to date?” she asked.

  “Is what up to date?” He was on his tiptoes now, but he still couldn’t see hide nor hair of Louisa. He kept trying to walk towards the elevator but Buttons was somehow in the way, no matter which way he tried to go. Finally, he looked down at her, giving her his full attention since the doors opened.

  “And now,” Buttons said, her voice ringing with satisfaction and mischief and pride, “I give you Louisa Vargas.” She stepped to the side just as the fabric fel
l away and a part of Zane’s brain realized that Jeffrey and Cade must’ve been standing on either side of the elevator, holding the fabric up in the air, but none of that mattered now.

  His brain froze, his hands froze, his legs froze, and all he could do was gape.

  Louisa was…

  More than words. More than description. He’d never seen such a beautiful woman in all his life. Her hair was pulled up into a neat chignon, just a few loose strands trailing down her face and neck to break up the severity of the look. But she could never look severe in this dress. Or in that makeup. Her perfect cupid’s bow mouth was painted a dark red and her eyes were a smoky world of eyelashes and brown irises that Zane wanted to spend the next year doing nothing but studying.

  The gold of the dress was a warm complement to her skin, making it glow, and clinging to her breasts – her natural, perfect breasts, so unlike the balloons that Tamara had – and then shimmering and flowing to the floor like a cascade of physical light. Louisa was turning around then, and Zane heard faint instructions from Buttons to Louisa, telling her what to do, but it wasn’t registering because when her J.Lo ass came into view, the world disappeared completely. The dress fell in folds, giving him a full and unimpeded view of the dimples at the base of her spine. He could see every inch of her back – the two tiny strands of gold offering no coverage at all – and he wasn’t entirely sure he’d ever breathe again.

  She was perfect. Absolutely perfect.

  She was facing forward again and his eyes raised to hers. She was biting her lower lip, obviously worried when he didn’t say anything. He needed to tell her how gorgeous she was. He needed to tell her how much he wanted her.

  “Wow,” he croaked out. Buttons laughed knowingly.

  “Jeffrey, Cade, let’s go. Our work here is done.”

  The men and Buttons began moving items towards the door, but Zane registered none of it. They could’ve been carrying out the sofa and the cabinet full of fine china for all of the attention he was paying them. He only had eyes for Louisa. Still, she was looking at him hesitantly, and he realized that “wow,” although a perfect summation of how he felt, wasn’t exactly eloquent. She moved forward and out of the way of the men as Zane moved forward too, picking up her hands and bringing them to his lips. Somewhere along the line, she’d even had a manicure done. Had he told Nina that he wanted that? He couldn’t remember now. All that mattered was Louisa.