Page 210 of The Nanny and the Beefcake
“Do you want us to come with you?” Char asked, snapping her back.
Libby stood and pocketed her cell. “I’m good. I’ll be okay on my own. With my luck, she probably found a forgotten vibrator.”
“Or ten,” Harper teased. “You are the queen when it comes to battery-operated boyfriends. Even people floating around in outer space know it,” H finished, gifting her with a grin, but there was concern in her sassy friend’s eyes.
Penny rested her arms across the back of the bench and eyed Charlotte. “We’ll hang out here and reminisce about the time Char forgot she was wearing a skirt, hung upside down from the monkey bars, then flashed half of the boys in our fifth-grade class.”
“That wasn’t me,” Charlotte shot back, her red hair whipping over her shoulder as she gawked at Penny. “That was Harper.”
“Oh, no, that was you, Char,” Harper corrected. “Wait, no, I think it was you, Penn.”
Penny’s jaw dropped. “Oh my gosh, it was me, wasn’t it?”
Libby drank in her girls, and her battered heart took comfort in their presence. “I love you guys.”
“We love you, too, Libbs,” the girls replied as the foursome embraced.
“Now, go get your ten vibrators,” Harper directed. “We’ll be here to help you carry the load.”
They would. They always would.
Libby gave her friends one last look, then headed toward the rec center, listening to the girls go back and forth over the case of the fifth-grade flashing, so grateful to have these women in her life. But as the sounds of the playground and her besties’ chatter faded away, a strange sense of déjà vu set in.
She came around a gentle bend and spied a stack of rocks and her heart ached. “How is this the right path?” she whispered to herself as a black blur flashed in her peripheral vision.
A crow glided through the air, sailing past her before landing on a nearby tree limb. She kept an eye on the bird. The winged creature appeared to be watching her, as well. The bird flew from perch to perch as she moved down the trail.
“Just don’t crap on me, buddy,” she cautioned, and now she’d clearly entered the conversing-with-animals portion of her heartbreak. But this bird had a familiarity to it. Yes, it was your typical black crow, yet the bird vibed with her.
“Catch you later, bird, namaste,” she said as the rec center’s entrance came into sight. But before she’d left the trail, a jingling sound caught her attention. She’d barely blinked when an arm shot out from the center of a bush—an arm adorned with several bracelets.
The nature lover’s back was to her as the bush dweller twisted her way out of the leafy foliage.
It was a woman.
“I talk to that crow, too, Libby Lamb,” the mysterious foliage frolicker chimed.
Libby gasped and pressed her hand to her chest at the sound of a woman’s voice.
Who was this?
And how did the covert shrub bandit know her name?
Thirty-Two
Libby
“Libby, it’s Ida.”
Libby caught her breath as a jolt of adrenaline hit her system. “Sorry, Ida, I didn’t see you there, chilling in the bushes.”
Ida dusted several leaves from her green tunic and plucked a small twig from her white, flowing hair. “I was meditating with a butterfly.”
“Good, great, yeah, butterflies have terrific energy. And you do find them outside in bushes,” she blathered, her pounding heart beginning to slow.
Ida raised her hand, and a butterfly landed on her palm like she was Snow White, albeit the crystal-wearing, leaf-covered, yogi sage version. “They do. They teach us that we’re capable of great transformation.”
Libby watched the brightly colored insect open and close its wings a few times before flittering down the trail. She and Ida stood together, silently looking on as the butterfly disappeared, and a crow—that same crow—settled itself in the branches of a birch tree not far from them.
