Music & Lyrics: The Wilder Books #4

When Mariliz Jennings agrees to the live-in nanny position for a Nashville musician’s family, she has no idea what she’s getting into. The musician is Alex Beaumont, drummer for the band Wilder. And his wife Bridget is . . . disturbingly absent.

Mariliz steps into what she can only call a cacophony of dysfunction. The older daughter, Olivia, is an angel, but Sophie is a two-year-old terror. Deaf from birth and not a candidate for a cochlear implant, she’s never learned to communicate by any way other than tantrums. Appalled, Mariliz begins to teach the girl to sign, finally giving her language and structure. So what if she never sees the children’s parents? Bridget is on a perpetual vacation and Alex is always leaving . . .

But one night, she sees him with his youngest daughter, and the little girl refuses to sign for him. He’s desperately trying to teach the girl to speak like a hearing child, hoping beyond hope that he can make her seem normal and his wife will come home. Mariliz can’t stay in a home this broken, but surprise divorce papers show up and her world gets flipped upside down again. She can’t leave the girls she’s grown to love either. And she certainly can’t handle it when Alex looks at her that way . . .