Big Sky Summer

Everything seemed to go still around him and Casey as they stood there, looking at each other in the shade of half a dozen venerable oak and maple trees, the new-mown lawn under their feet. Birds didn’t sing, and the voices of the bake-sale ladies and the congregation inside the church faded to a mere hum. Right then, Walker would have bet the earth had stopped turning and the universe had ceased expanding.

There was so much he wanted, needed, to say to this woman, but his throat was immovable, like a cement mixer with its contents left to dry out and form concrete.

Fortunately—or unfortunately, the jury was still out on that one—church finally let out and people spilled into the yard, streaming colorfully along both sides of the building and through the rear doors, too.

It was Shane who broke the spell, jarring the whole of Creation back into a lurching motion with a happy “Hey, Walker—can you have breakfast with us, after the bake sale is over? Doris is making stacks of blueberry pancakes, and there are always too many—”

Clare appeared at her brother’s side, equally insistent. “Please?” she added. “Mitch will be there, too, and he’s probably planning on bugging Mom about going on the road again. You could run interference!”

Mitch Wilcox, Walker knew, was Casey’s longtime manager. He’d never really liked the man, though there was no denying Wilcox was the best at what he did. Whatever that was.

Casey had regained her composure—if she’d ever lost it—while Walker was still trying to get his vocal cords to come unstuck.

“You’d be welcome,” she said, gently amused, her smile making Walker feel light-headed and very much off his game. “And you don’t have to ‘run interference.’ I can handle Mitch Wilcox just fine.” With that, she sent a mildly reproving glance in Clare’s direction, but the girl was undaunted, all her attention focused on Walker’s face.

“Say you’ll be there,” Clare wheedled, guilelessly wily.

“Yeah,” Shane put in. “’Cause if I have to eat your share of the pancakes on top of mine, I’ll probably puke or something.”

“Shane,” Casey warned sweetly, “this is no place for that kind of talk.”

“Sorry,” Shane said, clearly unrepentant.

Walker knew it would be better to refuse the invitation, especially since it hadn’t been Casey’s idea, but, looking into the hopeful faces of his children, he couldn’t bring himself to say no. “All right,” he said gruffly, finding that his voice had gathered some rust in the past few minutes.

“The bake sale will wind up in an hour or so,” Casey said. “After that, we’ll be heading for home, and Doris will be ready to put brunch on the table.” She checked her watch, the plastic kind sold from kiosks in shopping malls. “Stop by around one-thirty?” she concluded.

Walker nodded and was just turning to walk away when he nearly collided with a smiling Patsy McCullough. Her young daughter wasn’t in evidence, but Dawson was beside her, seated in his wheelchair, grinning up at Walker. Just behind Patsy’s right shoulder stood Treat McQuillan, Parable’s chief of police and most irritating citizen.

The look that passed between Walker and Treat was deadly, though brief.

Once upon a time, when he was still working as a sheriff’s deputy, Treat had crossed a line by putting a hand on Brylee in the Boot Scoot Tavern, demanding that she dance with him.

She’d indicated that she’d rather not, but Treat hadn’t taken no for an answer. He’d made the mistake of trying to drag Walker’s kid sister onto the small dance floor, really just a table-free space in front of the jukebox, since the establishment was nothing fancy, and Walker had clocked him for it. For a while afterward, Treat had made a lot of noise about pressing assault charges against an officer of the law, but in the end, he and Walker had come to a gentlemen’s agreement, the details of which Walker couldn’t exactly recall. Treat hadn’t filed a complaint with his boss, Boone Taylor, and he’d mostly kept himself out of Walker’s way.

None of which meant he wasn’t as sneaky as a rattlesnake curled up in a woodpile, ready to strike when the right opportunity presented itself.

Dawson, a handsome kid with dark hair and inquisitive blue eyes, broke the silence by asking, “When can I come out to Timber Creek and ride a horse again?”

Out of the corner of his eye, Walker saw a stricken look cross Patsy’s thin face.

“You just say the word, cowboy,” Walker said to the boy, hoping his smile covered the sorrow he felt whenever he thought of the way Dawson had been before he’d climbed that damn water tower and fallen nearly fifty feet, doing permanent damage to his spine.

“You know he can’t ride a horse,” Treat growled. As always, he was on the peck, beating the brush for something he could get all riled up over.

Patsy, a plain, hard-worn woman in a cotton dress, eased herself between Treat and Walker and offered up a feeble smile. “What Treat means is,” she warbled nervously, “we wouldn’t want Dawson to get hurt—”

Dawson groaned angrily.

“Patsy,” Walker said, ignoring McQuillan the way he ignored flies when he was shoveling out stalls, “I wouldn’t let anything happen to your boy. You can be sure of it.”

“I know,” Patsy allowed after a fleeting glance over her shoulder to gauge the heat of her escort’s temper, followed by a longer, softer look down at her son. It was clear that she loved the boy, felt torn between protecting her child and letting him spread his wings as far as their limited span permitted. “I guess it would be all right,” she went on, still focused on Dawson. “As long as Mr. Parrish was right there with you the whole time and all.”

Dawson’s face, cloudy before, busted loose with a dazzling smile. “Yes!” he said, punching the air with one triumphant fist.

Walker, who had been holding his hat until then, carefully placed it on his head, gave the brim a slight pull for Patsy’s benefit, a tacit signal that he was done here and he’d be going on his way now. Treat simmered behind her, but for once he had the good sense not to offer an opinion.

“I’ll be in touch in the next few days,” Walker said, grinning down at Dawson.

“Thanks,” Dawson replied, almost breathless. “I’ll be waiting to hear from you.”

Walker said goodbye and meandered through the milling congregation, making his way back to his truck. He had just short of ninety minutes to kill before turning up at Casey’s place for the pancake feed, but he wasn’t about to pass them hanging around a bake sale.

* * *

CASEY SMILED AND SERVED strawberry shortcake to a long line of eager customers, Clare obligingly squirting canned whipped cream on each plateful before handing it over, Shane making change from a cigar box balanced on the seat of a folding chair.

By the time the sale was over—the men of the congregation had been volunteered by their wives to clean up afterward and stow away the folding tables and other gear, since the women had done most of the baking and selling—Casey was more than ready to go home, have a few unhurried cups of coffee and enjoy another of Doris’s incomparable Sunday brunches.

And never mind that the pit of her stomach felt jittery, hungry as she was, because Walker would be joining them.

It was crazy—she’d had two children by the man, after all, and though they hadn’t been intimate in a long time, there was no part of her body Walker Parrish didn’t know his way around—but she was as jumpy as a wallflower suddenly elected prom queen.

Walker had that effect on her, even now.

“So what’s this about needing somebody to keep Mitch from talking me into booking another concert tour?” she asked when she and the kids were buckled into their respective seats in her unassuming blue SUV and rolling in the direction of Rodeo Road. “In the first place, I gave you two my word I’d stay off the road until further notice, and, in the second place, I’ve never, in my whole entire life, had any trouble standing up to Mitch Wilcox or anybody else.”

Clare, whose turn it was to ride shotgun, flicked a glance at the rearview mirror, the next best thing to making eye contact with her brother, seated in back. The exchange wasn’t exactly guilty, Casey noted with some amusement, but there was clearly some collusion going on there. Considering last night’s row in the upstairs corridor, by no means an unusual occurrence, unfortunately, it was almost a relief that brother and sister seemed to be on the same page, however briefly.

Neither of them spoke, though.

Casey sighed, keeping her eyes on the road ahead. By now, she knew every street in Parable and most of the ones in Three Trees, too, to the point that she could have driven them in her sleep, but you never knew when somebody might run a stop sign, or a dog might dash out into the road.

Careerwise, Casey was a card-carrying risk taker, but when it came to her children, she didn’t take chances.

Unless you counted lying to them for their whole lives, she thought with a slight wince.

“Fess up,” she said. “What’s going on here?”

“Walker looked like he might say no,” Clare finally answered. “To breakfast, I mean.”

“Ah,” Casey said knowingly. The knowing routine was sometimes an act; her kids were smart, and they confounded her more often than she’d have liked to admit. This time, though, she would have had to be in a coma not to pick up on their motivation.

“You could have invited him yourself,” Shane put in, addressing his mother and sounding slightly put out, as though he thought she’d been remiss. “It wouldn’t kill you to be nice to Walker, you know.”

Casey waited, sure there was more and unwilling to share her suspicion that being too nice to Walker Parrish might well kill her, because he had the power to break her heart.

“Did you see Walker talking to Dawson McCullough?” Shane asked, still fretful. “I heard him say Dawson could come out to the ranch and ride horses with him.”

A pang struck Casey’s heart. Did Shane envy the attention Walker had paid the other boy?

“I saw,” Clare told her brother, none too sympathetically. “Get over it, dweeb. Dawson’s in a wheelchair, in case you missed that, and he used to work for Walker sometimes, before he got hurt. They’re friends.”

Casey let the “dweeb” remark pass, and Shane maintained a glum and resentful silence the rest of the way home.

When they pulled into the driveway, Mitch Wilcox’s rental car, a white compact, was parked beside the guest cottage, and he was already lugging suitcases over the threshold.

How long, Casey wondered, was her manager planning to stick around? He’d called to say he’d like to “drop by,” and once he’d emailed his arrival time—Mitch had flown in from Nashville—Casey had replied that she and the kids would be out when he got to Parable, but she’d leave the key to the cottage under the doormat. He was to go ahead and make himself at home.

Evidently, he’d taken her at her word. From the looks of his luggage, he wasn’t just making himself at home; he was moving in.

Yikes.

Twenty years older than Casey and several times divorced, Mitch was still an attractive man, with his tall, graceful frame and full head of silver-gray hair. It would be easy enough to figure him for a catch, Casey supposed, provided you didn’t know him the way she did.

He set his bags down and waved as Casey parked the SUV. The kids got out of the rig immediately. Shane sprinted toward the house so he could let the dogs out to run in the yard for a while. Clare approached Mitch with one hand gracefully extended, like a princess welcoming a visiting dignitary.

Casey walked slowly behind her daughter, nervous now that Mitch had actually arrived. Most of the time, when he made plans to visit, he had an agenda—an offer to appear in a TV movie, perhaps, or some other “huge” opportunity she’d be a fool to turn down, but he was also prone to canceling his travel plans at the last minute. She’d hoped this would be one of those times, and for all the bravado she’d shown in the car, for the kids’ benefit, she was uneasy.

Mitch wasn’t one of the most successful managers in the music business because he wasn’t persuasive. The man could sell sand in Morocco or mosquitos in Minnesota. And she was feeling oddly vulnerable just now.

“Try to contain your enthusiasm,” he teased, planting a light kiss on Casey’s cheek. “I’m the bearer of good news.”

Casey smiled and folded her arms, then wished she hadn’t. Folded arms were classic body language for Don’t convince me, I’m feeling too convincible, and Mitch was more than shrewd enough to read her. In fact, he was a master at it.

“Get settled in,” she said cordially. “Doris is back from church by now, and she’s about to start stacking serious numbers of pancakes.”

Mitch laughed. “Wonderful,” he said. “I’m starved. They served three peanuts, two broken pretzels and a cup of bad coffee on the plane—and that was in first class.”

“Poor you,” Clare said, linking her arm with Mitch’s. During the years on the road, he’d been like a grandfather to Casey’s kids, and they were both fond of him, though not in the way they were of Walker.

Another tide of guilt washed through Casey’s beleaguered soul with that thought. What would her children say, what would they think of her, if they ever found out that Walker, the man they adored, was their father? On one level, they’d both be thrilled, she surmised, believing, as they did now, that they didn’t have a dad at all. And then they’d be furious—with her. She’d been the secret keeper, the villain of the piece, the one who’d raised them on lies, however well-intentioned. The one who’d robbed them of what they probably wanted most—a father.

She must have turned a little pale just then, because Mitch narrowed his wise blue eyes at her and asked with concern, “Are you feeling all right?”

Clare was already tugging Mitch toward the house. Mostly, she was eager to get out of her church clothes and into shorts and a T-shirt.

The three dogs clamored across the sunporch floor and shot down the steps like fur-covered bullets, overjoyed by the heady return of freedom and the presence of their significant humans.

“I’m fine,” Casey said, moving to head off the dogs. If she hadn’t, they’d have knocked poor Mitch to the ground in their exuberance.

Mitch looked skeptical, but he didn’t refute her statement.

Doris, who attended a different church, was back in her regular clothes and all smiles and bustling busyness. She’d set the big table on the sunporch with fine china and the best crystal, and well-polished silverware gleamed at each place.

“Walker’s coming to breakfast, too,” Clare said happily. “I’ll get another place setting.”

With that, she zipped into the kitchen, and Casey indulged in a proud moment, because her children hadn’t been raised to expect Doris or anyone else to wait on them or do their bidding. They cleaned their own rooms and washed their own clothes, for instance, though Shane was admittedly less of a laundry expert than his sister.

Doris said hello to Mitch and gave Casey a wry look. “Walker, is it?” she asked. “Imagine.”

Casey wondered, not for the first time, how much her cook/housekeeper had guessed over the years, and looked away quickly, pretending to straighten the perfect bouquet of spring flowers in the center of the table.

“Do my eyes deceive me,” Mitch inquired, “or did I actually see a genuine merry-go-round in the yard?”

Doris had already hurried back to the kitchen, and Clare returned with a plate, silverware and a glass for Walker, which she carefully placed, Casey noted, opposite the place where she normally sat.

“We had a wedding reception here yesterday,” Clare chirped in explanation. Miraculously, in the short time she’d been out of sight, she’d swapped out her dress for denim shorts and a tank top—probably raiding the laundry room and changing there. “Mom likes to make sure the little kids have something fun to do whenever she entertains.”

Outside, wheels ground up the gravel driveway. The dogs barked out a happy chorus, and Shane called out his usual “Hey, Walker!”

Clare abandoned the table to rush out and join the welcoming party.

Mitch, meanwhile, arched one neatly trimmed gray eyebrow and remarked quietly, “I wondered if he wasn’t part of the reason you decided to settle in Podunk, Montana.”

Casey blushed. “He’s a friend,” she said, sounding more defensive than she might have wished. “A good friend.”

Something sad moved in Mitch’s eyes, there for a millisecond and then gone again. “Yes,” he said, almost sighing the word.

Casey watched through the screen enclosing the sunporch on three sides as her children and the dogs ushered Walker toward the house, surrounding him like an entourage. Both Clare and Shane chattered fit to wear off his ears, but he didn’t seem to mind. In fact, he looked as happy as they did.

Casey’s stomach clenched, a not entirely unpleasant sensation but an alarming one nonetheless.

If—when—the secret was out, Clare and Shane wouldn’t blame Walker for the deception. They’d place the onus on Casey herself, and rightfully so. Dread filled her, even as the old, ill-advised excitement sang in her veins and made her nerve endings crackle. Had she been lying so long that she didn’t recognize the truth when she encountered it?

She wanted Walker Parrish, and not just as a friend, either. She wanted him as a man, as a lover. Heat surged through her as she remembered their times together, alone and lost in each other while the world flowed on past, like some oblivious river.

Walker looked up just at that moment—luck wouldn’t have had it any other way, Casey figured sadly—and when their glances connected, the planet slipped off its axis for the length of a heartbeat.

She went to the screen door, opened it and smiled her most cordial smile, the one she wore for guests and special fans. “You made it,” she said, that being country for hello.

Walker’s smile, slow and cowboy-confident, made her heart skitter. “Good to see you again, Casey,” he said, as though it had been days or even years since they’d last met, instead of an hour and a half.

The kids and the dogs and Walker all spilled onto the sunporch, forming a crowd.

Walker looked at Mitch.

Mitch looked at Walker.

And, finally, the two men shook hands.

Was she imagining it, Casey asked herself, or had she just heard the sound of antlers locking in combat?

CHAPTER FOUR

CASEY FELT AS JUMPY as a cat crossing a hot griddle, with Walker seated across the sunporch table from her, consuming a respectable stack of Doris’s pancakes, Shane at his left elbow, Clare at his right. Both kids actively jockeyed for his attention, and he managed to strike a remarkably diplomatic balance, taking in every word of their chatter and weighing it all, somewhere behind those calm green-gray eyes of his.

Poor Mitch might have been invisible, at least as far as Clare and Shane were concerned, and they didn’t spare their mom a whole lot of notice, either.

Casey wasn’t bothered by this—she understood their yearning to connect with this man they didn’t know was their father—but the guilt was another matter. She’d always been able to rationalize keeping the secret, out there on the road, far from Walker and the place he called home, but now she didn’t have a constant round of concert tours and other distractions to serve as buffers. The reality of what she had cost these children, and this man, all the while thinking she was doing the right thing, keeping them safe, was now up close and personal, in her face, a table’s width away. Denial, she realized, required distance—in close proximity to Walker, she might as well have been trying to spin plates on top of long sticks.

Once, amid the chatter of his children, Walker looked over at her, caught her gaze and held it, somehow making it impossible for her to look away. And what she saw in his eyes only reinforced the conclusion she’d already reached: that there was a crisis coming, an inevitable collision of deception and truth, and there would be casualties. That she stood directly in the line of fire was a given—and the least of her worries. Casey’s greatest concern was the havoc this revelation would wreak in the lives of her children and, yes, in Walker’s, too.

Yet again, the question pealed in her heart like sorrowing church bells announcing a funeral: What have I done?

Exhibiting surprising sensitivity, Mitch, sitting beside Casey at the table, reached over to squeeze her hand lightly. Another person, she thought with a stab of regret, who hadn’t been fooled. Mitch—and how many other people?—must have known all along that Walker was more than a family friend. Very possibly, her longtime manager had merely been pretending to believe Casey’s claims that the children’s fathers were anonymous donors. He’d been willing, for whatever reason, to play a small part in her private soap opera.

An achy warmth enfolded her heart just then, and she gave Mitch a grateful glance, which he acknowledged with a wink.

“So can we, Mom?” Shane’s eager voice jarred Casey back into the present moment. “Please?”

Flustered, Casey felt color bloom in her cheeks. She’d missed whatever had been said before, and now everyone at the table would know she hadn’t been listening.

Walker came to her rescue in a way so offhand and easy that she could have kissed him—which, of course, was something she’d already been obsessing about anyway, for very different reasons. “We’ll head out to the ranch and do some horseback riding,” he recapped, “and I’ll bring the kids back here after supper, if that’s okay with you.”

Casey swallowed, offered a wobbly smile and a nod of assent. If she’d heard the original request, she might well have refused it, if only to avoid being alone with her manager for a while longer. She wasn’t afraid of Mitch, far from it, but she didn’t feel like her usual scrappy self, either. Whatever he planned to propose—Mitch never showed up when she was off the road without a specific reason, generally one that would fatten his fee—she would honestly consider, and probably refuse. She knew her mind, and she was certainly no pushover, but the exchange was going to take more emotional energy than she could spare at the moment.

Both Shane and Clare cheered uproariously now that she’d given her permission, drowning out any possibility of conversation, and all three dogs got to their feet, suddenly alert, barking out a chorus of canine excitement.

“Can they come, too?” Shane asked Walker, big-eyed with hope, referring, of course, to the Labs.

“Sure,” Walker said gruffly. How could anyone miss the love in his face, in the roughness of his voice, as he returned his son’s gaze? And how had she managed to ignore the wide-open spaces of Walker’s heart—a heart big-sky expansive enough to hold not just his children, but a trio of chocolate Labs clamoring to join the festivities?

By comparison, Casey thought sadly, she was the Grinch, with a ticker the size of a walnut.

Chaos reigned as the meal ended and Clare and Shane rushed to clear the table and load the dishwasher—always their shared responsibility—each racing to be the first one finished, evidently, laughing and elbowing each other out of the way, good-naturedly for once. The dogs, clueless but wild with delight, only increased the mayhem.

“This is giving me a headache,” Mitch said, quickly retreating to the guesthouse.

On the one hand, Casey was glad he’d gone, because it was hard enough to think with Walker sitting there looking so unspeakably good, the dogs barking, the kids carrying on. On the other, though, she was, however briefly, alone with Walker.

And that sparked a kind of delicious terror inside her.

“You and I need to talk,” he told her quietly, in a tone that held regret as well as finality. “Soon.”

Casey’s heart had shimmied up into the back of her throat and lodged itself there, beating so hard that she felt submerged in the sound of blood pumping in her ears. She merely nodded, unable to speak.