The “First Lady of the West,” #1 New York Times bestselling author Linda Lael Miller, welcomes you home to Parable, Montana—where love awaits.

With his father’s rodeo legacy to continue and a prosperous spread to run, Walker Parrish has no time to dwell on wrecked relationships. But country-western sweetheart Casey Elder is out of the spotlight and back in Parable, Montana. And Walker can’t ignore that his “act now, think later” passion for Casey has had consequences. Two teenage consequences!

Keeping her children’s paternity under wraps has always been part of Casey’s plan to give them normal, uncomplicated lives. Now the best way to hold her family together seems to be to let Walker be a part of it—as her husband of convenience. Or will some secrets—like Casey’s desire to be the rancher’s wife in every way—unravel, with unforeseen results?

Dear Reader,

Welcome to Parable County, Montana, whether you’re new in town or not.

Big Sky Summer is the story of Walker Parrish, rodeo stock contractor and all-around cowboy in the “sexy” division, and Casey Elder, country music superstar and red-hot redhead! These two have a history, but it’s a tumultuous one, that’s for sure, including a couple of rapidly growing secrets. And you know how the truth is—it will come out, for better or worse.

Can these two hardheaded independent types make it work? A lot of people wouldn’t give their on-again, off-again love, tough and durable as it is, the proverbial snowball’s chance. But, as you and I both know, there’s magic in Parable County, and love is its favorite trick.

In addition to this brand-new story, I’m delighted to announce that I have teamed up with Montana Silversmiths, the legendary makers of championship belt buckles and fabulous Western jewelry, to create a piece I call “Casey’s necklace.” You’ll read all about it in the book, and might even find yourself wanting one of your own. Just go to www.montanasilversmiths.com/two-hats-one-heart. And know that 100 percent of my share of the profits will go toward establishing perpetual funding for my Linda Lael Miller Scholarships for Women, in the hope that generations of deserving ladies of all ages will continue to benefit from the program.

Meanwhile, stop on by www.lindalaelmiller.com for my (almost) daily blog, excerpts from my books, videos of some very sexy cowboys, scholarship news and fun contests, along with a few surprises now and then.

Happy trails, and thanks for the listen.

With love,

Praise for #1 New York Times bestselling author Linda Lael Miller

“Miller’s name is synonymous with the finest in Western romance.”

—RT Book Reviews

“Linda Lael Miller creates vibrant characters and stories I defy you to forget.”

—#1 New York Times bestselling author Debbie Macomber

“Miller’s down-home, easy-to-read style keeps the plot moving, and she includes…likable characters, picturesque descriptions and some very sweet pets.”

—Publishers Weekly on Big Sky Country

“After reading this book your heart will be so full of Christmas cheer you’ll want to stuff a copy in the stocking of every romance fan you know!”

—USATODAY.com on A Lawman’s Christmas

“Miller once again tells a memorable tale.”

—RT Book Reviews on A Creed in Stone Creek

“A passionate love too long denied drives the action in this multifaceted, emotionally rich reunion story that overflows with breathtaking sexual chemistry.”

—Library Journal on McKettricks of Texas: Tate

“Miller’s prose is smart, and her tough Eastwoodian cowboy cuts a sharp, unexpectedly funny figure in a classroom full of rambunctious frontier kids.”

—Publishers Weekly on The Man from Stone Creek

“Strong characterization and a vivid Western setting make for a fine historical romance.”

—Publishers Weekly on McKettrick’s Choice

Big Sky Summer

Linda Lael Miller

www.millsandboon.co.uk

For Larry Readman, aka the Canadian Wrangler. Thanks for taking such good care of my horses.

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Excerpt

CHAPTER ONE

WALKER PARRISH, WEDGED into the middle of a third-row pew, with old ladies wearing gauzy hats and floral dresses packed in tightly on either side, risked a glance up at the church ceiling, just to make sure it wasn’t fixing to fall on his head. He resisted a nervous urge to loosen his tie—for him, like churchgoing, tie wearing was reserved for funerals and weddings. This occasion, fortunately, fell into the latter category.

The small sanctuary seemed charged with excitement; folks chatted in whispers, the organist was tuning up for the wedding march, and the groom, Sheriff Boone Taylor, stood tall up front, just to the right of the simple altar, looking eager and scared shitless, both at the same time. Like the majority of men around Parable, Montana, Boone lived in jeans, cotton shirts and boots most of the time, and he looked a few degrees past uncomfortable in his rented tux.

Hutch Carmody and Slade Barlow, half brothers and Boone’s closest friends, stood up with him, hardly recognizable in monkey suits of their own. Both married men, and cowboys to the core, they kept an eye on Boone, as if ready to catch him by the elbows if his knees buckled, but wry grins twitched at the corners of their mouths, too. They were enjoying this, most likely figuring that if they’d had to get up in front of the whole county and plight their troths, Boone shouldn’t be spared the ordeal, either.

Walker fixed his gaze on Hutch, remembering the last time he’d set foot in this tiny church—a June day, much like this one, with birds chirping in the trees and warm breezes sweeping up the aisle from the open doors of the entryway—and felt the hinges of his jaws lock down. Back then, almost two years ago now, Hutch had been the bridegroom, not best man. And Walker’s kid sister, Brylee, the only blood kin he could—or would—rightly claim, had been the bride, shiny-eyed and full of bright hopes, wearing the kind of gown women start dreaming about when they’re little girls.

Just when the organ cue sounded, on that other day, the bridesmaids having already taken their places up front, as endlessly rehearsed, and Walker had swung one foot forward to march Brylee between the rows of pews jammed with people, Hutch had suddenly broken rank with Boone and the minister and walked midway down the aisle, where he stopped.

“Hold it,” he’d said in a sheepish but nonetheless determined tone.

He’d stopped the wedding, called it off, right then and there, shattering Brylee’s fairy-tale dreams and maybe souring her forever on the subject of marriage.

While a part of Walker had been relieved—he’d never thought Brylee and Hutch Carmody were a good fit—the memory of his sister’s humiliation still stung like a thistle stuck in his hide. If he hadn’t been so busy trying to keep Brylee from doing something stupid, he’d have punched Carmody in the mouth, church or no church.

Which was part of the reason he didn’t trust the rafters to hold. He tossed another wary glance toward the ceiling.

The Reverend Walter Beaumont was officiating, and he took his place, book in hand, resplendent in maroon robes and a long gold scarf of some kind. Most times, the preacher dressed Western, like most everybody else, but today he looked as serious as an Old Testament prophet about to lower the boom on a gathering of unrepentant sinners. He looked like Morgan Freeman and sounded like James Earl Jones, so everybody got ready to listen.

Beaumont cleared his throat.

The organist struck the first rousing chord, and the congregation settled in to watch the show. Walker suspected some of them were, like him, wondering if history was about to repeat itself. The thwarted Carmody-Parrish wedding was, around Parable County, anyhow, the stuff of legend.

Tara Kendall’s twin stepdaughters, now living with her, were barely teenagers and served as flower girls, happily scattering rose petals in their wake as they fairly danced up the aisle, both of them beaming and obviously enjoying the attention of the guests.

Joslyn Barlow, married to Slade and in a noticeably advanced state of pregnancy, soon followed, wearing an elegant lavender maternity dress and carrying a bouquet of multicolored flowers in both hands.

Walker noted the electric look that passed between Joslyn and her husband as she took her place opposite the three men dressed like tall, rangy penguins.

Kendra Carmody, Hutch’s beloved—the woman he’d thrown Brylee over for—came next, sleek and classy in pale yellow and also carrying the requisite flowers. Hutch winked at her when she came to a stop beside Joslyn, and a fetching blush pinked her cheeks.

Next to join the march were Boone’s two young sons, wearing suit jackets and slacks and little bow ties. Each of them carried a satin pillow with a gold wedding band nestled in the hollow, and the smaller boy stopped a couple of times along the way, seeming to forget the procedure. He showed the ring he was carrying to Opal Dennison, and she smiled and gently steered him back on course.

This brought an affectionate twitter from the assembly, and the clicks of several phone cameras slipped in between the notes of organ music.

Walker grinned as the older boy finally backtracked and herded his little brother the rest of the way.

Then it sounded, the loud, triumphant chord signaling the imminent approach of the bride. Walker felt a pang, again reminded of Brylee’s ill-fated wedding, but the truth was, he was glad for Boone and glad for Tara Kendall, too.

Widowed several years before, Boone had been one of the walking wounded for a long time, doing his job but clearly unhappy. He was a good sheriff and a fine man, and Walker liked him.

The bride, a glamorous city slicker hailing from the Big Apple, had come to Parable some time before, reportedly to reinvent herself after a nasty divorce. It had been a while before Boone and Tara got together, considering that they’d evidently disliked each other on sight, but they’d finally gotten past all that. And, wisely, Walker thought, they’d agreed on a fairly long courtship, just to make sure.

And now their big day was finally here.

There was a churchwide shuffle as the guests rose, turning to watch the bride start what probably felt like the longest short walk of her life.

Boone’s brother-in-law, Bob, escorted Tara, but he was pretty much lost in Tara’s glow. She looked like an angel bride in her billowing lacy dress, and her smile was clearly visible behind the rhinestone-studded netting of her veil, as were the happy tears sparkling in her eyes.

Walker felt a catch in his throat, wishing her and Boone well without reservation, but at the same time wanting that kind of joy for his disillusioned kid sister. She’d been invited to this shindig, right along with him, but Brylee stayed away from weddings these days. She stayed away from too many things, in his opinion, working crazy hours, too worn-out to say much when she did turn up, long after all her employees had called it a day and gone home. Even then she immediately retreated to her apartment in the main ranch house, her rescued German shepherd, Snidely, following devotedly at her heels.

Realizing he’d gone woolgathering, which was unlike him, Walker was a little startled when Casey Elder appeared beside the organist, music sheet in hand. She wore a blue choir robe and almost no makeup, and her shoulder-length red hair, usually tumbling around her face in spirals, had been pinned up into a sedate knot at her nape.

Inwardly, Walker allowed himself a grim, silent chortle.

This was a side of Casey he’d rarely if ever seen, despite the tangled and chaotic history they shared. She could still pack arenas and major concert halls, even after fifteen years as a professional entertainer, and she’d never recorded a song that hadn’t gone straight to number one on all the charts and ridden there for weeks on end. Her videos were legendary, full of fire and smoke and color, and she was as famous for her flashy style as she was for her voice, always astounding in its power and range. A thing that spread its wings and took flight, soaring like a soul set free.

Onstage or on camera, she wore custom-made outfits so bejeweled that she glittered like a dark Montana sky full of stars, a one-woman constellation, and between her looks and the way she sang, she took every member of every audience captive and held them spellbound until the moment she retreated into the wings after the last curtain call. Even then, the magic lingered.

Walker wondered if Casey’s legions of fans would even recognize her the way she looked today, all prim and well scrubbed. He shook off the riot of reactions he felt whenever he encountered this woman, up close or at a distance, and kept his face impassive when she started to sing.

She’d written the song, all about promises and sunrises and sticking together no matter what, especially for Boone and Tara. The organ played softly in the background, a gossamer thread of sound supporting that amazing voice.

By the time she finished, the old ladies on either side of Walker were sniffling happily into their lace-trimmed hankies, and Walker felt the need to blink a couple of times himself.

Casey retreated as swiftly and silently as a ghost, and the ceremony began.

The truth was, most of it was lost on Walker. He sat there in a daze, Casey’s song reverberating inside him like a sweet echo.

Boone moved to stand tall and proud beside his bride, and the reverend began his speech.

Vows were exchanged, promises made, and the light of Boone’s and Tara’s separate candles bonded into a single flame, strong and steady, barely flickering. They slipped rings onto each other’s fingers, their faces shining.

Walker, a man in a daze, took it all in, like a dream, with Casey’s remarkable voice for a sound track.

The reverend pronounced them man and wife in a tone of rumbling jubilance, and Boone gently raised Tara’s veil, smoothed it back and kissed her with a tenderness that struck even Walker’s tough cowboy heart like the plucking of a fiddle string.

The organ erupted again, joyous thunder, startling Walker out of the spell Casey had cast over him, and Mr. and Mrs. Boone Taylor came down the aisle together, both of them beaming, cheers breaking out all around them.

Patiently, Walker waited for the guests to file out into the afternoon sunshine, scented with flowers and new-mown grass and fresh asphalt, glad the wedding was over and equally glad he’d put on scratchy duds and shown up.

Now all he had to do was put in an appearance at the reception, eat a little cake, shake Boone’s hand and kiss Tara’s cheek, nod to this person and that one, and make a subtle escape. The to-do, which would probably resemble a small circus, was to be held in Casey’s massive backyard, about the last place Walker wanted to hang out, but there was no avoiding it, since he was representing Brylee as well as himself. If he was lucky, he might manage to steal a moment or two with Clare and Shane while steering clear of their mother.

Clare and Shane. Casey’s children.

His children.

Finally reaching his truck, a big rig with an extended cab and plenty of horsepower for hauling trailers loaded with rodeo stock, Walker swung up into the driver’s seat and immediately dispensed with his tie, which was starting to feel like a noose.

The road in front of the church was plenty crowded, and it took a while to get into the flow of traffic, all headed toward Casey’s mansion on Rodeo Road.

Walker spotted the nuptial limo up ahead and smiled in spite of his increasing case of the jitters, because Boone’s and Tara’s heads and shoulders were sticking up through the open sunroof, and both of them glowed as if they’d had sunshine for breakfast. It was good to be reminded that that kind of happiness was possible, short of heaven itself. With one broken marriage behind him, besides his long and tempestuous relationship with Casey, Walker tended toward skepticism when it came to love and romance. The kind that lasted, anyhow.

A mild glumness overtook him as he drove at a parade pace, and he was tempted, more than once, to zip out of the procession onto a side street, head home to his horses and his bulls and his regular clothes, and skip the whole second act. If only he hadn’t been cursed with a single-minded—some would say cussed—nature, the kind that compelled a man to do what he thought was right, whether that happened to be his personal inclination at the time or not.

So he endured, pushing on until the line of cars and trucks finally snaked onto Rodeo Road, and Casey’s house loomed ahead, big as a mountain. He found a parking spot—no small feat in itself—and walked two blocks to the mouth of the long white-gravel driveway, blending in with the wedding guests and the throng of new arrivals who wouldn’t have fit inside the church.

Everybody was dressed up in their best, toting wrapped presents and covered casseroles and flowers cut from their gardens.

Walker felt a little self-conscious, showing up empty-handed, but that passed quickly. Brylee had taken care of the gift-giving end of things, signing his name and her own to the card, and whatever she’d sent was sure to be just right for the occasion.

Rounding the side of the house with the others, Walker was amused to see that he’d guessed right—Casey’s yard did indeed have a carnival-like atmosphere, with paper lanterns strung on every branch of every tree, a silver fountain flowing with chocolate instead of water, a massive canvas canopy arching above a couple of dozen tables. There was a bandstand, too, a temporary dance floor, an open bar and, incredibly, a genuine carousel for the little ones.

Obviously, this party would go on long after Boone and Tara had cut the cake, posed for the pictures, danced the customary waltz and lit out on their weeklong honeymoon. Rumors varied as to the destination—Vegas, Honolulu and Cabo were all in the running—but the bride and groom were keeping that information to themselves.

In a town where almost everybody knew everybody else’s business, folks kept what secrets they could.

Walker was taking in the Casey-like spectacle of the whole setup when Shane turned up, handsome in his slacks and white dress shirt, though he’d gotten rid of his tie and suit jacket at some point. At thirteen, the boy was growing up fast—every time Walker saw him, he was a little taller, or his feet were a size bigger, or both.

“Hey, Walker,” Shane greeted him, grinning. While his sister resembled Casey, with her auburn hair, milky complexion and green eyes, Shane looked pretty much the way Walker had at his age. Strange that nobody seemed to notice that and put two and two together.

“Hey,” Walker replied. “Looks like this is going to be quite a party.”

Shane nodded. “Mom’s going to sing later,” he said, “and the whole town could live for a year on the food the caterers are setting out.”

Walker’s throat tightened. He was tough, raised a ranch kid, no stranger to hard work or hard knocks, but hearing Casey sing at the wedding had nearly dropped him to his knees, figuratively, anyhow. Listening to her repertoire of greatest hits might just kill him.

“I can’t stick around too long,” he said, his voice coming out gruff. “I’ve got things to do out at the ranch—” He fell silent then, because of the way Shane’s face fell. Although the kid probably had no clue that Walker was his biological father—Casey had made sure of that—there had always been a bond between him and Shane just the same. Walker was the avuncular family friend, the guy who usually turned up for Thanksgiving dinners, birthdays and sometimes Christmas. Casey refused to accept child support, but Walker had been putting away money for his son and daughter for years just the same.

“Oh,” Shane said, looking bleak. Familiar with the operation, he knew what it took to run a spread the size of Timber Creek, where Walker raised cattle, along with bulls and broncos for the rodeo circuit.

He’d spent a week or two on the ranch most summers, along with Clare, and he knew there were plenty of capable ranch hands to take up the slack when Walker wasn’t around.

Walker, aching on the inside, grinned and laid a hand on Shane’s skinny shoulder. “I guess I can stay for a while,” he conceded. Clare and Shane had had tutors, growing up on the road as they had, and attending school in Parable for the past year had been a new experience for them. Adaptable and confident, used to traveling from place to place in a well-appointed tour bus or a private jet, they’d thrived, even before the move to Montana.

Shane lit up. “Good,” he said, and he stuck pretty close to Walker for the next fifteen minutes or so before he noticed the flock of giggling girls watching him from the sidelines. “My public,” he quipped, making Walker laugh.

“Go for it,” Walker told him.

He meandered toward the bar, stopping every few feet to speak with somebody he knew, and finally scored a cold beer. Boone and Tara and the rest of the wedding party were busy posing for pictures, both amateur and professional, and he watched for a while, envying his friends a little. Between them, the newlyweds had four children: a ready-made family. What would it be like if he could claim Shane and Clare publicly as his own? If they called him Dad?

Never gonna happen, cowboy, he reminded himself silently. So get over it.

Walker took another long pull on his beer. How, exactly, did a man “get over” not being able to acknowledge his own flesh and blood?

He felt a stab of annoyance at Casey for insisting that Shane and Clare were her children, and hers alone, as though she’d somehow managed not just one Virgin Birth, but two. Heat climbed his neck and made his collar feel tight, so he set the bottle of cold beer on a side table, half-finished. Maybe it was the alcohol that was causing this fit of melancholy; best leave it alone for the time being.

He’d barely made his way through the crowd of thirsty wedding guests clustered around the bar when he came face-to-face with Kendra Carmody.

“Hello, Walker,” she said. She was a Grace Kelly blonde, classy and smart and soft-spoken, and Walker could certainly see why Hutch loved her, even though his sympathies were, of course, with Brylee.

“Kendra,” Walker said with a polite nod. He had nothing against the woman; she was no home-wrecker, and even Brylee knew that. When it came to Hutch, though, neither Walker nor his sister was quite so broad-minded.

“I’m sorry Brylee couldn’t be here,” Kendra told him, and he knew by the look in her pale green eyes that she meant it. Parable and Three Trees, just thirty miles apart, were the kind of communities where people just naturally included everybody when there was something to celebrate, put right or mourn.

Walker sighed. “Me, too,” he said honestly. He wasn’t about to make excuses for his sister; Brylee was a grown woman, and she had her reasons for avoiding social occasions—specifically weddings—that made her uncomfortable.

Kendra smiled, touched his arm. “Anyway, it’s good to see you,” she said.

After a few polite words, they parted, and Kendra went on to greet other guests. Once, the big house had been hers, but a lot had changed since then. She and Hutch lived on Whisper Creek Ranch, had two daughters and planned to add several more children to their family.

Once again, Walker put down a swell of pure envy. Okay, so maybe he didn’t have everything he wanted—kids, a wife, a home instead of just a house. Who did? He liked his life for the most part, liked breeding and raising rodeo stock and ranching in general, and besides, nothing good ever came of complaining. For him, it was all about keeping on.

* * *

CASEY ELDER WIGGLED HER TOES in the soft grass, glad to be barefoot after spending most of the day in high heels and pantyhose, both of which she hated. Her blue cotton sundress felt airy and light against her skin, too—a big improvement over that heavy choir robe she’d been talked into wearing when she sang at the wedding.

She smiled and nodded to passing guests, keeping to one side of the moving current of people, sipping champagne from a crystal flute and indulging in one of her favorite activities—watching Walker Parrish from a safe distance.

He was one fine hunk of a man, in her opinion; tall, with broad shoulders and a square jaw, movie-star handsome with his green-gray eyes and that head of glossy, deep brown hair, always a mite on the shaggy side. He was completely unaware of his effect on women, it seemed, which only made him more intriguing.

Casey’s feelings for Walker were complicated, like everything in her life. She knew she could fall in love with him without half trying—hadn’t she done precisely that numerous times over the years, only to talk herself out of it later? She was practical to the bone—too practical to open her heart to the one man on earth with the power to break it to bits.

As if he’d felt her gaze, Walker turned his head and their eyes met.

She nodded and lifted the champagne glass slightly. Here we go, she thought, wishing he’d walk away, hoping against hope that he’d weave his way through the crowd toward her instead.

Her breath snagged on a skittering heartbeat when Walker started in her direction. A sudden dizziness struck her, as though she’d stepped onto the rented merry-go-round only to have it start spinning fast enough to blur.

Once they were face-to-face, Casey tried hard to keep her cool, though part of her wanted to tumble right into those solemn, intelligent eyes of his and snuggle into a warm corner of his heart for the duration. “Hello, handsome,” she said softly.

He didn’t smile. “You did a real nice job with that song,” he told her. “The one you sang at the wedding, I mean.”

Casey raised one shoulder slightly, let it fall again. “I’ve had lots of practice,” she said. Just for a moment, she let her eyes stray toward the wedding party, still posing for pictures over by the gazebo, and felt a tiny pinch of sorrow at the base of her throat.

When she looked back at Walker, she saw that he’d been watching her face the whole time, and hoped he hadn’t guessed that, happy as she was for Boone and Tara, both of whom deserved the best of everything, she happened to be feeling just a tad sorry for herself at the moment.

“They’re lucky,” Walker observed quietly, inclining his head toward the bride and groom, who were clowning for the cameras now.

“Yes,” Casey agreed, barely suppressing a sigh. She knew her friends had traveled some twisting, rocky roads to find each other, and she was ashamed to admit to herself that she envied Tara all that was ahead—not just the wedding night and the honeymoon, but the solace and shelter of a committed marriage, the sex and the laughter, the babies and the plans. Fiercely independent though she was, Casey sometimes longed to be held and loved in the depths of the night, to share her joys and her worries and her children with a man who loved her, instead of always playing the brave single mother who could more than manage on her own. “Very lucky.”

To her surprise, Walker cupped a calloused yet gentle hand under her chin and lifted her face so he could look straight into her eyes. For one dreadful, wonderful moment, she actually thought he might kiss her.

He didn’t, though.

His expression was so serious that it bordered on grave. Whatever he was about to say was lost—probably for the best—when fourteen-year-old Clare bounded up, beautiful in her peach-colored dress chosen especially for the wedding. She was still coltish, horse crazy and ambivalent about boys, but the woman she would become was clearly visible in her poise and lively personality just the same.

Faintly, Casey heard a few of the local musicians tuning up, but the sight of her daughter, so beautiful, beaming up at Walker in pure delight, almost stopped her heart in midbeat. Don’t turn into an adult, Casey pleaded silently. Not yet.

“You have to dance with me,” Clare told Walker. The child didn’t have a shy bone in her body, and anyway, both Clare and Shane had always been close to this man, and to Brylee, as well.

Boone and Tara, with the photo session finally behind them, were standing in the middle of the dance floor, looking like the figures on top of some celestial wedding cake.

Walker smiled down at the daughter who thought of him as a beloved uncle, and in that moment Casey caught a glimpse of a place deep inside him, that part of his soul where he was this child’s father, not just a loyal and trusted friend of the family.

“Let’s wait a couple of minutes,” he said, taking Clare’s hand and squeezing it lightly.

Somehow, Casey found her voice. “The bride and groom always have the first dance, honey,” she told Clare. “It’s tradition.”

Clare’s emerald eyes sparkled with mischief and spirit. “Okay,” she agreed good-naturedly, still looking up at Walker with something like hero worship. She bit her lip, then blurted out eagerly, “When I get married, will you give me away? Please, Walker? I wouldn’t want anybody else to do it except you.”

Casey lifted her chin, swallowed. “That’s a ways off,” she said somewhat weakly. “Your getting married, I mean.”

“I’d be proud to walk you down the aisle,” Walker told his daughter, “when the time comes.” He paused, eyes twinkling, and one corner of his mouth crooked up in a grin, the way it did when he was teasing. “Of course, it all depends on whether or not I like the yahoo you choose for a husband.”

Clare laughed, clinging to his arm and clearly adoring him. “If I like him,” she reasoned with confidence, “you will, too.”

Walker chuckled and kissed the top of the girl’s head. “You’re probably right about that, princess,” he agreed.

Boone and Tara owned the dance floor, waltzing slowly, closer than close, lost in each other’s eyes.

Casey’s own eyes scalded, and she looked away quickly, afraid Walker or Clare would notice, but they, like everyone else, were watching the newlyweds.

As prearranged—Casey knew her showmanship—hundreds of snow-white rose petals drifted down on Boone and Tara like a velvety, fragrant first snow, spilling from a net strung up in the high branches of a venerable maple tree.

The guests were impressed, gasping in delight, and Boone and Tara looked up, smiling, Tara putting her hands out to catch some of the petals in her palms.

Casey started the applause, her throat thick with emotion, and the rest of the company joined in.

In the interim, the makeshift band launched into a twangy ballad that opened the dance floor to all comers, while Boone beckoned for others to join them. Clare practically dragged Walker onto the floor, and seeing how happy Clare was to have his full and laughing attention, Casey felt the starch go out of her knees. She made her way to the porch steps and sat down, willing herself not to blubber like a sentimental fool.

There, in the shade, amid all that celebration, she thought of the lies she’d told, right from the beginning. Sure, she’d been young and scared, wanting Walker a lot but wanting her then-blossoming career even more, back then at least. She’d told Walker the baby she was carrying belonged to another man, someone he didn’t know, and at first, he’d believed her. They’d broken up, as she’d planned, because Walker was a proud and decent man, but the grief she felt after losing him was something she hadn’t reckoned on, consuming and painful as a broken bone.

Casey had done what she always did: she’d carried on. Barely showing even when she was near full term, she’d been able to camouflage her pregnancy, from the fans and the media, anyway, by wearing flowing gowns and big shirts.

But a year later, she and Walker had met up again, and they’d both lost their heads and conceived Shane.

Knowing Walker wouldn’t buy the same story twice, Casey called him from the road when the second pregnancy was confirmed.

Nobody’s fool, Walker had soon figured out that the redheaded baby girl, just learning to toddle around on her own, was his, too.

All hell had broken loose, and the battle was on.

Walker wanted to get married immediately, but his cold rage was hardly conducive to romance. They’d wrangled back and forth over the children for a couple of years, though they never got quite as far as the courtroom, and finally, they’d forged a sort of armed truce.

Unwillingly, Walker had agreed to go along with Casey’s story—that both Clare and Shane were test-tube babies, fathered by an anonymous sperm donor—as long as he was allowed regular visits with both children.

For a long time, it worked, but now—well, Casey could feel the framework teetering around her, and she was scared.

Kendra sat down beside her on the porch step just then, touched her arm. Her friend was the only person on earth, besides Casey and Walker, of course, who knew the truth about Clare’s and Shane’s births. Oddly enough, it had been Walker who’d told her, possibly out of frustration, rather than Casey herself.

“It’s not too late to fix this, you know,” Kendra said gently, bumping her shoulder briefly against Casey’s. She was watching as Clare persuaded Walker to dance with her just once more, her gaze soft with understanding.

“Has anybody ever told you that you’re too damn perceptive sometimes, Kendra Carmody?”

Kendra smiled. “I might have heard it once or twice,” she replied. Then her smile faded and her expression turned serious. “Things like this have a way of coming out, Casey,” she said, nearly in a whisper. “In fact, given how famous you are, it’s a miracle the story hasn’t broken already.”

Casey wiped her cheeks with the back of one hand, sat up a little straighter. “What if they don’t understand?” she asked, barely breathing the words. “What if Clare and Shane never forgive me?”

Kendra sighed, then countered with a question of her own. “Do you want them to hear it from somebody else?” she asked.

CHAPTER TWO

THOUGH IT WASN’T QUITE DARK, lights glowed yellow-gold in the kitchen windows of the ranch house when Walker pulled in, and that raised his spirits a little, since he was grappling with a bad case of lonesome at the moment. Leaving Clare and Shane and, okay, Casey, too, had that effect on him, especially at that homesick time around sunset, when families were supposed to gather in a warm and well-lit room, laughing and telling each other all about their day.

Not that long ago, his ancient, arthritic black Labs, Willie and Nelson, would have been waiting in the yard to greet him, tails wagging, gray-muzzled faces upturned in grinning welcome and the hope of a pat on the head, but they’d both passed on last fall, within a few weeks of each other, dying peacefully in their sleep as good dogs deserve to do. Now they rested side by side in a special spot near the apple orchard, and Walker never got through a day without missing them.

He swallowed hard as he left the truck behind, heading for the house. He’d raised Willie and Nelson from pups, and Brylee had been urging him to replace them, but he wasn’t ready for that. For the time being, he’d rather share his sister’s dog, though Snidely went everywhere with his mistress, which meant he wasn’t around home much.

Walker let himself in through the side door, which opened into the spacious, old-fashioned kitchen, his suit jacket slung over one shoulder, and was heartened to find Brylee there. Blue-jeaned and wearing a T-shirt with the motto Men Suck on the front, her heavy brown hair pulled back in a ponytail, she was splotched with flour from head to foot.

Snidely kept watch nearby, curled up on a hooked rug.

“Hey,” Walker said, addressing both of them, draping his jacket over the back of a chair.

Snidely lifted his head, sighed and rested his muzzle on his forelegs again.

“Hey,” Brylee said, careful not to look at Walker. She’d been baking bread, probably for hours. The air was scented with that homey aroma, and pans full of rising, butter-glistened dough waited, assembly-line fashion, on the counter nearest the stove. “How was the wedding?”

Walker wanted a beer and a quiet chat with his sister, but he had to get out of his suit and head for the barn and stock pens, to make sure the chores had all been done. With six ranch hands working the place year-round, though, the task was more habit than necessity. “It was a wedding,” he said, pausing. He wasn’t being flippant; the church variety was always pretty much the same, that’s all—white dress and veil for the bride, nervous groom, preacher, organ music, crowded pews, tons of flowers.

Every line of Brylee’s slender body looked rigid as she absorbed his reply, and she kept her back to him. Whenever somebody got married, she folded in on herself like this, keeping frenetically busy and pretending it didn’t matter.

“So it went off without a hitch, then?” she asked, her tone so falsely airy that a crack zigzagged its way down the middle of Walker’s big-brother heart. Brylee wouldn’t have wished what had happened at her wedding on anybody, but she always asked that same question after every new ceremony and she always seemed to be braced for the worst.

“I’d say it was perfect,” Walker answered gently. He’d retrieved his jacket from the chair back, but beyond that, he hadn’t moved. His feet seemed to be stuck to the kitchen floor.

Brylee looked back over one flour-coated shoulder, offered a wobbly smile that didn’t quite stick to her wide mouth. “That’s good,” she said, blinking once and then turning to the dough she was kneading.

“What’s with all the bread?” Walker asked.

“Opal Dennison and some of the other ladies from her church are holding a bake sale tomorrow, after the second service,” she replied with brave good cheer, though her shoulders slumped slightly and she was careful to keep her face averted. “To raise more money for the McCulloughs.”

Young Dawson McCullough, seriously injured in a fall from the now-demolished water tower in town, had worked on the ranch since he was big enough to buck hay bales and muck out stalls, after school and during the summer, and he was practically a member of the family.

“And you’re the only woman in the whole county who signed up to bake bread?” Walker asked lightly.

Brylee stopped, stiff along her spine again and across her shoulders. She kept her head up, but it looked like an effort. “Don’t, Walker,” she said softly. “I know what you’re trying to do, and I appreciate the thought, but, please—don’t.”

Walker sighed, shoved a hand through his hair. He opened his mouth, thought better of saying more and closed it again, went on through the kitchen, along the corridor, past the dining and living rooms, and into his spacious first-floor bedroom, where he peeled off the suit and kicked off the dress shoes and put on worn jeans, a lightweight flannel shirt and boots.

The relief of being himself again was enormous.

Brylee was lining up what looked like the last of the doughy loaves on the oven racks when Walker came back through, on his way to the door. She didn’t acknowledge him, but Snidely got to his feet and lumbered along after him, outside, across that wing of the porch that wrapped around the house on three sides, down the steps.

“Women,” Walker told the dog in an exasperated undertone. “Brylee could have her pick of men and what does she do? She pines after the one that got away.”

Tongue lolling, Snidely wagged his tail as he ambled companionably alongside.

Walker was glad to have the company. “The worst part is,” he went on, relieved that nobody on two legs could hear him prattling away to a German shepherd, “she’s just being cussed, that’s all. Deep down—but not all that deep down—Brylee knows damn well that she and Hutch weren’t right for each other. By now, the honeymoon wouldn’t just be over, they’d have crashed and burned.”

Snidely offered no insight, but, in that way of faithful dogs, his mere presence was soothing. He paused to lift one hind leg against a pillar of the hitching post, then trotted to catch up with Walker at the barn door.

Walker flipped on the lights lining the long breezeway and stepped inside, pausing to check on each horse in each stall, making sure the electronic watering system was working and there was hay in every feeder.

Mack, his big buckskin gelding, occupied the largest stall, the one across from the tack room, and he nickered a greeting when Walker stopped to offer a quiet howdy. All the horses, Mack included, had been properly looked after, but Walker had had to see that with his own eyes if he expected to get any sleep. Same with the bulls and the broncos, some in the pastures and some in the holding pens behind the barn.

He sighed again, rubbed the back of his neck, still itchy from the starch in the collar of the dress shirt he’d worn earlier, and adjusted his hat, even though it didn’t need adjusting. With his head full of Casey Elder and the two children they should have been raising together, he’d probably toss and turn the whole night and wake up cranky as an old bear with a nettle between its toes.

Snidely, standing close, thumped the back of Walker’s right knee with his swinging tail, as if to remind him of the here and now.

Walker chuckled and leaned down to ruffle the dog’s ears, and then the two of them went on to check on the bulls snorting and pawing the ground in their steel-girded pens, the broncos grazing in the nearby pasture. Across the Big Sky River, the lights of the ranch hands’ cabins and trailers winked in the shadows of early evening, casting dancing reflections on the water. Voices drifted over—children playing outside, determined to wring the last moment of fun from a dying day, mothers calling them inside for baths and bedtime, men smoking in their yards while they swapped tall tales and laughed at each other’s jokes.

The sounds were ordinary, but they lodged in Walker’s chest like slivers that night. He tilted back his head, looked up at a sky popping with stars and wondered how a man could live square in the middle of a busy ranch like Timber Creek and still feel as though he’d been exiled to some faraway planet with a population of one.

Snidely lingered, but it was plain that he wanted to head back toward to the house and Brylee, and Walker figured the dog had it right. God knew, standing out here by the river, listening in on all those family sounds, wasn’t doing him any good.

“Let’s go,” he told Snidely, and started back.

By the time they reached the house, Brylee had the kitchen cleaned up, about two dozen loaves of bread wrapped up in foil and ready for tomorrow’s bake sale, and was actually sitting down at the table, sipping from a cup of tea while she waited for the stove timer to ring so she could take out the last batch.

She’d pulled herself together while Walker was out, and he was grateful, because he never knew how to comfort her when she got into one of these jilted-bride moods.

“I kept back a few loaves for you,” she told her brother, smiling a genuine Brylee smile when Snidely walked over and laid his chin on her lap so she could stroke his long, gleaming back. “One in the breadbox, two in the freezer.”

“Thanks,” Walker said, hanging his hat on its peg next to the door and proceeding to the sink to roll up his sleeves and wash his hands the way he always did when he’d been outside. He remembered their father doing the same thing in the same way, and their granddad, too. There was a certain reassurance in that kind of quiet continuity.

“I guess you must have seen Casey and the kids today,” Brylee said easily.

“I saw them,” Walker said.

“And?”

“And what?” Walker grabbed a dish towel and dried his hands, his motions brisk.

Brylee chuckled. “Whoa,” she exclaimed. “Touchy.”

“You’re a fine one to talk about being touchy,” Walker pointed out, frowning at her.

Brylee held up both hands, palms out. “Okay, fair enough,” she conceded. “It’s just that I’m allergic to white lace and promises.” Her hazel eyes, set wide above high cheekbones, twinkled, and she reached back to free her hair from the rubber band that had held it in place, shaking her head a couple of times so her curls flew around her face. Before the wedding-that-wasn’t, Brylee’s hair had tumbled past her waist, but she’d had it cut to shoulder-length afterward, which was better, Walker supposed, than getting a tattoo or having something pierced.

“You might want to get over that,” Walker remarked, walking over to the fridge, opening the door and taking out a can of cold beer.

“Are you going to make a speech?” The question was mildly put, but it had an edge to it nevertheless. Brylee narrowed her eyes, her cheeks flushed from an afternoon spent baking bread in a hot kitchen. “Because you’re the last person on earth, Walker Parrish, who has room to lecture anybody about their love life.”

He hooked one foot around the leg of a chair at the table, scraped it back and sat, plunking his can of beer down on the red-and-white-checked cloth and regarding her steadily. “Who said I was fixing to give a lecture?” he asked coolly.

Brylee flashed him one of her wide, toothy grins. The woman was a walking advertisement for orthodontia now, but as a kid, her pearly whites had gone every which way but straight down. “It isn’t as if we don’t have this conversation every time there’s a wedding anywhere in Parable County.”

“What conversation?” Walker took a long, thoughtful draft of his beer. “You said you were allergic to white lace and promises, and I said you might want to think about getting over that. Where I come from, that doesn’t qualify as a conversation.”

Brylee rolled her eyes. For somebody who’d probably been down in the mouth all day, she’d certainly perked up all of a sudden. “I come from the same place you do,” she reminded him. “Right here on this ranch.”

“Is this discussion going anywhere?” Walker asked, suddenly realizing he was hungry. The only food he’d had since lunch, after all, was a slice of white cake, a few pastel mints and a handful of those tiny sandwiches held together by frilly toothpicks.

She reached out then, rested her hand briefly on his forearm and then withdrew it. “I know you worry about me, Walker,” Brylee said softly. “But I’ll be all right. I really will.”

“When?” Walker wanted to know.

“Things take time,” she hedged, making her big brother wish he’d left well enough alone and talked about things like the price of beef or the weather or, better yet, nothing at all.

“How much time?” he asked, because they were already knee-deep in the subject and wishing he’d kept his mouth shut in the first place wouldn’t help now. “It’s been a couple of years since you and Hutch parted ways and, far as I know, you haven’t so much as looked at another guy since then, let alone dated.”

Brylee propped one elbow on the table and rested her chin in her palm, regarding him with a sort of tender amusement. “I’m running a business, Walker—a successful business, in case you haven’t noticed—and that keeps me pretty busy.”

“Too busy, if you ask me,” Walker grumbled.

“I didn’t ask you,” Brylee reminded him sweetly. Her brow furrowed in a slight frown, quickly gone, and another twinkle sparked in her eyes. “Are you afraid I’ll wind up an old maid, and you’ll be stuck with me for good?”

An image of Brylee sitting on the front porch in a rocking chair, her hair gray and pinned back in a bun, wearing a church-lady dress and knitting socks, flashed into Walker’s mind and made his mouth twitch upward at one corner. “Heck, no,” he teased. “I’d just park you in some nursing home and get on with my life.”

Brylee didn’t laugh, or even smile. Her expression was sad, and she gazed off into some unseeable distance. “What if we do end up all alone when we’re old?” she murmured. “It happens.”

“I reckon I’ll wait a decade or two before I start worrying about that,” he said. There had to be things he could say that would encourage Brylee, get her off the sidelines and back into the rough-and-tumble of life, but he was damned if he knew what those things were.

Like quicksilver, Brylee’s mood changed again. The timer on the stove made a chiming sound, and she pushed her chair back to stand, dislodging Snidely’s big dog head from her thigh. All hustle and bustle, she picked up a couple of pot holders and started taking tinfoil loaf pans out of the oven and setting them on the waiting cooling racks. “You’re right,” she said, as though there had been no lag in their verbal exchange. “Let’s wait twenty years and figure it out then.”

Remembering that he was hungry, Walker stood, went to the breadbox on the counter, a retro thing coated in green enamel, took out a loaf and set it on the counter while he rummaged through a nearby drawer for a knife. “It’s a deal,” he agreed, proceeding to open and close cupboard doors until he found a jar of peanut butter and one of those little plastic bears with honey inside. The bottle was sticky and the cap was missing, and honey went everywhere when he squeezed too hard.

“Honestly,” Brylee scolded, elbowing him aside, constructing the sandwich and shoving it at him, then wiping up the mess with a damp sponge.

Walker grinned at her efficiency. “You were born to pack lunches for a bunch of little kids,” he observed.

“Gee,” Brylee said, “thanks.”

“I only meant—”

“I know what you meant, Walker,” she broke in crisply.

He bit into the sandwich, chewed, swallowed. “Well, excuse me,” he said, pretending to be wounded.

“Shut up and go to bed,” Brylee told him.

“I’ll do that,” Walker replied, thinking that they must have slipped into a time warp and been transported back to their teens, when they couldn’t be in the same room without needling each other.

She made a disgusted sound and thumped the tops of a few loaves with one knuckle. She’d be up for a while, waiting for the last batch of bread to cool off so she could wrap it.

Walker saluted her with a lift of his sandwich and headed for his room, shaking his head as he went. He wondered when he was going to learn. Ninety-five percent of the time, reasoning with a woman, especially when that woman happened to be his kid sister, was a waste of breath.

* * *

IT WAS ALMOST MIDNIGHT when the last guests took their leave and the carousel finally stopped turning.

Surveying her backyard, empty except for the caterer’s helpers and the guys taking down the big canopy and dismantling the dance floor, Casey was reminded of her childhood and the feeling she got when the carnival moved on after its yearly visit, leaving a bare and somewhat forlorn patch of ground behind.

“Mom?” Clare stood at her elbow, barefoot but still in her party dress. She was already taller than Casey, and so was her brother, and she had the elegant carriage of a young woman. “You okay?”

Casey turned her head, smiled at her daughter, thinking that if she loved her kids even a smidgeon more, she’d burst. “I’m fine, sweetheart,” she said. “Just a little tired.” She paused, enjoying the night air and the sky full of stars and the bittersweet remnants of a happy day. “Speaking of which—shouldn’t you be in bed by now?”

Named for Casey’s late grandmother, Clare resembled the woman more with every passing year. Now she made a face. “Mom,” she said, “I’m almost fifteen and, anyway, it’s Saturday, so I can sleep in tomorrow.”

“We’re going to church,” Casey reminded the woman-child. “There’s a bake sale after the eleven o’clock service, and I promised Opal I’d help out. And you won’t be fifteen for another eight months.”

With a dramatic sigh, Clare turned and started across the darkened sunporch, toward the kitchen, and Casey followed with some reluctance, turning her back on that big sky full of stars.

“Well,” the girl argued, since teenagers couldn’t go more than ten minutes, it seemed to Casey, without offering up some kind of back talk, “you didn’t promise Opal that I’d help, did you?”

Shane stood at one of the sleek granite-covered counters in that gleaming, cavernous kitchen, eating leftover wedding cake with his fingers. He gave Casey a look of good-natured guilt, shrugged once and reached for another slice.

“You’re disgusting,” Clare informed him.

Shane stuck out a crumb-covered tongue and made a rude noise.

“Yuck,” Clare wailed, drawing the term out to three times its normal length. “Mother, are you just going to stand there and let him act like a baboon?”

Casey pretended to consider the question. “Yeah,” she said finally, with a little grin. “I guess I am.”

Shane laughed in obnoxious triumph, snorting more crumbs. The three dogs, clustered around him, waited eagerly for scraps.

Clare made a strangled, screamlike sound of truly theatrical proportions and stomped off toward the rear stairway, bound for the sanctuary of her upstairs bedroom, a private preserve where Shane was not allowed.

“That’s enough cake,” Casey told her son. “Have the dogs been outside?”

Shane nodded, his mouth full, and dusted frosting-sticky hands together. Once he’d swallowed again—actually, it was more of a gulp—he answered, “Only about five times. Rockford ate a crepe paper streamer and part of a balloon.”

Rockford, the baby of the chocolate-Lab trio, gave a mournful little howl of protest, as though objecting to being snitched on.

Casey walked around, took a gentle hold on the dog’s ears and looked him over closely. “He seems all right,” she said.

“He’ll be okay,” Shane confirmed nonchalantly. “He already barfed. That’s how I knew what he ate.”

“Ewwww,” Casey said, taking her son by the shoulders and steering him toward the stairs. “Be sure to wash up before you turn in for the night,” she added as he followed the trail blazed by his older sister.

The dogs trooped after him, the way they did every night.

Doris, the cook and housekeeper, poked her head out of her apartment off to the side of the kitchen, wearing face cream and curlers and a pink chenille bathrobe. “Is the party over?” she asked pleasantly. It was, of course, a rhetorical question; Doris had to have heard all the goodbying and the slamming of car doors and the crunch of gravel in the driveway. She’d stayed until nearly ten, socializing, then retired to shampoo and set her hair so she’d look good at church the next morning.

“Yep,” Casey replied with a smile. She locked the back door, set the alarm and padded over to the counter to brew a cup of herbal tea. The stuff helped her sleep—usually.

Doris nodded a good-night and retreated back into her nest, shutting the door softly behind her.

Casey lingered in the kitchen for a few minutes, sipping tea and listening to the familiar sounds overhead—the dogs’ nails clicking on the hardwood floor of the upstairs corridor, Shane laughing like a villain in a melodrama, Clare calling him a choice name and slamming her bedroom door hard.

With a sigh, Casey crossed the kitchen—it seemed to cover two acres, that room—and, reaching the foot of the stairs, flipped off the lights.

Shane was still baiting Clare from the hallway when Casey reached the second floor, and Clare made the mistake of opening her bedroom door and calling him another name, which, of course, only egged him on.

Casey whistled shrilly through her teeth, the way Juan, her grandparents’ gardener and all-around handyman, had taught her to do when she was eight. The sirenlike sound was an attention-getter, all right, and it had served Casey well over the years, not only with the kids, but with the band, the road crew and every dog she’d ever owned.

“The fight is over, and I’m calling it a draw,” she announced with authority when both Clare and Shane stared at her, startled, along with all three of the dogs.

“Dickhead,” Clare said to Shane in an undertone.

“Pizza face,” Shane shot back.

Casey put her hands on her hips and puckered up to whistle again.

The mere threat made them both retreat into their rooms, the dogs ducking in ahead of Shane, probably keeping a low profile in case they were in some kind of trouble themselves.

“My sweet children,” Casey said wryly, and went on to her own room.

Actually, the word room fell a little short of accurate description—the place was the size of a small gymnasium, or one of those swanky penthouse hotel suites that take up a whole floor all by themselves.

Again, she had that sense that things had shifted. Everything looked the same—the fancy antique bed rescued from some crumbling Italian villa and sporting a museum-quality painting of nymphs frolicking with various Roman gods on the gilded headboard, the massive dresser, the couch and chairs and elegant marble fireplace, the expanse of floor-to-ceiling windows specially made to give her a sweeping view and, at the same time, ensure her complete privacy.

It was just plain too big a space for one lone woman, but at least it didn’t have wheels, like the tour bus, or a reception desk downstairs, like a hotel. This was the home she’d hungered for all her life.

Oh, yes, she’d wanted this house, she reminded herself, wanted to park herself and the children somewhere solid and real and finally put down some roots. So what if she and Clare and Shane sometimes seemed to rattle around in the place like dried beans in a bucket? She hadn’t bought the mansion because it was grand, so she could play lady of the manor or live in the style to which the public probably believed she was accustomed; she’d bought it because it was big, with room for the band and the backup singers and the roadies and a host of other staffers who came and went. Downstairs, there was a soundstage for filming videos and a recording studio, both of which she used constantly.

Try fitting all that into a three-bedroom, split-level ranch, she thought, glancing at her reflection in the big three-way mirror, encircled with lights, above her vanity table.

Vanity was certainly the operative word for that setup, Casey reflected with a shake of her head as she turned away and set her course for the bathroom. Like the rest of the house, the room was almost decadently luxurious—the shower stall could have accommodated a football team, and she’d seen backyard hot tubs smaller than the mosaic-lined pool she bathed in.

Shutting the door—it was a habit one developed after years of living in a bus—Casey washed her face at one of the three gleaming brass sinks, brushed her teeth and finally pulled her dress off over her head, tossing it dutifully into the laundry hamper, along with her underwear, before pulling on flannel boxer shorts and a T-shirt commemorating her most recent European tour. Once again, she faced her own reflection.

Wearing the shirt should have made her feel nostalgic, she supposed, since that tour had been a record breaker, every concert sold out months before she and the gang had flown over a dark ocean in a jet with her name emblazoned on its sides to visit the first of twelve cities. She’d loved singing in front of huge audiences—thrived on it, in fact—and instead of wearing her out, those performances had energized her, flooded her system with endorphins, provided a high no drug could have matched. Unlike some of her colleagues in the music business, she’d never burned out, had a breakdown, played the home-wrecker or floated into rehab on a wave of booze and cocaine.

So why didn’t she miss all that excitement and attention and applause? She supposed it was because, for her, life was and had always been all about singing and plucking out new tunes on her favorite guitar, the scarred and battered one her grandfather had given her for Christmas when she was around Shane’s age. She’d done what she’d set out to do, pursuing her goals with near-ruthless resolve, but somewhere along the line, she’d noticed that her children were growing up faster than she’d ever thought possible. All too soon, she’d realized with a road-to-Damascus flash of insight, they’d be heading off to college, starting careers of their own, getting married and having children.

Figuratively blinded by the light, Casey had finished the tour, called Walker and asked him if he knew of any houses for sale in his part of Montana. Suddenly, she wanted her children attending a regular school, saluting the flag every morning and making friends their own age. And she’d wanted Clare and Shane to see a lot more of Walker, too, though she hadn’t been sure why and still wasn’t, considering the effort she’d gone to to keep the truth under wraps.

If he’d been surprised by this turn of events, Walker hadn’t given any indication of it. He’d said he knew a real estate broker—who turned out to be Kendra, now a dear and trusted friend to Casey, like Joslyn and Tara—and before she could say Jack Daniels, she’d found herself smack-dab in the middle of Parable, Montana, taking one good look at this house and promptly signing on the dotted line.

Since then, Casey had had plenty of second thoughts, though she’d never actually regretted the decision to settle in a small town where it was still safe for kids to go trick-or-treating on Halloween, where everybody knew everybody else and people not only went to church on Sundays and then had breakfast over at the Butter Biscuit Café, but voted in every election.

It was living in close proximity to Walker Parrish that made her question this particular choice. By doing so, she’d put the secret she’d guarded for years in obvious jeopardy.

Frowning thoughtfully, Casey left the bathroom, crossed to her big, lonely bed and switched out the lamp on the nightstand.

Was it possible that, on some level, she’d wanted the truth to come out?

CHAPTER THREE

IRRITABLE AFTER A RESTLESS NIGHT, Walker spoke briefly with his longtime foreman, Al Pickens, leaving the orchestration of yet another fairly routine workday on the ranch to him. Climbing into his truck, the backseat jam-packed with boxes of Brylee’s homemade bread, each loaf carefully wrapped in shining foil and tied with a ribbon for the church bake sale, it occurred to Walker—and not for the first time—that he was more of a figurehead than a real rancher.

Sure, he ran things, made all the major decisions, personally hauled badass bulls and even badder broncos to rodeos all over the western United States and parts of Canada, led roundups and rode fence lines here at the homestead, signed the paychecks and paid the bills. But, in point of fact, his crew was so competent that they could manage without him, any day of the week.

He headed for Parable, a thirty-mile drive, with his windows rolled down and a worn Johnny Cash CD blaring out of the dashboard speakers, tapping out the familiar rhythms on the steering wheel with one hand as he drove. There were some days, he thought wryly, when nothing but songs like “Folsom Prison Blues” and “A Boy Named Sue” could keep a man’s mind off his problems.

When he reached the same small clapboard church he’d sat in the day before, watching Boone and Tara tie the proverbial knot, the Sunday services were still going on. He found a parking place in the crowded gravel lot, and not without difficulty, as the Reverend Walter Beaumont was a popular preacher.

Since the day was warm and the congregation wouldn’t spring for air-conditioning, the doors were propped open, and the voices of those gathered to make a joyful noise before the Lord spilled out into the sunshine, curiously comforting simply because the words of the old hymn were so familiar.

Spotting the booths set up in back of the church—members who had probably attended the early service were out there lining up goods for the bake sale—Walker briefly recalled the Sundays of his youth. His mother had branded the whole idea of religion as pure hypocrisy—and, in her case, that was certainly true—but their dad had carted him and Brylee off to a similar place of worship over in Three Trees every single week until they reached the “age of reason,” that being, by Barclay Parrish’s reckoning, twelve.

Life had its rough patches, the old man had quietly maintained, and, in his opinion, a person could take the dogma or leave it, but over the long run, they’d be better off believing than not believing. If nothing else, he’d figured, Walker and Brylee would lead better lives just for trying.

Brylee had continued to attend services, on and off, but Walker had gone his own way when he was given the option. He wasn’t a believer or a nonbeliever—it seemed obvious to him that nobody really knew what the celestial deal was—but he was grateful for the training and the Bible verses he’d had to memorize for Sunday school just the same. Those lines of Scripture had a way of popping into his mind when he needed them.

Opal Dennison, soon to be Opal Beaumont since she was engaged to the preacher, beamed at him from behind one of the booths. A tall, handsome black woman, Opal carried herself with an easygoing dignity and served as matchmaker and mother confessor to half the county. Rumor had it that she’d been directly involved in hooking up not only Boone and Tara, but Hutch and Kendra Carmody, and Slade and Joslyn Barlow, as well.

A part of Walker tended to turn nervous whenever he encountered Opal—he might suddenly find himself married if he wasn’t careful.

She approached as he was opening the back door of the truck and reaching in for the first box of Brylee’s homemade bread.

“Mercy,” Opal marveled, her eyes widening a little at the sheer bounty. “Talk about the miracle of the loaves and fishes. Without the fishes, of course.”

Walker grinned at her. “Brylee got a little carried away,” he said, recognizing this as an understatement of no small consequence. “Where do you want this?”

Opal pointed out a nearby booth, consisting of a portable table covered with a checkered vinyl cloth and shaded by an old patio umbrella with its pole held in place by a pyramid of cinder blocks. A charitable frown creased her forehead as she walked alongside Walker, subtly herding him from here to there in case he got lost between the truck and the backyard bake sale. “I didn’t see Brylee at the wedding yesterday,” she said before adding in a confidential whisper, “I worry about that girl.”

Walker set the first box down on the appointed table and started back for another. Opal stuck with him, marching along in her sensible shoes and her flowery dress, which she’d probably sewn herself.

“Me, too,” he admitted, thinking admissions like that one came all too easily with Opal. She did have a way about her.

Picking up the second of three boxes brimming with wrapped and beribboned loaves, Walker raised an eyebrow and grinned. “You keeping attendance records at weddings these days, Miss Opal?” he asked.

She laughed. “I’ve got what you might call a photographic memory,” she explained, sunlight glistening on the lenses of her old-fashioned eyeglasses. “It’s a God-given gift—if anybody’s missing from anywhere, I know it right away.” She paused, ruminating. “It’s time that sister of yours got her act together, as far as love and marriage are concerned. And past time she put what happened with Hutch Carmody behind her once and for all and moved on.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” Walker said on the return trip to the booth.

“Not that you’re doing all that great in the love department yourself,” Opal observed, benignly forthright. “You’re not getting any younger, you know. Living out there in that big house, all alone except for your sister and her dog—haven’t you noticed just how happy your good friends Slade, Hutch and Boone are these days?”

“It would be hard to miss that,” Walker allowed with another grin, this one slightly wicked, “what with Joslyn and Kendra coming a-crop with new babies and all.”

Opal smiled widely, and mischief danced in her eyes. “That’s just the way it should be,” she said with confidence.

Walker set down the box of bread and returned to his truck for the last one.

Again, Opal accompanied him every step of the way, there and back again.

“I wouldn’t dream of arguing with you, Miss Opal,” Walker said as they covered the final leg of the journey.

“Good,” she answered, “because you wouldn’t win.”

He laughed, tugged at the brim of his hat, intending to bid her farewell and get out of there, reasoning that if he headed straight for the Butter Biscuit Café, he might beat some of the after-church rush, especially since it was safe to assume a large portion of folks from the other local denominations would gravitate to the bake sale.

Opal caught hold of his shirtsleeve. “Don’t you go rushing off. These other ladies and me, we could use some help setting up extra tables.”

Walker suppressed a sigh. He couldn’t turn Opal down—that would go against his grain and she knew it—but he did narrow his eyes at her so she’d know he had his suspicions concerning what she might be up to.

She just laughed and pointed him toward a half-assembled booth with boxes of fresh strawberries stacked all around it. It was no big surprise when Casey Elder came out of the church kitchen carrying a tray loaded with shortcake to go with the strawberries. Seeing Walker, she stopped in midstep, rummaged up a smile and then marched straight toward him.

“Hello, Walker,” she said sweetly.

Walker had set his hat aside and crouched to wrestle with a table leg that refused to unfold. That put him at a physical disadvantage, the way he saw it. “Casey,” he replied with a brief nod and no smile. After all, this woman and her stubborn streak had cost him the better part of a night’s sleep—and not just this once, either.

Her mouth quirked up at one corner, and she cast a glance in Opal’s direction before meeting his gaze again. “This must be some kind of record,” she said. “Walker Parrish setting foot on church property twice in two days, I mean.”

He got the table leg unjammed with a hard jerk of one hand, straightened, hat in hand. Walker rarely made small talk—there wasn’t much call for it on a ranch, working with a bunch of seasoned cowboys—and he didn’t have a quip at the ready.

He felt heat climb his neck and throb behind his ears.

Opal whisked over and, with a billowy flourish, spread a cotton cloth over the rickety table before vanishing again. Casey set the tray of shortcakes down with a knowing and possibly annoyed little smile.

“I’m sorry,” she murmured without looking at Walker.

The interlude gave him time to recover some of his equilibrium, and he was secretly grateful, though he wasn’t sure to whom. “For what?” he asked calmly. Oh, yeah, Mr. Suave-and-Sophisticated, that was him.

“Giving you a hard time just now,” Casey answered, meeting his gaze but keeping her hands busy fussing with the cellophane covering all those little yellow rounds of shortcake. “It was nice of you to help with the table and everything.”

Walker felt his Adam’s apple travel the length of his throat and back down again, like mercury surging in a thermometer, and hoped his ears weren’t glowing bright red. He was a confident man, at home in his own hide and stone-sure of his own mind, but something about this ordinary exchange made him swear he’d reverted to puberty in the space of a few moments. “That’s all right,” he managed, apropos of whatever. The appropriate answer, of course, would have been something along the lines of You’re welcome.

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.

Walker’s expression was not unkind, but it was obvious, from his tone of voice, that he wasn’t going to give an inch of ground, either. He’d reached critical mass, the proverbial hundredth monkey, and this time there would be no going back, no reasoning with him, no changing his mind.

He meant to claim Clare and Shane as his own, once and for all, and publicly, whether she wanted him to or not.

Once the children and the dogs had all been loaded into Walker’s pickup truck, the figurative floodwaters slowly subsided, and Casey could, at last, hear herself think.

She brewed a cup of tea and went downstairs to the soundstage, turning on a single lamp, the only light in the huge room besides the green, blue, yellow and red LEDs blinking back at her from various pieces of high-tech equipment.

Casey opened the battered guitar case she’d first glimpsed under a glittering Christmas tree when she was still a child herself, reverently lifted out the instrument on which she’d played her first, stumbling chords, picked out the initial uncertain notes, made her earliest attempts at composing songs. Eventually, after many incarnations, some of those tunes had become hits, catapulting her to fame.

Remarkable.

The guitar fit comfortably in her arms, and she smiled sadly as she looked down at the open case—both Clare and Shane had taken backstage naps in that unlikely cradle, as tiny babies, bundled in denim jackets on loan from the band or the roadies, nestled among rolled-up souvenir T-shirts or blankets brought in from the bus.

Remembering, Casey’s heart turned over again.

She began to play softly, feeling her way into the sweet flow of music that had always been her solace, her hiding place. Even before she’d learned to play the guitar or any other instrument, she’d sung along with the radio or her grandparents’ stereo system. According to family lore, she’d tackled singing first, and talking later on.

There, in the music, her private refuge, if only for a little while, she lost her fears and her worries and her doubts, and her everyday self with them.

* * *

THE TRUCK WAS a rolling uproar—both kids talking at once, the dogs scrambling to change places every few minutes, like some canine version of the Keystone Cops—the wind whipping past open windows and swirling inside to jumble it all into primordial chaos.

Walker loved it, but his delight in Shane and Clare’s company was bittersweet, too. In a few hours, it would be time to say goodbye and take them back to their mother and her world, the one they knew so well—and he had no place in.

It was something of a relief to see Brylee’s rig parked in the driveway when they pulled in at the ranch house—Walker, grimly independent all his life, suddenly felt the need for his sister’s moral support.

She stood on the steps of the side porch, blue-jeaned and wearing a flannel shirt over a T-shirt, battered boots on her feet, her smile as wide as the Big Sky River that flowed through Parable, through the middle of Three Trees, and rolled on by Timber Creek Ranch, in a hurry to reach the distant coast. Her dog sat obediently at her side, tilting his large head to the right, ears perked in curiosity as he took a silent roll call and found himself up two kids and three dogs from the norm.

Walker had no more than stopped the truck when Shane and Clare both tumbled out, hitting the ground running like just-thrown riders racing for the fence at the rodeo, with a pissed-off bull hot on their heels. The Labs, quieter now, followed, probably trying to gauge Snidely as friend or foe.

Brylee met the kids halfway, and the three of them ended up in a huddle hug, laughing and jumping around like happy fools on a trampoline.

Walker hung back, taking it all in. It was a scene he wanted to remember, etch into his heart and mind, so he could come back to it when he felt the need, and savor the sight and the sounds.

Snidely greeted the Labs with some sniffing and some cautious tail wagging and, as quickly as that, the dogs were all friends. They dashed off to explore the wonders of a genuine barnyard on a genuine ranch, Brylee’s faithful German shepherd leading the pack.

Brylee’s eyes were gleaming with happy tears when the hugging and jumping finally subsided long enough for everybody to catch their breath.

“What a terrific surprise!” She beamed, apparently crediting Walker with the working of this particular miracle.

Brylee loved Clare and Shane; she considered them her honorary niece and nephew—if only she knew—kept their most recent pictures taped to the refrigerator in her apartment kitchen, was forever sending them texts or emails or small gifts.

“Opal said to thank you for all that bread,” Walker told his glowing sister, oddly uncomfortable in the face of all that joy.

“Every single bit of it got sold!” Clare put in. “Mom said the bake sale took in a small fortune.”

“Good,” Brylee said, slipping one arm around Clare’s shoulders and one around Shane’s and giving them each a squeeze. Her eyes were full of questions, though, as she studied Walker’s face.

“We’re going riding,” Shane said to Brylee. “Will you come with us?”

Brylee, still looking at Walker, raised one eyebrow in silent question.

“Absolutely,” Walker said. When, he wondered, was the last time he’d seen Brylee looking so happy?

Anyhow, they all ended up in the barn, choosing which horses they wanted to ride—Walker steered the kids toward the gentler ones—saddling up, leading the animals out into the penny-bright sunshine of a Sunday afternoon in summer.

Brylee, like Walker, had been riding since before she could walk or talk, but as far as he knew, she hadn’t done more than groom her trusty black-and-white pinto gelding, Toby, in months. She’d told Walker once, in a weak moment, that some things, like certain kinds of music and the company of her horse, touched places so raw inside her that she had to back away.

Recalling this, Walker was heartened to watch his sister instructing Clare and Shane, who were fair riders but lacking in experience, as easy in the saddle as if she’d been born there. This was the old, spirited, devil-take-the-hindmost Brylee, the one Walker knew best and loved without reservation.

With Brylee leading the way, Clare alongside on Tessie, the four of them headed for the foothills rippling at the base of Big Sky Mountain like ruffles on a fancy skirt. Walker followed on Mack, while Shane bounced cheerfully beside him, riding chubby, mild-mannered Smokey.

The four dogs brought up the rear, behaving themselves and sticking close to the band of horses and riders, though not so close they were in danger of being kicked or trampled.

“This is great!” Shane said enthusiastically, his backside slapping hard against the saddle as Brylee eased Toby into a slow trot and the other horses followed suit.

Walker laughed. “You’re going to be mighty sore tomorrow if you don’t get in rhythm with that horse,” he told his son.

His son. He wanted to shout it from the mountaintop: my daughter, my son, my children.

“I’m trying,” Shane answered, smiling fit to light up the whole county.

Walker showed him how to stand up in the stirrups—sometimes that helped a rider get in step, so to speak, with his mount—but the boy’s legs weren’t quite long enough to reach.

When they got to the creek, some fifteen minutes later, Walker got off Mack, walked over to Smokey and adjusted the stirrups to suit Shane.

“I guess I’m sort of out of practice,” Shane said, keeping his voice low so Brylee and Clare, who were having a fine old time girling it up, wouldn’t overhear.

“That’ll be easy to fix,” Walker assured him. “It’s been a while since you and your sister came for a visit, after all, and my guess is, you haven’t had many opportunities to ride horses in the meantime.”

Shane studied him solemnly, swallowed once. “I wouldn’t mind being here more often,” he said, choosing his words with such obvious care that Walker’s heart hurt a little. “If you wanted me—us—Clare and me, I mean, hanging around and stuff.”

Careful, Walker counseled himself, because his most powerful instinct was to gather the boy in his arms, tell him how much he wanted Shane and Clare to play bigger parts in his life. How very much he wanted to tell them they were his, try his damnedest to make up for lost time, hear the world call them by their rightful surname, which was Parrish, not Elder.

“You can hang around as much as your mom will allow,” Walker finally replied. “How’s that?”

“She’ll say you’re busy and we’ll be underfoot,” Shane answered with bleak certainty.

Walker’s throat hurt. He cleared it, in order to speak. “I reckon that part of it is my call,” he said cautiously. Then, after a long pause, he added, “Suppose I have a talk with her?”

Shane brightened, but his delight faded as quickly as it had appeared. “You can try,” he said. “Mom’s pretty hardheaded, though. Everybody says so.”

Walker chuckled, a rusty sound, saw-toothed enough to draw blood, the way it felt coming out. “That’s true,” he allowed gently, “but I reckon she’s had to be a bit on the hardheaded side to raise you and your sister into the people you are, and build a world-class career at the same time.”

Shane appeared to consider this, but in the end, Walker suspected, the finer points went over his head. He was only thirteen, after all, in that in-between place, neither boy nor man, an ever-changing sketch of the person he would become as he grew to manhood. “I guess,” he said, sounding unsure.

“Are we going to ride or stand around and yammer?” Brylee interceded, the smile on her face seeping into her voice. She hadn’t dismounted, and neither had Clare.

Walker laughed, shook his head and swung back up into the saddle, the reins resting loosely across his right palm. “You ready?” he asked Shane in a quiet aside.

Shane nodded, proud and determined. “Ready,” he confirmed.

They rode for another hour, until the dogs started lagging behind, tongues lolling, signaling that, as Walker’s dad used to say, they’d had about all the fun they could stand for one afternoon.

Back at the barn, Brylee and Clare continued to chatter while they unsaddled their horses and put them away in their stalls. They talked while they brushed the animals, too, and the whole time they were feeding them.

“How come women talk so much?” Shane asked innocently. He and Walker had been performing the same tasks as Brylee and Clare right along, but only a few words had passed between them. It wasn’t that there wasn’t anything to say—working together, side by side, was its own kind of communication, rendering speech unnecessary.

“I have no idea,” Walker answered in all honesty. “I guess females are just wired that way.”

“Maybe,” Shane agreed. “Mike—that’s my mom’s lead guitarist—says girls think if things get too quiet, somebody’s mad at them.”

Walker weighed the pros and cons of that theory. “That’s a little on the simplistic side, I think,” he said. “My guess is, strong women—like your mom and Brylee and Clare—don’t worry too much about whether or not anybody’s mad at them. They’re too busy doing the things they figure they ought to get done.”

Shane nodded thoughtfully, and Walker would have given a lot to know what was going on in the boy’s mind just then. What had it been like for him, on the road with Casey and the band for most of his young life? Had he ever felt scared, facing new places and new people at every turn? Did he ever wish he could just light somewhere, attend regular school, make friends and play on the softball or soccer team?

He didn’t really know Shane, or Clare, for that matter, and that realization, oft-visited though it was, shook him, made him feel wistful and pissed off and a whole passel of other things, too. He clamped his jaw down tight so he wouldn’t say it, wouldn’t blurt out the facts. While it was probably right, the claim that the truth set people free, it was equally true that it could scorch the earth, destroying everything in its path, leaving nothing but rubble in its wake. It could break hearts.

Maybe, he reflected glumly, it was already too late to rectify the situation without doing more harm than good.

He was fairly sure Casey believed exactly that—and she might be right.

“Spaghetti for supper?” Brylee asked when the horses were taken care of. Two ranch hands were already busy feeding the rest of the livestock and attending to other end-of-the-day chores.

The kids approved of the suggestion loudly and with vigor, but Walker remained pensive, thinking of all the time they’d wasted, he and Casey and the kids. And while he figured he could love the woman if he was ever fool enough to trust her that much, right about then, if she’d been handy, he’d have read her the riot act from start to finish, and then started all over again just in case she’d missed anything.

Whatever happened between him and Casey, Walker thought, he was through playing games, through watching from the sidelines while his children grew up, through with the lies and the pretending and all the other bullshit.

If the four of them—he and Casey, Clare and Shane—couldn’t be a family, well, so be it. It wasn’t an uncommon problem, in the modern world—folks dealt with it, did the best they could.

All Walker could have said for sure as he fed and watered all four dogs on the side porch, the sounds of laughter and cooking and table-setting rolling out through the screen door between there and the kitchen, was that he was done doing this Casey’s way.

Yes, there would be consequences. He’d just have to find a way to work through them, the way a man worked through a hard winter or a long-term heartache.

* * *

MITCH FOUND HER, eventually, probably drawn by the faint strains of her guitar and a song that wouldn’t quite come together.

Companionably, Casey’s manager sat down on the bottom step, rested his elbows on his knees and his chin in one palm.

“You and the cowboy,” he began. “Is it serious?”

Casey stopped playing, placed her guitar gently back in its case, lowered the lid and snapped it closed. “By ‘the cowboy,’” she replied, “I assume you mean Walker?”

“Don’t try to throw me off, Case,” Mitch said with a note of sadness in his voice. “We’ve known each other too long for that.”

Casey looked away. “Walker is a—friend,” she said, because the first person she told about her relationship with Walker was not going to be Mitch Wilcox, no matter how much she respected him and appreciated all he’d done for her over the years. No, Clare and Shane had to hear what she had to say before anyone else and, after them, Brylee. This was, after all, a family matter.

“If you say so,” Mitch agreed, still seated on the stairs. Out of the corner of her eye, Casey saw him spread his hands in a gesture of helpless acceptance. “I’m not here to talk about Walker Parrish.”

“You could have fooled me,” Casey replied sweetly, though the joke fell a little flat, flopping between them like a fish out of water.

“I care about you, Casey,” Mitch went on in a concessionary tone. “And about the kids, of course.” With Mitch, Clare and Shane were always an afterthought. A logistical problem. “That’s why I’m here—in Parable, I mean.”

She looked straight at him then, dread leaking into her soul through the holes in her heart. “What?” she asked, somewhat stupidly.

“I care about you,” Mitch repeated.

A silence fell, very awkward and pulsing with all sorts of nebulous meaning.

“I care about you, too,” Casey finally replied.

Mitch seemed to relax slightly, and a grin spread across his face. “Then maybe there’s a chance,” he said.

“A chance for what?” Casey had no clue, though later she would reflect that she ought to have known where this conversation was headed. In some ways, she’d always been aware of the undercurrent in her association with Mitch.

He looked affably hurt. “I know you’re not in love with me,” he said carefully, “but I’m proposing all the same. You’re tired and burned out, Casey. You need someone to take care of you for a change.”

She blinked, unable to believe what she was hearing. Yes, she’d suspected once or twice that Mitch had a “thing” for her, but it came and went. Every few years, he got married, then divorced, then married again. Each time that happened, she’d shaken her head in confused concern, but she’d never entertained the idea of joining the lineup.

“You’re a good friend, Mitch,” Casey said, trying to be gentle and, at the same time, firm. “I’m grateful for all you’ve done for me, careerwise, but you’re right, I don’t love you.”

“Love is overrated,” Mitch offered with a casualness she knew he was putting on for the sake of his pride. “Where has the fantasy of happily-ever-after gotten you so far, Casey? Two children, no husband—all the money and fame in the world can’t make up for the loneliness you’re bound to feel when Clare and Shane grow up and go off to live their own lives.”

Casey blinked. Where has the fantasy of happily-ever-after gotten you so far, Casey? Was Mitch implying that she’d been in love before and wound up with a broken heart? True or not, that was private turf—no trespassing allowed.

“Where has what gotten me so far?” she demanded, feeling testy and dizzy and very disoriented, as though she’d wandered onto the set of a play with a worldwide audience and didn’t know her lines. This was the stuff of her nightmares—going onstage, finding herself unable to sing or play her guitar or even think.

“Let’s take the gloves off,” Mitch said with a lightness that made her want to cross the room and slap him across the face—hard. “I know Walker Parrish is the father of your children, Casey—” He paused, raised both hands, palms out. “Don’t deny it, please. Shane looks just like him, and Clare bears a resemblance, too, though you have to look more closely to see it.”

“I don’t believe this,” Casey said, although she did believe it. Like Job, the thing she had most feared had come upon her. “That’s just—speculation, Mitch. Dangerous speculation. What do you think gossip like that could do to Shane and Clare?”

Mitch simply looked at her for a long moment, his expression maddeningly tolerant and even gentle. “Stop,” he said. “I’m not going to blow your cover, Casey—I love you, and I love the kids. But after all the years we’ve worked together, I think I deserve the truth.”

“I think you need to leave now,” Casey said evenly.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Mitch replied flatly and without rancor. “Not before you agree to marry me, anyway.”

She gaped at him. “Marry you?”

“It’s not as if I’m the Elephant Man or the Incredible Hulk,” Mitch pointed out. “I’ve been your partner, Casey. Your mentor and your advisor and, most important, your friend. Maybe I can’t offer passion and all that other fairy-tale malarkey, but I understand you. And I can give you companionship, security, a good name—”

“A good name?” Casey broke in, incensed. She’d come in for her share of trash talk, having two children without benefit of marriage, but she was damned if she’d apologize for doing her honest best. Besides, this was her business, not Mitch’s. Friend or not, he didn’t have the right to pry or make judgments—especially not with his marital track record.

“Maybe I could have been more tactful,” Mitch allowed.

“I doubt it,” Casey observed sharply. She was glad she’d put her cherished guitar away, because if she hadn’t, she might have been tempted to smash it over Mitch’s head. “No, Mitch. That’s my answer. No. And, furthermore, I’d appreciate it if we could pretend this conversation never took place.”

“In that case,” Mitch said, looking broken, “perhaps this is the time to offer my resignation as your manager.”

“That might be for the best,” Casey said, shaking on the inside, solid on the outside. If it hadn’t been for Mitch, she might never have gotten past playing in cheap bars and opening for loser bands in third-rate venues, yet while she certainly owed him a debt of gratitude, she did not owe him her soul.

Mitch said nothing after that. He simply set his jaw, got to his feet and headed back up the stairs. Fifteen minutes later, after she’d crept into the vast kitchen to brew another cup of tea with shaky hands, Casey heard the rental car start up and saw her old friend driving away—probably for good.

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