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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.
