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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.
