скачать книгу бесплатно
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.
