Big Sky Summer. Linda Miller Lael

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