Linda Lael - Big Sky Summer

“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.”