Big Sky Summer Part 11

Clare's response was an angry sob, and the chains supporting the swing creaked as she started it in motion, probably with a hard kick at the floorboards.

"You can tell me," Brylee said.

"Ask them!" Clare cried in response. "Ask the liars!"

Casey closed her eyes for a moment, against the pain she'd caused her daughter, boomeranging back to bruise her, as well. Her stomach felt as though someone had just slammed a fist into it, hard.

Some murmuring followed, and Clare continued to cry, fury giving way to heartbreak. Neither Casey nor Walker moved or spoke, though Shane, by then out of his chair and stroking Doolittle's head and gleaming back, seemed to be lost in a happy world of his own.

He snapped out of it long enough to make a comment, though.

"I don't get it," Shane said, amazed. "We find out we're not lab experiments-that we have Walker for a dad-and Clare's bawling her eyes out like it's the end of the world or something."

Walker, leaning from his chair, laid a hand on his son's shoulder and, though he'd done that many times before, it was different this time. Casey saw pride in the way Walker touched Shane, knew he was claiming the boy, that no matter what happened after this, they would always be father and son-the bond, finally established, was unbreakable.

"Clare will be all right," Walker told Shane. Then his gaze caught Casey's again, and he leaned back in his chair. "We all will."

The screen door opened with a slight squeal of hinges in need of oiling, and Brylee came in, the dog right behind her.

"What's going on here?" she asked bluntly, her eyes big and her cheeks pale with concern. "Did something happen-?"

Walker was still looking at Casey, and there was a question in his eyes, as clear as if he'd asked it aloud. Should I tell her?

Casey merely nodded.

Walker broke the news to his sister and he was a lot more diplomatic than Casey had been just minutes before. Briefly but thoroughly he outlined the circ.u.mstances that had brought them all to this moment and this place.

A slow smile spread across Brylee's wide mouth as she listened, moved up into her eyes, shining there.

"Wow," she said when Walker finished. "That's great."

Great, Casey thought dismally. Except that Clare was still out there on the porch, crying her heart out, feeling cheated and furious and sold out-by her own mother, no less.

"Can I live here now, with you?" Shane asked Walker. "Can I have a horse? Does this mean my last name is really Parrish, instead of Elder?"

Walker smiled at the boy. "Whoa," he said. "You belong with your mom. As for the horse and the last name, we'll discuss all that later, after the dust settles and everybody's on the same page."

Casey tossed an appreciative glance in Walker's direction; he was letting her know he didn't plan on trying to take her children away from her, and she hadn't realized, until that moment, how afraid she'd been that he would do exactly that.

At least, she hoped that was his meaning.

She stood, unable to wait any longer, her knees wobbly and her head spinning a little, and moved past a sympathetic Brylee to open the screen door and step out onto the porch.

Just as she'd pictured her, Clare was crumpled up in a corner of the big swing, looking more like the little girl she had been, just a few short seasons ago, than the young woman she was so rapidly turning into.

Casey walked over and sat down beside her daughter on the plump, faded cushion padding the seat of the swing. She didn't touch Clare and she didn't speak, either. She just wanted to be there.

Clare, resting both forearms on the arm of the swing, shoulders shaking, eventually lifted her head. She didn't look at Casey, though. Instead, she stared off into something well beyond the rails of the porch, the nearby barn, even the distant horizon.

"Why?" she asked, after a long, long time. She sounded broken, as well as outraged.

Casey weighed the obvious answers. It seemed like a good idea at the time, though true, would sound flippant. I thought it would be the best thing for all of us, then? No, that wouldn't do, either, because while she'd wanted to believe that from the beginning, she knew now that it was just another lie. She'd wanted her career, too, and, dammit, she wasn't ashamed of that, for all her other regrets.

"No excuses," she said. "I should have told you the truth, right from the start, and I'm really sorry I didn't, honey."

Clare turned puffy, accusing eyes on her then. "Why?" she repeated fiercely. "Tell me why."

Casey sighed. "I'm not sure I know," she admitted, at some length. "Not the whole reason, anyhow. I was young, my career was just getting started and I wasn't expecting to get pregnant."

"So you chose your music over Shane and me and Walker?" The words pierced Casey's heart like a spray of porcupine quills.

"I wanted to keep singing," she said after deliberating for a while. "But it wasn't about choosing anything-or anybody-over you and your brother." Mitch, members of the band and other close friends had advised her to put her baby girl up for adoption, and she'd flatly refused, but she didn't think it would do any good to mention that just now. In fact, it might even make things worse.

"And you let it happen twice," Clare marveled angrily, as though Casey hadn't spoken at all. "I'm sorry, but that's just weird."

Casey smiled sadly, remembering the scared, pregnant girl with fame and fortune at her fingertips. By then, her grandparents were both dead, and when it came to kinfolks, she was alone in the world. "Maybe," she confessed presently, her voice small and soft. "But I can't imagine my life without both you and Shane."

Clare didn't answer right away, and she'd averted her eyes again, too. "What about Walker? Did he want us?"

"He didn't know," Casey replied, after biting the figurative bullet. It would have been so easy to blame Walker, make him out to be one of those men who make babies and then skip out, fancy-free.

But she couldn't do that-it would be the worst lie of all.

"What do you mean, 'He didn't know'?" Clare shot back. "He knows now, so you must have clued him in at some point-unlike Shane and me."

"When I found out I was expecting you," Casey said, thinking that telling the truth was overrated, "I led Walker to believe there was another man in my life. A year later, when Shane was on his way, I knew I had to tell Walker, because he was sure to guess everything if I didn't. He was madder than a bee-stung mule at first, but not because I'd gotten pregnant again-he wanted to us to be a family then, the four of us, but I wasn't ready for that."

"You weren't ready," Clare echoed, scornful again. Inside the house, Walker, Brylee and Shane talked in quiet, peaceful voices, and it seemed to Casey that they were apart from her and from Clare, in some other, unreachable dimension. "You still had to win all those Grammies and CMA awards, didn't you? Make all that money?" A shuddery pause followed. "Did you even think about us, Mom? Did it cross your mind that maybe Shane and I would have liked to grow up in a real house, instead of airplanes and tour buses and hotels, with a mother and a father and a regular life?" She gestured, taking in everything around them. "We could have lived right here, gone trick-or-treating at Halloween, ridden the bus to school in town, had friends we'd known since kindergarten, put up the Christmas tree in the same part of the same room every year. We could have been regular people-but, no. We had to have a mother so famous she couldn't even take us to Disneyland without being mobbed!"

Where did all that come from? Casey didn't dare ask. Not yet, anyhow. All these years, she'd thought her confident, capable children were happy living unconventional lives, at least most of the time. Obviously, that had only been partially true. Her head began to ache.

"If I could go back," she said, "I'd do things differently."

"Easy to say," Clare retorted. She'd put her stubborn face on, and she meant to wear it for a while. Maybe forever.

"I love you and Shane with all my heart," Casey said. "I always have."

Clare made a contemptuous, huffy sound, barely audible. "Whatever," she replied in bitter dismissal.

After that, an invisible wall came down between the two of them, and Casey knew there would be no reaching the girl, that the time for talking was over, for now anyway.

She stood up and went back into the house, leaving Clare in the porch swing and feeling as though she'd aged twenty years in the past hour. Worse, she was literally beside herself, a step removed from her body, oddly detached, like an observer following close on her own heels.

Brylee crossed to Casey when she entered the kitchen, gave her a wordless hug.

Casey was profoundly grateful for the other woman's support, though she had no idea how long it would last, and hugged her back.

Shane remained remarkably unshaken-it was as if he'd been told he'd won the lottery, and maybe he had. The prize was a father-just what he'd always wanted.

It hurt to know, with such certainty, that she, Casey, for all her love, for all her devotion and hands-on parenting, wasn't enough.

"I want to be Shane Parrish from now on," the boy announced.

Casey merely nodded, unable to look at her son or at Walker, keeping her eyes cast downward as she stood there in the middle of that plank floor, stricken all over again.

"So," Brylee said, suddenly, expansively and with a little too much enthusiasm, "suppose I take my niece and nephew out for a nice, long horseback ride? Followed by supper in town?"

"Yes!" Shane said.

"Might be a good idea," Walker agreed, standing now. Casey wondered when he'd moved, gotten up from his chair at the table. That peculiar feeling of being separated from herself remained, and the headache was getting worse, too.

"I'm not sure Clare will want to-" Casey began, but she lost momentum before she could finish the sentence. She didn't know what Clare would do next, or what she would say.

To Casey's surprise, though, Brylee easily convinced Clare to join her and Shane on an impromptu adventure, and Casey watched through the window above the sink as the three of them headed for the barn, accompanied by Brylee's dog.

Walker moved to stand behind Casey, slipping his arms loosely around her waist, giving her plenty of room, even inside his embrace. He'd always had a way about him, an ability to comfort her without making her feel cornered. "The worst part is over," he told her, his voice husky, resting his chin on the crown of her head.

The dam broke then, the one Casey had erected years ago, before she had Clare and Shane, even before she'd known Walker. A virtual torrent of emotion flooded through the barrier that had held for so long-sorrow and loss, shame and regret, loneliness and exhaustion. Casey, disoriented before, landed back in her own skin with a crash, and a cry of pain escaped her.

Walker turned her around, held her. And she sobbed into his chest, clung to his shoulders with both hands, convinced she'd collapse if she let go.

She knew that, like most men, Walker was uncomfortable with tears, but he didn't shush her, didn't tell her not to cry, didn't prattle on about how everything would turn out just fine. He merely stood there, as solid as the trunk of a venerable Ponderosa pine, holding her. It felt so right, the heat and the substance of him, the strength.

That was the trouble, of course, because it wasn't right. When she allowed Walker to take care of her this way, when she allowed herself to be a mortal woman with needs and feelings instead of a powerhouse, a star, a success, things happened. Babies happened.

For all that, she couldn't pull away from Walker.

Curving his hand under her chin, he lifted her face, kissed away her tears. "Casey," he ground out, holding her tightly.

Their lips came together naturally-inevitably-seeking at first, tentative, then demanding, fusing them together on some deeper level, where nameless forces surged and swelled, as powerful as a rain-swollen river on a downhill course.

They remained where they were for a long time, kissing, pausing to catch quick, desperate breaths, kissing again.

Vaguely, at the far periphery of her awareness, Casey heard voices-Brylee, Clare, Shane-heard the clomp of horses' hooves out in the yard, the jingle of bridle fittings, and Brylee's dog, barking with excitement.

They might have been in another world, all of them, quite apart from the one she and Walker and-somewhere nearby, Doolittle-occupied.

Her common sense, normally her north star, her personal compa.s.s, deserted her, and that wasn't even the worst part. No, the worst part was, she didn't care about practicality, about consequences, about old lessons learned the hard way and the scars they left behind.

All she wanted was to lose herself in Walker for a little while.

Need crackled between them, almost tangible.

"Are you sure?" Walker asked, reading her with perfect accuracy, the way he'd always done, at least when they were intimate.

"Yes," she said, because she'd been hungry for so long, lonely for so long, brave for so long. She didn't want to be her usual strong, independent self-no, instead, she yearned to give in, to let Walker's strength be enough for both of them, if only for a little while.

He lifted her easily into his arms, carried her out of the kitchen, along a corridor.

She knew she ought to stop him, right this instant, before things went any further, but she couldn't. Make that, wouldn't. Alarm bells should have sounded in her head-history was about to repeat itself-but they didn't. She wanted this, wanted to be swept away, wanted Walker.

Soon, they were in his bedroom.

Momentarily, sanity returned. What if Brylee and the kids came back?

Casey didn't realize she'd asked the question out loud until Walker answered it, his breath warm against her ear, making her skin tingle even as he eased her down onto the bed.

"They'll be gone a while," he promised hoa.r.s.ely. "Bless her, Brylee will see to that."

He was already undressing Casey, even as he spoke-or was she undressing herself? Or him? Either way, their clothes seemed to evaporate, his as well as hers, like morning dew under the light of a summer sun.

Casey murmured Walker's name, feeling the steely length of him against her side as they lay together, a breeze blowing through, cooling their flesh, if not their ardor.

His mouth fell to hers then, consuming, igniting flames within flames within flames. There was no stopping this, Casey knew-they were already lost, both of them.

Walker nibbled at her earlobe, traced the length of her neck with his warm mouth, found her breast, took her nipple with a greedy tenderness that sent hot, sweet pleasure skewering through her.

It's been so long, her body whispered-or was it the wordless language of her soul that spoke so eloquently? Walker-Walker-it's been so long.

Casey couldn't get close enough to him; her hands roamed up and down the muscular length of his back, urging, urging.

With a low groan, Walker parted her legs, found her most sensitive place and began plying her with his fingers. He knew just how to touch her, lightly but not too lightly, increasing the turmoil inside her with every skillful motion of his hand.

Casey arched her back, biting down hard on her lower lip to hold back a cry of raw, primitive surrender. "Now," she pleaded, nearly strangling on her own voice. "Please, Walker-now-"

But Walker would not be rushed; even in the state she was in, she should have remembered that. No, he'd take his time with her, enjoy both her b.r.e.a.s.t.s at his leisure, kiss her senseless, and then he would- The memory of all those other times when they'd made love electrified her, made her gasp again in antic.i.p.ation, and Walker, understanding, chuckled low in his throat.

"Hang on, cowgirl," he murmured, his lips moving against the quivering flesh of her belly now and headed slowly, inexorably south. "We're just getting started."

"I don't think-I can wait-" Casey whimpered, already wet, already expanding to receive him, take him inside her, hold him there.

"That's all right, too," Walker replied. And then he was there, burrowing through with his tongue, teasing her, finally taking her into his mouth.

Her entire body buckled in a spasm of frantic welcome as he shifted to his knees, slid his hands under her backside, raised her high off the sheets and went right on partaking of her, now gently, now hungrily, as though she were a honeycomb, ripe and juicy and sweet.

She buried her fingers in his hair, holding him to her even as she thought she'd surely explode into flaming fragments at any moment, like a dying star, dissolving into darkness. The pleasure was all-consuming and yet not nearly enough, a mere promise of what was still to come.

Casey rasped Walker's name, fevered, desolate, triumphant.

Walker went easy on her for a few moments, then grew more demanding again, more insistent.

Her first climax erupted like a geyser, propelling her skyward in dizzying spirals of splintered light, the force of it stopping her breath behind her throat, even as her body flexed in glorious abandon, and flexed again. Then again.

When it was over, Walker lowered her back to the mattress and Casey, though saturated with satisfaction, every muscle and bone melted, craved more. She wanted, needed, to feel Walker deep inside her, part of her, needed to be driven mad all over again by the friction as they moved together, in that most private, most sacred dance of all.

She could only mutter his name, though, because she'd given him all her strength, shamelessly thrown everything she had, everything she was, into that shattering, seemingly endless o.r.g.a.s.m. For all its power, she knew it was only the first of many, each one wilder than the last, each one hurling her outside herself, outside the ordinary, everyday world, into realms of mystery and magic.

Walker shifted, and the thought flitted through Casey's mind that he was putting on a condom, and she wanted to laugh for sheer joy, though she knew she didn't have the breath for even that much effort. He'd been wearing a condom when they conceived Clare. Shane, too.