“I can work a cash register,” Ayanna said, patting Avalon’s head when the dog rounded the end of the counter to lean against her in silent adoration. “I was a waitress for years, and I’ve rung up a lot of sales. Just show me what you want me to do. We can figure out all the details later, and if the setup doesn’t work for either one of us, we’ll shake hands and call it good. What do you say?”
Echo smiled, already feeling better. Life went on.
“You’re hired,” she said.
The UPS man came and went, leaving piles of boxes higher than Echo and Ayanna’s heads. Customers entered, bought books and left again. Several commented on the newspaper article.
During a lull in the middle of the afternoon, Echo ducked out to the bank, taking Saturday’s profits with her in a zippered plastic pouch. When she returned, Ayanna was bagging up a sizable sale for a heavy-set woman dressed for ranch work.
She gave Echo a friendly smile and left.
Avalon followed her to the door and stood whimpering when it closed in her face, nose pressed to the glass.
Echo and Ayanna exchanged glances. Ayanna probably didn’t know Avalon’s story, but given the size of the community, she might.
“What do you suppose that’s about?” Echo asked.
“Most likely she’s lonesome,” Ayanna said, presumably referring to Avalon. “That was Nell Jenson. She and her husband, Roy, have a spread outside of town, and at least half a dozen dogs.”
Fresh sadness touched Echo’s heart in that moment. Maybe it was wrong to keep Avalon in town, cooped up in the shop or the tiny apartment upstairs so much of the time. Maybe she’d be happier on a ranch, running with a pack.
So many “maybes” and nothing, it seemed, for certain.
“I found her, you know,” Echo confided. “The dog, I mean. Outside a truck stop, down by Tucson. She’d obviously been on her own for a while. I’m not sure if she’d been dropped off, or just gotten lost.”
Ayanna, who had been sorting the cash in the register drawer, paused to look at Avalon, then Echo. “It was good of you to pick her up,” Ayanna said. “A lot of people wouldn’t have.”
“I couldn’t just leave her,” Echo replied softly, watching with a heavy spirit as Avalon turned sadly from the door, crossed to the foot of the stairs and lay down with a deep sigh. “She was so bedraggled and hungry, and it was raining.”
Bud Willand came to mind, and Echo shivered. Rance had gotten rid of the man somehow, but she wasn’t convinced she’d seen the last of him.
Or of Rance.
Do not think about Rance McKettrick.
“I’ve put notices on all the lost-pet Web sites,” Echo went on. “I’ve had one response, but I don’t think the man was on the level. If Avalon did belong to him, he must have abused her. As gentle as she is, she’d have bitten him if she could.”
“Animals,” Ayanna said, “are good judges of character.”
“You wouldn’t want a puppy, would you?” Echo asked.
Ayanna managed to frown and smile at the same time. “So there’s going to be a birth, is there? No, I certainly wouldn’t want a puppy, but Jesse and Cheyenne might. I’ll mention it to them. How soon is she due?”
“No idea,” Echo admitted. “I’ve been thinking of taking her to a vet, just to make sure she’s okay. Is there a good one in town?”
“Doc Swann,” Ayanna answered. She approached Avalon, crouched in a soft billow of turquoise, pink and green skirt, and lifted one of the dog’s ears, then the other, rubbing the flesh gently between a thumb and forefinger. “Could be she has a microchip. You know, one of those things they implant, with all the pertinent information recorded on it?”
Echo tapped a palm to the middle of her forehead. “I didn’t think of that.” She brought the Flagstaff telephone book out from beneath the counter, Indian Rock and other nearby communities being listed in their own sections, and flipped through the business directory.
Finding Dr. Swann’s number, she placed a call and explained what she needed, while Ayanna went on stroking Avalon’s glossy coat. For a woman who didn’t want a puppy, she certainly looked smitten.
“Bring her right over,” the receptionist said. “We’re not busy at the moment.”
Echo cupped a hand over the receiver. Closing time was more than an hour away, and although there was no one in the store at the moment, she hesitated to lock up early. “They can see Avalon now, if you can stay here for a while,” she told Ayanna.
Ayanna nodded.
Avalon’s leash was behind the counter, and she stood eagerly when Echo got it out. She was always up for a walk, and since Dr. Swann’s office was just two blocks down Main Street, there would be no need to take the car. Besides, a little fresh air would do them both good.
As they strolled down the sidewalk, Echo congratulated herself.
She’d gone at least ten minutes without once thinking about Rance McKettrick.
CHAPTER TEN
RANCE WATCHED, WITH HIS damnable McKettrick pride jammed up tight in his throat, as Jesse got out of his mud-spattered truck at the top of the driveway and ambled toward him. It hadn’t rained for weeks. Did the man drive that rig through the creek, just to make it look like that?
As he approached, Jesse resettled his hat and grinned that got-it-dicked grin of his. As far as Rance could tell, his cousin saw life as one big casino, and he was always on a winning streak. “You wanted to talk,” Jesse said, spreading his hands in an affably unspoken “I’m here. So talk.”
Rance had called Jesse after the disastrous interlude with Echo at the bookstore, out of pure desperation. Dragged him out of a poker game in the back room at Lucky’s, where he was, as usual, winning.
Now he wished he hadn’t done it. Better if he’d just suffered in silence—after all, he’d had a lot of practice at that.
He scowled, lifted his own hat and shoved a hand through his hair. “What if I said I changed my mind?”
Jesse laughed. “Then I’d have to knock you on your ass. I had pocket aces, with a third in the flop and a good chance of one more on the river.”
Most Americans spoke English.
Jesse spoke Texas Hold ’Em. Fluently.
“You think you’re man enough to do that?” Rance asked, stalling.
“Knock you on your ass? You better believe it.” Jesse paused, and his grin was super-charged. “’Course, there might be a problem when you got back up again.”
Rance was grudgingly mollified. The truth was, he and Keegan and Jesse used to get into it, and plenty, when they were kids. Usually behind one of the barns on the Triple M. They’d fought like young bulls back then, and then laughed about it afterward.
He kind of missed those times.
Jesse took in the house and yard in a quick, sweeping glance. He was probably looking for Rianna and Maeve, who always greeted him with shouts of joy and shinnied up him as if he were a pole at the county fair. They were in town with Cora. “What’s going on, Rance?” he asked quietly, but the glint in his eyes indicated that he’d already guessed the answer.
“Something happened,” Rance said. He turned and led the way to the patio, the place where he’d served Echo and the kids a fish supper just the other night. Why did it seem like somebody else’s experience, and not his own?
“No shit,” Jesse replied, hauling back a chair, sinking into it and setting his battered hat on the tabletop. “You wouldn’t have called me if it hadn’t.”
“Maybe I would,” Rance said, still on his feet, and still uncertain, “if you’d carry a damned cell phone like everybody else.”
“I hate them,” Jesse answered. “They always ring at the wrong time.” He settled back, touched the tips of his fingers together and regarded Rance thoughtfully. “You good for a cold beer?”
Rance chuckled and relaxed a little. “Sure,” he said, grateful for the request because, one, he could use a beer himself, and two, it would give him a minute or so to nail up the framework of what he wante
d to say. He’d already had three-quarters of an hour, though, since making the call to Lucky’s and asking Nurleen to put Jesse on the horn, and he’d made no significant progress.
All too quickly, the task was completed. Rance handed Jesse a bottle, watching as he twisted off the lid and took a long drink.
“Sit down,” Jesse said after swallowing. “You make me nervous, standing there like you expect your clothes to burst into flame and you’re figuring out how fast you can get to the creek.”
Rance thrust out a sigh. Sat down. Took a draught of his own beer.
“Something happened,” Jesse prompted when Rance didn’t say anything right away.
“You know damn well what it was,” Rance accused. “You just enjoy watching me sizzle on a grill.”
Jesse grinned. “That, too,” he admitted. “My guess is, you’re in over your head with Echo Wells. You took her to bed, didn’t you? And worse yet, you enjoyed it. Now you’re hammering yourself into the ground for committing the unforgivable sin.”
“I used her, Jesse.”
“Did you?” He picked at the label on his beer bottle with one thumbnail. “I assume the lady was amenable to the idea. You didn’t knock her over the head and drag her into your evil lair, or anything like that?”
Rance felt a rush of heat climb his neck and pulse painfully along his jawbones. “Of course I didn’t,” he bit out. “What do you think I am?”
“I think you’re scared shitless, for one thing.”
“Thank you, Dr. Phil,” Rance said, seething.
Jesse laughed, swigged more beer and turned his hat in a slow circle on the tabletop, watching the process with quiet interest. When his eyes met Rance’s again, they were solemn. “Rance, Julie is dead. You didn’t betray her, okay?”
“I took something from Echo,” Rance said glumly. “I didn’t mean to, but I did.”
“She was a virgin?”
“No,” Rance replied. “Thank God.”
“Then what’s bugging you so much?”
“There’s nowhere to go from here, Jesse. I can’t marry her. I’m not ready for that.”
Jesse’s eyes twinkled. “Did she propose?”
Rance, in the act of raising his beer to his mouth, set it down again. “No.”
“Did the subject of marriage come up at all?”
“No.” Something else sure had, though. And that part of Rance’s anatomy was still a little tender.
“So what’s the problem? Shit, Rance—give the woman some credit. Maybe she just wanted a good roll in the hay, the same as you did. Maybe she doesn’t expect anything from you. Just because you’re old-fashioned, doesn’t mean she is.”
Rance thrust out a ragged sigh. What Jesse said made sense, in a Jesse kind of way. So why didn’t he feel one damn bit better?
“Rance?” Jesse urged, when the silence went on too long to suit him.
“Is it old-fashioned to think that sex that good ought to mean something?” Rance asked, of himself more than Jesse.
“Yeah,” Jesse said. “It is. But it’s honorable as hell. Old Angus would be mighty proud of you.”
“I told her I wasn’t ready for a relationship. Like some damn fool. I even said it wasn’t about her, it was about me.”
Jesse rolled his eyes. “Oh, my God,” he marveled. “You didn’t.”
“I did.”
“Well, do you?”
“Do I what?”
“Do you want a relationship with Echo Wells?” Jesse asked, measuring the words out one by one, like scoops of grain for a blind mule with a short attention span.
“I don’t know.”
“Do you want more hot sex?”
Rance grinned. “Hell, yes.” The grin died and fell right off his face. “But she told me to get out of her shop.”
“Well,” Jesse said, “you probably weren’t going to have sex in the shop, anyhow. Not that it’s such a bad idea, now that I think about it. Ask her out again. Tell her the truth—that you can’t make any promises and you don’t expect any in return.”
“She’ll hand me my head.”
“Maybe,” Jesse agreed. “But maybe she’ll understand. Could be, she feels the same way. You’ll never know if you turn coward, Rance.”
“I’m not a coward.”
“Come on. Where this woman is concerned, you’ve got a yellow streak a mile wide. I’ve never seen you so bent out of shape. Even Julie didn’t rattle your cage like this.”
Rance took a moment to recover. Sometimes the truth burned like a brand fresh from a hot fire, and though none had been used on the Triple M for a long time, he caught the scent of scorched hide, all right.
And it was his own.
“What would you do?” he asked, and even though he’d made an effort to sound as if he didn’t give a damn, his voice came out rusty as the hub of an old tractor wheel, left out in the weather for too many seasons.
Jesse didn’t actually look smug. Just easy in his skin, like always. Content, too, because he had Cheyenne now—the two of them were living together, and different as they were, it seemed they’d found a balance, reached some kind of accord. Jesse still played a lot of poker, and Cheyenne thrived on her job at McKettrickCo.
“Probably the same as you,” Jess said, after considering Rance’s question for an uncomfortably long time. “I don’t mind telling you, when I met up with Cheyenne again, I wanted to split myself right down the middle and run in two different directions. I’d gotten pretty comfortable. I had everything I wanted—the game, the money, the horses, that ridge up there, on the ground floor of heaven—or I thought I had everything. Cheyenne turned the whole works upside down, and me with it.”
“This isn’t like you and Cheyenne,” Rance interjected. “You’re in love. This is just sex. There’s a big difference.”
“I think you’re scared you might find out it’s more than ‘just sex.’ You fool a lot of people, Rance, but I know you too well. It was bad, losing Julie the way you did. You’ll always care about her. But there’s more to this than not letting go, isn’t there?”
Rance sighed. “Julie was going to leave,” he said. “Move in with Cora for a while.”
“I figured it was something like that,” Jesse replied.
“It wasn’t the first time,” Rance heard himself say. As close as he was to his cousins, he hadn’t leveled with either one of them. He still wasn’t ready to lay all his cards on the table. “I was gone too much, and she didn’t like living so far out of town. She wanted to start a career, and she’d have had to go to Phoenix or Flag to do that.”
Jesse waited calmly.
But Rance couldn’t get the rest of it out. Much as he wanted to tell Jesse, to tell somebody, he just couldn’t bring himself to say more.
Jesse studied him. “Now what?” he asked.
“What do you mean, ‘now what’?”
“You gonna stay solid, Rance, or split yourself and run?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then what do you want to do?”
“Stay in one piece, I guess. Stand toe to toe with this thing and see what happens.”
Jesse grinned, pushed back his chair and stood. “My work here is done,” he said. “Cheyenne’s working late, and I promised to bring her a burger from Lucky’s.”
Rance didn’t rise, nor did he reach for the bottle and down the dregs of his beer. He just looked up at his cousin. “Was it worth it, Jess?” he asked, very quietly. “Taking a chance, I mean.”
Jesse put on his hat. He looked like a saloon gambler with a fast horse waiting outside, but he was in no rush. Life unfolded for Jesse. The cards came. Sure as hell, when the time was ripe, the right woman turned up, too.
“Best wager I ever made,” he said. “I always thought I was a winner before. Wasn’t till I hooked up with Cheyenne that I knew what it really means to win.”
Rance watched, in pensive silence as his cousin turned and walked away, adjusting his hat as he went, and not once looking b
ack.
*
DR. SWANN, A HANDSOME white-haired man with kind eyes, gave Avalon a quick examination, paying special attention to her belly.
“She’s got a few weeks to go, I’d say,” he told Echo kindly, “but there’s definitely a litter in there.”
“What about the microchip?” Echo forced herself to ask. She’d related the story about finding Avalon alone in the rain, and explained that she’d posted notices on every reliable missing-pet Web site she could find.
If there was a chip, she didn’t want to know.
At the same time, she had to know.
The veterinarian deftly felt Avalon’s ears. “Yep,” he said presently. “It’s right here.”
Echo gripped the edges of the plastic chair she was sitting in, though she tried to be subtle about it. The room seemed to sway a little, and she closed her eyes.
If the Doc, as Ayanna referred to him, had noticed her reaction, he didn’t let on. “We can take it out, of course, but we’ll have to send it up to a lab in Flagstaff to retrieve the information. We’re not equipped for it here.”
Echo gave a wooden nod and swallowed. The name, address and telephone number of Avalon’s real owners would be on that chip. She’d have to get in touch with them. But what if they weren’t nice people? What if they’d dropped her off on purpose?
She squeezed her eyes shut again, tight, and when she opened them again, Doc Swann was standing directly in front of her, holding out a little paper cup filled with water.
“Those folks must care a lot about this dog, if they had a chip implanted,” he said gently.
Echo accepted the water with another nod, this time of thanks, and gulped it down. For a moment or two, she was afraid it would come right back up. Then she got another mental picture of Avalon jumping against the door of that RV, on the street running alongside the park, and she knew the doctor was right.
Somebody out there loved Avalon.
They’d probably looked high and low for her, and waited for the phone to ring or a letter to come. Maybe they’d given up hope, though—thought the dog was dead, or gone forever.
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