McKettrick's Pride

by Linda Lael Miller

  THE SHOP TELEPHONE RANG first thing the next morning, before Echo had even opened for business. She’d slept with one eyelid raised, terrified that Bud Willand would make bail and come straight for her, and now she felt frazzled, so she might have been just a touch on the snappish side when she said, “Good morning. Echo’s Books and Gifts.”

  There was a moment of silence.

  “This is Marge Ademoye,” Snowball’s true owner said tentatively.

  “Marge,” Echo said, sighing the name. “Hello.” She looked down at Snowball, who gazed up at her with the usual fathomless devotion. Then she swallowed a lump. “Hello,” she repeated.

  “How is Snowball?” Marge asked, sounding relieved.

  “She’s fine,” Echo answered, because Snowball was fine, thanks to Jesse and Keegan. No sense in worrying the Ademoyes with the Bud Willand story, when they were still on the road and helpless to protect their dog.

  “We made it as far as Boise,” Marge said. “Then Herb had a little incident with his pacemaker. It might be a few more days before we can get there. I could send you something for taking care of Snowball—”

  “That won’t be necessary,” Echo broke in gently, ashamed of the surge of relief that made her lean against the counter’s edge and lower her head. Poor Herb had pacemaker problems in Boise and she was relieved? “She’s no trouble at all.”

  “You’ve become attached to her, haven’t you?” Marge asked, with a tenderness and perception that took Echo completely by surprise. After all, the woman was a complete stranger, hundreds of miles away, and they weren’t on picture phones.

  “Yes,” Echo admitted.

  “It would be impossible not to be,” Marge said. “That dog is a saint. When Herb came home from the hospital, after his prostate surgery, she wouldn’t leave his side for a week.”

  Echo looked down at Snowball, whose ears were perked, as though she could hear Marge’s voice, and maybe she could. Yes, Echo thought, it would be impossible not to become attached to this dog—unless you were somebody like Bud Willand.

  She shook off the image of that odious man and fuel-injected a smile into her voice. “Would you like to say hello to Snowball?” she asked.

  “I’d love to,” Marge said, and she sounded choked up.

  “Give me a second,” Echo replied, and lowered the receiver to Snowball’s ear.

  Marge spoke, and Snowball gave a little yelp, swishing her tail hard from side to side.

  Echo crouched beside Snowball, stroking her.

  Marge was just finishing when Echo put the phone back to her own ear. “And we’ll be so glad to see our sweet puppy—”

  Echo waited a moment or two, then said, “She’ll be waiting for you, Marge.”

  “Thank you,” Marge said, and promptly burst into tears. After a little recovery time, she apologized. “I’m sorry. It’s just that we’ve been so worried, and now there’s Herb’s pacemaker—”

  “Take your time,” Echo told her. “Snowball misses you, but she’s fine, really.”

  “We’ll be there as soon as we can,” Marge said after one last sniffle.

  There was a jiggling sound at the front door, and Echo’s gaze darted in that direction—she fully expected to see Bud Willand looming on the other side. Instead, it was Ayanna, with her key in hand, looking baffled.

  Echo waved, said goodbye to Marge, hung up and hurried over to let her friend into the shop.

  Burdened with two lattes, Ayanna stepped past her.

  “I know I’m not on the schedule for this morning,” she said, “but this love-spell thing is heating up, and I thought you might need help.”

  “Heating up?” Echo echoed, frowning. What with all that had happened the night before, and then the call from Marge, she was having trouble getting up to speed with current events.

  “There could be a riot,” Ayanna confided, handing over one of the lattes.

  Echo thanked her, breathed in the heady aroma of strong coffee, foaming with full-fat milk, and parroted stupidly, “A riot?”

  She definitely needed a serious jolt of caffeine.

  “I was at the post office, not twenty minutes ago,” Ayanna told her, turning to peer through the display window like a private eye suspecting a tail, “and I almost didn’t dare stop for this coffee.” She faced Echo again. “Jessica Borger’s mother was there. At the post office, I mean. Three boys asked Jessica to the dance before supper was on the table last night. Three of them. The kid’s probably at her computer right now, composing a testimonial.”

  Echo beamed. “But that’s wonderful!” Her smile faded, as the possible implications struck home. “Isn’t it?”

  “If you’re up for a stampede,” Ayanna answered, checking the sidewalk and street again. “Half the high school will probably be in here, demanding love-spells, once they wake up.”

  Echo put a hand to her mouth.

  “Then there are the old maids and the divorcées,” Ayanna went on. “They don’t sleep in, the way teenagers do.”

  “Yikes,” Echo said, resisting an urge to fling herself bodily against the door. “What am I going to do?”

  “I’d be for stuffing a boxcar-load of those little velvet bags,” Ayanna said.

  Before Echo could answer, Cora bustled in.

  “Whoop-de-do,” she cried jubilantly. “Nothing this big has hit Indian Rock since that time in the eighties, when we accidentally got a shipment of Cabbage Patch Kids bound for a Wal-Mart in Flagstaff!”

  Echo could almost hear the hordes, thundering toward her. She’d be trampled. And, once these people came to their senses, run out of town on a rail. Maybe even thrown into Wyatt Terp’s jail for fraud. In the cell adjacent to Bud Willand’s.

  She spilled her guts. “I get the bags from a wholesaler in Hoboken!”

  Snowball whimpered, sensing disaster. Or perhaps, Echo thought wildly, with her superior canine hearing, she’d already caught the pounding of approaching feet.

  “Lock the door!” Echo cried.

  Cora stared at her. “Are you out of your mind, girl? They’d break it down. Besides—you’re in business. You’ve got to think about the bottom line!”

  “We’d better start stuffing,” Ayanna said.

  Echo dragged out the box of supplies from behind the counter, and the three women were on their knees around it in a heartbeat, jamming prayers, stones and feathers into little bags.

  Maeve and Rianna soon arrived from next door and immediately started helping.

  The first onslaught came fifteen minutes later.

  “I wonder what kept them?” Cora muttered, when no less than fourteen women blew in like a desert whirlwind, waving twenty dollar bills.

  Ayanna manned the cash register, while Cora, Echo, Maeve and Rianna kept on stuffing.

  They’d sold forty-seven, by Ayanna’s count, when the rush ended.

  “Thank God that’s over,” Echo said.

  “Over?” Cora challenged, still on her knees, amid piles of tiny velvet bags bulging with promises only Cinderella’s fairy godmother could keep. “By now they’ve called and e-mailed all their friends. Folks are probably hitting the road as far away as Phoenix!”

  Echo paled. “No,” she whispered.

  The first tour bus arrived at two-fifteen that afternoon.

  At three-thirty, they closed the store to regroup.

  “How could a tour bus…?” Echo began, shaking her head.

  Cora gave her a congratulatory slap on the back, nearly sending her face first into the box of supplies, which was rapidly emptying. “What are you fretting about?” she asked. “You’re making a fortune!”

  Echo sat back on her heels, utterly exhausted. She hadn’t even had a chance to walk Snowball, or call the jail and find out if Bud Willand was on the loose. “What’s going to happen when all those people decide they’ve been taken, and storm in here demanding their money back?”

  “They won’t,” Cora said.

  “Not all of them are going to find lov
e before supper,” Echo reasoned.

  “No,” Cora answered, “but they’ll be too embarrassed to ask for a refund.”

  Since Maeve and Rianna were upstairs by then, watching fuzzy TV with Snowball, Echo felt safe in whispering, “Cora Tellington, that is devious.”

  “Business,” Cora said, “is business. Keep on stuffing, ladies. That was just the first wave.”

  *

  THE COMPANY JET WAS TIED UP in New York, where Meg and her mother, Eve, were doing something vital to the corporation’s future, like shopping.

  First class was booked solid on every airline flying out of Taiwan, so Rance sat in coach, on a red-eye, wedged between two women who kept passing a cookbook back and forth across his tray table. He couldn’t move his elbows, and the old rodeo injury to his right knee, dormant for years, chose then to kick in.

  He was crazy, putting himself through this.

  Plum loco, as old Angus might have said.

  In two days, he could have had the McKettrickCo jet.

  In one day, there would have been a first-class seat available.

  But he couldn’t wait even that long.

  Oh, no.

  Because he, Rance McKettrick, was certifiable.

  He rubbed his chin, not an easy thing, since his seatmates overlapped their assigned space on both sides. He was bristly as a pissed-off porcupine in mating season. He’d showered and changed before leaving his plush hotel suite, but shaving had slipped his mind. Unless he wanted to lather up and scrape in a restroom the size of a laundry chute, he’d just have to endure the itching—not to mention the way the cookbook women kept looking at him as though he’d just been released from a maximum security prison—all the way across the Pacific.

  All because of Echo Wells.

  Because Keegan might consider her fair game.

  Because Bud Willand might have made bail.

  Rance shifted until he managed to turn sideways and catch hold of the onboard phone imbedded in the back of the seat in front of his. More maneuvering followed, because he needed a credit card, and that meant getting his wallet out of his back pocket.

  The cookbook women became thoroughly disgruntled.

  Rance gave them both a Shawshank glare, no redemption included.

  His wallet wasn’t in his back pocket. It was in his suit coat, which was wadded up and stuffed between a lot of carry-ons in the overhead compartment.

  Honest to God, the stuff people brought on airplanes.

  Since when did a bulging suitcase on wheels qualify as a “small personal item?”

  The gourmet on the aisle wouldn’t let him out.

  In desperation, he finally pressed the call button. When the flight attendant condescended to answer, he asked for his jacket, very graciously, too, if you overlooked his clenched teeth.

  At last, he produced a credit card.

  Snatched the phone from its holder, and went through the protracted and painful process of dialing in every number from his collar size to his great-aunt Nellie’s age on her last birthday.

  The line rang on the other end.

  “McKettrickCo,” Myrna Terp chimed.

  “I want to talk to Keegan,” Rance said, trying to unclamp his jaws.

  “Who’s calling, please?”

  “Myrna,” Rance replied carefully, “you know damn well who’s calling.” This earned him more disparaging glances from the cookbook women. “Put Keegan on now.”

  “Keegan McKettrick,” Keegan said a couple of moments later.

  Rance resisted an urge to spread his elbows into flab territory. “Stay away from Echo,” he said.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  THE POUNDING AWAKENED ECHO from a sound sleep, simultaneously eliciting a low growl from Snowball.

  Another tour bus? Echo wondered, rummy even in a state of rising panic.

  She raised herself onto her elbows, blinking, and as the pounding intensified, so did the anxiety.

  Bud Willand. Who else could it be, at that hour?

  She looked around for her cell phone, having no extension in the apartment, and realized she’d plugged it in behind the counter in the shop to charge.

  Snowball barked and cannon-balled for the stairs, nails clicking on the hardwood floor.

  Echo, clad in boxers and an old T-shirt, had no choice but to follow.

  She was midway down when it came to her that Snowball had quit barking.

  Had Willand gotten past the new locks somehow? Harmed the dog?

  But, no, Echo reasoned, still foggy. He couldn’t have, because the pounding hadn’t stopped.

  At the bottom of the steps, Echo paused, considered flipping on the inside lights, decided it was a bad idea. She’d be illuminated, in her boxers and T-shirt, like an actress on a stage, and thus at a distinct disadvantage.

  She squinted.

  Snowball sat in front of the door, tail whisking back and forth.

  A man’s shape was framed against the glass center of that door, and Echo automatically yelped. She was sidestepping toward the counter, and the shop telephone, when the visitor’s identity finally registered.

  “Rance?”

  Snowball’s tail accelerated.

  Rance.

  A surge of jubilant fury sent Echo hotfooting it across the floor. Closer inspection confirmed her theory.

  Rance McKettrick stood on the other side of the door, grinning.

  She worked the locks, turned the knob and wrenched.

  “Do you realize it’s the middle of the night?” she demanded.

  Rance came as far as the threshold, leaned one shoulder against the doorjamb and took in everything from her bare feet to the top of her head before engaging her eyeball to eyeball.

  His white shirt was hopelessly wrinkled and open at the throat, leaving his tie askew. The lower half of his face was blue-black with beard, and his eyes were bloodshot.

  “Have you been drinking?” Echo asked.

  “No,” he said. “I’ve been flying. In economy.”

  “Poor you,” Echo said, because she didn’t want him to know how glad she was to see him. Conversely, she could have strangled him—that part, she didn’t care if he knew.

  “Can I come in?” he asked.

  Echo stepped back, nearly stumbled over Snowball, who scrambled to get out of the way and then stood to one side, panting.

  Distractedly, Rance leaned down to ruffle the dog’s ears in the time-honored man-canine greeting ritual.

  “What are you doing here?” Echo inquired, shutting the door behind Rance and wishing she had shades to pull down. As if Rance hadn’t roused half the town with all that pounding.

  Talk about shutting the barn door after the horse escaped.

  “I’m not sure,” Rance said, with endearing confusion and a silly grin.

  Echo leaned in a little, sniffed. No alcohol. Just a faint but enticing blend of laundry starch, expensive cologne and pure hombre.

  Rance chuckled at her expression. “I need coffee,” he said. “Or, maybe, sex.” He paused, pondering. “Sex would be good.”

  Every nerve in Echo’s treacherous body turned itself into a little rocket and lifted right off the launch pad. “Not a chance,” she retorted, taking a step back precisely because she wanted to jump him on the spot, get him in a scissor-lock with both legs. “What are you doing here?” she asked for the second time.

  He laid his hands on either side of her waist, and Echo had to close her eyes for a moment, in order to focus on fighting down another elemental urge.

  “Obviously, I came to see you,” he said in a gruff, wheedling voice that wouldn’t have worked for anyone else on the face of the earth but him.

  “It will be morning in a couple of hours,” she pointed out, going for irony and missing by a mile, wanting to pull away but not quite able to rise to the occasion.

  Rance, she suspected, from the heat he was radiating, was having no such difficulty. She used all her determination to keep from looking down to find out.


  “We need to talk,” he said.

  “Another thing we could do in the morning,” Echo replied, melting inside because the pads of his thumbs were making little circles just beyond the curves of her hip bones. She drew a deep, shaky breath. “I’m not having sex with you, Rance. Not after what happened last time.”

  “Funny,” Rance said. “I remember last time as—well—nuclear.”

  “I meant afterward,” Echo answered quickly, because other, far less sensible words wanted to tumble off her tongue, like yes and now. “You said things were happening too fast—”

  “I’ve revised my opinion.”

  “Good for you. It just so happens, though, that I haven’t revised mine.”

  Liar.

  “Okay,” Rance said, sounding affably resigned. “Can I spend the night?”

  Echo blinked, stunned by his off-the-charts audacity and, at the same time, all too ready to share her bed. “Spend the…?”

  “Night,” Rance finished.

  “I just told you, I do not want to have sex with you.”

  He frowned. “Is there somebody you do want to have sex with?”

  “No!” Echo cried on a burst of frustration.

  “Good,” he said with a deep sigh. His thumbs continued their minimassage, awakening parts of her that had been safely asleep until five minutes before, when she’d been foolish enough to let him in.

  “Rance,” Echo said, “go home.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m jet-lagged. What if I went off the road on one of those curves between here and the ranch?”

  Echo paled, realized a second too late that she’d taken the bait. “You could stay at Cora’s. Sleep in your car. Rent a motel room—”

  Rance lifted his hands from her hips and raised them to chest level, palms out, like a cornered fugitive proving he was unarmed. “I promise I won’t make love to you,” he said. “Just let me use your shower and crash beside you for the rest of the night. That’s all I ask.”

  “Great idea!” Echo mocked, a little too quickly. “Then, when the town of Indian Rock wakes up—if they haven’t already, thanks to you trying to break down my door—your SUV will be parked in front of my shop…”

  He cupped her chin in one hand. More thumb-work, this time on the curve of her cheek. “I’ll be gone before the sun comes up,” he said.