He’d always known he was lucky, but hearing it put that way gave him an emotional jolt. “Why do they call you Echo?” he said, because he figured it was his turn to ask a question, and because he needed to catch his balance.
She hesitated, but she didn’t hedge. “When I went to live with my aunt and uncle, after my parents were killed, so I’ve been told, I repeated everything anybody said to me. My uncle nicknamed me Echo, and it stuck.”
Rance wanted to touch her, take her into his arms, shield her from anything and anybody who might do her harm. But he knew he couldn’t protect her—he’d learned that lesson with Julie. “What’s your real name?”
She smiled, and turned her head, not just looking at the land now, but breathing it in. Storing it up, as though to take some part of it away with her. “I might tell you one day,” she said. “Not now, though.”
He had to accept that. He took her hand. “Let’s go saddle up a couple of horses,” he told her. “Of course, you’re going to have to get out of those fluffy pants.” He hadn’t intended the statement as an innuendo, and he felt the heat of embarrassment creep up his neck.
Echo laughed, touched his arm. “It’s okay, Rance,” she said. “I know what you meant.”
They went back to the SUV, where she’d left her jeans, the dog trotting behind, happily sniffing the ground. Inside the house, he filled a mixing bowl with water and set it on the floor while Echo changed clothes in a nearby bathroom.
Avalon seemed content to stay behind and snooze in a patch of sunlight on the kitchen floor when they headed for the barn.
He saddled Snowball, Cassidy’s old mare, for Echo, and Comanche, his own pinto gelding, for himself. He knew Echo had never ridden before, but she was game to try, and that impressed him.
He helped her mount up, out in front of the barn, and she sat grinning in the saddle, obviously nervous, but excited, too.
Echo.
It was a pretty enough name, but now that he really thought about it, it didn’t suit her. It belied her substance, sounded hollow. And this woman was anything but hollow.
He drew Comanche up alongside Snowball, showed Echo how to hold the reins, one resting loosely in each palm.
“Never wrap them around your hands,” he said. “Snowball’s probably the gentlest horse in Arizona, but any horse can be spooked. You could be dragged if she threw you and you were tangled up in the reins.”
Echo swallowed, nodded. Again, Rance was struck by her courage. It was a quality he valued above everything but integrity.
“What if she runs?” Echo asked.
“She won’t,” Rance promised. “We’re going to take it slow.”
Clearly relieved, Echo let out an audible breath. “Okay,” she agreed.
They rode down the driveway, over the bank, along the side of the creek, headed upstream, moving at an easy pace. Practically raised on the back of a horse, as most McKettricks were, Rance would have let Comanche have his head if he’d been alone. Snowball, docile as she was, would have kept pace—he sensed the mare’s desire to run, saw it quivering under her hide. Muscle memory, he thought. Cassidy had ridden bareback, fearless as an Apache warrior.
Cass, Rance mourned silently. I miss you, little sister.
Snowball missed her, too. He knew that now, and it broke something loose, deep inside him.
They spent the next couple of hours riding the land, he and Echo, and it was more like making love than anything they could have done in bed.
“SUSAN?” RANCE ASKED, grinning, when they stopped, miles down the stream, to let the horses rest. They’d been playing the Rumpelstiltskin game between long intervals of companionable silence, for some time by then.
“No,” Echo said, relieved to be standing on solid ground, waiting for the circulation to return to her legs.
“Allison?”
“Nope.”
“Laurie?”
“Wrong again.”
Rance laughed, bent, picked up a flat stone from the bank. Sent it skipping across the sun-sparkled water. “Sandy?”
“Give it up, Rance. You’ll never guess my name in a million years.”
“They why don’t you just tell me what it is?”
“Because I like being a woman of mystery,” she said.
He moved a step closer. Cupped his hands on either side of her face. “Oh, you’re that, all right,” he told her.
Then he kissed her.
There were kisses, and then there were near-death experiences.
For Echo, this bold and fiery contact fell just short of the latter.
Dazed, breathless as a near-drowned swimmer clawing her way up onto a bank, Echo pressed her hands against Rance’s chest and turned away.
“What the hell…?” he muttered, and somehow she knew he wasn’t referring to her sudden retreat, but to the kiss itself.
She turned back to study his face. Had he felt it, too?
He met her gaze squarely, and she knew, somehow, that he had, even though he might not have defined it in the same way.
For Echo, a jagged tear had opened in the fabric of the universe itself, and something wholly new and terrifyingly beautiful waited on the other side.
“Are we going to run away from this?” Rance asked, very quietly. “Or shall we find out where it leads?”
Echo put a hand to her throat, too stricken to answer right away. Once she stepped through that rip in time and space, she would never be the same. And she instinctively understood that, while the other side was a fiercely beautiful place, it was not a safe one. There would be new dangers there, things she’d never encountered before and had no idea how to deal with.
Joy was a certainty, but so was sorrow.
Did she dare take the risk?
Her life was mundane. It was also familiar. She knew the paths, because she’d traveled them so many times. Of course there were surprises, some good and some bad, but not many.
Not many.
“Echo?” Rance prompted, when she didn’t, couldn’t speak.
Her mouth was parched; she wanted to drop to her knees amid the moist, shiny pebbles littering the creek side like confetti and drink as thirstily as the horses did. “I…am…so…scared,” she managed.
“Me, too,” Rance admitted. His voice was a rasp. “Right about now, I’d like to get back on that horse and ride full out until he drops someplace far from here.” The stark honesty of his statement rocked Echo almost as profoundly as the kiss had. “I suspect you want the same thing. But the truth is, if we run in opposite directions, we’ll never know what might have happened. I don’t mind telling you, that prospect scares me even more, because the landscape out there looks pretty bleak.”
Echo nodded. Everything had changed. Maybe it wasn’t even possible to go back to being the person she’d been just a few minutes before.
Then it struck her. Her world hadn’t shifted on the fulcrum of a single kiss, or even on her first encounter with Rance McKettrick a few days before, on the sidewalk in front of the shop. Her destiny had been permanently altered the moment she decided to leave Chicago. She’d left her false self, her safe self, behind for good. And while she certainly found Rance attractive—indeed, she felt magnetized—the truest change had nothing to do with him.
“What do we do now?” she asked.
He grinned, though a look of grave wonder showed in his eyes. “I have a few ideas,” he said. “But this one’s up to you, Echo. I’m not going to push you in one direction or the other.”
She summoned up a shaky smile. “Could you help me back up on that horse, please? I don’t think my legs are working right.”
He smiled, set her foot in the appropriate stirrup, and hoisted her into the saddle, with one strong hand splayed across her backside. His fingers might have been electrified, and so many needs spiraled through Echo’s body that if he’d taken her down off Snowball’s back, peeled away her clothes and taken her right there on the rocky ground of the creek bank, she would have welcomed hi
m.
They rode slowly back toward the ranch house, and instead of subsiding, as she thought it might, her visceral desire for this man only grew stronger.
The sun was sliding westward when they reached the barn, though there were still hours of daylight ahead.
In silence, Rance attended to the horses, removing their saddles, checking their hooves for stones, putting them away in their stalls, filling their feeders with hay.
Echo watched the whole process, knowing she could fetch Avalon from the house, get into her car and leave, and save herself by doing so.
Instead, she perched on an overturned bucket in the wide, sawdust-strewn place between the rows of stalls, and watched Rance do a rancher’s work. Only when all the horses had been fed did he turn to look at her.
Again, he surprised her. “A swim might loosen your muscles a little,” he said. “That was a long ride for a first timer, and one way or another, you’re going to be mighty sore by morning.”
He’d shown her the swimming hole earlier; it was a tree-sheltered, Garden of Eden kind of place. Fitting, she supposed. Given the way she felt, they might have been the only two people on a whole new earth.
“I didn’t bring a suit,” she said, brought up short by her practical side.
He helped her to her feet when she tried to rise and found out that the predicted soreness had arrived ahead of schedule. “You won’t need one,” he said.
More hot shivers spiked through her.
He held tightly to her hand and led her not toward his SUV, but in the direction of the house.
“I thought we were going swimming,” she said. She didn’t even recognize her own voice; it seemed she’d given it over to some inner stranger. Some reckless woman with a powerful craving for forbidden fruit.
“We are,” he answered. “There’s a pool on the far side of the house.”
“Oh,” she said, letting him tug her along.
They passed through the massive kitchen, where Avalon still slumbered, dreaming dog dreams that made her legs twitch. The room was all Echo had seen of Rance’s home, besides the spacious powder room where she’d changed into her jeans earlier.
Now they came to a dining room, furnished in rustic elegance, and then a living room beyond, where the biggest natural rock fireplace she’d ever seen seemed dwarfed by the space around it. Books on the walls, colorful rugs lying like splotches of paint on a slate-tile floor.
They passed through a bedroom next, a suite, rather, with floors of inlaid hardwood and a fabulous fresco of wild horses, running free, taking up one entire wall. The bed, a huge four-poster, faced an expanse of windows, a living tapestry of trees and mountains and sky. Lying in that bed, Echo imagined fitfully, would be like sleeping outside, in the midst of nature.
Suddenly, it came to her that she was trespassing, and she balked a little.
Rance stopped, looked down into her eyes and shook his head. Clearly, he’d read her thoughts again—an unnerving prospect in and of itself. All her life, or at least since she was very small, Echo had felt semitransparent, like a ghost wandering unnoticed among the living, and while she’d chafed at that sometimes, she’d grown used to it, too. But this man saw her, left her no place to hide.
“This was my parents’ room,” Rance said. “Mine’s upstairs.”
Did that mean he’d never slept here, with Julie?
He brought her through a wide doorway, and there before them was a secret grotto of a pool, enclosed by semiopaque walls of glass brick. She soon saw, when Rance flipped a switch on the wall, that the roof was retractable, opening the space to the broad high country sky.
Echo was so enchanted that she forgot, for a few moments, to be afraid.
“Shower’s over there,” Rance said, pointing to a wooden door flanked by flourishing plants that would normally grow only in tropical places.
She bit her lower lip.
He grinned, awaiting her decision. She could shower alone, or with him.
The choice was hers to make.
She was still carrying on the internal debate when he caught her off guard again.
“Help yourself,” he said. “You’ll find towels and a robe and anything else you could need inside. I’ll go rustle us up something to eat.”
With that, he was gone.
Echo stood very still for a long time. She knew what would happen when Rance came back, they both did. Although she wasn’t a virgin—she’d given herself freely to Justin, and not so freely to a couple of other men, too—she wasn’t into casual sex.
As if there could be anything casual about sex with Rance McKettrick.
If that kiss back by the creek had been any indication, the experience would be downright apocalyptic.
Did she want that?
Other men had pleased her, in a sedate, clothes-on sort of way.
But Rance wasn’t just going to please her. His lovemaking would be the naked kind, fevered, sweaty, skin to skin.
With Justin, she’d had pleasant little climaxes that left her sighing.
With Rance, it would be different. She had already felt the first tremors on the steps in the bookshop, when he’d seduced her with words. Again, when he kissed her. Now, the very air itself seemed to tremble with the prospect of all he could make her feel.
With Justin, she had purred and snuggled.
With Rance, it would be an elemental, frenzied exchange, a slamming collision, a desperate struggle for satisfaction.
Echo went into the bathroom, moving like a woman in a trance. She took off her clothes, opened the glass door of the enormous shower and adjusted the taps. The hot spray at once soothed her and washed away the last shreds of her resistance.
When she stepped out into the pool area again, wrapped in a bath sheet, Rance was there. She knew by his damp, towel-ruffled hair that he’d showered elsewhere. And now he was in the water, watching as she approached.
A plate with a couple of sandwiches rested on a low table between two patio chairs, and Echo was suddenly ravenous. Paradoxically, her throat might have been cinched tight and tied, for all the food she could have gotten past it.
She pretended confidence, since she had none of her own, and walked to the side of the pool, where tiled steps led down into the water.
“This is some swimmin’ hole,” she said.
Rance laughed, but his eyes were intent, missing not the lightest nuance. He wore nary a stitch, of course, and the water was clear.
Echo was careful not to look beneath the surface, but, in fact, his ruggedly handsome face, his wide shoulders, muscular chest and strong arms gave her plenty to consider.
In a rush of boldness, she dropped the towel, and Rance’s startled expression was so delicious that the embarrassment she expected to feel never came.
Let him look, said her inner Amazon, emerging for the first time, ever, from some subconscious jungle.
Echo took a few moments to exalt in the beauty of her own body and the power it gave her. Rance gazed upon her, rapt, as though she were some shining and golden creature, appearing suddenly out of nowhere, and moved back slightly, giving her space to step into the pool.
The water was delicious—just the right temperature, neither too cool nor too warm.
Echo closed her eyes, held her breath and bobbed, allowing the water to close around her, and then broke the surface abruptly, joyously, as though baptized into a freedom undreamed of by ordinary men and women.
Rance laughed and splashed her, sending a sparkling sheet of water cascading over her.
She responded in kind.
But when the battle ended, they were standing almost toe to toe, and Rance’s dark lashes were beaded with gleaming droplets of pool water. He reached out, set his strong hands on either side of her waist and pulled her to him.
She put her arms around his neck and stood on tiptoe to kiss him, before he could kiss her.
Their tongues touched, a spark was ignited, and a flame burst from it that no amount of water could hav
e extinguished.
Instinctively, Echo wrapped her legs around Rance’s hips, while the kiss went on, deepening from exploration to passion, and then beyond. She felt his erection between her thighs, and would have taken him in then, if he had cooperated.
Of course, being Rance McKettrick, he didn’t cooperate.
He kissed her senseless and caressed her breasts until she broke free of his mouth and leaned back to offer herself. He feasted then, laving her nipples with his tongue, suckling at them until her clamped legs went limp.
He lifted her into his arms, carried her out of the water, up the steps, into the bedroom with the horses racing along the wall. He laid her sideways on the bedcovers, wet as she was, with her legs dangling. And then he knelt, easing her thighs farther apart.
She arched her back, gasping, when she felt his breath warm on the nest of curls, gave a strangled cry when he parted them and touched his lips to her. Gripping her ankles, he set her feet on the edge of the mattress, now nibbling, now suckling, now teasing her with butterfly-light flicks of his tongue.
He brought her to the verge of climax, left her quivering there.
She whimpered in soft dismay.
Rance rose and stretched out on the bed, shifting her in the process, until she was kneeling on the pillows, astride his head. She gripped the headboard, and grasping her hips, he lowered her onto his mouth for the real ride.
Echo’s vulnerability was complete, and so was her surrender. The first climax made her groan aloud and sag limply in the heat of quick release. Now, she thought, he would take her.
But he didn’t.
He made her come again, more intensely this time, staying with her as she rocked and bucked, a low howl of primitive abandon tearing hoarsely from her throat. Her palms sweated where she gripped the headboard; indeed, her whole body was slick with perspiration. He suckled until her body convulsed from its molten core, like some little-earth, spewing fire.
“Make…love…to…me…now!” It was both an Amazon’s demand and a supplicant’s plea. She wanted Rance within her, part of her, hard and powerful, at once conquering her and paying homage to the holy underlying power that gave her life.
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