McKettricks Bundle

by Linda Lael Miller

  He answered by giving her still another orgasm, one so ferocious that it seared through flesh and bone and imprinted itself on her very soul, like a brand.

  Even as he laid her down for the taking, reeling and spent, caught in the charged space between the last shattering climax and the inevitable next, Echo knew that whatever happened between her and Rance after this, she would bear his mark forever.

  CHAPTER 9

  THRUST UPWARD ON THE VIOLENT swell of some already-forgotten nightmare, the remnants of it trailing behind him like rags, Rance opened his eyes to a room silvered by the light of a full moon.

  Echo had gone; he knew that even before he looked for her.

  For a few fanciful moments, he imagined her receding, like a sound, like her name, growing fainter and fainter with distance.

  He supposed it was for the best—they’d mated, like a wild stallion and a mare, with plenty of carrying on. Facing each other, in the bright light of day, might be a tall order.

  Yes, sir. He was relieved, that’s what he was.

  Relieved.

  So why did he feel like an old bucket with a leak?

  He glanced at the clock next to the bed—a little after two in the morning. How long had she been gone?

  No telling. He’d slept like a dead man, after the last bout of lovemaking; a circus parade could have come past the foot of the bed, brass band and all, and he’d never have known it. One slight woman, slipping back into her clothes and sneaking out wouldn’t so much as stir a breeze.

  He got up, because he knew he wouldn’t get back to sleep again. Prowled naked into the master bathroom, where he’d undressed and showered earlier, after the horseback ride, before getting into the pool. Echo, standing under the spray just on the other side of the wall, had clearly been surprised to find him already in the water.

  He smiled at the recollection of her, standing there, wrapped in a towel but otherwise just as God made her. She’d looked wary and, at one and the same time, fiercely female.

  Now he showered again, pulled on a terry-cloth robe and headed for the kitchen.

  He didn’t realize how much he’d been hoping to find Echo there until he arrived and found that she was really and truly gone. She’d left the lights burning, taken the dog and hit the trail for town.

  Rance sighed and fired up the coffeemaker.

  While the java was brewing, he went upstairs to his bedroom and pulled on his last pair of clean jeans, a shirt he’d already worn twice, socks and boots. In the bathroom, he brushed his teeth and combed his hair.

  He wasn’t much of a housekeeper, he had to admit. That was part of the reason he hadn’t brought Echo up here—there was laundry scattered everywhere, and nobody had scrubbed the fixtures since the last time Cora put on a Hazmat suit, as a charitable act, and waded in with hot soapy water and a hard-bristled brush.

  Part of the reason.

  Gathering up an armload of dirty clothes and musty towels, Rance advanced on the bedroom.

  The sheets hadn’t been changed in a while.

  Everything was covered in dust.

  And he had shared this room with his wife.

  They’d conceived Rianna here—Maeve, he suspected, as Julie had often joked, had gotten her start in the back seat of an extended-cab pickup, after a Fourth of July rodeo in Flagstaff.

  There was so much history in that room.

  He and Julie hadn’t just made love there, they’d fought there, too.

  They’d said things they couldn’t take back.

  And one morning, Julie had climbed out of that bed, having slept in it alone for too many nights, put on her fancy English riding gear and headed for a horse show down in Scottsdale. She’d left Maeve and Rianna with Cora on her way out of town, with no way of knowing that she’d never see them again.

  Rance squeezed his eyes shut for a few moments, remembering.

  He’d been asleep in a hotel room in Hong Kong, exhausted after the fourth day-long meeting in a row, when the phone jangled him awake.

  Keegan had been on the other end of the line, Jesse on an extension.

  “I’ve got some bad news,” Keegan had said. Then he’d choked up, and Rance’s heart had seized so hard he’d thought it would never start beating again.

  Rianna and Maeve, he’d thought. One or both of them had been hurt, or killed.

  It was his worst fear.

  Jesse had stepped in then. “Julie’s dead, Rance,” he’d said. “She took a spill off a horse at a show this afternoon and broke her neck.”

  Rance had been stone silent for a breath or two. Then he’d let out a bellow of grief that had brought hotel security to pound at his door. Just recalling that night, he felt that agonized cry rising inside him again, hammering at the back of his throat.

  They’d come for him the next day, in a chartered jet—Keegan, Jesse and his dad. Gathered him up and brought him home, like the shards of a relic, almost irretrievably broken, but worth gluing back together.

  One by one, he’d put the pieces in place again.

  But he hadn’t realized, until just now, that the cracks still showed.

  He took the laundry to the chute in the corner of the closet, opened the small door, and stuffed the wash down it. After that, he gathered more dirty clothes from the floor, tore the sheets and blankets off the bed, sent it all after the first batch.

  Julie’s face, framed in gold-trimmed ebony, smiled at him from a photograph on the bedroom mantel. In the old days, when the house was new and much smaller, the room had been Rafe and Emmeline’s, and he and Julie had both felt a connection with them, sleeping there.

  Rance crossed to the fireplace, took the picture in both hands.

  He couldn’t remember the nightmare he’d had earlier, in that bed downstairs, but he knew it had been about Julie. Maybe the afternoon horseback ride had spawned the dream—more likely, though, it had sprung from the lovemaking.

  He’d been with a number of women since Julie’s death, all of them carefully selected for their inability to touch him in any deep place. Echo was the first one he’d bedded under his own roof, and, like it or not, she’d gotten past all his defenses.

  As he looked into Julie’s eyes, his own burned.

  He’d loved her since he was twelve years old.

  All through high school and college, he’d loved her with everything he had. Loved her so recklessly, so completely, that he hadn’t known how to respond when she’d told him she wanted a separation, that she meant to move back to town with the girls, stay at Cora’s for a while, until she could get some perspective.

  He’d sweet-talked her out of it—promised not to travel so much, bought her jewelry, told her sure, she could start her career as a graphic designer, as soon as the girls were older. And it wasn’t as if they needed the money, he’d said, damnably certain that he was right.

  A month later, she was dead.

  And now there was no way to tell her that he’d been a proud, stupid fool, and he was sorry.

  He polished the glass on the front of his shirt, put the picture back on the mantel, in its usual place.

  Whatever he had with Echo Wells, it wasn’t love. He’d had that with Julie, and this didn’t feel anything like it.

  Guilt assailed him, roiled up out of his midsection and soured at the back of his tongue. He knew it was irrational, but the plain fact was, he’d never felt this way before, as if he’d betrayed his wife.

  He turned, left the room and went downstairs.

  The coffee was ready, and he poured a cup, then proceeded into the laundry room. While the washing machine chugged away, a few minutes later, Rance stood at the kitchen window and stared out, wishing to God the sun would come up.

  When it did, he would put a bridle on Snowball and ride her bareback over the hills. He’d take it easy, because the horse was out of shape, and no one but Maeve had taken her far from the barn since Cassidy died—until yesterday.

  Maybe together he and that old horse could outdis
tance all they’d lost.

  CORA WALTZED INTO THE SHOP first thing the next morning, Maeve and Rianna tagging after her, and plopped a newspaper down on the counter, right under Echo’s nose.

  “You made the front page of the Indian Rock Gazette,” Cora said proudly.

  Echo, who hadn’t slept since leaving Rance’s bed a little after midnight, had to concentrate to focus her eyes. There she was, on opening day, with the big cake in front of her and Avalon’s big dog head jutting up at her side.

  Town Welcomes Newcomer Echo Wells, the headline read.

  Echo blinked.

  Was it possible that she’d opened the bookstore only the day before yesterday?

  “I took my camera right down to the newspaper office and had them download the picture into their computer,” Cora rambled on. “There’s no weekend edition—most everybody gets the Republic on Sunday—but here you are on Monday, big as life!”

  Echo smiled and scanned the brief article, which included her name, the store’s telephone number and address, her business hours and a rather cute remark about dogs who read books.

  “Thank you, Cora,” she said.

  “A little publicity never hurts,” Cora answered.

  “What’s all this?” Rianna asked. She’d come around the end of the counter, and found the box full of little mailing packets Echo intended to take to the post office at lunchtime.

  Echo glanced at Cora, who was peering curiously over the counter, then turned her attention back to Rianna. “Just some stuff I’m sending out,” she said. “Samples.”

  “Samples?” Rianna asked, puzzled.

  “Rianna McKettrick,” Cora said, “you stop that snooping.”

  “We get samples sometimes,” Rianna went on, staring solemnly up at Echo. “Laundry detergent and things like that. I never heard of sample books, though.”

  “Well,” Cora announced, apparently making no connection between the packets in the box and the one she’d received her mail order love spell in, “I guess we’d better get out to the ranch and see how Rance is faring with the cowboy life.”

  Echo’s face felt warm, and she looked away.

  How in the world was she going to face Rance, after the things they’d done together?

  “Are you all right?” Cora asked, pausing on the periphery of Echo’s vision as she turned to go. “You look a little peaky. I hope you’re not coming down with something.”

  “I’m fine,” Echo insisted, making herself look at Cora. Her smile felt wobbly, and a little on the brittle side. Cora liked to play the matchmaker, it was true, but Echo’s having several hours of headboard-slamming sex with her late daughter’s husband probably wasn’t what she’d had in mind.

  A little handholding, maybe. A few backyard suppers, with the girls in attendance. Innocent things like that.

  Fortunately, Cora accepted Echo’s answer at face value. She looked at the box of mailers once more before she left, though, and a small frown creased her forehead.

  The sideline, while something she wasn’t in the habit of talking about it, was no deep, dark secret, but Cora hadn’t actually asked for an explanation, so Echo hadn’t offered one. She wouldn’t have, anyway, while Rianna and Maeve were there to overhear.

  The bookstore did a brisk business all morning and, at noon, Echo closed the shop, loaded Avalon and the packages into her car and drove to the post office.

  The postal clerk, a good-natured woman who had come to the grand opening and bought a sizable stack of romance novels, remarked on the volume and suggested the purchase of a bulk-mail permit.

  Echo smiled, thanked her and left.

  When she and Avalon returned to the store, there were four people waiting on the sidewalk out front.

  Things got quiet again around one o’clock; Echo used the lull to dash upstairs, build a tuna sandwich and fill her grumbling stomach. When she heard the bell over the shop door, she hurried back down to the first floor, chewing hastily.

  Rance stood examining the spine of a military thriller.

  Echo nearly choked on her food.

  She glanced around the shop, and was relieved and, paradoxically, alarmed to find that they were alone.

  She couldn’t tell anything by his face, or the way he stood. He was dressed for ranching, as he had been the day before, and simply seeing him again awakened memories that speeded up her heartbeat and made her breath run shallow.

  He laid the thriller on the counter, produced a money clip from his shirt pocket.

  Was he going to act as if nothing had happened between them?

  Was that good—or bad?

  She drummed up a smile, slipped behind the counter to ring up the purchase. “Do you read that author a lot?” she asked. Rance might have been a tourist passing through town, someone she’d never seen before and would never see again, rather than a man she had made love to, not even twenty-four hours before.

  “No,” Rance answered.

  So much for small talk, Echo thought, somewhat desperately.

  She blushed miserably as she made change and bagged the book.

  “Echo,” Rance said. “Look at me.”

  She did, but it wasn’t easy. She knew, even before the words came out of his mouth, what he was going to say next, and braced herself.

  “Things are moving too fast between us,” Rance told her.

  He was right, of course. Echo completely agreed. At the same time, she felt as though the floor beneath her feet had just dissolved, leaving her dangling over the mouth of a black hole, with nothing to grip except the edge of the counter.

  Her knuckles hurt, she was holding on so tightly. “Yes,” she said.

  Rance looked pained, as well as solemn. “I need you to understand that this isn’t about you, Echo.”

  This isn’t about you. The classic.

  Justin had used that line, after standing her up at the altar. She’d been alone in a city of strangers, wearing a wedding dress and clutching a cheap silk bouquet. How could that—or this—not be about her? She wasn’t just a bystander, untouched by these events. She was a casualty of them.

  “Right,” she said, with quiet bitterness. “It’s all about you, isn’t it, Rance?”

  He paled beneath that tan of his. “Echo—” he began.

  She shoved the book at him, tucked into its anonymous plastic bag. She couldn’t afford the printed kind, with a logo—hell, she didn’t even have a logo. “Get out,” she said.

  “Echo, I—will you listen to—”

  “Just get out. Please.”

  Avalon rose onto her haunches, growled.

  At least I have one friend, Echo thought. But then Cora’s image leaped into her mind. Okay, two, she allowed silently. And probably temporary on both counts.

  Rance took the book, turned and walked out of the shop.

  Cora appeared within five minutes. The woman must have radar.

  “What happened?” she asked without preamble, glancing back over one shoulder as Rance drove away.

  Echo wanted to sigh, but she refrained, busying herself behind the counter, straightening things that were already straight. “Exactly what I should have expected,” she said, because keeping secrets from Cora was obviously impossible and, anyway, she was tired of trying. “Things are happening too fast, according to Rance. And, of course, none of it is ‘about me.’”

  Cora frowned thoughtfully. “I should ask those love-potion people for my money back,” she muttered.

  Echo opened the cash register, took out a twenty dollar bill and handed it over.

  Under any other circumstances, the look on Cora’s face would have made Echo laugh out loud. As it was, she was barely holding herself together.

  Cora stared at the money. “What…?”

  “Take it.”

  “But—”

  “I’m the one who sold it to you, Cora. I own the Web site.”

  Cora blinked. “You’re…?”

  “I am,” Echo confirmed. “All those little mailers yo
u saw? The ones Rianna asked about? Every one represents a hopeful customer.”

  Suddenly, a smile spread across Cora’s face. “Well, I’ll be switched,” she said. “Is that a coincidence, or what?”

  “Or what,” Echo answered grimly. “I’m a fraud. I ought to return every single one of those people’s money. I can’t do that, because I’ve put almost everything I have into opening the store—but I can refuse all future orders. I can shut down the Web site.”

  “Wait a second,” Cora said. “It says right on the site, ‘Order at your own risk.’ How is that fraud?”

  “I’ve set myself up as some kind of expert on love.” She gave a soggy little snort of laughter. “What a joke.”

  “Did you make up all those testimonials? The ones on the Web site, I mean? I was especially struck by the one from E. Simmons of Trenton, New Jersey.”

  “Of course not,” Echo answered, trying to remember what E. Simmons had said, and failing completely. “That would be dishonest!”

  Cora chuckled. Then she turned toward the front window again, staring at the empty place where Rance’s big, obnoxious SUV had been. After a few moments, she smiled mysteriously and slid the twenty dollar bill back in Echo’s direction. “Well, here’s one from C. Tellington of Indian Rock, Arizona—It ain’t over till it’s over.”

  “What are you talking about?” Echo asked, though she was afraid she knew. It should have been obvious all along, but she’d been so preoccupied with Avalon, getting her bearings in a new place and opening the shop, that she simply hadn’t followed that one little thread of logic back to the spool.

  Cora turned back, but she seemed to be looking through Echo to someone or something standing beyond. “Everybody’s heart is like a cup,” she mused softly, as though feeling her way toward some private conclusion. “They stumble from place to place and person to person, trying to get them filled. They get cracked, those cups, and even broken. Some people throw them away, thinking that will stop the pain. Poor fools. Nobody can fill a cup but Almighty God Himself. Nobody.”

  Echo knew Cora was a church-going woman, but she herself had only a nodding acquaintance with God. He minded his business, and she minded hers. “You’re not going to start preaching, are you?” Echo asked weakly.