“Are we dating?”
He laughed again. “After what happened on the bathroom floor? God, I hope so.”
Echo remembered a pivotal moment and slapped a hand over her mouth.
“What?” Rance asked.
“That one time—we didn’t—I didn’t…”
He’d reached for a condom. Echo hadn’t given him a chance to open the packet, let alone put the thing on.
“How’s the timing?”
“The timing?”
“Echo? Don’t echo.”
She blushed. “My cycle? Is that what you’re asking about?”
“That’s what I’m asking about.”
“I’m irregular,” she said.
“Then I guess we have to play that part by ear.”
“You’re not…mad at me?”
He took her hand, kissed the backs of her knuckles. “Do I look mad?”
“No.”
“My turn to ask a question.”
Echo waited, building up her courage, watching him, memorizing his face. What she had with Rance was half again too good to last. She’d survived being jilted at the altar, because that was Justin, and a part of her had been relieved. Yes, she’d cried when she realized her groom wasn’t going to show up. Yes, she’d gone back to her solitary hotel room and thrown pillows, the phone book, and everything in the desk drawer against the walls.
And then she’d done a victory dance and consumed a little bottle of champagne from the minibar.
“What’s your real name?”
“I’m not ready to tell you.”
“Why not?”
“Because she’s not me. Not yet.”
“How can she not be you?”
“She just isn’t.”
“Hortense,” Rance guessed.
Echo laughed.
“Minerva?”
She hit him with a pillow.
“Wilhelmina?”
“Please.”
“Please?” He bent, tasted her nipple. “Your name is ‘Please’? Or are you making another scandalous request?”
Echo stretched, deliciously ready to make love again.
“Guess,” she said.
He rolled on top of her, gently parted her legs with one knee. “I’m thinking it’s the scandalous request.”
“Umm,” she purred. But she reached for one of the packets on the nightstand and handed it to him.
A few moments later, he was inside her, and this time, their lovemaking was slow, tender, and sweet enough to break Echo’s heart.
CHAPTER 14
“DAD?”
“Hey, Rance,” his father responded easily. God knew where he was, but he could always be trusted to keep his cell phone charged.
“There’s a woman.” Rance leaned back against the counter in his kitchen, closest to the coffeepot, waiting for the java to perk. He’d been as good as his word to Echo earlier—before the sun rose over the hills east of Indian Rock, he was long gone.
He’d locked the shop door behind him, using Echo’s spare key, stopped by Wyatt’s office to make sure Bud Willand was still in custody, and now he was home. Alone. Maeve and Rianna were at Cora’s.
After the night with Echo, the place felt bigger and emptier than ever before.
“Well, hallelujah,” Wade McKettrick answered. “It’s about time.”
“You don’t understand.”
“Try me.”
“Where are you?”
“Beside the point.”
“Dad.”
“Tahiti, surrounded by beautiful women in grass skirts. Where are you?”
It was a reasonable question, given Rance’s travel history. “The ranch.”
“How are the girls?”
“Fine.”
“So tell me about the woman.”
“I don’t know her real name.”
“Is she a secret agent or something?”
“No. She’s some kind of wood nymph.” Rance smiled. Did wood nymphs wear boxer shorts and Tshirts? He took a mug down from a shelf and poured coffee. Slurped some up. “She calls herself Echo.”
“You’re sleeping with her.”
“Yeah.”
“This is a healthy thing, Rance. So why the panicked phone call?”
“I’m not panicking.”
“Aren’t you? I haven’t heard from you in six months.”
Rance sighed. “Sorry about that. Of course, I haven’t heard from you, either.”
“Semantics. What’s up?” Wade paused. Chuckled. “As if I didn’t know.”
“Dad? You aren’t helping.”
Wade echoed the sigh Rance had just given. “You’re scared.”
“I’m not.”
“Don’t bullshit me, boy. I’ve been down this trail before, and a mapful of others you haven’t gotten to yet. Are you in love with her?”
“No,” Rance said. “I feel something, that’s a given. But love? Hell, I’m not even sure what that is.”
“She’s not Julie,” Wade said, after a few moments of pregnant silence.
“That’s the problem,” Rance replied.
“No,” Wade answered, “it’s the solution.”
“Thanks for that pearl of wisdom, Dad.”
Wade laughed. “Think about it.”
“I can’t stop thinking about it.”
“Well, that ought to tell you something, right there. You know what’s getting in your way, Rance? That McKettrick pride of yours. You’re scared of making a fool of yourself. I’ve been down that road, too. Take it from me, it’s a dead end.” Another pause followed, then, “Is your mother coming home for Jesse’s wedding?”
In the back of Rance’s harried, jet-lagged mind, two boxcars shifted onto the same spur and connected with a clang. “Don’t know,” he said. “Probably.”
“Do me a favor,” Wade said. “Find out. And whatever you do, don’t mention that I plan to be there, too.”
Rance frowned. “Dad—”
“We’ll talk more when I get home. In the meantime, don’t do anything stupid.”
Rance laughed, even though there was a strange thickness in the back of his throat, and the space behind his eyes burned. “Too late,” he said.
“You taking good care of Cassidy’s horse?”
Rance took another slug of coffee. That way, if his voice caught, he could blame his gag reflex. “Soon as I feed the cattle, I’m going to saddle old Snowball up for a ride.”
“Good,” Wade answered, and from the sound of it, he’d just swallowed something, too. “What cattle?”
Rance filled his dad in on the gentlemen-rancher angle. He’d hired the old man on the next place to dump hay out of the back of a pickup while he was away, but he didn’t feel good about it.
They were his cattle, after all. His responsibility.
The next leap was easy. Maeve and Rianna were his daughters. As much as Cora loved those girls, it wasn’t her job to take care of them.
Wade chuckled. “Damn. The McKettricks ride again. Just like the old days.”
“Just like the old days,” Rance replied, wishing it was true.
Jesse was the real thing. He’d never sold out. Himself and Keegan? Now, that was another matter. They’d traded in their saddles for seats on a company jet. Abandoned the land. Left their kids for other people to raise.
And for what? More money?
Prestige?
The thrill of the chase?
What?
Something shifted in Rance as he pondered those questions and stood, unflinching, before the obvious answers.
“I’ll get a room ready for you,” he told his dad.
“And call your mother?”
“And call my mother. Right after I feed the cattle.”
“Rance? Call her now.”
“Why don’t you call her?”
“Because you came by that pride of yours honestly, that’s why. Do this for me, Rance. You know better than anybody how hard it is to ask.”
“I’ll get right back to you.”
“I’ll be waiting.”
Rance looked up his mother’s number and placed the call.
She answered on the first ring. “Rance! How are you? Is everybody all right?”
“Everybody’s fine, Mom,” Rance said, rubbing his eyes. “I’m just checking to see if you’re coming back for Jesse’s wedding.”
“I wouldn’t miss it,” Katherine McKettrick replied.
“It’ll be good to see you.”
“And you, sweetheart. You tell Cora I’m muscling in on some of the grandmother action.”
Rance laughed. “I’ll tell her.”
They chatted for a few more minutes, then rang off.
Rance immediately called his dad back.
“Well?” Wade demanded.
“She’ll be here,” Rance said.
“Hot damn,” Wade replied, and hung up in Rance’s ear.
Rance finished his coffee and went out to feed the cattle.
When that was done, he saddled Snowball and mounted up. Rode to the top of Jesse’s ridge and looked back over the Triple M, the sprawling range land, the creek, the copses of trees. It seemed, though he knew it was crazy, that Cassidy had made the trip with him, and stood now, at his elbow, the way she’d always done.
His eyes smarted.
“I miss you, Cass,” he said aloud. “If I could take back even one of those times I told you to get lost, I would.”
And he thought he heard her answer, with his heart, not his ears.
Just ride Snowball, she said.
Rance ran a sleeve across his face. And when he lowered his arm, he blinked, because he’d have sworn he saw five riders in the long coats of another time, traveling single file along the far side of the creek.
They were gone again, in an instant, but the memory was fixed on Rance’s brain in images as clear as if he’d been riding beside those men.
Old Angus, in the lead, followed by Holt, his elder son, then Rafe, Kade and Jeb.
His dad’s words, spoken just that morning over a cell phone, echoed in his mind.
The McKettricks ride again.
Rance laughed right out loud, and if he’d been wearing a hat, he’d have thrown it in the air.
“MORE LOCKS,” ECHO TOLD Eddie, the handyman, when she got back from filing a second complaint against Bud Willand, who was at that moment being transported to jail in Flagstaff. “Bigger locks. Lots and lots of locks.”
Ayanna, who had admitted Eddie, sighed. “Crime comes to Indian Rock,” she said.
Echo glanced at the almost-empty box of love-spell supplies sitting on one end of the counter. “Yeah,” she reflected.
“Were you scared?” Ayanna asked. It was a rhetorical question, of course, and because Echo liked the woman so much, she let it pass without remarking on the inanity of it.
“Yes,” Echo said.
“Good thing old Rance was around,” Eddie put in.
Echo blushed.
Ayanna twinkled. “The whole town knows,” she said out of the side of her mouth.
Rance had predicted just that, of course, but Echo had still cherished a forlorn and flickering hope that word wouldn’t get around.
Before she could think of anything to say, Cora zipped in, waggling a yellow flyer in one hand. “Came to tape this up in your window,” she announced, beaming at Echo. “It’s your civic duty to let me.”
Echo blushed again. Someone had probably awakened Cora out of a sound sleep the night before, with the news that her son-in-law happened to be present, wearing nothing but a towel, when Bud Willand broke into the bookshop by the back way and got himself punched in the nose.
“What is it?” she asked, not really caring.
“Summer Dance,” Cora said, as if Echo should have known. Maybe, given Jessica’s visit and the subsequent rush on love-spells, she should have. She’d just assumed it was a high school affair, that was all.
“You got a date, Cora?” Eddie teased. He was kneeling just to one side of the door, laying out tools and taking the new locks out of their packaging.
Cora grinned, taped the poster to the glass, facing the street, and gave back as good as she got. “You asking, Eddie?”
He turned bright crimson.
Cora dropped her tape into the pocket of her cotton vest, leaned slightly and mussed his hair. Then she waltzed over to the counter, reached into the love-spell box and plucked out a bag.
“Put it on my tab,” she said.
Echo laughed. “On the house,” she answered.
“I wouldn’t mind one myself,” Ayanna mused.
“Help yourself,” Echo told her, with a grand gesture of one hand.
“What about you?” Ayanna asked Echo, twinkling again.
“She doesn’t need one,” Cora said happily, just before she sailed out the door again, probably intent on hanging more flyers in more windows.
Echo turned as red as Eddie had a few moments before.
Then she went outside, stood on the sidewalk and read the flyer.
Oh, for a pair of glass slippers, she thought.
Size eight-and-a-half, medium.
DOC SWANN HIMSELF UNLOCKED the front door of his office to let Cora in.
She felt the familiar flutter in her heart.
He’d been widowed three years before, and folks said he still visited his late wife’s grave at all hours of the night. Cora had seen his study light on, in the wee-smalls, plenty of times, when she got restless herself and went out to drive around town. Doc always had bags under his eyes, and even when he smiled, there was an air of sadness about him.
“What’s this?” he asked, taking a flyer from the stack she’d brought in from the truck and reading the print. “The Summer Dance. Is it that time again?”
“It is June,” Cora said, glancing around. The reception area was empty, except for the two of them. “Where is everybody?”
“I sent Cindy up to Flagstaff to pick up a software program and some equipment so we can read those lost-pet microchips without having to extract the thing and send it to a lab,” he answered, but he was still looking at the flyer. “Time we dragged this practice into the twenty-first century.”
“I guess I’ll just tape that flyer up and be on my way,” Cora said.
“I hear there was some excitement down at the bookstore last night,” Doc Swann remarked, looking up from the flyer at last.
“Rance took care of it.”
Doc chuckled. “So I’m told. I had breakfast out at the Roadhouse this morning, as usual, and the story was hotter than the grill back in the kitchen. No harm done, then?”
“Everything’s fine,” Cora confirmed, coloring up a little.
Doc’s tired blue eyes sparkled. “I love a good romance,” he said.
Cora almost choked. She’d known this man all her life, but she’d never once heard the R-word come out of his mouth. She managed a nod.
“They out of the woods, Rance and Echo?”
It was Cora’s turn to chuckle. “Not by a long shot,” she said, shaking her head. “But if they stick together, they might make it.”
Doc nodded. “That’s good,” he said.
Cora turned, reached into her vest pocket for the roll of tape.
“Cora?”
She looked back.
“You own a pair of dancing shoes?”
Cora blinked. “Now, why would you ask a question like that?”
Doc cleared his throat. Looked away. “Never mind.”
“Oh, no, you don’t, Walter Swann,” Cora burst out, poking him in the chest with her roll of tape. “I want to know what you meant.”
More throat clearing, and just the slightest shuffling of his feet. “I thought…maybe…it was just a crazy idea—”
“Walter.”
“I was going to ask you to the Summer Dance.”
“Did you decide not to?”
“Not to what?”
“Not to ask me to the Summer Dance, Walter.�
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He smiled. “Will you, Cora? Be my date for Saturday night?”
Cora blinked.
“Well?” Walter prompted.
“Yes. If—if you really meant to ask, I mean.”
“I meant to ask,” he said.
“Okay, then,” Cora said, feeling flustered.
“Pick you up at seven? We could have dinner at the Roadhouse. Fortify ourselves before we go tripping the light fantastic.”
“Seven,” Cora agreed.
“What color is your dress?”
“I don’t know,” Cora replied. “I haven’t bought it yet.”
Walter laughed. “I’ve seen you go six months without wearing the same outfit. Are you telling me you don’t own a dress?”
She smiled. “No,” she said. “I’m telling you I don’t own the dress.” With that, she left. She’d gone in there an old woman and come out feeling like she was eighteen again.
When she glanced back, Walter was taping the flyer to the inside of his front window. He grinned and waggled his fingers in farewell.
Cora waited until she was behind the wheel of her truck. Then she took Echo’s love-spell out of her vest pocket, held it in the palm of her hand and wondered.
JESSE WAS IN FRONT OF the barn when Rance and Snowball got back from their ride, leaning against his truck and chewing on a blade of good high-country grass.
“I don’t even own a cell phone,” he said, as Rance swung down from the saddle, “and I already know where you spent the night.”
Rance grinned, patted Snowball’s neck and hooked one of the stirrups over the horn so he could unbuckle the cinch. “That so,” he replied, in his own good time.
“Saturday’s her birthday,” Jesse said.
Rance went still. Turned to look at his cousin.
“Saturday,” Jesse repeated. “Echo’s birthday.”
“How the hell do you know that?”
Jesse laughed. “Keeg and I ran a background check on her.” He slapped Rance on the shoulder, then tugged Snowball’s saddle down off her back.
“You did what?”
“Hey, she turned up out of nowhere. You’re a decent catch. We were looking out for your best interests, man.”
“You’d better not know her real name,” Rance said.
Jesse looked puzzled. “Legally, she’s Echo Wells. What else would she call herself?”
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