“YOU WANT TO DO WHAT?” Keegan asked the next morning, leaning halfway across his shiny desk at McKettrickCo and bracing himself against the wood with both hands, like a man about to do a standing push-up.
“You heard him,” Jesse said from his place by the window. “Our cousin Rance has come to his senses.”
“Come to his senses?” Keegan echoed, furious. He looked as though he might blow an artery at any moment. “He’s lost his freaking mind!”
Rance sighed. “Take a breath, Keeg,” he said.
Keegan thrust himself back, threw his hands out from his sides. “Goddamn it, Rance!” he yelled. “You can’t just throw over everything this family has worked for for the last fifty years!”
“Sure he can,” Jesse said.
“You stay out of this!” Keegan roared.
Jesse didn’t so much as flinch, nor did his piss-off grin falter.
The office door popped open, and Myrna Terp stuck her head in. “Is everything all right in here?” she asked. Having raised three sons herself— Morgan, Virgil and, alas, Wyatt—and worked in the Flagstaff operation until the new branch of McKettrickCo was opened in Indian Rock a few months back, Myrna was no stranger to conflict, verbal or otherwise.
“Yes!” Keegan answered.
“Everything’s fine,” Jesse told Myrna in calm tones. “Rance is going to retire from the company and concentrate on ranching, that’s all.”
Myrna opened her mouth, closed it again and retreated, shutting the door softly behind her.
Keegan sank into his cushy leather chair, braced his elbows on the edge of the desk and covered his face with both hands.
“You are taking this way too hard,” Rance said. “It’s not as if I’m selling my shares to an outsider and moving to China.”
Keegan lowered his hands. Stared at Rance as though he’d never seen him before. “It’s the woman, isn’t it?” he asked, his voice dangerously quiet. “The one with the pink car.”
“Echo,” Rance said, suddenly defensive, “has nothing to do with this. I’ve got two daughters to raise, Keeg. I have more money than their grandchildren could ever spend. What do I want with a job?”
Jesse began to clap, slowly and quietly.
Keegan threw him a murderous glance.
Jesse grinned, unfazed as always.
“Maybe you want to work yourself to death,” Rance told Keegan, “but I don’t.”
“It’s the woman,” Keegan insisted grimly. A vein jumped under his right temple, and his jawline looked hard enough to bite through a brick.
“It’s not the woman.”
Jesse rolled his eyes. “Of course it’s the woman, Rance. Until she came to town, you wanted to set up branch offices on other planets.”
“Whose side are you on?” Rance demanded.
Jesse ignored the question.
“You’ll regret this,” Keegan said, glaring at Rance again. “Buying cattle. Planting hay, for God’s sake. You’re a businessman, Rance—not a rancher.”
“I’m a McKettrick,” Rance said. “The Triple M is in my blood.”
“Oh, go ahead, then,” Keegan railed. “Ride the range. Sit around campfires and sing with the coyotes, for all I care. You’ll be bored out of your skull within six months. You’ll want to come back. Trouble is, McKettrickCo will be gone.”
“You need a vacation,” Jesse told Keegan. “Go somewhere and get laid.”
“Shut up,” Keegan bit out. “Unlike you, I do not subscribe to the theory that getting laid is the solution to everything from global warming to fallen arches, all right?”
Jesse laughed. “There’s your problem,” he said. He left his post at the window, strolled to where Rance stood and laid a hand on his shoulder. “If you’re serious about heading up to Flag for that cattle auction,” he added, “I’ll go with you. Just give me a call at Lucky’s.”
Lucky’s was a bar and grill, with a card room in the back. Jesse spent a lot of his spare time there, playing poker.
“At least Cheyenne works,” Keegan said, once Jesse was gone.
Cheyenne, who would be Jesse’s bride in a matter of weeks, was McKettrickCo’s newest executive. Working in conjunction with the local high school and a junior college in Flagstaff, she’d set up a work-study program for kids and displaced homemakers and even a few senior citizens. So far, though still in the early stages of development, the idea was a success.
Rance didn’t need the fat paycheck he drew from the company, but he’d hate to see a new board of directors put all those people out of work.
“I’ll vote with you, Keeg,” he said.
Keegan sighed. “I’m not sure that’s going to be enough,” he admitted. “Even if you stay on.”
“You know I’ll help any way I can.”
Keegan studied him for a long time, then nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “I know. But who’s going to do your job, Rance?”
“I was in charge of expansion,” Rance answered. “As far as I’m concerned, this company is big enough. Maybe too big.”
“Maybe you’re right,” Keegan said. “Hell, maybe Jesse’s right, too. Maybe I need to get laid.”
Rance laughed. “It couldn’t hurt.”
Keegan grinned. For a moment, he looked like the old Keegan, the one who’d fished in the creek on the Triple M and ridden the hills on horseback with him and Jesse. The one who’d seen ranching as a fine, free life.
But then Keegan turned sober again. “Is it serious, Rance? With Echo, I mean?”
Rance shoved a hand through his hair. Looked away, then met his cousin’s gaze squarely. “Damned if I know,” he said. “Something’s going on. We haven’t slept together yet, but it’s bound to happen.”
Keegan leaned back in his chair, cupping his hands behind his head. “Be careful,” he counseled. “I barely met the lovely Ms. Wells, but there’s something fragile about her. She’s breakable, Rance.”
Rance recalled the way Echo had stood up to Bud Willand the night before, when the ne’er-do-well wanted to take her dog. She was delicate—small-boned and slender enough to blow away in a high wind. But she was strong, too. She’d come to a new town, where she didn’t know a soul, and she was about to open a business.
It took guts to do that.
“I don’t want to break her,” Rance said.
“No,” Keegan agreed, watching him pensively. “I know that. But she’s the first woman you’ve really been drawn to since Julie. Don’t use her, Rance. That’s all I’m saying. Somebody’s done Echo Wells a real number, somewhere along the way. Maybe more than once.”
Rance narrowed his eyes. “You got all that just by meeting her at Rianna’s birthday party?”
“Yeah,” Keegan said. “She’s been hurt, Rance.”
Haven’t we all? Rance wondered. Keegan surely had—he’d lost his folks in a plane crash when he was still in high school, and later his marriage had gone sour. He rarely saw his daughter since the divorce.
Even Jesse, for all his easy ways, had been lonely as hell until he’d met Cheyenne. He’d been the wildest of the three of them, dancing on a razor-sharp ledge above an abyss, tempting death. Daring it to come and get him.
And then there was Rance himself—he’d never stopped grieving over the death of his sister, Cassidy, and toward the end, he and Julie had done each other the worst kind of injury. They’d given up, gone their separate ways, even though they’d still lived under the same roof.
“I’ll tie up all the loose ends by the end of next week,” Rance told Keegan, resting a hand on the doorknob.
Keegan nodded and looked away.
ON SATURDAY MORNING, ECHO rose even earlier than usual. She put coffee on to brew, pulled on a pair of old jeans and a baggy T-shirt, and took Avalon out for a predawn walk.
When they returned, Echo paused on the sidewalk.
The shop window sparkled, and the latest bestsellers were prominently displayed behind the glass. Echo had climbed a ladder, the night before, to hang a butcher-paper banner above the door—Grand Opening Saturday at 9:00 a.m. it proclaimed. The till waited on the newly varnished counter, alongside the credit-card machine. Now all she needed were customers.
Would they come?
Echo bit her lip. Yes, she thought, her spirits rising on a swell of optimism. People would come—probably out of curiosity at first. But if they were welcomed, and if she listened to them, they would return again and again.
Remembering what Rance had said, early on, about competition from the chains, she was a little deflated, but the sensation lasted only a moment.
She was too excited to be discouraged.
She unlocked the door, led Avalon inside and locked up again. No dead bolt and chain yet, but she had a call in to Eddie Walters, the local handyman.
Upstairs, she took a quick shower, wolfed down scrambled eggs and toast in her bathrobe, and reconsidered the clothes she’d laid out for her first day in business. The lightweight navy pin-striped pantsuit had seemed sensible when she’d chosen it the night before, but now the general effect seemed a little stiff.
More like something a banker would wear to refuse a loan or foreclose on something.
Not good, Echo thought. Half her wardrobe was still in boxes; her small closet contained mostly sundresses, summery tops and jeans.
Jeans wouldn’t do—she wanted to present a friendly image, but not too casual.
The sundresses were all pretty, made of light cotton or floaty stuff.
Floaty stuff: out. Sure, she had a few decks of tarot cards and some crystals among her stock, but she didn’t want to come off as Glenda the Good Witch. Indian Rock, as Rance had once pointed out, was not Sedona.
Finally, she selected a sleeveless navy dress with tiny white polka dots. Back in Chicago, she’d worn it to casual luncheons and backyard fund-raisers, with the single strand of pearls Justin had given her as a preengagement present.
She’d given the pearls to a casino employee in Vegas, a weary, resigned-looking woman wiping out ashtrays along a line of slot machines, along with her plastic bridal bouquet.
Looking back on that humiliating day, when she’d been all dressed up with nobody to marry, she smiled. Thank you, Justin, she thought for the first time. Thank you.
Once she was dressed, with her hair braided and her usual lip gloss and touch of mascara applied, Echo twirled.
Only Avalon was there to see, but Avalon was enough.
“Show time,” she told the dog.
Avalon panted and smiled her dog smile.
Together, they went downstairs.
Cora, Rianna, Maeve and a number of other people were waiting on the sidewalk, smiling through the glass. Cora juggled a tote bag and a huge bakery box.
Echo grinned as she opened the door to let them all in, and it didn’t bother her a bit that Rance hadn’t come.
“Daddy bought a whole bunch of cattle!” Rianna announced the moment she crossed the threshold. “Trucks and trucks and trucks full of them!”
“He’s going to be a rancher,” Maeve added solemnly. “And he’s wearing shit-kickers, just like Uncle Jesse’s.”
“Maeve McKettrick,” Cora scolded, her tone as good-natured as her manner, as she bustled to set the bakery box down on the counter. “Watch your language.”
“Granny bought you a cake,” Rianna told Echo. “That’s what’s in the box.”
“Picked up some paper plates and napkins and plastic forks, too,” Cora said. “I’ll just get them out of the truck.”
Cheyenne Bridges, whom Echo had met briefly at Rianna’s birthday party, introduced her mother, Ayanna, and said her brother, Mitch, would be along later, with Jesse.
Sierra materialized out of the crowd, too, accompanied by a slender blond woman with enormous blue eyes and a great haircut. She wore jeans, boots and a black cashmere turtleneck. “Echo Wells,” Sierra said, “this is my sister, Meg. Echo, Meg McKettrick.”
Meg smiled and put out a hand. “Hi,” she said. “It’s about time this place had a bookstore.”
Sierra was already scanning the shop. “Amen,” she agreed.
Cora returned with a bulging grocery bag, beckoned to Echo and proudly unveiled the sheet cake, iced in white butter cream, with the words “Welcome to Indian Rock, Echo Wells” written in blue frosting across the top.
It was an ordinary-enough sentiment, but Echo had never seen her name on a cake before. Her eyes burned, and for a moment she was too choked up to speak.
Ever perceptive, Cora patted her arm. “You get behind the counter, there, and I’ll take your picture,” she said, immediately hauling a small digital camera out of her tote bag.
Echo swallowed hard and went to stand behind the cake. Avalon followed, and just as Cora snapped the photograph, the dog stood on her hind legs, forepaws resting on the counter’s edge, as though posing.
Everyone laughed, and the tightness in Echo’s chest eased.
She cut the cake, setting a smidgeon of it on the floor for Avalon, and began working the cash register. Cheyenne, who had already set aside a stack of cookbooks for herself, stepped in to help bag people’s purchases.
Customers came and went, most buying, all sampling Cora’s welcome-to-town cake. There were only crumbs of it left when Rance appeared in the open doorway of the shop.
He wore jeans, a black cowboy hat, boots and a blue chambray work shirt—ordinary clothes, in the same way the greeting on the cake was ordinary. And yet the sight of him seemed to stop time itself, for Echo. Everyone else in the store receded, as though behind a silent, murky waterfall—visible, but indistinctly so.
Rance smiled, took off the hat. Set it aside on a bestseller table, now stripped nearly bare, and approached the counter.
“Howdy, ma’am,” he said, very seriously.
Echo stared at him for a moment, then laughed. The waterfall vanished, the people were back, and every clock in the world started ticking again. “Howdy yourself,” she replied.
He peered into the cake box, now almost empty, and looked comically forlorn.
“That’s what you get for showing up late,” Cheyenne told him, edging Echo aside to work the register herself. “Take a break,” she added, when Echo hesitated.
Echo made her way to the stairs at the back of the shop, knowing Rance would follow, and sat on the third step up. He took the second, smiling up at her.
“Looks like the place is a hit,” he said.
Echo shrugged, but she felt ridiculously proud. “You should have seen the cake,” she told him. “It had writing on it. ‘Welcome to Indian Rock, Echo Wells.’”
“I wish I had seen the cake,” Rance teased. “I might have gotten some of it then.”
Suddenly, Echo was ambushed again. Tears sprang to her eyes, and she turned her head to hide them, but Rance was too quick.
He took her hand. “What’s the matter?” he asked.
She blinked, hoping her mascara wouldn’t run. “Nothing,” she answered. “Everything is wonderful. It’s just that—”
“What?” Rance prompted.
“It’s silly.”
He squeezed her hand but said nothing.
“Nobody ever gave me a cake before,” she told him.
“Not even on your birthday?”
She swallowed, thinking of all the childhood birthdays that had come and gone. She hadn’t made the connection at Rianna’s party. And all those celebrations that never happened were ancient history, anyway, along with the little-girl disappointment that accompanied them. What was the big deal now?
“I told you it was silly,” she sniffled.
Rance raised her hand to his mouth, kissed it lightly. “Are we still on for that ride tomorrow afternoon?”
For a moment, Echo misunderstood. Her body heated, and warm, secret places expanded, deep inside her. Then she remembered the invitation he’d extended, after the Bud Willand incident and the unpacking of all those boxes of books.
She was just starting to hope Rance hadn’t noticed her first and entirely spontaneous reaction when the grin spread across his face.
He knew what she’d been thinking, damn it.
And his next words confirmed that.
“I was planning to saddle a couple of horses,” he said, “but I’m open to any kind of ride you might have in mind, Echo Wells.”
Another rush of heat swamped Echo, because she couldn’t help imagining what it would feel like to straddle Rance McKettrick’s hips and take him deep, deep inside her.
He chuckled, and it was a low, naked sound, as though they were alone in his bedroom, alone in his house, alone in the universe. He leaned toward her, spoke in a tone only she could hear.
“When the time comes,” he told her, “I’m going to peel off your clothes, real slow. And I’m going to taste everything I uncover. Take my time. You’re wound up tight inside right now, but when you turn loose, it’ll raise the rafters.”
Echo went damp all over.
Rance grinned again, well aware that he’d gotten the response he was after, and got to his feet. “I just came to say hello,” he told her, as though he hadn’t just carried out a virtual seduction on the stairway between her shop and her apartment. “There’s another truckload of cattle due at the ranch anytime now, so I’d better go sign for them.”
He was talking about cattle?
After nearly bringing her to a climax with just the promise of his lovemaking?
Echo was mortified.
She was also so aroused that she wondered how she’d get through twenty-four hours without the satisfaction only this one impossible man could possibly give her.
Rance bent, touched his mouth to hers, nibbled slightly at her lower lip. “One o’clock,” he told her. “Wear jeans if you want to ride…a horse.”
Echo watched, dumbstruck, as he turned and walked away, weaving through the crowd of shoppers, pausing to speak to Cora, and then to his daughters.
Mercifully, the rest of the day went by quickly, because the shop stayed busy. Echo didn’t have much time to ponder the mysteries of Rance McKettrick, at least not consciously, but her very cells seemed to hum with naughty subliminal expectations.
At five o’clock, she closed the shop, went upstairs to change her clothes and took Avalon out for a second walk.
Back home, they shared a grilled cheese sandwich, and Avalon plodded to the airbed, exhausted.
Echo was tired, too, but she knew if she tried to sleep, she’d start thinking about Rance, so she spent the next three hours filling orders for her mail-order clients. When she took that pile of padded envelopes to the post office on her lunch hour Monday, she’d have to take care that Cora didn’t see her.
One look at those packets and Cora, being as perceptive as Rance, might just recognize the size and shape, and put two and two together.
Echo huffed out a sigh. “Get real,” she muttered. “Nobody is that perceptive.”
But she wondered.
She finished her work, checked the locks downstairs, took a cool shower and crawled into bed.
She tallied the day’s receipts in her head.
She made out a mental grocery list.
She turned onto her left side, then onto her right.
The apartment was too hot.
She tossed back the covers.
Sweltering.
She got up and opened one of the back windows to let in a breeze.
That didn’t help, either, because Echo Wells had her own heat wave going, and it had nothing whatsoever to do with summer weather in northern Arizona.
KEEGAN WAS PROBABLY RIGHT, Rance reflected, leaning on the top rail of the fence overlooking the long-empty pasture behind his house. He’d lost his mind, buying all these damn cows.
Who did he think he was? Angus McKettrick, the legendary old man who had founded the Triple M, way back in the 1800s?
Still, the night air felt good, and there were a million stars shining overhead, and it was a fine thing to listen to the cattle setting down in the deep grass.
He turned, looked back at the house. It was dark, except for a few of the downstairs windows. Rianna and Maeve had long since fallen asleep, reading the books Cora had helped them pick out at Echo’s grand opening.
Echo.
It was a good name for her, he decided. Just when he thought he’d put her out of his mind, she’d come back to him and set all his senses to vibrating.
According to Maeve and Rianna, the name was made up. She had another, and evidently it was a secret, and a person had to know her well before she’d say what it was.
Rance intended to get to know Echo Wells’s real well.
He sighed, took off his hat, shoved a hand through his hair. He’d done hard physical labor that day, for the first time in more years than he cared to think about, and he needed a shower, bad. Like as not, every bone and muscle in his body would be aching like a son of a bitch by morning.
Hell of a thing if he couldn’t mount a horse tomorrow, he thought, because he was all stove up like some broken-down old bronc-buster with too many rodeos behind him.
He grinned.
Maybe he wouldn’t be able to mount a horse, but he wouldn’t have much trouble mounting Echo. Lay her down in the sweet grass, and cowboy-up.
Somebody did her a real number, he heard Keegan say. She’s breakable.
With a cousin like Keeg, a man didn’t need a conscience.
“Shit,” Rance muttered, and resettled his hat.
“Something on your mind?”
He started a little. “Think of the devil,” he said, “and he’ll appear.”
Keegan chuckled and stepped up beside him, out of the darkness, then leaned against the fence. “You’d better hire some ranch hands,” he told Rance, “if you’re serious about playing the old-time McKettrick.”
Rance sighed. “It’s going to sound strange,” he said quietly, “but sometimes it feels as if they’re still here—Angus and the boys. Once or twice, just at twilight, I’d swear I saw a horse and rider where they couldn’t be.” He braced himself, expecting Keegan to call him a sentimental fool, or worse, but it didn’t happen.
“I know what you mean,” Keegan said. “I’ve had one or two experiences like that myself. Maybe Sierra’s right. Could be, time isn’t what we think it is. Past, present, future—maybe it’s all now.”
“You been listening to that spook-talk again?” Rance asked. Sierra was convinced that she and Travis were sharing Holt and Lorelei’s old place with some of her ancestors. Said Doss and Hannah McKettrick were as alive as anybody—and they’d been married in 1919.
Sierra wasn’t the first person in the family to make a claim like that, either. Eve, Sierra and Meg’s mother, had always sworn strange things went on in that house, and Meg believed it, too.
One summer, when they were kids, Meg had hauled off and sucker-punched Rance, right in the nose, for saying she was crazy, believing in ghosts.
He hadn’t minded the pain or the blood, he reflected, with a slight smile, but he’d sure as hell hated being slugged by a girl, especially since he couldn’t hit her back.
Keegan let the question pass and put one of his own. “Do you think I ought to try to get custody of Devon?”
Rance didn’t look at Keegan. His cousin had just said a hard thing, and he needed to stand with it for a little while.
“Is that what you want, Keeg?” he asked when the time seemed right.
Keegan sighed. “I know I miss that kid something awful,” he answered. “That old house over there on the other side of the creek is big, and it’s empty. I guess that’s why I work the way I do. Because then I don’t have to think about how lonesome I get whenever I stand still for too long.”
Rance hesitated, then slapped a hand to his cousin’s shoulder. “I know all about empty houses,” he said.
“You’ve got Rianna and Maeve,” Keegan pointed out.
“Yeah,” Rance said. “They’re my own kids, but I couldn’t tell you much beyond that. I hardly know them, Keeg.”
They were silent for a long while, just listening to the sounds the cattle made and the babble of the creek behind them.
“They’re female,” Rance said.
“Most girls are,” Keegan replied.
“Cora has to translate practically everything they say. Who’s this Barbie broad, anyway?”
Keegan laughed aloud. “Barbie’s a doll, Rance.”
Rance frowned, confused. “You dating her or something?”
Keegan gave another guffaw. “The toy kind,” he explained when he caught his breath. “Devon has about fourteen of them.”
“Oh,” Rance said, bemused.
“Thanks,” Keegan told him, after another lengthy silence.
“For what?”
“Making me feel like less of an idiot. Compared to you, I’m an expert on kids.” Keegan’s grin flashed. “So, thanks again.”
Rance chuckled. “Don’t hold your breath waiting for me to say ‘you’re welcome.’”