“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 T-shirts? 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.”
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?”
Rance wrenched the saddle out of his cousin’s arms and headed for the barn. Jesse followed, leading Snowball by her reins.
“Rance?”
“Forget it.”
“I’m not going to forget it.”
“Tell me what you dug up on her, since you’ve already checked her out behind my back.” Rance put the saddle in its customary place.
“She’ll be thirty this Saturday. She’s an only child, orphaned young, raised by an aunt and uncle. Put herself through college, worked in an art gallery until she came here. Never married, no rap sheet.”
“What are you, an FBI mole?”
Jesse put Snowball in her stall, slipped the bridle off over her head and stroked her side. Something in the slant of his shoulders told Rance he was thinking about Cassidy, not the conversation at hand.
A gap of silence opened.
“Nice to see you riding this horse,” Jesse said when they got to the other side. “Out of all the things we could do in her memory, I guess Cass would have wanted that most.”
Rance swallowed hard. Looked away.
Jesse gave him another slap on the shoulder as he passed.
“You remember how I used to tell her to get lost?” Rance asked.
Jesse stopped in the barn doorway, but he didn’t turn around. “I remember,” he said.
Rance gave Snowball some extra hay and followed Jesse outside.
With a little distance between them and the subject of Cassidy and the horse she’d loved more than just about anything else, it was easier to talk.
“Saturday, huh?” Echo hadn’t mentioned that her birthday was coming up, but, then, they’d never gotten past the sex. He knew what she liked in bed, but not much else.
“Saturday,” Jesse confirmed, climbing into his truck and starting the engine.
“I don’t want to hurt her,” Rance heard himself say.
“Then don’t,” Jesse replied. With that, he put the truck in gear, turned it around and drove away.
RIANNA’S FACE LIT UP WHEN Rance walked through the front door at the Curl and Twirl. “Daddy!” she whooped, and flew at him. “You’re back from Taiwan!”
“Sure am.” He lifted her up, swung her around once and gave her a smack on the cheek. “How’s my girl?” he asked.
“Bored,” Rianna said. “Granny’s putting up posters all over town, and Maeve spent the night at her friend Suzie’s. They got to have pizza and stay up all night and watch DVDs.”
“Your grandmother is putting up posters?”
“For the dance,” Rianna informed him.
“What dance?”
“The Summer one. It’s this Saturday.”
“Oh,” Rance said. Now that he had the information, he didn’t know what to do with it. Not an uncommon experience when it came to things that interested those of the female persuasion.
He set Rianna back on her feet.
“Are you going to invite Echo?” she asked.
“I hadn’t thought about it,” Rance admitted. It was true. He’d thought about plenty else, though.
“Do you like her, Daddy?”
Three women with goop on their heads peered around the portable wall separating the waiting room from the main part of the shop.
Rance felt his neck heat up. “Yes,” he said. “Of course I like her.”
“Then ask her to the dance,” one of the women said.
Rance glared at her.
The trio retreated, but he knew they hadn’t gone far.
“I’ll go with you if you’re scared,” Rianna offered, looking up at him with huge, hopeful eyes.
Rance put out a hand to his daughter. “Okay,” he said.
The portable wall wiggled.
He shook his head.
Rianna pulled him out the door, onto the sidewalk. “Ready?” she asked.
Rance stifled a grin. “Yeah. Any last-minute pointers?”
“Tell her she’s pretty.”
“Got it.”
Rianna tugged him into Echo’s shop. The bell tinkled over the door.
Echo, busy unpacking a box of books, looked up and then looked down again.
“My daddy wants to ask you to the Summer Dance,” Rianna announced.
“Thanks, coach,” Rance said.
“I was afraid you’d chicken out,” Rianna replied in a stage whisper.
Echo turned roughly the same color as her car, then smiled.
Ayanna, watching the whole exchange, beckoned to Rianna. “We just got a new shipment of pop-ups,” she said. “Wanna see?”
Whatever “pop-ups” were, Rianna seemed delighted by the prospect.
They disappeared into the back room.
“I’d understand if you said no,” Rance told Echo when she didn’t jump right in there with a yes.
She studied him. “Okay,” she said.
“Okay ‘yes,’ or okay ‘no’?”
She grinned. “Okay, ‘yes.’”
Rance felt ridiculously happy, and his tongue had tied itself up in a knot. Since he couldn’t speak, he nodded.
“Was there something else?” Echo asked.
“Jesse and Keegan ran a background check on you,” he said, half expecting her to throw something.
“I know,” she said.
“You know?”
“Rance? Don’t echo.”
He laughed, and it felt almost as good as making love to her on the bathroom floor.
“They told me. Keegan and Jesse, I mean.”
“Oh.”
Most of what he knew about Echo, he’d gotten secondhand, either from Cora or his cousins. It was amazing how much that bothered him. He wanted to know everything all of the sudden. If she’d been lonely as a kid, for instance, and how her aunt and uncle had treated her.
He couldn’t ask, because things like that had to be offered. So he just stood there, like a fool, wondering what to do next.
She tried to let him off the hook. “See you Saturday, then?”
“Saturday,” he agreed hoarsely. He’d hoped to see her a lot sooner than that. Like tonight, and tomorrow night, and the night after that, but it was probably better to take things slowly.
She took in his boots, jeans and work shirt. “Looks like you’re back to ranching,” she said.
He nodded, stuck where he was as surely as if he’d planted the soles of his boots in a spill of superglue.
Rianna saved him by bursting out of the back, carrying a book. She held it up to him, opened the covers with a flourish and laughed with delight when a fully formed paper horse jumped to life right before his eyes.
“Can I have it, Daddy? Can I? Please?”
Rance studied the horse, fascinated. At the same time, he reached for his wallet.
Rianna relayed the money to Echo, who rang up the purchase and sent back change.
“Pretty amazing, huh?” Echo asked, resting her forearms on the counter and leaning a little, so her plump breasts pushed together under the fabric of her frothy sundress.
Rance shifted, pulled his feet loose from the invisible superglue. “Pretty amazing,” he replied.
A knowing look sparked in her eyes. “I meant the pop-up book,” she said.
“That, too,” he responded.
She laughed.
“Wait till Maeve sees this!” Rianna cried, in little-sister triumph. She dashed out the door, waving the book in the air.
“I’d better make sure she doesn’t run all the way to Suzie’s place,” Rance said, and turned to follow his daughter.
Echo laughed again.
Or was it the little bell over the door?
THE PACKAGE WAS BULKY, and it had been forwarded at least once. The wrapping was coming undone, the return address was smudged, and the handwriting, though vaguely familiar, didn’t bring any names to mind.
Echo set it on the counter and stood back from it, frowning.
“Do you think it’s going to explode?” Ayanna asked, only half joking.
Snowball rose on her hind legs and sniffed the wrapping.
“No,” Echo said, after biting her lower lip for a few moments. “It’s just weird, that’s all.”
“You get packages all the time,” Ayanna reasoned.
“From companies,” Echo told her. “This looks—personal.”
Snowball dropped back to all fours and strolled away.
“Well,” Ayanna said, “the bomb dog doesn’t seem alarmed.”
Echo gave her a nervous glance, approached the package again and tried to make out the return address. There was no name, just a post office box and a Chicago zip code.
That eliminated one possibility—that Justin had found some of her stuff at his place, tucked away and forgotten in a box or a drawer, and decided to send it back. He still lived in New York.
“Open it,” Ayanna urged.
Echo’s hands trembled slightly as she tore away the ruined paper.
Whatever it was, it was gift-wrapped. Little bears and balloons, something the worse for wear, but determinedly cheerful. A card was taped to the top, with her name printed in block letters.
A birthday present?
Her palms grew moist.
Ayanna appeared at her side. Elbowed her lightly.
Echo pulled the envelop free, opened it. The card was cheap, the kind that comes twenty to a box, and it looked as forlorn as the bears and balloons.
There were flowers on the front, along with a generic “Happy Birthday.”
Holding her breath, Echo opened the card.
“I’m sorry if this is a little scruffy,” the inside read. “I found it on eBay. Hope you’re okay. Uncle Joe.” A phone number was scrawled beneath.
Gently, Echo tore away the wrapping paper, and there, looking tired and tattered from her long journey, still smiling and holding her wand with the star at the top, was the doll she’d been waiting for since she was seven years old.