McKettrick's Pride

Rance threw back his head and shouted with laughter.

“I get to help,” Rianna said. “What’s a nursing home?”

“Never mind,” Cora told her, bending to kiss both her granddaughters on top of the head. “Nobody’s going into a nursing home. Not in the immediate future, anyway.”

A silence fell, and Rance looked up at his mother-in-law, suddenly realizing that she was getting older. She’d lost weight since Julie died, and there were wrinkles around her eyes and at the corners of her mouth. Her husband had passed away years ago, and she had no family other than Maeve and Rianna—and him.

“What’s a nursing home?” Rianna repeated.

“It’s like a hospital,” Maeve explained. “Old people go there.”

Cora, her gaze locked with Rance’s, suddenly looked away.

He pushed back his chair, stood and followed his mother-in-law to the sink, where she stood with her back to the room. He laid a hand on her shoulder, just as she had done earlier, when he was at the window.

“Are you feeling okay, Cora?” he asked quietly. “You’re not sick, are you?”

She shook her head, tried to smile. “No, Rance—I’m fine.”

But as she turned from him to tackle the breakfast dishes, it was clear something was on her mind.

Maybe he ought to tell her he thought he knew what it was.

CHAPTER FOUR

ECHO SAT CROSS-LEGGED IN the middle of her featherbed, awash in sunlight from the big windows opening onto the alley behind the shop, laptop open, Avalon snoozing peacefully beside her.

Four different people, in four different and far-flung parts of the country, had e-mailed offers to adopt Avalon, but no one claimed ownership. Both relieved and discouraged, Echo dispatched electronic thank-you notes and went to her own Web site.

Seeing it always made her smile.

It was her delicious little secret.

And the orders were piling up—more than a hundred had come in since she’d last logged on, before leaving Chicago.

“Best get cracking,” she told Avalon, who opened her eyes, yawned and then went back to sleep.

Reaching for the pen and notepad on the bedside table, Echo scrawled a shopping list. Velvet bags. Cording. Certain herbs and stones. Some of the supplies she needed had arrived with her furniture and other belongings, but she would have to contact her wholesalers, just the same.

Biting her lower lip, she scanned the list of orders again. Something niggled at the periphery of her awareness.

And then the name jumped out at her.

Cora Tellington.

“Cora?” she said aloud. A smile broke over her face as she checked the address. Sure enough, it was the Cora Tellington, of Indian Rock, Arizona.

Well, she thought happily, I’ll be darned.

Of course, she could fill the order from supplies on hand and deliver it in person, but Cora might be embarrassed and, besides, Echo wasn’t sure she was ready to reveal her sideline to anyone just yet. Her name didn’t appear on the Web site, and there was no toll-free number or post office box listed, either. Any receipts went directly into an online-payment service account, and she’d always shipped the merchandise from a franchise in the neighborhood.

Something else caught her attention as she studied Cora’s order on the screen of her laptop.

Cora wasn’t buying for herself.

“Hmm,” Echo murmured, confused.

Then, because she felt a peculiar sense of urgency, she set the computer aside, got off the bed and started rummaging through boxes, gathering the necessary materials.

A feather.

A pink agate.

A prayer, printed on a tiny strip of paper.

She put all these things into a small blue velvet bag, tied the gold drawstring and placed the works inside a little padded envelope, to be mailed on Monday morning.

What on earth, she wondered, had prompted Cora Tellington to order a love-spell, not for herself, but for a man?

THE PACKAGE ARRIVED IN Monday afternoon’s mail. Cora smiled when she saw it, felt a shiver of excitement and secreted it away in her purse before Maggie or any of her other employees caught a glimpse.

It was silly, she knew, to place her hopes in this kind of magic, but desperate times called for desperate measures. She’d tried just about everything else, and she was fresh out of ideas.

Of course, she could have gone to Sedona and talked to a psychic, but people knew her there. She didn’t want anybody spilling the beans—if word of what she was up to ever got back to Rance, he’d have a fit and fall in it.

I did it for you, Julie, she said silently. And for your girls.

Julie would have laughed, Cora knew that. Her daughter had been the practical, pragmatic type, just like Rance. Indeed, the two of them had been very much alike, believing only in what they could see, hear and touch.

It was sad.

Cora came back from her mental sojourn. Hammering sounded from next door, at Echo’s shop, and Eddie Walters’s old truck was still parked out front.

Needing a break, after giving three perms and a weave, Cora decided to go over and see how the new shelves were coming along.

Echo was up on a ladder, painting the ceiling. Barefoot, wearing a fitted T-shirt, her long, firm legs revealed by a pair of denim shorts, she looked like a wood nymph. The dog was nowhere in sight.

“Wow,” Cora said, admiring Eddie’s work as well as Echo’s. “The place looks great.”

Echo smiled and descended the ladder, laying her paint roller in the tray and resting her hands on her hips. “The first shipment of books is due to arrive on Thursday,” she said. “I might be open for business by Saturday morning.”

It pleased Cora to see the old shop coming alive again. She’d bought it years ago, along with the space next door, planning to expand her own business one day. As it turned out, though, she’d had her hands full with the Curl and Twirl, and now she was thinking more and more often of retiring, maybe doing a little traveling.

Of course, she couldn’t do that with Rance still running hither and yon like some crazy man, trying to work himself into an early grave, or outrun memories of a past he tended to idealize.

Cora had loved her daughter, but Julie had been a flesh-and-blood woman, with all the accompanying faults and foibles, not a paragon of virtue. In some ways, it was unfair, Rance’s remembering her the way he did. He’d forgotten the way the two of them butted heads, because they were too much alike. Stiff-necked, both of them. Used to getting their own way.

A curious expression came over Echo’s face; she seemed to be pondering Cora, like the blank spaces in a crossword puzzle.