Kathy Martin's Reviews > McKettrick's Pride

Echo Wells is heading for a new start in Indian Rock after a bad break-up in Chicago when she finds an abandoned dog at a truck stop in New Mexico. She can't leave the dog; she reminds her too much of herself - lonely and abandoned.

Almost the first persons he meets in Indian Rock is Rance McKettrick, scion of the famous and very wealthy McKettrick family. They don't exactly hit it off. Rance is still grieving for the wife he lost five years earlier and is using work to fill up his time which leaves his seven and ten-year-old daughters in the care of his wife's mother more often than not.

Echo and Rance have had very different pasts. Echo was orphaned at four and reluctantly raised by an aunt and uncle who already had four children of their own. She hasn't seen them since she left for college at eighteen. Her loneliness wasn't eased when her fiancé abandoned her at the altar of a wedding chapel in Las Vegas. She's hoping for better in her new life in Indian Rock, but it is starting with her adopting a dog that likely belongs to someone else.

Rance was raised surrounded by a bunch of cousins and other family. He has suffered loss; his sister Cassidy died of leukemia when she was seventeen and he was in college. He also lost his wife to a horseback riding accident.

I liked the way the two of them grew to like and trust each other. There were a bunch of interesting side characters from Rance's cousins to his mother-in-law and other townspeople who both welcomed Echo and encouraged her relationship with Rance.

This was a nice contemporary romance from a very prolific author.