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“Around four,” he told her, then grinned impishly. “And I didn’t buy the stallion. He had a big ankle. He might have gone lame later on.”
“Four,” Isabella repeated thoughtfully. “The shooting took place when?”
Ross shrugged. “Victoria wasn’t sure. She said dusk was falling.”
“Hmm,” she mused aloud. “If that’s the case, you had plenty of time to drive back here and get out to the arroyo where the shooting occurred.”
“That’s right.”
She sipped her coffee and tried a bite of the cookie. As Ross had promised, it was delicious.
“You don’t seem a bit concerned about that,” she accused.
The corners of his mouth turned downward. “Why the hell should I be? I didn’t do anything.”
“Yes, but can you prove that?” Isabella asked the pointed question.
He made a dismissive gesture with his hand. “The burden of proof should be on the state, not me. Or has the law that a person is innocent until proven guilty changed?”
“Nothing has changed. But if you had a solid alibi, you wouldn’t have any need for a lawyer.” A tiny frown creased the middle of her forehead. “So where did you go after you looked at the horse?”
He swallowed more of the coffee, which reminded Isabella that hers was getting cold. She reached for her cup and took a dainty sip.
“I went to another ranch. The Double X, just north of here. Someone had told me that the owner thought he’d spotted my missing stallion a few days before.”
“Did you talk to him?”
Ross shook his head. “No. No one was home. So I drove back here, saddled Juggler and went to check on the cattle in the south flats.”
“Who went with you?”
“No one. I went alone.”
Her eyes widened at this bit of information. “Is that normal? For you to ride out alone?”
He chuckled as though he found her question inane, but Isabella knew it wouldn’t be so funny if he found himself on a witness stand.
“Look, Bella, the T Bar K is a big spread. And though I’ve got a bunkhouse full of hands, we’re still sometimes spread thin. If I can do a job alone, I do it.”
As Isabella watched him pop the last piece of cookie into his mouth, she felt certain that Ross Ketchum was being honest with her. But her opinion didn’t count in a court of law. He needed an alibi.
“I’m sorry, Ross, but I’m merely asking you what any good prosecutor would want to know.”
He left his seat and placed his empty cup on the serving tray. Then turning to face her, he looped his thumbs over the wide leather belt at his waist. “Okay,” he said, “I can’t account for my whereabouts. But that doesn’t make me guilty.”
“No,” she agreed. “It just makes you unlucky.”
“What are you going to do about it?”
Rising from the couch, she walked over to where he stood by the desk. After placing her coffee cup next to his, she looked up at him.
“I’m going to figure out who really did this thing.”
Ross couldn’t help it, he burst out laughing. “Sure. One little woman is going to do what the whole San Juan County sheriffs’ department can’t seem to accomplish.”
She didn’t allow his laughter to get to her. After all, her boast probably did sound ridiculous. But he was a white man. He wouldn’t understand if she tried to explain that Naomi had told her that the truth would appear to Isabella. And her godmother had never told her a wrong thing.
“I’m Apache,” she said with solemn pride. “We’re tenacious hunters. We don’t give up until we get our prey.”
Humor creased his cheeks and danced in his green eyes. “Okay, so where do you intend to start on this great hunting trip?”
A provocative smile suddenly curved the corners of her lips. “I think the best place to start would be your bedroom.”
Chapter Three
“My bedroom!”
The shocked look on Ross’s face told Isabella he’d taken her suggestion all wrong. Which didn’t surprise her that much. Next to ranching, women were probably his favorite entertainment. And now he was thinking she wanted to be his tidbit for the afternoon.
Heat swarmed her face as she tilted her chin up at him. “Yes, your bedroom,” she answered primly. “That is where you keep your firearms, isn’t it?”
“Oh,” he said inanely. “Yeah. I have a gun cabinet in my bedroom. Is that what you want to see?”
Turning her back to him, she licked her dry lips. “Among other things.”
His hand suddenly rested against the small of her back and Isabella had the absurd urge to close her eyes.
“It’s at the other end of the house,” he told her. “I’ll show you.”
Isabella mentally shook herself and quickly started toward the door. Ross followed at her side while his hand remained at her back. Once they were out of the long study and in the hallway, he guided her to the left.
“How many people live here in the ranch house now?” she asked, while wondering why she didn’t make a move to pull away from him.
“Only me. Victoria moved out three weeks ago when she married Jess. Marina lives in a small house of her own on the property.”
The two of them had already passed several doorways. Too many rooms for just one man, Isabella thought.
“There’s another wing on the opposite side of the house,” he added, as though reading her thoughts. “Victoria did use those.”
More curious than ever, she glanced up at him. “Why did your father build such a huge house?”
“Well, he had four children. And when Mother was still alive he did a lot of entertaining. Cattle and horse buyers might come and stay a whole week while they looked over the ranch’s livestock. That’s when the ranch was really hopping,” he added, his voice full of wistful pride.
She gave him a sidelong glance. “And it isn’t hopping now?”
He smiled faintly. “Sure it is. We just do things differently nowadays.”
“You mean you don’t invite people into your home anymore?”
Ross frowned. “You’re trying to make me sound inhospitable.”
“Not really. You just don’t seem the sort of man who’d enjoy playing host for very long.” Not without a wife around to play hostess, she thought.
With a sly smile, he reached out and pushed open a door to his right and motioned for her to go in.
“This is it,” he announced.
A bedroom said a lot about the person who slept there, and as Isabella looked around the spacious room, one thing kept coming to her mind. Ross Ketchum was all man.
The king-size bed was sturdy oak with short, fat posts at the head and foot. It was covered with a rich burgundy-colored spread that matched the drapes on the windows. Paintings and sketches of the old west were scattered here and there on the whitewashed walls. To one side of the doorway a row of pegs held an assortment of felt and straw cowboy hats, a leather holster for a six-shooter, and a brown, oiled slicker. Along the end of the room, a tall gun cabinet made of varnished cedar and glass sat next to a shorter chest of drawers.
Several steps away to her right, one lone photo sat atop an otherwise bare dresser top. The distance between it and Isabella made it impossible to see who or what was in it.
“No TV?” she asked.
His lips twisted wryly. “A man has better things to do in bed.”
She should have seen that coming, Isabella thought with a measure of irritation at herself.
“Is that where the rifle was kept?” she asked, inclining her head toward the gun cabinet. “The one that was fired at Mr. Hastings?”
Ross nodded. “That’s it. I’ve had that particular 30.30 for years. Dad gave it to me for my fourteenth birthday. We used to take deer-hunting trips back then, before his heart got too bad.”
There it was again, she thought. That faint wistfulness in his voice that said he missed his parents and missed the way his home life used to be.
The notion softened her in a place that was far too private to be letting thoughts of Ross Ketchum inside.
“When did your parents pass away?” she asked gently.
“Dad died nearly two years ago. Mother passed on quite a while before that. Probably five or six years, I’d say. I’ve pushed the dates out of my head. They’re not ones I want to remember, if you know what I mean.”
She knew all too well. When her grandmother Corrales had died, she’d felt such an intense loss, she’d not been able to eat or sleep for days.
“I’m sure your father is riding another range now. And your mother is probably with him.”
Her remark reminded Ross that she was Apache; she viewed spirituality and the afterlife in a slightly different way than most white folks. The Apache believed that once a loved one died, he or she simply journeyed to another world where life continued in much the same way.
“I hope you’re right. But I doubt Amelia is with him.”
Her brows lifted. “Why do you say that? Surely your parents would want to be together.”
He chuckled. “Dad was a tough old codger. I can’t see any woman wanting to live two lives with him.”
Isabella wanted to ask him why he hadn’t followed his father’s example and filled the empty ranch house with a wife and children. From the information Neal had given her, she knew he was thirty-five. Well past the settling-down age. But questions of that sort would be getting away from her reason for being here, she told herself. And anyway, it didn’t matter why Ross Ketchum was without a wife. She wasn’t interested in him in such a way. She doubted she would ever be that interested in any man again after Brett.
Leaving his side, she walked over to the gun cabinet and peered through the glass doors. There were four rifles and a pump shotgun resting in the velvet holders.
“Is this where you store all your firearms?” she asked thoughtfully.
“Yeah. There’s a couple of pistols in the drawer at the bottom.”
“Did you have the cabinet locked up the day of the shooting?”
Ross cursed. “No. I never lock the thing. It would be pretty useless when anybody could knock the glass out. Besides, why should I lock it? There’s no children around, except my nephew Aaron, who lives about a mile on up the mountain. And he never comes into this room. Even if he did, the guns are never loaded.”
She could see his point, even if she didn’t agree with it.
Turning away from the cabinet, she studied the layout of the room. “What about those sliding glass doors? Where do they go?”
Ross walked over and pushed the drapes completely to one side to expose a view of a rocky, pine-dotted bluff.
“And if you’re wondering, I never lock the doors, either,” he told her.
“So in other words, anybody could have walked through those doors and taken the 30.30 from the gun cabinet,” Isabella reasoned.
“That pretty much sums it up.” Moving over to where she stood, he looked down at her, his expression slightly daunting. “Still think you’re going to catch your prey?”
His closeness set her heart to pounding like the heavy beat of a war drum. “Yes.”
“I’m interested to hear how you plan to do it.”
His eyes were crinkled at the corners, she realized. And there was a tiny scar running through the line of his upper lip. Heat radiated from his body and washed through Isabella in palpable waves. She’d never reacted so physically to any man before, and it disturbed her that a man like Ross had such a strong effect on her.
“Easy,” she said, as she struggled to keep her mind on her business and off of the potent man standing next to her. “We make a list of all the people who dislike you and go through it one by one until we find our man.”
Laughter rumbled deep in his chest before it spilled into the quiet bedroom.
“Oh, honey, if you have to make a list of all the people who dislike me, you’re going to be here for a good long while.”
The man could very well be charged with attempted murder and all he could do was laugh. She wanted to stomp his foot, whack her fist against his chest, anything to wake him up and make him realize that simply being a Ketchum wasn’t enough to keep him out of jail.
Her nostrils flared. “Then all I can say is that you’d better get used to my company,” she said coolly. “Because right now you don’t have much defense.”
The humor suddenly fell from his face. “Now look, Bella, I don’t care how you go about handling this thing. Just don’t expect me to spend my days playing Hardy Boy with you.”
His arrogance was unbelievable. “To be honest, I expect very little from you,” she clipped, then turned and walked out of his bedroom.
He caught up to her in the hallway and her lips pressed together as his hand closed tightly around her elbow. Did he have to put his hands on her every time he got within a foot of her? she wondered. She’d never had a man touch her so much. Especially a man she’d known for little more than twenty-four hours. To make matters worse, she’d never wanted a man to touch her the way she wanted Ross to touch her.
“Wait a minute,” he muttered roughly. “Just what was that crack supposed to mean?”
“It means that—” she paused and drew in a fierce breath. “It’s obvious you’re not interested in clearing yourself. You don’t even see a need to get to the bottom of this suspicion hanging over your head. Maybe if you’d been the one with a bullet in your shoulder, you might be showing a little more concern!”
“Oh, hell,” he spat with disgust.
She breathed deeply and told herself she would refuse to be intimidated by this man. “That’s right.”
“There’s nothing right about it,” he blasted back at her. “Jess is a part of the family. I don’t want him hurt any more than I do my sister!”
