His Defender

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!”