appliances and brass-bottomed pots gleamed. “But I wouldn’t be thinking Ivan Aldridge was behind it, you know.”
Colton raised a skeptical brow.
“It could’ve been anyone around here. There’s a lot of good will and friendliness in ranching,” she said thoughtfully as she poured herself a well-deserved cup of coffee and added a spoonful of sugar. “But there’s a lot of jealousy and envy, too. All the ranchers in these parts lost money a few years back. Winters were bad, crops ruined and some of the stock froze to death. But this place”—she gestured grandly to the house and beyond, through the fields—“managed to get by. Barely, mind you. When Denver returned, he was fit to be tied—claimed Tessa and Curtis had run the ranch into the ground. But he soon found out that she’d turned the corner, forced McLean Ranch into the black when some of the other ranchers, Bill Simpson, Matt Wilkerson, Vince Monroe and the like, were having trouble keeping the banks from foreclosing.”
“Seems as if they all made it,” Colton observed.
Milly frowned. “By goin’ further in debt.”
“Including Aldridge?”
She shrugged her big shoulders. “Don’t know, but it wouldn’t surprise me. Cassie got herself through college and veterinary school somehow, and that’s not cheap!”
“Curtis seems to think Aldridge is the most likely suspect.”
Milly’s steely brows quirked. “So now you’re listening to a Kramer!”
“He’s family.”
“You didn’t always think that way.”
“I was wrong,” Colton admitted, thrusting his jaw out a bit.
“Yes you were, and you might be again. Just because there was a feud between the families, doesn’t mean that Ivan’s going to do something about it. Leastwise not anymore. And as far as what Curtis thinks . . .” She snorted. “He’s as stubborn as a bull moose.” Colton thought she was so agitated that she might spill her coffee as she raised it to her lips and took a sip. “Well,” she finally conceded, “I suppose we’re all entitled to our opinion.”
“Even me?” Colton asked, his eyes glinting with amusement.
“No, you’re the one person on this ranch that doesn’t count,” she teased, then chuckled to herself. “By the way, I found something earlier—now where’d it go?” She reached into the closet and pulled out a shoulder bag containing his 35-mm camera with a wide-angle lens. “This yours?”
Colton nodded, accepting the bag.
“It was in the den beneath a stack of newspapers a mile high! Thought you might be lookin’ for it.”
“Haven’t had much use for it here.”
“Why not? Seems to me you can take pictures of anything.” Her old eyes twinkled. “You don’t have to limit yourself to war and political scandals and all the rest of that nonsense.”
“Nonsense, is it?”
“If you ask me.”
He slung the strap of the bag over his shoulder. “I guess I’m just not into pastoral scenes.”
“Maybe it’s time you changed. Slowed down a bit. Before the next bullet does more damage than the last one.”
“It won’t,” he assured her, setting his empty cup in the sink. “Thanks for the coffee.”
“Anytime.”
With the same restless feeling that had followed him in, Colton shouldered his way through the door and walked outside. He considered Milly’s advice, discarded most of it, but couldn’t help wondering if she were right about Ivan. How much simpler things would be if Aldridge weren’t behind Black Magic’s disappearance. How much easier his relationship with Cassie would be.
Loading his camera without thinking, Colton lifted it, staring through the lens and clicking off a few quick shots—Len, tall and rawboned, the epitome of the twentieth-century cowboy, working with a mulish buckskin colt; Curtis leaning against the top rail of the fence, smoking and eyeing the surrounding land; the sun squeezing through thin white clouds. Snap. Snap. Snap.
And yet his mind wasn’t focused on the image in the lens; his thoughts kept wandering to Cassie. He forced himself to concentrate. Snap. He caught Curtis leading Black Magic outside. Snap. A shot of the horse yanking on the lead rope and rearing against a backdrop of late afternoon sky.
The clicking of the shutter sounded right. The view through the lens looked right, and yet, something was missing—something vital—that surge of adrenaline he’d experienced so often when he’d stared through the eye of the camera.
“Hell with it,” he muttered, savagely twisting on the lens cap and shoving the camera into its case. Without considering the consequences of what he was doing, he shouted to Curtis that he’d be gone for part of the evening, advising the older man to lock Black Magic in his stall. Then he strode angrily