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Tiffany lifted her hands and shook her head in silent protest. “It still could be a coincidence,” she whispered. Her suggestion was a desperate attempt to right her crazily spinning world, to hold on to what she had believed to be true for four long years, and both she and Zane knew it.
“Look at the pictures, Tiffany,” Zane quietly insisted. “You’re knowledgeable enough to realize those two stallions are different. Something isn’t right at Emerald Enterprises.”
“Pardon?”
“Emerald Enterprises owns the farm.”
“And therefore King’s Ransom.”
“If that’s what you want to call him.”
Still the connection to her horse wasn’t completely clear. “And you think Devil’s Gambit is somehow involved?”
“I know he is.”
“Because . . . someone switched horses, planned the accident, thereby killing the replacement horse and Ellery? Then what about Dustin? How did he manage to escape with his life?”
“Maybe he planned it.”
The words settled like lead in the room. Only the occasional crackle and hiss of the fire disturbed the thick, condemning silence. “Dustin wouldn’t . . .” she said, violently shaking her head. “He couldn’t kill Ellery . . . they were brothers . . . very close. . . .”
“Maybe it wasn’t intentional. I told you I think Ellery was in on the swindle.”
Her frigid blue eyes held Zane’s gaze. “That doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense, you know,” she rasped, her body beginning to shake from the ordeal of the past two days. “Ellery owned the horse. Devil’s Gambit was worth a lot more alive than he was dead!” She raised a trembling hand in the air to add emphasis to her words, but Zane reached for her wrist and clutched it in a deathlike grip.
“Just hear me out. Then you can draw your own conclusions.”
“I already—”
He broke off her protests by tightening his fingers over her arm. “Please listen.” His grip relaxed but his stormy eyes continued to hold her prisoner.
“All right, Zane. I’ll listen. But in the end, if I don’t believe you, you’ll have to accept that.”
“Fair enough.” He released her and took a seat on the corner of the desk. His stormy eyes never left the tense contours of her elegant face. “When I requested a third breeding to King’s Ransom, at the high stud fee, I was granted it. But because of the stallion’s ‘temperamental state’ I wasn’t allowed to witness my horse being bred.”
“And you didn’t buy that excuse?” Tiffany guessed.
“It sounded like bull to me. It just didn’t make a lot of sense. I’d witnessed the first breeding but was out of the country when the second foal was conceived.”
“So what happened?”
“I began asking a lot of questions. Too many to suit the manager of the farm. All of a sudden I was told that King’s Ransom’s services were, after all, unavailable. He was booked to cover far too many mares as it was, and I was asked to pick up my mare and leave.”
“Before she was bred?”
“Right.”
Tiffany began to get a glimmer of the truth, and it was as cold as a winter midnight.
Zane walked over to the hearth. As he sat on the warm stones he studied the amber liquor in his glass. “I picked up the mare, and the manager didn’t bother to hide his relief to be rid of me. As I was leaving I saw a horse I recognized as King’s Ransom running in a distant field. I thought it odd, since the manager had told me not five minutes before that King’s Ransom was supposedly in the breeding shed.”
“So you took these pictures!” she said breathlessly, the scenario becoming vivid in her confused mind.
“I’m a camera buff and happened to have my camera and telephoto lens with me. I grabbed what I needed from the glove box and photographed the horse. I took several shots and noticed that the stallion was running with a slight misstep. I hadn’t heard about any injury to King’s Ransom, and that’s when I began to suspect that there might be two horses using the same name.”
Tiffany’s eyes were wide and questioning. “And from that you just deduced that one of the horses was Devil’s Gambit?”
“It wasn’t that difficult, really,” Zane stated, his silvery eyes delving into hers. “Black Thoroughbreds are fairly uncommon, much rarer than bay or chestnut.”
