Darci's Pride

She should have been prepared.

The last time, she’d been naked, clutching only a sheet. But somehow, through the years and the miles, the distance she’d injected between them, she’d forgotten. She’d forgotten what it was like to be in the same room as Tyler Preston, to feel the gleam in those dark green eyes, to see how his mouth could curve into those naughty, wicked smiles, smiles that had the simultaneous power to seduce and destroy. She’d forgotten how his voice, that low, irreverent Aussie drawl, could swim through her and touch places she hadn’t been touched in six long years.

She’d forgotten, because she’d had to.

She’d forgotten, because remembering would have made walking away, moving forward, impossible.

And if there was one thing Darci was determined to do, it was move forward. There’d been no future for her in Australia all those years ago, a seventeen-year-old whose face had been splashed on the cover of every tabloid. Everywhere she’d gone, people had looked at her. They’d stared—and they’d known. She was the girl who’d seduced the man, the jailbait who’d gone to bed with the cowboy.

The harlot who’d smeared the reputation of one of Australia’s favorite sons.

The shame had followed her everywhere, until finally she’d stepped onto the big jet that hot March afternoon, and never looked back. England, Oxford, had been a world away, and with the miles and the years, she’d moved forward.

But then she’d run into Andrew Preston at a party in London, and all those hard broken edges she’d pushed deep had shoved their way forward, and she’d known. Finally, after six years, she’d realized how to fix things. How to make things better, to give Tyler back all that she’d taken from him.

That’s what she wanted. To give Tyler back the respectability her recklessness had cost him, to prove to him and her father and everyone who still saw her as frivolous that she was no longer that reckless, irresponsible child. That she was competent, could be trusted. That she was no longer that motherless girl spinning so desperately, horribly out of control. Then she would be free of the past. Then she would walk away, walk forward. Finally, at last, get on with her life.

She’d planned and she’d analyzed, just as she’d learned to do at Oxford. She’d struck up a conversation with Andrew and the two had quickly realized how much they had in common. It had been easy between them. He hadn’t recognized her name, hadn’t recognized her as the girl who’d almost destroyed his cousin.

The invitation to join his campaign had been natural, easy. He needed help in Australia. She was Australian. Her father had served two terms as president of the ITRF. Despite her six-year exile, she knew people. She had friends, influence. She could help Andrew as no one else could. She could help him gain Australian support, despite the popularity of Jacko Bullock.

The opportunity had been all but gift wrapped, the kind of chance she’d been craving since earning her degree in commerce and political science.

She’d wanted to say yes, absolutely, to shout it from the rooftop of her London flat. But she’d realized she couldn’t, not until she’d told Andrew the truth about her and his cousin. She’d learned the consequences of lies, even seemingly harmless little white ones. So she’d talked to Andrew and held her breath, and after a long, unsteady heartbeat, he’d smiled warmly and held out his hand, told her the past was the past.

But then Tyler strode into his office, tall and dusty, damp from his land, in need of a shave and with that battered hat pulled down low on his head, and something inside her, all that determination and resolve maybe, the nice little speech she’d rehearsed, had simply shattered.

The years had been kind to him. Amazing, actually. He was still lanky, but no longer in the way of the brash cowboy half the country had been in love with. He was a man now, with all the confidence and awareness that came with the years. Even the gleam in his eyes was different, still bloody irreverent, but more focused now.

Dangerous.

And in the moment she’d first seen him standing there, she’d realized how wrong she’d been. How badly she’d misjudged the situation. All that she’d forgotten, all she’d refused to remember, had surged back, tightening around her like a shiny new vise.

One glance at the picture in her hands, of Tyler so long ago, and the ache in her chest deepened. He’d been young then, innocent in the way only a child could be. But even then, when he could have been no more than eight or nine, the grit had been in his eyes, the dreams and the determination to make them come true. And the hat…

She smiled at the sight of it sitting crookedly on his head, much like a similar hat he’d worn when she’d first seen him all those years ago. She’d been bored, flipping channels on her television, when she’d landed on a local access cable station, and seen him. She hadn’t known the horseman’s name, had only seen the naughty gleam in his eyes, heard the irreverent drawl, and from that moment forward, she’d been hooked. She’d made it her mission—

Her mission. It always had a way of getting her in trouble.

She set the picture back on the shelf and fished around in the leather satchel that doubled as a briefcase, locating her mobile phone. She pushed the button to see the missed call, braced herself even before her father’s name appeared.

He’d been trying to reach her for several days.

Sighing, she jabbed a few buttons and brought the phone to her ear: “Sweetheart, I do wish you would answer your phone. I have decided to fly into Sydney a few days in advance of the Summit.”

Darci closed her eyes and let out a slow breath. It was one thing to avoid her father with an ocean between them, something entirely different when he was only two hours south. “We can have lunch,” he said in his booming formal voice, the one he always used. The only one, Darci had learned, he knew how to use, even when she’d been a young girl who’d needed something so…different. “I will be at the Observatory, as usual. Barbara will set something up.”

She wanted to resent him for that, and maybe once, she had. Most fathers didn’t need an assistant to arrange time with their children.

But Weston Parnell was hardly most fathers, and he never had been, even before, when her mother had been there to soften him.

“I need you to think about what we discussed last week,” he said, as he had in every message he’d left her over the past four days, since she’d boarded the plane at Heathrow. He’d actually insisted on driving her there, but in the end, she realized he’d only driven her there to try and talk her out of leaving. “Now is not the time to get involved with the Prestons.”

They were an upstanding family, but he made them sound like pariahs, something dangerous to be viewed with mild curiosity, but only from a safe distance.

“Not even Andrew. I am hearing things—”

She stiffened. That was new.

“I know you think you have something to prove, Darci-Anne, but aligning yourself with that family at this point in time is not the way.”

The chill down her spine was immediate. It almost sounded as though her father was warning her.

Through the window, she saw Tyler squatting next to two black-and-white dogs in the shade of one of the old gum trees, his attention on a young girl with a high ponytail. They were laughing.

“Please be careful,” her father concluded. “Please think about all that I have advised you.”

His words fell silent then, leaving only the haunting thrum of the music piped through the office.

“Miss Parnell?”

Hiding her unease, Darci turned toward the tidy woman with the surprisingly long gray braid standing in the doorway.

“If you’ll follow me,” the woman who’d introduced herself as Peggy said. “Mr. Preston requested that we use the conference room.”

The quick blade of disappointment shouldn’t have surprised her—she didn’t belong in Tyler Preston’s office any more than she belonged in his life.

“I take it you’ve increased security?”

Staring out the window, Tyler threw back the last of his Scotch. Night had long since fallen. Deep in the shire, over thirty kilometers from Pepper Flats, the nearest town, darkness swallowed the land. But he could still see her, damn it. Still see Darci walking with his cousin to her shiny little sports car. Andrew had pressed a hand against the small of her back. He’d opened the door for her. Before she’d disappeared inside, she’d turned toward him and slipped off her sunglasses, beamed a smile up at him. He’d smiled back at her, warmly.

Intimately.

“Around the clock,” he said, turning from the memory and toward the man. Darci had gone, butAndrew had stayed. “Called a private security firm this afternoon. They’ll have someone here in the morning.” Maybe it was an extreme step, but Tyler wasn’t taking chances. “Until then, the grooms are taking turns staying awake, just in case.”

Leaning forward in one of two leather wing chairs, Andrew frowned. The two had grown up a world apart, but with the same height and short dark hair, they could easily pass as brothers.

The Irish blood of their paternal grandfather ran strong like that.

“If I didn’t know better, I’d think someone was targeting the family,” he said.

Tyler pushed from the window and strode toward the small table where the whiskey bottle sat. He rarely had more than one glass, but tonight he was pressing for his third. “Not the family,” he said, offering the bottle to his cousin.

Andrew tossed back the rest of his glass and extended it toward Tyler.

“It’s bigger than that,” Tyler said, pouring. “Corruption is everywhere, and the Internet is only making it easier. The syndicate sees money to be made.”

And they didn’t give a damn who fell in the process