Darci's Pride

“I’m on my way now. My plane leaves Louisville first thing in the morning.”

Phone in hand, Tyler strode across the muddied paddock toward the small brick building that housed Lochlain’s medical facilities. They were equipped for routine maintenance and injuries—not triage. But each horse needed to be evaluated before individual arrangements could be made. Neighbors from throughout the shire had been arriving in a steady stream since long before the blaze had been put out. They had their trailers. At their stud farms, they had barns. They wanted to help. Fairchild Acres was the only stud that hadn’t sent assistance, and yet even Louisa’s head trainer had phoned to express his horror.

Tyler was quite sure Louisa had not authorized the call. She made no secret of her disdain for the Prestons, whom she still considered nothing more than newcomers.

“There’s really no need, mate,” Tyler told his former trainer, Marcus Vasquez. “Your hands, they’re full with Lucas Racing.” Marcus had relocated to America the year before and was working to establish his own stable.

Half a world away, Tyler wasn’t sure how Marcus had already found out about the fire.

“I was there when Lightning was born,” he reminded. “We were both there that first morning he—” His voice thickened, bringing with it the faintest trace of his Spanish heritage. “I was there,” he finished abruptly, and in truth that said it all. He’d been a hell of a lot more than just Lightning Chaser’s trainer. “And I need to be there now.”

Tyler understood.

He ended the call and kept walking, turned off his phone. There’d been enough calls. Enough questions.

Too bloody few answers.

“The insurance investigator rang,” Peggy said, as he passed. “She’ll be here within the hour.”

He nodded, kept walking. He’d met Beverly Morgan a time or two in the past. She was fair, but she took no prisoners. She would have her own set of questions.

And she would not appreciate his lack of answers.

Over four hours had passed since the fire had been put out, but the heat kept boiling. Tyler’s watch said it wasn’t yet ten, but the morning sun scorched like midafternoon. With every breath, the stench of smoke burned, and everywhere he looked he saw the lingering smear of smoke.

Even when he closed his eyes.

God, especially when he closed his eyes.

He’d yet to go inside. His mother had tried to get him to shower and clean up, to eat something. To have some tea. She meant well, he knew that. She wanted to help. But she hadn’t understood that he couldn’t. If he put so much as one bite of food in his mouth—

His stomach roiled at the thought.

Tyler rounded the corner and slipped in the back door. From the front of the brightly lit facility he heard Russ’s voice in a serious conversation with one of the three additional veterinarians who’d arrived with the sunrise.

But it was the soft voice from the stall to the right that stopped him. Low, sad…oddly reassuring.

He moved closer and looked, saw the boy. Scrawny, covered in soot with a bloodstain on his torn shirtsleeve, he stood next to Lightning Chaser with a hand on the colt’s neck. Stroking. Slowly. Gently.And his words, they were too quiet to hear, but the cadence almost sounded like…a lullaby.

And in that moment the juxtaposition hit Tyler, hit him in a way that nothing else had. The kid had been there all night. He’d been arm to arm with the men. He’d been the one to shove a glass of cold water into Tyler’s hands, and now he was bloody singing to his horse. Lightning Chaser stood there quietly with his head bowed, but his ears perked, almost relaxed despite the equipment monitoring his vitals.

The last time Tyler had seen him he’d been fleeing the fire with Tyler’s shirt covering his eyes.

Tyler stood there now, in the back room of the medical clinic, alone for the first time since he’d crawled between his sheets and forced himself to count wallabies over ten hours before. And everything started to rush. The brightly lit room whirled around him, bringing with it the bullhorn and the shouting, the cries of the horses. It all rushed around him like some sick, twisted soundtrack that refused to die.

Then the boy shifted, and the hair slipped from beneath the tattered bush hat.

Blond.

Long.

Like goddamn sunshine.

Chapter Four

She sensed him before she heard him. She stood there in the brightly lit back room with her hand on Lightning Chaser’s velvety neck, not trusting herself to move. She hadn’t wanted him to find her like this.

She hadn’t wanted him to find her at all.

From the relative quiet of Whittleson Stud, where her father’s former trainer Sam Whittleson had invited her to stay despite his absence, she’d heard the bullhorn, and the horrible rush of cold had been immediate.

In horse country, the sound of a bullhorn breaking the night could only mean one thing.

She’d run to the window and seen the strobe gyrating against the darkness to the east in the direction of Lochlain.

Everything else was a blur. She’d thrown on clothes and run to her car, sped toward the awful red glow. That’s what people did. That’s what everyone in the shire did. When there was trouble, everyone came. Everyone helped.

That’s what she told herself. She was there because it was the right thing to do, because horses were in trouble and every able body was needed.

But the second she’d seen Tyler emerging from the smoke, tall and commanding, that air of authority enveloping him despite the horror drenching his eyes, she’d known the truth.

She’d come for Tyler.

She stood there now with her back to him, not allowing herself to move. Because if she moved she would turn, and if she turned and saw him, the urge to go to him and put her arms around him…

She should have gone home. She should have slipped out with the sunrise, once the fire was under control and she knew Tyler was okay.

But Tyler was not okay, and Darci wasn’t sure he ever would be again. Lochlain was his life, the horses, every one of them, his children. Once, he’d almost lost it all. That had been the price all those years ago, the fallout from a stupid schoolgirl desire she’d been unable to control.

This time, she knew…this time would be different. It had to be. She’d left Australia a girl, but she’d returned a young woman. She had goals. She was deliberate, methodical. And she wasn’t about to fall into the same trap she’d fallen into before. She had a career to build, a future to claim.

But she couldn’t just stand there like a coward, either, not when she could feel him behind her, watching.

Not when she knew that her hair had given her away. Slowly, she turned. And slowly, she saw. He stood not five meters behind her, in a shaft of sunlight cutting in from a high window. It exposed him—the smoke smeared against his face and the battered Akubra hat he always wore, the grime on his clothes and the rips in the once-white undershirt. They exposed the minor burns and dried blood on the arm that hung oddly at his side—blood she knew his mother had tried to wipe away.

But it was his eyes that got her. Normally they gleamed like raw emeralds. Normally the deep dark green glimmered with intensity and enthusiasm, with energy, excitement. Awareness.

Now they were grim, flat…and so damn agonized she almost forgot every promise she’d made to herself, every goal. Every dream. Because in that one moment, there was only Tyler Preston…and the low, hard thrum of her heart.

“You’re hurt,” she said inanely, and like a fool, she started toward him. Toward Tyler.

Once, all those years ago, when she’d caught his eye and sashayed over, when she’d worn low-rise jeans and a flirty tank top, he’d lounged against the wall with a drink in his hand, and watched. His eyes had gleamed.

Now he turned, and walked away.

Darci stopped midstride and watched him make his way toward the front of the clinic, where the team of veterinarians examined the horses as quickly as possible. She’d heard them for the past thirty minutes, since she’d slipped in to check on Lightning. Over and over and over, the prognosis was the same: severe smoke inhalation. The horses would live…most of them.

But Lochlain’s finest would never race again.