Darci's Pride

But with another groan, the section of barn in front of him collapsed.

Tyler twisted into the side of a stall and out of the path of a burning beam.

“H-help!”

The cry barely registered over the hunger of the fire.

“S-some…one he-elp!”

Smoke stole visibility. Eyes burning, Tyler staggered into the stall and used his hands to find the side. There he could climb. On pure determination he made his way into the next stall and jumped to the hay below.

Hay. As a precaution, they stored it in another building, but there was enough in each barn to feed a fire into an allout inferno.

“Help!”

The voice was weaker now, but Tyler fought his way toward the far side of the corridor. “Who’s th-there?” he choked.

The sound that greeted him was not human, but equine. A big black shadow moved against the glow of the fire, gyrating frantically. “Easy.” Tyler coughed, reaching for the lead. “Easy now, boy.”

The horse reared away.

“Thank God,” rasped the voice he’d heard before, and through the suffocating darkness a hand closed weakly around Tyler’s ankle.

“Christ almighty,” he swore, dropping to his feet where he found the man. “What the hell—”

“B-broke away,” Reynard, one of Lochlain’s most recent hires, choked out. “Tried to get back to his stall.”

And knocked his rescuer down in the process. Reynard was lucky he hadn’t been trampled to death. “Come on,” Tyler said, easing the older man to his feet. “We gotta get you—”

“Preston!”With the new voice came the hard rush of water and Tyler knew the brigade had arrived. The flames devouring the beam that had blocked the corridor hissed against water as three uniformed firefighters surged toward them.

“Here!” Tyler shouted, handing off Reynard. Pivoting, he ran for the spooked Thoroughbred, finding a saddle blanket to cover the animal’s eyes.

“Got him,” called one of the men, reaching for the lead. Tyler released the horse, turned back to the far end of the barn.

“Preston! You gotta get out of here!” the firefighter called. “The whole place is about to come down!”

But Tyler was already lunging toward Lightning Chaser’s stall. He had to be sure. He had to check.

Staggering, he veered into the stall and, eyes burning, saw through the sickening red glow. The horse that had grazed so quietly just that afternoon, the champion Thoroughbred who’d run a breathtaking last leg of the Queensland Stakes. He fought against the back corner of the stall he equated with safety, literally trying to climb the wall.

The shadowy sight hit Tyler like a punch to the gut.

“Easy, mate,” he tried to drawl, speaking to the animal as a parent would speak to a child. But his voice was a choked rasp. Fumbling for a blanket, he grabbed the halter and lead and moved forward. “Howzabouta l-little midnight—” His throat burned. His lungs screamed.

His vision blurred.

He’d been in too long. He knew that. He’d done the research, consulted with the fire brigade. They’d run the drills. He knew how long he had, how long he could be inside before the smoke overcame him and he became useless.

But he pushed forward anyway. From his first days of training, Lightning Chaser had given Tyler his all. Just like his grandsire had, all those years ago. A Thoroughbred down to his hooves, the horse never said no. He never protested. He trained and he performed.

And now he was in trouble.

Tyler could no more abandon him than he could have left his father or brother.

Staggering, he reached for his horse even as one of the firefighters reached for him. Then something was thrust against his face and he was choking again, harder, not from the smoke but the rush of oxygen. He gulped greedily, taking what he needed to ease Lightning Chaser from his stall.

The animal’s guttural cry sickened him. He put his hands to the colt’s back and tried to reassure him, get him to quiet. Quickly he affixed the lead then ripped off his overshirt and pulled it over the animal’s eyes. Then, in tandem with the firefighter, they led Lightning from his stall and down the corridor.

Through the darkness Daniel appeared. And Andrew. His trainer took the horse. His cousin took him. Coughing, they burst from the building and into the night.

It was all Tyler could do not to go to his knees.

But this was his barn, his stable. These were his men. And they looked to him for leadership. Direction.

Assurance.

He could not go to his knees in front of them.

Hands then, lots of them. Reaching for Tyler. Pulling him farther from the inferno. Shouts.

An oxygen mixture pressed to his face.

He sucked it in as greedily as before, trying to orient himself. Around him, everything blurred, slowed. The strobe light still flashed in obscene synchronicity with the lights on the fire engines. The bullhorn still pulsed rhythmically. He could see his men, all of them doing what they’d been trained to do. And Christ, he could see the other barn then, Barn A, the original structure—the one used for boarding.

Up in flames.

All those horses…some of them weren’t young, weren’t in the same top-notch condition as the Thoroughbreds. Some of them were older, slower.

One was blind.

Anthem…

“Here,” someone said, and he blinked to see a young man with soot-smeared cheeks thrust a glass of water into his hands.A towel then, damp, cool, against his face. He blinked and tried to bring the kid into focus, could make out little more than a scrawny frame and an old, torn bush hat.

“Thanks,” he said, or tried to say, but wasn’t sure the words made it past the rawness of his throat.

“D-Daniel—” But before he could locate his trainer, Peggy was there, with her long gray hair loose around her face, wearing what Tyler would swear was only a nightgown. She lifted her hands as if to inspect him.

“Don’t you ever do that again!” she scolded, and then she started to cry. Peggy. Stalwart, unflappable Peggy, started to cry. “Going into that inferno like that!”

“Easy now,” he choked, but every time he opened his mouth, air rushed the back of his throat, and he coughed abrasively.

“Don’t talk,” she said as one of the paramedics—Pete Rutherford, he thought—kneeled in front of him and started to check him over.

“I have everything under control,” she announced, tears over, and magically, with the same efficiency she did everything, she produced the laminated checklist they’d designed for emergencies. “I’ve called your parents,” she said as old Windbag materialized at his feet, panting frantically. “And Russ.” She glanced toward the shadows milling nervously in the far pasture. “He’s already here.”

Russ Chaplain was their head veterinarian.

“Have we…” Tyler coughed as Peggy shot him a look of reprimand. “The horses,” he got out with a hand to the dog’s back. “Have we lost—”

“Too soon to tell.” That was Daniel. With the whites of his eyes glowing against a face covered in ash and maybe a smear of blood, he crouched in front of Tyler. Andrew and Shane flanked him. Daniel started to speak, but when he coughed instead, Shane took over.

“As best as we can tell, all barns are empty,” Tyler’s brother said, and relief rushed in like oxygen. “We’ve evacuated Barn C as a precaution.” Shane was not a horseman, never had been. He’d chosen the family’s other business, a vineyard elsewhere in the Valley. But in that moment, with the hat pulled low over his head and the ferocity in his eyes, he looked as though he lived and breathed the land every bit as much as Tyler did. “The horses are in the pasture. They’re secure. We’re trying to count them, but…”

The words trailed off, didn’t need to be said.

Not all animals were accounted for.

“Light…ning?” He could still see the animal frantically pawing the back of his stall.

God, even over the shouting and the sirens, the fire and the water, he could still hear him….

His brother and Daniel exchanged a tense look. “Russ is with him,” Shane said. “He took in a lot of smoke.”

Tyler’s eyes burned. Lightning Chaser was a fighter, Tyler knew that. If any horse could survive—

Survive. That was the best they could hope for. For Lightning Chaser to survive.

But already Tyler knew his champion Thoroughbred, the big strong bay colt who loved nothing more than to run, would never race again.

“The brigade is wetting down the surrounding area as a precaution,” Shane explained, but the words barely registered. Tyler stared dry-eyed at the gnarled flames devouring two of his barns, and felt the sickness churn in his gut. Just that afternoon—

He could still see young Heidi sitting in the shade of a now scorched gum tree, with an apple in her hand.

Acutely aware of his brother and cousin, he straightened his shoulders and stood, noticed the young groom standing with the other two dogs. The kid was covered in smoke, had rips in his baggy, long-sleeved plaid shirt and something that looked like blood on the side of his face. But his eyes…it was his eyes that got Tyler, the horrified, haunted glow of shock.

No one would walk away from this unscathed.

“Preston,” said a quiet, intense voice over the wail of the fire engines. Tyler turned, saw Detective Sergeant Dylan Hastings of the Pepper Flats station striding toward him, not in his normal attire of jeans and a button-down, but the protective gear of a volunteer firefighter.And in that instant the voice clicked and Tyler realized who had followed him to Lightning Chaser’s stall and pressed the breathing apparatus to his face. “Pete here tells me you’re going to be okay.”

Tyler stuck out his hand. “Thanks to…” he started, but another spasm stole his words. He cleared his throat, tried again. “Thanks to you, mate.”

Hastings’s eyes were hard, flat. “Just doing my job.”

That’s all he ever said. Tyler had been teaching young Heidi the ins and outs of riding for almost a year, but her father still treated Tyler with a formality typically reserved for strangers.

Heidi.

He glanced toward the remains of Barn A. A smaller building, the fire there had already been put out. “A-Anthem?”

Hastings shook his head. “Don’t know yet,” he said grimly, as Tyler again noticed the groom in the bush hat hovering nearby. “I’m needed back over there, but before morning we’ll need a full accounting of what happened here tonight.”

A rough sound broke from Tyler’s throat. He turned toward the inferno that had once housed his Thoroughbreds, his entire stable of two- and three-year-olds, surrounded now by the fire brigade. Hoses shot water against flames that didn’t seem to give a bloody damn.

“The note,” Tyler muttered, and Dylan’s eyes met his. The two had talked earlier in the day, when Tyler had called to report the threat against Lightning Chaser. “GodAlmighty.”

Dawn brought an otherworldly glow to the eastern horizon.

“We’re lucky,” David Preston insisted. He had been the one who had first walked the rolling hills of the northern Hunter Valley that had become Lochlain, who’d struck out from America almost forty years before, who’d used his inheritance to found the dynasty denied to him in America.

He and Tyler’s mother had arrived from Sydney just as the main fire had been brought under control, less than two hours after Peggy had called them. The horror of what he’d found burned in his hooded, dark green eyes.

“That’s what we have to focus on,” he insisted, standing with his two sons outside the corral where the horses milled. They were quieter now that the strobe light had been turned off and the bullhorn had fallen silent.

Quieter after the fire went dark, and the remains of the stables had fallen.

“We can rebuild,” David said in the same strong, stoic voice Tyler remembered from his childhood, when Tyler had found his father kneeling in the soft hazy light of sunrise, next to a mare and a foal who’d both been lost in childbirth.

It was the same voice David had used six years before, when Tyler had gotten caught with his pants down, literally, and almost lost Lochlain.

Tyler looked at him now, at his father, strong and robust even in his late fifties, at the lines carved into his weathered, rancher’s face, the tight lines of his mouth and the devastation he couldn’t quite hide, and quietly vowed to make sure David Preston never had to see Lochlain in ruin again.

“You’re alive,” father said to son, and Tyler felt his chest tighten. He should say something. He knew that. But that would mean letting go of the tight rope he’d been holding since staggering from the barn with Lightning Chaser. And once he let go…

“No one was seriously hurt,” David went on. Cuts and bruises, a groom with a broken wrist, another—the new handyman Reynard, who’d fought to control the panicked horse after a beam had fallen—diagnosed with fractured ribs. “That’s what we have to focus on.”

But the same could not be said of the horses. Three had yet to be found. Two had been put down shortly before sunrise, one due to a shattered right front femur, the second to intense smoke inhalation. The others…

“Lightning will recover,” David Preston said, tapping into his son’s thoughts just as he always did.

“You saved his life,” Shane added, but the trace of hero worship in his younger brother’s voice, something Tyler had not heard since they were kids, scraped.

He glanced from the smoldering remains, where the fire brigade still battled hot spots, toward the horses on the other side of the soot-smeared white fence: the big bays and chestnuts; the shiny black two-year-old who’d run his first race only the week before; the Appaloosa who started each race like a streak; and the little filly who’d never even gotten a chance to show her stuff. Her maiden race was still two weeks away.

“They’re goddamn bloody innocent,” he finally said, and even now, hours after he’d emerged for the last time from the burning barn and sucked in fresh oxygen, each word seared against his throat. “They didn’t deserve this.”

But his father misunderstood. “Son,” David said, and with the quiet word, put a hand to Tyler’s shoulder. “Don’t.”

Tyler’s throat tightened. He turned to meet his father’s gaze, felt something hot and salty sting his.

“This is not your fault,” David insisted. “You did everything right here. You don’t store hay in the horse barns. Smoking isn’t allowed. The wiring is new…hell, Peggy says it passed inspection just two months ago. There’s no bloody way—”

Tyler’s eyes must have flashed. He felt the streak of fury, saw the confused look that passed between his father and his brother.

“Someone did this,” Tyler said, pulling the crumpled note from his pocket and pressing it into his father’s hands. “Someone wanted to hurt him.” Hurt Lightning Chaser. To punish him. Punish them all. “Because of the Queensland,” he gritted out. Because More Than All That had been disqualified, and Lightning had taken home the purse.

Shane moved beside his father, and together they stared down at the thick words scrawled against the picture of Lightning Chaser in full, magnificent stride.

It was a long moment before they looked up. “You think it was arson,” David said.

The words were hard, incredulous, and Tyler felt his jaw tighten in response. He glanced back toward the horses, automatically searching for young Heidi’s horse, Anthem. He’d yet to account for the filly. “I know it was.”

“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.

Her throat worked. She fought against it, fought against the hot sting of moisture in her eyes. But then she turned and saw Lightning Chaser watching her through those gentle, melted-chocolate eyes, and she couldn’t fight it anymore. The tears came.