Darci's Pride

“Sweet boy,” she murmured, stepping into him and wrapping her arms around his neck, nuzzling her face against his mane. “You didn’t deserve this.”

None of them had.

For a long while, she just stood there, holding and stroking Tyler’s horse, whispering, singing the lullaby her mother had once sung to her. The words came easily, but with the years the sound of Anne’s voice had faded from the last corners of memory.

“You’re going to be okay, big guy,” she promised Lightning Chaser. Then, with one last kiss to the side of his face, she turned and went in search of Andrew.

“You need to let someone look at that, Ty.”

He looked away from the X-ray of Anthem’s lungs toward Russ, who was studying him as intently as he’d been watching each horse he examined.

She was gone, he knew. He’d heard her leave. Only a few minutes before he’d heard her singing again.

Before that, he’d heard her crying.

He’d almost turned. Like a needy little boy he’d almost turned and gone to her, yanked her into his arms and buried his face in her hair, breathed her in. Held on.

“It’s fine,” he barked now, frowning when he realized he’d been unconsciously cradling his left arm. “Just a little sore.”

Russ crossed the sterile room and put his hands to Tyler’s forearm. “Here, let me—”

Tyler swore the second Russ shifted his arm.

Grim-eyed, Russ released the arm and stepped back. “I’m betting it’s broken,” he said, but Tyler didn’t think so. If his arm were broken, he would know it, feel—

Feel it. Feel something.

“You can’t wrestle fifteen-hundred-kilogram animals and expect not to get hurt,” Russ lectured. Despite the ten years he had on Tyler, they’d practically grown up together. It was only recently that Russ’s aging father had turned his equine practice over to his son. “Get it checked for me, okay?” he said as the phone on the wall started to ring. He grabbed it, muttered a few words before handing it to Tyler. “It’s Peggy.”

Tyler took the receiver, but it was not his office manager’s voice that greeted him. It was a Yank.

“I just heard,” his cousin Robbie said. “Andrew filled me in. How’s Lightning Chaser?”

Tyler glanced toward one of the stalls in the back room, where the three-year-old now stood alone. “Stable.”

“Well, thank God for that,” Robbie said. The youngest of Tyler’s three male cousins, Robbie had always been the easiest to talk to. Whereas the older Kentucky Prestons had a taste for the business side of racing, for Robbie, it had always been about the horses. “Look, if there’s anything I can do, I’m there. Just let me know.”

Turning toward the window, Tyler looked beyond the pile of rubble that had, twenty-four hours before, been a state-of-the-art barn, and assessed the horses. Their ranks were thinning. Close to thirty had already gone home with neighbors. They would live there until Lochlain could rebuild.

“I appreciate that,” Tyler said. He did. “But I don’t really know—”

“Anything,” Robbie said. “I’ve got room here at Quest. I know it’s a long trip, but I can take in as many horses as you need. They can stay here, I can train them until you’re back up and running…”

Robbie kept talking, but the words ran together. Tyler looked from the horses to the paddock, where Andrew and Daniel led two colts and a filly toward a waiting trailer. All his life there’d been the Kentucky Prestons, and the Australian Prestons. Tyler’s father had never spoken an ill word of his brother, Thomas, but the undercurrent had been there. The competitiveness. That’s why David Preston had left America. That’s why David had founded Lochlain. He’d needed an entire ocean to get out from his brother’s shadow and create his own legacy.

The families had gotten together occasionally, for weddings, funerals, but there’d always been a line. A divide. His blue-blooded Kentucky cousins had grown up with everything. Their position in the racing community had been established before they’d even been born. In Australia, Tyler’s father had started with little more than dirt and dreams.

But here, now, as he watched Andrew, hot and sweaty and laboring beneath the blistering sun, with his shirtsleeves rolled up and soot still covering his face, with Robbie on the phone from half a world away, offering to help in any way possible, the invisible bonds of family wrapped around Tyler, and he realized just how strong the Preston blood ran.

Over the past year they’d all been targeted. Scandal had rocked them, every single one of them. His American cousins had been stripped of both the Kentucky Derby and Preakness titles and their racing privileges. They’d come bloody close to losing everything. But they’d endured. They’d banded together and cleared the family name. They’d emerged stronger, more unified than ever.

And now they were here.

Tyler wound down the call with Robbie and started outside, stopped when he saw Darci approach Andrew. Still dressed like a scraggly ranch hand, but with her blond hair tangled around her face and the puppy Tulloch at her heel, she hurried up to Andrew with a glass in her hand… and offered it to him.

It was hardly an intimate act. Darci was Andrew’s employee. Andrew was hot, tired. She was just bringing him something to drink.

But something dark and hard twisted through Tyler. Frowning, he ignored the burn and turned back to Anthem’s X-ray.

She found him at the far paddock. He stood with his back to her, staring at some point on the horizon. She’d seen him off and on for the past few hours talking with the fire brigade and Detective Sergeant Hastings, walking the smoldering remains of his barns with his father and shaking hands with several neighbours, who’d come to offer shelter to Lochlain’s horses.

Now, for the first time all afternoon, he stood alone. There was an unnatural stillness to him, as if some kind of invisible barrier separated him from the rest of the world. Darci knew better than to go to him, knew she should just go home. He’d walked away from her earlier. There was no place for her in this day.

But with the lemon cordial she’d gotten from Tyler’s mother in hand, she quietly covered the hard, dusty ground separating her from Tyler.

She knew he sensed her presence. She could tell by the way his body changed. It was subtle, but he stiffened, went a little more rigid.

“Tyler,” she said as the hot wind blew against her face. Her body ached from head to toe. She’d been up all night. She should be tired. But the rush of adrenaline refused to let go.

He didn’t turn, didn’t say a word. Just kept standing there looking out on the parched rolling hills of Lochlain. They’d been spared. If the wind had picked up during the night, the fire could have spread from the barn complex to the bush.

Somehow, she didn’t think that was the right thing to say. “Here,” she said, extending the glass even though he’d yet to look at her. “I thought you might be thirsty.”

He did turn then. He turned with a near violence that stunned her, and stared down at her from beneath the brim of his bush hat as if she’d just shoved a knife into his gut.

His eyes…they’d been flat before.

Now they gleamed. It wasn’t the roguish sexual gleam from all those years before, but a hard, predatory gleam that sent her heart into a cruel rhythm.

She wanted to step closer. Instinct warned her to step back. Instead, with the sun baking against her skin, she forced her mouth to curve into the same kind of tight, aching smile she’d given her father in those dark months after her mother had died.

“Lemon cordial,” she said, lifting her hand. “You’ve got to be parched.”

He looked from the sweaty glass to her face, and something inside her twisted. And in that moment, all those years, all the lies and truths, the consequences, fell away, and there was just her and Tyler.

“I know you’re exhausted,” she said quietly. She’d tried to forget about him. She’d wanted to forget about him. But sometimes, alone at night in her father’s stuffy London town house, memories would stir. Sometimes it was the accent that would jar her, sometimes the name Preston. Several months before, it had been the man himself. She’d been about to switch the channel when coverage of the Queensland Stakes had come on, and she’d seen him. He’d been part of a profile on his brilliant three-year-old, Lightning Chaser, and the reemergence of Lochlain Racing.

She’d sat there, frozen. Aching.

When she’d run into his cousin Andrew a few months later, it had seemed that fate had gift wrapped the chance she’d never thought to receive: the ability to make things right for Tyler.

“Maybe you should head on inside,” she said.

He looked beyond her toward the barn, where a member of the fire brigade led a muscular yellow Lab through the remains. The dog’s name was Millie, and she had a talent for sniffing out accelerants.

“Your arm,” she said, and without thinking she reached for him. “Have you had it looked at?” Her hand brushed his left wrist. “I noticed you’re favoring it—”

He didn’t jerk away as she’d expected, instead just stood a breath away and bloody near pierced her with the gleam in his eyes. “You brought me a lemon cordial.”

The sting was quick and brutal, and with it her throat tightened. But then his voice registered—not harsh or mocking as it had been the day before, but raw and hoarse and…gentle, almost.

“Do you have any idea—” He moved so fast she had no time to prepare. No time to step back. He crushed the distance between them and brought a hand to her face, stroked the hair back from her cheek. “What were you thinking? What in God’s name were you thinking coming out here in the middle of the night?”

That was easy. She didn’t stop to edit or plan, didn’t stop to consider implications. The truth, something she’d kept too much of from him six years before, simply came out.

“I heard the bullhorn,” she said, rocked by the feel of his roughened fingers against her skin. “And I saw the strobe.” And she’d wanted to throw up. “I knew it was Lochlain and I couldn’t…” The words, the awful possibilities, jammed in her throat. “I had to be here,” she said. “I had to come.”

“You could have been hurt,” he said, sliding his hand down to her arm, where cuts and bruises crisscrossed her flesh. “You could have—”

“So could you have,” she shot back. “The way you kept running back into that barn—” The memory chilled her. That last time, when he’d eventually come out with Lightning Chaser, he’d been in too long. She’d grabbed the firefighters as soon as they’d arrived, had begged them to go in after him….

“I had to,” he said. “They trusted me.”

And to him, she knew that said it all.

“I could hear them…” His words trickled off into the buzz of activity coming from the barn, but above the wind and the voices she could hear them, too. Hear the horses. Their panicked cries would haunt her for a long time.

“You got them out,” she said, and now she was touching him, a hand on each of his upper arms, pushing up on her toes as if not a day, a lie, stood between them. “You did everything humanly possible.”

The lines of his face tightened. “So did you.”

The words were so quiet she wasn’t sure whether she’d heard them or imagined them.

“You should go now,” he said, and the disappointment cut to the quick.

He stepped back but did not release her, kept his hands on her body as he openly inspected her, his gaze sliding from her face to the damp, smoke-stained shirt and jeans clinging to her body. “Take a shower,” he said. “Get some rest.”

She felt her back go a little straighter. “There’ll come a time for resting, Tyler, but it’s not now.” Lifting her chin, she again extended the glass. “Now here, drink.”

His eyes sparked, reminding her for a brief heartbeat of the brash young man she’d first seen on television one Sunday afternoon, telling anyone who cared to listen the proper way to saddle a horse.

“I know what you think of me,” she said, swiping a tangled strand of sooty hair from her face. “But I’m not that spoiled girl you remember from six years ago.”

He took the lemonade and brought it to his mouth, drank it in one long sip. But his eyes never left hers. “You have no idea what I remember.”

From a starkly cloudless sky, the sun seared even hotter. “Then tell me.”

Chapter Five

The words, soft, challenging, slipped through Tyler, burning where seconds before, the lemon cordial had cooled. He looked at her standing next to the dusty white fence with her chin lifted and the hair falling in her face, her eyes filled with a glow he’d tried to forget.

She’d been at Lochlain since the fire. She’d led horses to the far pasture. She’d tended to him under the cover of darkness. She’d given him a drink, damn it. She’d soothed shaken members of his staff.

She’d sung to Lightning Chaser, and she’d cried.

Over sixteen hours after arriving, she still wore the same stained, torn clothes. Only her hair was different, no longer stuffed inside a cap, but hanging loose and tangled around her face. In place of makeup she wore soot and fatigue and grief, but somehow, goddammit, she still looked beautiful.

And he wanted to touch. So brutally bad he refused to let himself move. Because more than touch, he wanted to taste. He wanted to crush her in his arms and bury his face in her hair, to slide his mouth to hers and forget—

For-bloody-get.

It was the word that got him, the word that stopped him. He stepped back and looked toward the hulking remains of Barn B, where his father and Detective Hastings strode toward him, with Beverly Morgan following closely behind. Their expressions were tight, unreadable, and before they reached him, he knew. He knew what the news would be. What the arson dog had detected.

“Thanks for the drink,” he said with the politeness typically reserved for strangers. The spark in Darci’s eyes went flat, but already he was handing her the glass and turning toward the approaching trio.

His barn complex lay in ruins. He’d lost two horses, might lose several more. Lightning Chaser would never race again.

Now was not the time to wonder if Darci Parnell could possibly taste as sweet as she looked.

“Have that arm looked at,” she said quietly, and if there was a note of hurt in her voice, he reminded himself just how dangerous illusions could be.

With narrowed eyes he watched her walk into the glare of the lowering sun as his father drew near, watched her hair sway against her back as she once again headed forAndrew.

“Millie found an accelerant,” Hastings said. “Near what your father says used to be the tack room.”

Swearing softly, Tyler looked toward the blue-and-white checked crime-scene tape stretched around the barn. In the nearby shade, two of the border collies drank greedily from a bowl of water Darci had brought over.

“There are faint trails leading to both the other barns,” Hastings added.

“We’re lucky we didn’t lose all three,” Tyler’s father said. “It could have been a hell of a lot worse.”

The confirmation of his suspicions sickened him. Someone had torched his barns. Someone had started a fire while the animals were inside, sleeping. If things had only been a little different—

“Someone was supposed to be watching.” They had a rotation. Someone was awake at all times, walking the grounds, monitoring the surveillance feed….

Hastings glanced at his notepad. “Fella named Reynard had first shift, but turned it over to a kid named Craig around midnight.”

Tyler nodded. Reynard was new to Lochlain; Craig Stevens had grown up there. His father was one of the assistant trainers. Craig was an exercise rider. He wanted to be a jockey.

“He’s a good kid,” Tyler said.

“Says he heard a noise over by the office and went to check it out. Didn’t see anything, so he went to get a drink. He was on his way back when he smelled smoke.”

“He sounded the alarm, did everything right,” David added. “But he’s torn up something awful. His dad is with him now.”

Tyler looked at the three of them, Hastings all business, his father grim-eyed, the insurance investigator ominously quiet. She didn’t need to say anything. What she was thinking—what anyone would think—was clear.

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