Darci's Pride. Jenna Mills
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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.