“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
Andrew’s gaze turned speculative. “Darci thinks…”
His cousin kept talking, but his words barely registered. Darci says. Darci thinks. Darci believes. It had been that way all evening. No matter where the conversation turned, it always twisted back to Darci Parnell.
And even a deaf man could have heard the admiration in Andrew’s voice.
“I’m so damned lucky to have her,” he said, and Tyler refused to let his fingers tighten against the glass. “She’s really giving me her all.”
Tyler bit back the hard sound that wanted to break from his throat. “She’s a go-getter,” he drawled. “Always known how to get exactly what she wants.”
Andrew stiffened, swore softly. “Christ, will you listen to me? I’m sorry, man. I wasn’t thinking. She told me about you two.” He stood, spread out his hands. “If having her around is a problem—”
“No problem at all,” Tyler assured. “You won’t find anyone who can do for you what she can.”
Somehow he didn’t choke on the words, and the image they immediately evoked, of Darci smiling as she pushed up on her toes and curved her arms around Tyler’s neck…
Andrew didn’t look convinced. “I’m not here to—”
Tyler lifted his hand. “It’s all good, mate. Darci is good, the fund-raiser is good…your campaign is good.”
The blue in Andrew’s eyes darkened, but he said nothing. They looked like brothers, but they weren’t. They were cousins. An ocean had separated them most of their lives. They knew how to talk horses and campaigns, but that’s where it stopped.
Hell, even Shane didn’t bring up Darci Parnell.
But long after Tyler had gone upstairs, long after the big stone house had gone quiet, the scent of rose and powder overrode that of leather and sandalwood.
He should have slept. Sunrise would come whether he wanted it to or not, and with it a full day of training and finalizing security for LC. But sleep eluded him. He tried reading. He tried some of Peggy’s new age music. He tried another drink.
But the restlessness kept right on surging.
Shortly after one o’clock he turned out the lamp and resigned himself to counting wallabies.
He’d reached fifteen before the bullhorn broke the silence. He was on his feet before the red glow coming from his window registered. For one sickening second everything slowed, blurred—the shouting, the glow that turned into flames, the acrid intrusion of smoke.
The frantic scream of horses.
But just as quickly adrenaline punched through the haze and he was yanking on his jeans and his boots, grabbing a shirt as he lunged for the door.
Chapter Three
This was when he woke.
This was when he always, always pulled himself awake.
When he ran toward the fire. When the orgy of flames streaked against the night sky and the smoke poured from the windows, when the alarm kept droning against the normally quiet night, when the horses cried. That’s when he made the nightmare end, when any horseman would sit up drenched in sweat, heart slamming and breathing hard, shoving aside the residue of the nightmare. Before. Before they ran into the barn. Before they smelled the stench of burning—
Tyler didn’t wake up. Because he wasn’t asleep. And the strobe light pulsing against the night sky from the barn complex was not a drill.
“Jesus, God,” Andrew shouted from two steps behind, but Tyler kept right on running. They’d prepared for this, trained for this.
But it was instinct that took over, instinct that drove him straight for the flames shooting from Barn B—and the fifty-eight two- and three-year-olds trapped inside.
His staff was already there, grooms and trainers and exercise riders fighting the fire and wrestling the terrified horses out one at a time. If one horse spooked—
“The far pasture!” Tyler barked as he passed head groom Charlie Moore. “Make sure someone stays with them!”
Grim-eyed, Charlie nodded, and ran.
Both men knew what would happen if the horses were not contained. They would try to return to the barn, their home. Where they felt safe.
It had happened before.
“Where’s Daniel?” he shouted above the pulse of the bullhorn.
“Inside!” Mac, another groom, answered. “He called 000, then went in!”
Tyler didn’t hesitate. The bush fire brigade was on the way, but there was no time to wait. Sucking in a sharp breath, he grabbed a flame-retardant blanket and ran into the darkness, veering left while Andrew went right. Flames greedily consumed the center section, where they kept the tack.
Trying not to inhale, he ran down the corridor until he found an occupied