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.
“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