Jenna Mills - Darci's Pride

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 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.