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
