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. “There’ll come a time for resting, Tyler, but it’s not now.” Lifting her chin, she again extended the glass. “Now here, drink.”
His eyes sparked, reminding her for a brief heartbeat of the brash young man she’d first seen on television one Sunday afternoon, telling anyone who cared to listen the proper way to saddle a horse.
“I know what you think of me,” she said, swiping a tangled strand of sooty hair from her face. “But I’m not that spoiled girl you remember from six years ago.”
He took the lemonade and brought it to his mouth, drank it in one long sip. But his eyes never left hers. “You have no idea what I remember.”
From a starkly cloudless sky, the sun seared even hotter. “Then tell me.”
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