“I’m going to head out and take care of my horses and start unloading a lifetime of stuff from the back of my truck,” Tory said. “I expect that will take me some time.” Tory’s gaze went to Wyatt first, then to Chey, her Queen Victoria face on full display. “We’re adults now,” she said flatly. “Start acting like it.”
She strode out of the barn as if it belonged to her, which was pretty much how she’d appeared in any ring she’d stepped into from childhood on up. All tawny blond hair, bright blue eyes, and a fiercely determined, wildly competitive spirit hidden behind the biggest heart and the sunniest smile Wyatt had ever seen.
He shifted his gaze back to Chey, who looked anything but sunny. He fought the urge to smile. Some things hadn’t changed there, either.
“You can’t have him,” Chey said quietly. She might as well have yelled it, because the words, spoken in that deadly calm of hers, made him flinch just the same. “You had your chance. He’s mine now.”
“I had no chance, Chey,” he told her, quite truthfully. With the horse, or with you. “I am happy to take him, and will guarantee you he’ll live out his years in comfort—”
“He already is,” Chey said, and he looked directly at her then, noting that for all her quiet ferocity, she wasn’t looking at him. That much was very unlike the Cheyenne McCafferty he’d known.
“As I saw on the way in,” Wyatt went on, “you have a wonderful spread here. Which is an understatement. He deserves nothing less and I’m grateful to you for going to get him and bringing him here. I’ve got no reason to move him again, except that I’m willing if you want me to. I’ll be happy to take care of his board and—”
“Don’t insult me.”
Wyatt lifted his hands, then let them fall to his sides. He knew he’d earned her scorn, and far worse. “Not trying to,” he said, a bit of edge in his own voice now. “I’ll own up to not handling my departure, or the time since, in a good way.”
Her gaze swung directly to his then, eyes widened, brows lifted, her expression all but screaming, “You think?” That made him want to smile, too. Tory had been right, as she almost always was. Not all of the past he’d left behind was bad. The woman standing in front of him had been the very best of it.
“All of that is on me,” he told her honestly, openly. “The condition of that horse, however, is not. I take full responsibility for the sins of my past, Cheyenne. I do not, however, take any responsibility for the sins of my father.”
She flinched at that and looked down at her booted feet.
He wanted to take a step closer, felt the pull of her every bit as strongly now as he had as an overly quiet, withdrawn nine-year-old, in the thrall of his first-ever crush. His last, too. He stayed where he was. “I won’t go into the gory details, but you knew Zachariah,” he said evenly and quietly. “Knew what he was capable of.”
Chey looked directly at him again, her expression now filled with the one thing he never wanted from her. Pity. “You don’t have to talk about him, Wyatt. I—”
“Don’t insult me,” he tossed back at her, instantly sorry when she visibly flinched again. “That was out of line,” he said immediately. “I’m sorry.”
“No,” she said simply, then let out a weary sigh. “It wasn’t. And you shouldn’t be. Not for that. And not for him.”
“He told me he put Buttercup down,” Wyatt explained, then laid it all out there. He told himself it was because of the pity she’d shown, but he suspected the reason was far more convoluted than that. “Told me he shot him between the eyes, then sold his carcass to the meat market. Revenge for me telling him I was going to saddle up and head out.”
“Wyatt—” she said in a horrified whisper.
“I had no reason not to believe him. He’d done far worse. I should have known he’d never kill something that could bring in more money alive than dead. I’d taken damn good care of that horse.”
“I know you did,” Chey said, abashed. “I didn’t think—”
“Buttercup and our other mounts, our bulls, were the only reason I stayed with that sick son-of-a-bitch as long as I did.” He looked directly at her, hating the horror and grief he’d put in those eyes he’d missed seeing so much, hating the memories he was inflicting on both of them. But that didn’t alter the truth of it. “I didn’t know Buttercup was alive, much less in the condition he was in, until Tory tracked me down halfway around the world. I thought I was coming here with her to rescue him.”
“Halfway around the world?” she asked, looking sincerely confused. “Where were you?”
“Nepal,” he replied, the corners of his mouth kicking up at her clearly shocked expression. Even as another part of him took that look as a bit of a punch to the gut. So, she truly had left him in her past. Not that his ego was such that he assumed she’d kept track of him. It was just that he’d tried—and failed—to track her down. More than once. He saw now why that had been a doomed proposition. He knew she wasn’t on social media; he’d looked. Seeing her life out here, way up in the hills, he realized she’d cut herself off from pretty much everything else, too. Couldn’t say he faulted her for it.
He’d only thought it because, in his case, it was very easy for anyone to know exactly where he was, to see what he was doing. A few million people he’d never even met did just that. Every day. “Country boy got a passport,” he said, a sardonic note in his voice, and left it at that. If she’d wanted to know where he’d ended up, she would have found out already.
Clearly Tory had always had a handle on Chey’s whereabouts but had chosen to protect Chey when Wyatt had asked for her help locating their mutual friend years back. Maybe Chey had asked after him, too, and Tory had protected him as well. Not that that would have done much good, in his case. If Chey had done even a cursory search online for him anytime in the past half dozen years, she couldn’t have missed him if she’d tried.
“So it would seem,” Chey said, her expression unreadable now. “I’m sorry,” she said, after the silence had stretched out a bit. “About Buttercup, about . . . all of that. For what it’s worth, I didn’t think you’d done anything to hurt him. I assumed it was Zachariah from the moment Tory told me where he was. Or that your father was, at least, at the root of it. If I was mad at all, it was that you’d left Buttercup behind, knowing what Zachariah was capable of. I should have known better than that.” Her voice softened just a hint, when she added, “It’s been a long time, Wyatt, and we don’t know each other now.”
She let out a short but humorless laugh. “Clearly, because . . . Nepal? Really?” She shook her head, but her expression and words couldn’t have been more serious when she went on. “But I do know, as well as I know myself, that you’d never be like him. You’d never hurt anyone, man or beast.” She held his gaze quite steadily now, as direct as she’d been since he’d stepped into her stables. “Not physically, at any rate.”
He took that well-aimed sucker punch to the gut, and the heart, and felt it reverberate deep inside him, leaving him with a sick feeling of regret. “I should have responded, Chey,” he said. “To your notes, your calls. Right after I left, I just . . . couldn’t. Not then.” He dug his hands into his pockets, curled his fingers into fists, fists he wanted to aim at himself for the pain that had flashed through those formidably serious, old-soul brown eyes of hers. “By the time I finally pulled my head out of my heartbroken ass, I—”