“Stop,” she said, quietly but no less forcefully than anything she’d said before. Then she sighed, and he saw the stiffness leave her stance. “I shouldn’t have said that.” A half smile curved her lips. “Some things haven’t changed.” Her expression sobered. “I share plenty of the blame. I hated that I hurt you. One of the single biggest regrets of my life. I had no idea how you felt, and I handled it—not well.”
“It’s not like you asked,” he said, reeling a little at her confession. “You were honest, which is exactly what you should have been. You weren’t unkind. But that didn’t make it hurt any less. Probably would have been better if you’d told me off,” he said, a hint of a smile surfacing. “Made me stomp off all mad at the entire female race or something.”
“I was sixteen and so utterly hormone addled, I couldn’t get out of my own way,” she replied. “It wasn’t that I didn’t, or couldn’t love you—I did, in all the ways that mattered to me—but I hadn’t even considered that it could be different between us. You were my rock, my friend, my confidant, my partner-in-crime. You and Cody protected me and gave me a swift kick in the butt when I needed it.” Her lips twitched. “We won’t mention how often that was.” Her gaze changed then, and even though he knew the affection that filled them was one of remembrance, not something she felt now, today, it still rocked him.
God, how he’d missed her.
“I tried to talk to you, call you. I even wrote letters.” She nodded toward the stable doors. “Ask Tory how good I am at that. I suck. But I wrote them anyway. Because I hated how we ended. I wanted us to go back to how we were—”
“I couldn’t,” he said, as baldly and as honestly as he’d ever said anything in his life. He lifted his shoulders, searched for better words to explain. There were none.
“I know,” she said, the words hardly more than a whisper. “I didn’t get it then. I do now. I’m sorry, Wyatt. Truly. You know what you meant to me. Losing you was one of the hardest things I’d dealt with in my life up until then. Made it doubly hard when—” She broke off, shook her head, frowned, then shook her head again. “No, that’s not fair. That had absolutely nothing to do with you.”
“I didn’t know,” Wyatt said. “About Cody.” He watched her, and she dipped her chin, kept her gaze downward. He saw her frowning again, perhaps as a way to keep tears from gathering—he didn’t know. Though he couldn’t imagine Cheyenne McCafferty crying. She was too tough for that.
Losing her brother, the person she loved above all else, had to have changed her, though. Worn her defenses down, at least a little. How could it not?
“I would have come back,” he said quietly. “I was long since out of the country by then. I didn’t find out about it until way after it had happened. Years later. I’d cut myself off from my life here pretty thoroughly. I tried to find you when I heard, but you’d left the circuit by then.” His smile was rueful. “That’s when I tracked down Tory and reconnected with her. She said she had no idea where you’d gotten off to.”
Chey looked surprised at that.
“She was protecting you,” he said. “You probably didn’t want anything to do with your past any more than I did when I left.”
Chey nodded. “True enough. I appreciate that you tried to find me. Don’t beat yourself up over that. It’s okay. I didn’t expect you to show at that point.”
“It’s not okay,” he said. “Cody was my closest friend, next to you. I would have been there. For you, for him.” He shook his head. “When I left, it wasn’t just your attempts to reach me that I chose not to respond to, Chey. When I say I cut all ties, that’s not an overstatement. When I finally left—escaped, because that was how it felt—I didn’t look back. At anything, or anyone. I couldn’t if I was to have any chance of making it. Maybe you, of all people, can understand why. I felt like I was running for my life. The only way I could break free was to look ahead. Always. Only.”
She met his gaze again, and what he saw now was understanding, as well as sincere curiosity. “Are you saying that when Zachariah was kicked off the circuit—you, well, you were too old to be considered a runaway, I guess—but you split from him then?”
Wyatt nodded. “I’d already told him I was leaving before they booted him. Buttercup was dead, or so I thought. We were down to our last three mounts and we only had two bulls at that time. He got thrown in jail in the next town we landed in.”
Wyatt looked away, hating that, even after all these years, he couldn’t remember that time in his past as dispassionately as he’d have liked. Likely because of the woman standing in front of him. She knew all about his past. She and Tory were the only ones left who knew. He never spoke of it. Not directly. Not ever. Millions of followers watched his every adventure. Not one of them knew about Zachariah Reed. Nor would they. “For once he didn’t slither back out after a forty-eight-hour hold,” Wyatt told her. “The judge actually locked him up for a six-month stint. So I did the only thing I could think of. I sold the bulls and the horses—to good people—and I took that money and got as far away from that son-of-a-bitch as I could.”
Chey nodded, as if she understood perfectly. And of course she did. She knew what he’d dealt with, firsthand.
“Overseas, far, I’m guessing,” she said.
“It was the only way I felt safe.” He smiled then, though it was empty of humor. “Early on, when I was figuring out how I was going to survive, where, doing what, I still had this overwhelming, completely irrational fear that my father would just show up, would find me, like he was some kind of omnipotent overlord instead of a sorry, violent drunk. It had always felt that way to me. He was always one step ahead of me, always seeming to know what I was going to do before I did it. I was certain he’d track me down somehow, beat me, or worse, for selling our livestock, for leaving him to rot in that county lockup instead of bailing him out.”
“You were eighteen,” Chey said softly.
“I might have been a man in calendar years,” Wyatt said, nodding, then pointed to his head. “In here, however? I was a perennially scared little kid. I know it sounds pathetic—”
“It sounds awful, Wyatt. Because it was. The only thing that was pathetic in that whole scenario was your old man. I’m glad you got away. Far, far away. And I’m glad you told me. In your place, I would have done the same thing. And I guess, though for a different reason, I did. When Cody died, I tried to keep going, sort of in tribute to him. He’d have hated it if I’d quit because of him. I just . . . there wasn’t any fun in it for me. You were gone, he was gone, Tory went off right after that to ride the circuit in Canada, then on from there to train horses in South America. Everyone I cared about was gone.”
“What about your aunt and uncle?” he asked.
She smiled then, and he was relieved he hadn’t inadvertently triggered another bad memory. “My aunt and uncle were still here back then. They were wonderful people from beginning to end. I loved them more than anything for taking on Cody and me when our folks died, and that bond only grew stronger over the years.” Her smile grew. “We’d never have known rodeo life if not for them. Tory is right—that life made me who I am, and I’m proud of it. Cody was, too. But after he was gone, it wasn’t long before I knew I was done with that life. I needed to strike out, find my own way, find a new path.” Her smile edged back to dry. “Though I managed to stay on the continent while doing it.”