Impulsion (Station 32 #1)(36)

It seemed the time he was away had quelled the distance between the pair of them as well. He fell back into a routine with his mother, with his family. Breaking the horses that were too harsh for his mother’s students, daring to climb on a bronc every chance he got. That rush, alongside the calls he went on with the fire department, got him from one day to the next, gave him a surge of life, enough that he didn’t have to force his carefree smile.

It had been just at four years since that last night at the creek, and sometimes he could close his eyes at night and not see her face.

He’d been with other girls since Harley. Never in another relationship, though, and rarely for more than a night—and never sober. Every time he tried, his chest would clench, his head would spin. Most cases, he kept to his dangerous hobbies and embraced his heart-racing career. When he needed a girl or wanted one, he found one.

He’d learn to put on a smile, joke, relax around everyone. Only those that knew him best—Easton, Memphis, and his family—could still see the scars in his haunted blue eyes, but they never dared to mention the reason they were there.

***

Harley’s mother sat right next to her on the plane ride home to New York, but she never said, “I told you so,” or anything like it. Instead, she plotted aloud Harley’s schedule, the goals before her, acting as if Wyatt Doran never existed.

Life moved by in a haze after that point. Harley was only home for a day before she flew out again, overseas that time. Her mother waited two weeks before she followed her. She’d claimed she was staying behind to finish up the charity project she had started with the Grant family, but Harley assumed she was giving her space to grieve, the only mercy her mother had ever given her.

Month by month, class by class, one event after another, a life built around Harley. It took her six months before she dared to ride again, and Danny Boy crashed through four trainers before she had no choice but to send him to a prestigious barn in Wellington, Florida, to be trained. She flew down there when she could, moved through the lessons and the trainers, fighting emotions until the point where she could not feel them. She became a better rider, simply because she could not handle it when someone told her to use more leg or soft hands. That was the only good thing that came from her broken heart—mastering the sport she loved.

Collin had become her best friend, an ally. They were always at the same functions together. A wayward press release had stated that Collin Grant had attended an event with longtime companion Harley Tatum. Their mothers were ecstatic, thought they had given that title to whomever that night. Neither one of them ever denied it publicly or to their family, but they joked about it privately.

Basically, that assumption made their lives easier. Harley’s mother treated her like a human being around Collin, and Collin’s mother gave him space. He was three years older than Harley, and in his mother’s eyes he should be plotting his five, ten, fifteen-year plan, and in that plan he needed a woman with a distinguished background at his side.

One summer night, almost two years after she had been ripped from Wyatt, she and Collin had a bit too much to drink, had fallen a little too deep into the public roles that they played.

That night as Collin held her, somewhere in the middle of the onset of passion he felt the tears on her face. It took him a second to understand that. Every once in a while, Collin would think to himself that of all the girls in their world his mother could have pushed him to, he had lucked out with Harley. She was real, knew how to play her part but never committed to the socialite scene enough to care what others thought of her, which made her all the more desirable, all the more powerful.

When her hand would linger in his a moment after they were alone or when she would fall asleep on his shoulder as he studied, he’d think to himself that he may have been reading her wrong, that maybe she did have feelings for him that were more than friendly, that maybe he did, too. But that night, as he held her just after they had crossed that line, he knew she would never love another person beyond the horseman that had broken her heart.

In that beach house they were sharing for a few weeks, in the middle of the night he decided he was going to track that boy down, either help Harley get back to him or help her get over the memory. It wasn’t as easy to track down the Doran family as it was to track down his or the Tatum’s. He had found the farm’s website, seen a few images, caught a few names.

He searched through social media after that, but he never found Wyatt. He found his brother, Truman, and his sister, Ava. They had next to no privacy settings blocking Collin from seeing images that had been posted. He had come across what looked like a party at a pub or something. Click after click, group shot after group shot he saw Wyatt in the middle of a group of friends, in some cases more girls than guys. In one image, one girl was even leaning over his shoulder, kissing his cheek. You couldn’t see her face, but you could see his grin, his arms reaching up like he was about to pull her in his lap.

That was the image that Harley saw when she came up behind Collin. The second he heard her gasp, he shut his computer.

“What are you doing?” she breathed as her chest rose and fell violently.

Harley had lain in bed all night, feeling mortified for having the worst sex on the planet with Collin. She did everything in her power to be in that moment with him, but the alcohol and what was left of her broken heart kept flashing her back to the first boy that held her.