Impulsion (Station 32 #1)(41)

Camille lifted her chin. “It had.” She let those words settle for a minute, seeing them wash over Harley. “After getting into every ounce of trouble that a boy could get into, after running away to crash your birthday, only to figure out that he’d been replaced, my son hit the road, rode professionally. Bareback. While managing the Doran bulls and working to gain his degree in business.” Camille paused. On the outside it looked like she was furious, but really it was emotion that was stopping her. “He said the farm hurt him. That you were haunting him. He had no choice.” Wyatt said all of that to his father, not Camille, but that didn’t matter right then.

Harley sat up, sure she did have whatever concussion they thought she had.

“Dorcas—”

“Dorcas’ parents were going through a divorce. She rented out the apartment.” Camille tilted her head. “Of all people, you should know I raised my boy with more class and sense than to mess with the likes of Dorcas.”

Harley was speechless.

“You see now, Harley, when you’re afraid and you run, you quit. You put it all on the table and walk out. When you don’t run, when you decide to be brave and fight for what’s yours, you find out that the fear was inflating everything you saw.”

Harley looked away. At seventeen, she was sure her mother could have destroyed the Dorans—there was not a doubt in her mind. It was her father that let her see that was a fallacy, and Collin backed up that point every time her mother let her dark side out in the present day when he’d say, “What’s the worse she can do?”

“How different would your life be right now if you had walked out of that barn and up to my front porch? If you had even dared to stop and listen to Ava as she called your name?”

“A lot,” Harley admitted.

“You gonna marry that boy?”

Harley’s eyes moved to Camille’s, not sure what boy she was talking about. Even if that Dorcas business was nonsense, it had been years. Wyatt had to be with someone; she had seen pictures of girls with her own eyes.

The only people on the planet who knew she and Collin were not in a real relationship were them and Quinn.

Harley only barely stopped herself from saying no, and that was just because the habit of acting like she and Collin were more than friends was ingrained her mind.

“Yes, I know about him,” Camille said, reading the question in Harley’s eyes. “You see, my son, the bronc rider, the fireman, he reads articles every day. Ones about charities, about political events, all topics that should be of no interest to him. I read them, too. I read them to gauge his mood. I know if your name appears, if Collin Grant’s is there, if there is some high society photo, that I need to make sure he stays away from every dangerous ride until that aggression of his is gone—for if I don’t, he’s going to end up killing himself.”

“I’m not engaged,” Harley said after a moment, finding an honest way to answer the original question.

“You love him?”

“There are a lot of definitions to that one word,” were the words that left Harley’s lips, her silent way of saying that she had not given her heart to Collin or anyone else that came along. She didn’t have one to give.

“Harley, I have no idea why you were driving that rig with that horse, alone, past my town. I don’t know how you survived. I don’t know how he did. But this is a pause. This is the only chance life is going to give you to set things right. To burn bridges, close doors. Figure out what you want.”

Harley was sure she was telling her to burn the bridge with Wyatt, to be an adult. The thing was, Harley didn’t want to burn a bridge. Deep down she knew the reason she wasn’t over Wyatt by now was because she didn’t want to be.

Then the other words Camille had said started to register in her mind. “Danny Boy’s alive?”

Camille winced when she assumed that her son was not even daring to cross Harley’s mind. She nodded tensely. “He’s hurt. Lame, with a few lacerations. Doc Knox said if he were any smaller, he wouldn’t have survived, that his size stopped the trailer from tossing him. He’s on stall rest for thirty days.”

“Where?”

“In his stall,” Camille said firmly. She had never once filled Danny Boy’s stall, the largest one in the farm that sat right next to her office. She could have divided it up, made three stalls, brought in three new boarders, but she never did. In fact, his nameplate was still in place.

Harley let her head fall, trying to process everything, trying to pick an emotion to feel. She felt like she had been thrust into her past, and it would be so easy to fall into that. But there was a present life that she was stuck in, a lot of time with a lot of pain between one point and the next.

“I called your father,” Camille said.

Harley’s eyes went wide.

“I explained how lucky you were, what was being done with Danny Boy, your condition.”

“What did he say?”

“He tried to send me a check for your and Danny Boy’s board.” Camille pursed her lips. “Personally, I’m not taking another dime from your family. When you’re discharged, your room will be there. If you have somehow turned into the coward your mother wanted you to become, I’ve also told the hotel twenty miles away to hold you a room.”