Impulsion (Station 32 #1)(85)
“Is that not allowed? I have a layover, might as well use it to come and get you, even see Danny Boy.”
“No, it’s fine. I just…Wyatt knows about this part we’ve played for years, but his family doesn’t, at least I didn’t tell them. I don’t know how his mother would take me bringing my fake boyfriend to her farm.”
“Well then, I guess you’ll have to call me your friend from New York. I’ll be there for all of ten minutes. I may not even see the woman. I can even stay in the car. I just want a glance at this paradise you’ve found.”
“K,” she breathed.
“I’ll see you in a few days. Forward what your mom sends you. I’ll follow up with the coordinator before I leave for Wellington and when we fly in.”
The next few days as the clients packed to go to a horse show a few hours away, a show Harley was missing, a show that Wyatt was missing because he had shifts at the fire department, Harley sank a little further into herself. She wanted to get past that weekend as fast as she could, but she didn’t want it to come either.
She knew she had developed some kind of phobia about leaving this farm and tried to tell herself that, tried to tell herself that Camille’s random remarks, the way she would talk about the horses, their integrity, loyalty, anything like that, meant nothing. That she was not all but telling Harley that the road she was about to go down was the wrong one.
“You’re quiet,” she said to Wyatt as she started to pack her bag. Collin was going to be there first thing in the morning to meet her, to meet all of them, then fly home with her.
She thought Wyatt was avoiding her. They kept passing each other the last few days. He was helping pack the trailers just the same as she was, getting all the students ready, but every time they had a chance to duck away, even steal a kiss, something seemed to stop them.
Even tonight, he brought her home after dinner, only to have to take things back to his mother. She’d heard him come in, but he hadn’t said a word as he leaned in the doorway to the room they shared.
“Just watching.”
“Why did your mom want your suits?” She thought that was what she heard Camille ask for.
“She didn’t say; might have wanted to see if one would work for Truman at this banquet coming up.”
“Are you going to be able to go to the one after this?” she asked.
“Are you?”
Harley looked back in question. He knew she had two students that were showing in that schooling show, that she was more nervous than they were about that. “Yeah…”
“I’ll be there, with a suit to take you to dinner,” he said with a shy smile.
“Riding pants or jeans will do,” she said with a glance over him. As much as she saw him, after all they had shared, she was sure she should not feel her heart kick up or even her breath hitch when his eyes would look a little deeper into hers, but it always did. The boy knew how to stir her deep in her soul with only a glance.
“And my mother would kill me if I showed up at the banquet attached to that show dressed that way,” he said with a wink.
“Isn’t there a bigger event attached to this one? The one you couldn’t get shifts covered for?”
“I could get them covered.”
Harley furrowed her brow.
Wyatt never answered the question on her face; it would give her doubt, or even let her see the dark side that he always kept from her. When it became clear that Harley was going home and he wasn’t invited, Memphis and Easton began to stay hip-to-hip with Wyatt. No doubt they thought that Wyatt would chase Harley, make some scene like he did before.
None of them knew about Harley’s fake relationship. No one asked about the rich boy Harley was with before she crashed back into Wyatt’s life. They assumed that he just stole Harley back, but they all hated her mother just the same, knew the woman had always had some kind of control over Harley, at least made Harley feel that some things were important that weren’t.
All he’d said when his friends or family mentioned this weekend was that Harley was going home for her father’s birthday party, which was the truth. Harley didn’t tell him until three days before that Collin was coming to his farm to pick her up.
She told him that in passing one night, like it was just a random update on her travel schedule. But he saw her tense, her skin flush, her preparing for a fight. He hated it when she felt like that, he hated knowing her mother had made her like that. All he said was, “Did your mother invite him?”
She nodded, and her eyes even welled. She started to say something to him then, but he decided to mask it. He pulled her into his arms and devoured the sensation of her touch, which was fierce that night, demanding and claiming.
He was trusting Harley, trusting her to go home and tell her father they were together and come back to him. He even halfway convinced himself that if she left and came back, they would both be better for it, that this rigid fear of an end or separation they both had deep inside would vanish.
He assumed Harley wanted to tell her dad about them face to face. Without a doubt, Garrison Tatum was a man that expected you to look him in the eye when you revealed life-altering news to him—and without a doubt, Harley being with Wyatt was life-altering.
Right now, Harley wasn’t even sure if she wanted to finish her degree, but she’d already gone with Ava to the campus, which was just under an hour from Willowhaven, to review courses that would get her to that point. Harley was deciding to move permanently away from her father, states away. In the past, she’d been away from him months at a time, but apparently even when she lived with Collin, she was always at his home on a steady basis.