Under a Firefly Moon

by Donna Kauffman

  “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  He wanted to take a step closer, felt the pull of her every bit as strongly now as he had as an overly quiet, withdrawn nine-year-old, in the thrall of his first-ever crush.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—”

  “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.”

  He offered her the same smile in return. “Your aunt and uncle, are they—” he began, but she filled in the blank before he could ask.

  “Both gone now.” She lifted a hand to stall his reply. “It’s okay. They weren’t spring chickens when they took us on. They had a good, long life.” Her love for them shone brightly. “They used to say they had to live forever just to keep us in line.” She laughed. “I think they might have, too.” Her expression shifted to one of love and sadness. “Losing Cody broke them, I think. They lost their love of rodeo life just as I did. I think they were tired, too, but they didn’t know anything else.”

  “How did they take your leaving?”

  “Oh, we all left,” she said with a laugh. “I found a job where I could board our horses. I put all our gear in storage once I was settled and convinced them to take the RV down to Florida, park it on the beach for a month, see how that felt.” Her smile grew. “They never left.”

  “I’m glad to hear it. No one deserved that more than they did.”

  She nodded. “They did. I got down there as often as I was able. They were pushing ninety when my uncle finally checked them both into a senior-living facility. His heart eventually gave out, and my aunt went soon after.” She shook her head, let out a laugh. “She told me she couldn’t leave him up there unsupervised. Passed in her sleep two months after he was gone.” Chey took in a deep breath, shoved her hands in her pockets. “That was four, almost five years back now.”

  “We should all be so fortunate to live such a long, happy life.”

  “Agreed,” Chey said. “And, though it might sound odd, losing them helped me deal with losing Cody. Neither of them suffered. And they loved each other so much, right up to the end.” She smiled. “And probably on since. It helped, seeing people I love live their lives fully all the way to the end.”

  “I can see how that would be. I’m sorry they had to live through the loss of your brother, but I’m glad they were there for you.”

  “I wish I could have spared them that, but in truth, I needed them. We had each other to cling to, and we did.” She paused, then said, “So, Zachariah, is he . . . ?” She trailed
off, and Wyatt nodded, knowing what she was asking.

  “Eight years ago. Pancreatic cancer. In the end, it was the one thing he couldn’t beat the crap out of.”

  She nodded, not a shred of remorse on her face. “Good.”

  Wyatt had loved her for many things, but in that moment, he loved her most for that. For knowing, for understanding. For feeling exactly as he did about it.

  “Did you see him again?” she asked. “After you left?”

  Wyatt shook his head. “I kept track. Early on, it was for my own sake, so I always knew where he was. After a while it became habit. In the end, it wasn’t a challenge.” He held her gaze, knowing there would be no judgment on the son because of the father, not from Chey. “He died in a prison hospital. He was incarcerated for the last two years of his life.”

  She said nothing, simply nodded, as if not surprised, nor sorry for the outcome. In that regard, they were also in total agreement. If for no other reason than the longer Zachariah remained locked up, the safer everyone else was.

  “Hello again,” Tory said, walking back into the stables without preamble. “We’re talking, we’re sharing, we’re catching up?” She eyed them both. “No bloodshed?” She smiled. “I’ll take that as a win.”

  “Who, exactly, did you think was going to draw blood from whom?” Chey wanted to know.

  “Fifty-fifty odds,” Tory replied airily, then laughed. “Who am I kidding? If there’d been a pool, I’d have taken Chey and spotted seven points.”

  “Wow,” Wyatt said. “I’ll just pack up my decimated manhood and meet you out at the truck.”

  Tory walked up to him and pinched his cheek. “You would never harm so much as a hair on woman or beast. It would have been like taking candy from a baby.”

  He chuckled. “I feel so much better now. I think.”

  Tory turned, bright smile firmly in place. “I know I’ve arrived at your simply gorgeous farm far earlier than we’d planned, so I’m happy to find a room in town if need be. You had said that Hannah would be happy to let me lease her artist’s loft, but I was thinking that—”