Impulsion: A Station 32 Fire Men Novel (16 page)

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.

She could not wrap her head around how one act could feel so differently from partner to partner. She’d told herself it could not be that hard. Wyatt had told her he hated Dorcas, that she was gross, but he went down that road with her. She’d never call Collin gross or dare to hate him because there was some kind of love there, some kind of bond. He had protected her over and over from her mother, given her space. He was a logical choice. She should be thrilled that she had managed to find the only non-asshole in her world.

Then there that image was, right in her face. She was weighed down by her past, and Wyatt looked as if he were in Heaven. That hurt so bad that it made her angry. At herself. There was too much time between them now, a lot of time for him to come to his senses about Dorcas, to call her or something. Harley was pretty positive that girl kissing
his cheek was not Dorcas, which meant he did come to his senses about her and had moved on to the next girl.

Harley needed to get over him. She had no choice.

“I just thought—Harley, you love him,” Collin said.

“It can be better between us,” she said as she flushed.

“It can be the same, too,” he said, moving closer to her, wrapping his arms around her. He pulled her to his chest and swayed her, feeling how tense she was.

All in all, over the months they tried three times more to hold one another. Harley didn’t cry, but she wasn’t there. She was the one that told Collin he was right. They sat up all night in his apartment in New York, talking through it all.

“Every day you’re away from your mother, you get a little stronger. But the second she calls you, the second you see her, you fall back again. We have to get you away from her more. I think if that happens, you’re going to figure out who you are, what you want. Until you do…you’re not going to be able to connect with anyone or anything.”

Harley nodded to agree.

The next day, Collin asked her to move in with him. It was his way of keeping her safe. That started rumors in their social circles and in their families, but he told her they would deal with them later.

Living with Collin was easy. He was never there, in general. He was always at school or his father’s firm, if not out with his friends. When they were in the same town, they did share that bed, not because they were still lovers but because it was the only one in the luxurious studio.

Collin was Harley’s ambassador to her mother. He was the one that told her what Harley was doing, the plans she had, and he always did it with charm, with a classic smile in front of several so her mother had no choice but to play into it.

That was why Harley was able to take a semester off from school, why she had flown down to train with Danny Boy that entire time without any grief from her mother. All of that was presented to Claire Tatum by Collin as if it were his idea.

Collin even went out of his way to fly down to Florida just to keep up the fallacy.

“How’d last night go?” Harley asked him as she padded her way into the kitchen to pour a cup of coffee.

Collin grinned up at her, still in his clothes from the night before, with that ‘just fucked’ look all over his face.

“That good, huh?” Harley said with a smirk.

“We might go out again.”

Harley’s only condition to allowing Collin to take all this time and effort to defend her was that he didn’t pause his love life. She wanted to make sure he was not playing the role of the best friend and waiting for her to come around.

He never had any serious relationships. For one, school and his budding career took a lot of his time; two, he never found anyone he cared to see more than a few times; and most of all, he was trying to protect Harley’s reputation. Their society would eat up that gossip, Collin stepping out on Harley.

Almost ten months ago, when he’d come down with Harley to meet the trainer before shipping Danny Boy, he met a girl, Quinn. Her family had a home in Wellington, but she went to school in Boston. She wasn’t in the
same world as Harley and Collin, but at the same time, as brilliant as she was there was little to no doubt one day she would be there, if not, then very close at least.

Harley knew it was getting serious, at least taking root, because each time after he went out with her, he’d give that same comment, that same smile. The girls before her, he’d just shake his head and ask Harley about her day.

“Did you get everything packed yesterday?” he asked.

Harley was taking Danny Boy home again. He wasn’t really progressing anymore in Wellington, and Harley didn’t want him that far away from her when she went back home. Her hiatus was almost over. Her mother had made more than one random remark, with Collin’s mother backing her, that the only reason for Harley to take more time off from school after this upcoming summer would be to plan a wedding.

Basically, Collin and Harley had backed themselves into a corner. They were sure they could stall for a while. Even if they mocked an engagement, they could get out of it, but to get out of it there would have to be some family drama, some hell.

Collin wouldn’t really care either way
—he liked driving his mother mad—but he wasn’t sure how Harley would make out. Her dad was an old man that had lived a long life, and old men that have bad hearts leave this world. He knew that, had told Harley that a million times. But he also knew that if they staged some break up and her father happened to pass away within any time frame after that, Harley would carry that blame. Always the martyr.

Before Quinn came along, knowing the pair of them they would have stayed engaged for years, maybe to the point where her father did pass away.

Now it just felt wrong to Harley.

Quinn found what Collin and Harley were doing hilarious, even gave them lines to say now and again. Those lines seemed to do nothing but encourage their family to the point where they had all but
insisted that Collin propose.

Their grand plan now was for them to spend time apart, make it seem like they were silently breaking up to those around them. That’s how they became a public couple, so it seemed fitting for them to fall apart that way, to call the friend card out for their family.

This separation was going to come from Harley transporting Danny Boy herself up to New York. Collin had plotted her course, found a friend that she knew every few hours, just over six hours being the most she would have to drive, and that was only for two stretches. Each stop, she was going to lay over for at least a day at a few facilities for a week, in all making the trip almost a month long.

When she did get home, she was going to stay at her family home and ri
de with a new trainer for two months. Her mother was overseas with Collin’s, so Harley would not have to be at the same address with her.

This plan would carry them right up until a few days before her father’s eightieth birthday celebration.

Collin’s mother told her son that celebration was a virtual world stage, among other hints that said she was all but demanding he propose that day. Collin and Harley thought if they spent this time apart, they could pull the ‘we’re growing apart, we need to rekindle our love affair before we embark on an engagement’ just before the party. Collin was all for rocking his mother’s boat. The only drawback was in not rocking Garrison Tatum’s too hard.

Harley was good with the plan but told him that her mother would tell her that her father deserved to see her settled and happy. She would guilt them into this
. She knew she would.

Collin
had only smirked and said under his breath, “That is the end goal.”

“Are you sure you don’t want anyone to ride with you?” Collin asked her.

Harley shook her head. The trainer here was in love with Danny Boy, downright ticked that Harley was taking him home. She’d said that Harley was not qualified to haul him, that she should ride with Harley.

Collin made sure Harley’s rig was equipped with every safety measure known to man. She even had cameras to watch Danny Boy. He’d mapped out every place for her to stop and fuel, every detour she could take. Anything and everything was thought of. Harley needed this time, this independence
. Collin knew that and had told that trainer to pretty much go to hell.

He was only questioning the point now because every once in a while he would still see the scared little girl he knew as a boy, the one he would try to make laugh when they were both stuck in monkey suits. Those glimpses made her look fragile, and he knew she wasn’t, not deep down. Harley’s only problem was that she always knew what she wanted but never knew how to
grasp it. Her hesitation—that was her downfall every time. It allowed doubt to threaten and ultimately overcome her.