Impulsion: A Station 32 Fire Men Novel (35 page)

Wyatt felt her tense in his lap, looked up from the paper. His stare didn’t seem to help her edgy response.

“No, I’m giving you mine.”

“Same difference. You give me yours, and your daddy gives you another one.”

Where the hell did that come from?
“I don’t get why you’re mad about this.”

He heard the building anger in her voice. There was still a tremble there, but she was fighting back. He might have taken the time to realize how strong she had become, but right now he was too furious, felt like he had been punched in the stomach.

“You don’t get why I’m upset? Harley, I don’t want your money. I don’t want or need anything that I haven’t earned.”

“That’s stupid.”

His glare was murderous. “It’s stupid for me to earn what’s mine?”

“It’s stupid for you to think that gift came from anyone but me.”

“And why would you give me a truck?”

“Why do I need one? Maybe I just should have said, ‘Here is
our
new truck.’ What else do we need to add to it?”

Wyatt leaned back on his arms and stared out into the distance. His jaw line was sharp, that stare near lethal. “The first threat that was used to divide us before was money and power. I don’t give a damn about either. Just you. This place.” His eyes moved back to hers. “There is nothing I own that does not have more value than the almighty dollar, it’s all priceless in my mindset.”

“I can say the same.”

“You? You can say the same?” he said, lifting his brow, daring her to press on.

Neither one of them had ever wanted for much beyond each other, but it was different all the same. The Tatums purchased what they wanted, if it was broken they bought a new one. Not the case with the Doran’s.

In Wyatt’s family it meant more to have something that had been carried down, something that was ripe with loyalty. Whether it was
a saddle his father had won medals in, tools that his grandfather had mended the fences with before, or the tact trunk that had traveled across the globe with his mother as she staked her claim in the jumper world. Even the home he was raised in carried generations of priceless gems that meant more to the Dorans than any dollar that had been offered, simply because their legacy was attached to every piece.

That truck. His truck. It was his first. And in that truck his father taught him to drive. He’d held Harley, crossed lines that made his heart thunder; it had carried him across state lines. It was the truck that Lucas Armstrong, Memphis’s dad, had helped him build a customize
d motor for, and he was long gone from this world now. Each time Wyatt cranked his truck a flash of some past would surface. It was like that with everything he owned.

If something didn’t have meaning, it was not worth owning in his mindset.

Harley’s skin was flushed, not with fear, but with anger. “That truck that I totaled, it was a graduation present. That rig, a Christmas present. I could go on, occasion by occasion. I didn’t wake up and ask my dad to buy me anything. What I was given, I put in my name. All mine.”

“And you think that’s an average, everyday graduation present?”

“You’re giving me shit about this when your mother signed over a horse to me that is worth just as much as that truck, if not more. A horse that she is boarding right alongside Danny Boy for free.”

His stare searched her face as he gritted his teeth. His mother had given her something that had meaning, emotion
—that would have a legacy. Bottom line it was a lesson to the pair of them. This truck was a machine, an object, one that could be made a thousand times over. There was a difference. In his mind there was.

“That’s debatable. He hasn’t made a name for himself yet.”

“He will. And that’s not the point.”

“And what is the point? I’m in the good graces with the Tatums so I should accept their gifts humbly.”

She squeezed her legs around his waist like a vice, heard him grunt. That was all the pain she could bear to bring him, even though she wanted to slug him, for him to get over whatever macho bullshit this was. This had nothing to with the Tatums, it had to do with her. This was her possession and she wanted to share it with him.

“The point is, I’m not going to spend the rest of my life wondering if I should or should not give you something, if you will take some chauvinist
ic defense to it. What is mine, whatever it is, it’s yours, and if you don’t like that, we have an issue.”

He felt his heart thunder. That one rapid line, the one that promised some kind of forever, those were rare. Even though this was wrapped in anger, he felt it slam into him.

They stared endlessly at each other, a silent dare.

“I love my truck
.”

She threw her hands in the air. “Easton and Memphis are helping you do something to it every other week.”

“Yeah, the basics may be something off the wall, but I earned that truck.” His hands reached around her waist, putting her all the way on his lap once more. “Harley, a lot of good things happened to me in that truck.”

That damn southern charm was her weakness every ti
me. The way he said her name, slow and deep, still made her chest hum with anticipation.

The anger in her expression started to fade.

“Do you have any idea how many people have offered to buy it from me? How many even went above any blue book because of everything me and the boys did to it?” She shook her head slightly. “A lot. That’s all I meant, Harley. I meant that what I own means something to me.”

“You meant more than that,” she said quietly.

He’d hurt her feelings, and he could kill himself for doing that. Then again, he knew, from watching his parents, you had to say what you felt, you could not live your life with someone and not expect there to bumps in the road, different views. He was always a little guarded when it came to pushing Harley’s buttons. Her mother had pushed enough for a lifetime, taught Harley to see every disagreement as a threat, instead of the stage for reasoning, compromise.

“Listen…I’m not going to lie to you, your mother burned me with every word she said to you, every word Ava overheard her yelling at you that last night before she took you away
. I was raised to give and not take. If things like this come up, it might be hard for me, but I’ll get over it.” When she looked down, he lifted her chin with his fingertips. “I swear I will. I’m not a materialistic person, I can’t change that. I don’t want to.”

“I’m my father’s daughter
, not hers. He raised me the same, to give and not take. You and me, we have to do both. I don’t have a dime to my name, Wyatt. My horses and that rig…that’s me. And I want to share that with you and anything else that’s mine. We can give it all away together if you want, but that’s how I’m going to see it. Money is nothing to me, not because of my family, but because I know money can’t buy the only thing that makes anything worth having in this world. It can’t buy the reason I wake up every day with a smile on my face.” She raised her chin slightly. “You can drive it or not. That truck is coming here because it’s mine, and this is where I’m staying. You want to fight about that, Doran, fine, give it to me. But I
will
win that fight. I swear that to you. You’re mine, Wyatt. I’m not living my life without you. I already know it’s impossible.”

He let his eyes rapidly move across hers. Harley had always known what she wanted, he knew that, but she never really knew how to demand it. This right here, that fire in her eyes, it was stirring him, making his heart thunder. He knew without a doubt she was every bit as powerful as her father had told him she was when he was just a fifteen-year-old boy. And she was his.

His pride tried to hide behind the anger, but he knew she meant every word she’d said. If anything, that gift was merging their lives.

He leaned in and let his lips glide across hers,
nibbled the flesh of her bottom lip with his, then pulled away. “Silver.”

She furrowed her brow.

“Change the color to silver on our truck. It’ll match the trailers we pull to shows.”

A beaming smile
crossed her lips as she dove forward, leaning him back on the blanket. “We get to make up now, right?” she whispered against his jaw as her lips moved to his neck before she leaned up and gazed down at him.

His hands drifted under her shirt. She
grabbed the end of it and pulled it over her head, laughing when she felt his fingertips trace the sunrays across her near bare chest. Only a thin trace of lace was shielding her.

“My only goal every day
is just to let you
be
,” he said as his hand unclasped her bra without the slightest fumble. “And each day that I do, you grow stronger, even more vibrant. I want to give you the world, Harley.”

“You have
.”

Harley leaned forward and met his lips as he rose. The kiss was soft and sweet but grew in strength as that random, stupid fight drifted away and the deep-rooted, claiming passion they had together took flight.

With the setting sun as the backdrop, kiss by kiss, touch by touch, the clothes that bound them left, the intense passion exploded.

The stars had risen just as Harley won the final battle of control, sat astride him, then brought them together as one. Their eyes, that deep stare full of emotion, only broke for a moment, only when an erotic rush of energy forced them to.

Harley was in the shower when she heard her phone ring. She hadn’t managed to talk to Wyatt all day, so she ran to her phone thinking it was him, drenched enough to leave a pool of water with every step, only to figure out it was her mother calling.

That sick, plummeting feeling hit Harley like a Mack truck. She refused to answer, walked away from the phone, even got back in the shower and finished the task she had abandoned. She was cleaning up her mess from the water, gathering a load of laundry when it rang again.

Seeing that it was Collin didn’t really ease her nerves. She had tried to call her father earlier, but Donald had told her that he was having an off day and decided to retire earlier. He seemed to be having a lot of those lately. Right when Harley would grasp the idea of the inevitable, she would call and find him on the golf course with Conrad, laughing as if it were ten years before, when he seemed too powerful to ever die.

Right now, she didn’t know what to expect when she answered. If it was more of the same, making plans for the plays in the game of life she and Collin had no choice but to play in, or if it was bad news, news she didn’t want to hear alone.

“Hey,” she said in a weak voice.

“You all right?” Collin asked in a stunned tone.

Harley took a breath. “Mother called just before. I thought maybe something had happened.”

Collin was silent for a second; he had to stop himself from telling her not to worry about that because he knew one day that call would come. “She called me, looking for you.”

“Where does she think I am?”

Harley had answered every recent email her mother had sent, but there was no emotion or anything personal in them, just what size are you, what jewelry do you have, little nonsense things that made Harley feel like she was nothing more than an item on a menu that her mother was checking to make sure was represented correctly.

“I assume she thinks you are at your father’s house. I never told them any different about your detour, and I don’t think our fathers have either.”

“Our fathers…did your dad meet Quinn? Did you talk to my dad?” Most times, Harley had a pretty good gauge on what communication Collin had with either of their parents, but the closer this party came to be, the more of it there seemed to be—meaning this impending drama was building faster than Harley would ever want it to.

“He keeps cancelling on me, and when he reschedules Quinn is back in Boston.”

“Denial?”

“I don’t know.”

“He has to have a clue, though. You’ve had lunch with him every other week for the last two months.”

“Right, but that is all about business or school. He cuts me off every time I even try to bring you or Quinn up.”

That wasn’t really enough to raise a red flag. Conrad was a lot like Harley’s father, always knew what drama was going on in his family but rarely engaged, and when he did engage it, he had the last say in how any matter would be handled.

“What did my mother want?”

“She said that they were staying a few days past when they were to travel back and needs you to basically play her role, make sure the party was set to perfection. She said she was forwarding you the coordinator’s contact information and everything you needed to check for the party.”

“Does she not realize that is what coordinators are for?”

Collin laughed when he heard the snap in Harley’s tone. He’d heard it in the past, but only after Harley had been pushed way past any limit one could be asked to withstand.

“Right, but she needs you to breathe down their neck the way she always does.”