Page 2 of For Always
“He’s a beautiful Appaloosa. Do you get the chance to ride him often or is he part of the shows that take place at the resort?”
In response to her question Tyler looked back at GG’s chestnut blanket coat. It wasn’t strange that he knew what type of horse GG was without a second thought because he’d grown up on a ranch. As for the woman with the perfectly manicured nails and silky hair, well, she didn’t look like the type to get dirty riding horses, let alone hanging out in stalls long enough to learn the names of the breed.
“They have quarter horses down at the resort. Nevil Snyder is the new head wrangler, he handles all the horses and other animals for the show. This is Golden Glory. He was my dad’s horse.”
“Oh.”
The one quick reply wiped the smile from her face and simultaneously increased Tyler’s irritation.
“Look, I’m kind of busy right now.”
She nodded. “That’s fine. Is there a better time for me to come back? Dessie and Clyde stated that they’d like to have the ranch on the market in the next month. Considering I’ll be working on the staging of the main house, employee residences and the resort, I’ll need to get started pretty quickly.”
“What?”
She’d just said a lot, most of which he hadn’t deciphered because he’d been stuck on the part where the ranch would go on the market for sale in the next month. That decision was his, and well, Jagger’s. But who knew when, or if, his younger brother would decide to make an appearance. He hadn’t been able to pull himself away from his “important business deal” three weeks ago when Tyler called to let him know about their parents’ death. So Tyler had returned to Hobbs Creek to handle everything himself, just as he used to do when they were kids.
“No,” he said when she looked like she was about to speak again. “I can’t do this right now. Come back later.”
“If you’d like to give me a specific time so I’ll be sure to not interrupt you again,” she said.
“Right,” he replied with a curt nod. “Tomorrow. In the evening, around six I guess.”
“That will work. In the meantime, I can draft some ideas for the resort and visit the employee residences. So when we meet, all I’ll need to do is tour the ranch house. Then we can schedule another time to go over my thoughts and hopefully get started.”
Again, she was saying a lot and Tyler just did not want to hear it. He didn’t want to hear anything but the sounds of the ranch, the periodic whine of horses, the bleat of Spanish goats, squeal and grunts of the pigs. The Longhorn cattle would be out to pasture, releasing an occasional bellow or snort. And at night, after dinner when he sat on the porch, staring up to the starry sky the memories came. The ones he loved and would forever miss and the ones that still brought fresh pain.
“Fine. Tomorrow at six. We’ll have some dinner and sit on the porch to talk about your plans,” he said and waited for her to walk away.
She didn’t and he wanted to frown or possibly yell. He did neither. Instead, Tyler did what he always did instead of asking the next question or waiting for uncomfortable conversations to run their course. He returned to the work at hand as if he’d never been interrupted.
At some point he suspected she’d left because by the time he finished all four of GG’s hooves, had brushed him down and offered the gelding his favorite treat—apple slices—she was gone.
That was a relief. Tyler didn’t want to be bothered with people right now. Truth be told, he hadn’t wanted to be bothered with anyone or anything since hearing of his parents’ deaths.
Their bodies were found three weeks ago, each with an execution style gunshot to the back of their head, seated inside their F-350 while it burned to a crisp. A family on their way to the resort to check-in had stopped at the sight. They immediately called 911 and just four hours later, Sheriff Fred Alvarez called Tyler. It had been almost three o’clock in the afternoon for Tyler in Los Angeles that day, and he’d just finished a meeting with the marketing team for his new sportswear line. He didn’t know how long he’d stood in the hallway of the office building trying to digest the news. But Bez, one of the guards Tyler’s agent insisted he needed, had eventually led him to the SUV parked at the back of the building. A while later Tyler arrived at his apartment. He’d been texting his assistant Mellie, during the drive, so by the time he made it home, all he’d had to do was pack a bag and then he was back in the truck heading to the airport.
That’s when he called Jagger.
“It’s Mom and Dad,” Tyler had said, his voice gruff with all the emotion he was trying to contain. “There’s been an accident. The truck was on fire and they’re…dead.”
He hadn’t known any other way to put it. George and Verna West, life-long residents of Hobbs Creek, Texas; owners of the Westwind Ranch & Resort; and, parents to Tyler and Jagger West departed this world on June 12th. That’s how it read in the Hobbs Gazette and the obituary that had been distributed to the more than two hundred people who attended the funeral one week later. Jagger hadn’t said much on the phone when Tyler called, just that he was in Paris about to close a big deal and would be unable to return to help Tyler with the funeral plans, or anything else.
Though this had been no surprise, Tyler was still disappointed and angry with his younger brother. For as long as he could remember, Jagger had left everything to Tyler. From the time Tyler was five years old he’d had chores on the ranch. They’d started with simple things like assisting the ranch hands with feeding the pigs and goats. By the time he was eight he’d been bumped up to feeding the chickens by himself and cleaning the horse stalls. Jagger was six by that time and was supposed to assist Tyler. But the first time George pulled one of his surprise check-ups and yelled at his youngest son for not closing the door to the chicken coop, set the stage for Jagger’s life on the ranch. Nothing the younger West son did was right in George’s eyes, which for Jagger meant, he never had to do anything. Tyler, who watched the ranch hands like a hawk because he didn’t want to incur his father’s wrath, did everything to George’s satisfaction. So Tyler was the worker while Jagger became the playful West brother. The prankster and the star of the football team, Jagger was voted most likely to succeed in his graduating class. His brother went on to do just that after obtaining an MBA in marketing and landing a job at one of New York’s most prestigious PR firms.
Tyler had achieved success as well, although if anyone from L.A. saw him walking out of the stable three hours after he’d gone in, they might not recognize him. His jeans were dusty in some places, caked with mud in others. The white t-shirt he wore looked more gray at this point, while the boots he’d just purchased a couple days after arriving in Texas, were now scuffed and splattered with a variety of animal fluids, dirt, mud and grass. He slapped the worn Dodgers cap he kept stuffed in his back pocket, down over his head as the late afternoon sun blazed as high and hot as it had early this morning.
This Tyler West was a far cry from the easy-smiling, charismatic model turned fitness guru that lived in a three bedroom townhouse in Chatsworth, California and had earned millions of dollars over the last twenty years. That Tyler wasn’t a rancher by any stretch of the imagination, because he’d left everything about his childhood in Hobbs Creek the day after his eighteenth birthday when he’d packed a bag and flew to New York at the urging of Lorinna Holt, an agent at the KMC Modeling Agency that he’d met one day at the local mall.
Tyler hadn’t fallen in love with modeling the way Lorrina had promised all those years ago, but he had enjoyed the money that he made doing the job. To stay in shape he’d spent a lot of time at the gym. Not ready to go back to Texas, his overbearing father and the ranch, he’d used the proceeds from modeling and everything he’d learned at the gym to fund his own workout video. That was when he was twenty-five years old. Now, thirteen years later, Ty-Fitness Inc. was a nationally recognized brand producing workout videos, meal plans and exercise apps, and in a few weeks a full brand of fitness wear for men, women and children.
Tyler was now a brand. He was not a rancher.
Yet, here he was, walking up the steps to the front porch where he’d broken his finger while wrestling with Jagger and Noah Windmyr, the former ranch manager’s son. He was going to walk through those massive oak front doors and into the main foyer of the house and remove his hat and dust his feet on the rug just inside the doorway before moving any further. Because old habits die hard, if they ever died at all.
Despite how he felt or how he’d left, Tyler was back at Westwind. And he wasn’t leaving until he found out who killed his parents.
“He’s an arrogant jerk,” Gabriella said into the phone as she plopped down on the bed.
