Page 66 of For Always
He wore his brown Stetson today, pulled down low, jeans and a white t-shirt. She wished she’d changed out of this dress and found a pair of shorts instead.
“You know this was my dad’s horse,” he continued.
Gabriella folded her arms over the railing and rested her chin on her arms. “He’s beautiful.”
“Yes, he is. This land is beautiful. I think I forgot that for a while. A long while.”
He sounded contemplative and looked just a little sad. Gabriella wanted to reach out to him, to take his hand and assure him that despite all that was going on, things were going to work out. But she didn’t. Instead, she just listened.
“I always felt so bad for being better than Jagger at everything on the ranch. I hated when my dad compared us because I knew it must have made Jagger feel awful. My mom never said much in that regard. She just kept Jagger with her as much as she could. Protecting him, I guess.”
“Mothers are the best protectors of their children,” she said.
“And fathers are the best at expectations, I guess.”
She could have agreed with him, but something told her that wasn’t what he needed to hear right now. His mind seemed pretty made up where his father was concerned.
“That’s why I didn’t go after Jagger for being with Hannah. I didn’t want to risk sounding like my father, even though Jagger was wrong as two left feet for getting near Hannah. He knew we were together. Everyone in town knew that,” he said vehemently.
“Hannah knew it too,” Gabriella said. “And considering what I knew of her, I don’t put it past her to have seduced Jagger.”
“He was still my brother. My blood.”
“You’re right. They were both wrong as two left feet,” she conceded.
He gave her a weak smile.
“Seeing them together was the push I needed. And meeting that scout in the mall, she was the answer. I got out of here as fast as I could and I never planned on coming back. I feel like I was wrong for that.”
As much as Gabriella hated her family’s smothering tendencies sometimes, she’d never considered going away from them forever.
Tyler’s hand moved further back on the horse, gliding slowly over its glistening chestnut coat.
“This is my home. It’s always going to be my home. I should have come back to help out. Especially when I started to learn more about operating a business. I should have read those reports my dad sent me more closely.”
“Your father sent you reports on how the ranch was doing while you were gone?”
“Every year,” he replied and nodded. “When I first came back I read all of them over and over again.”
“Because you saw something?”
He nodded.
Gabriella lifted her head and stared at him. “What did you see?”
“Just a few minor discrepancies at first. So I brushed them off. But then I hired D&D Investigations,” he told her.
“You what?” She let her arms slide from the railing and took a step closer to where he stood. “How did you know about D&D?”
“When you told me about attending that wedding at Basset Banks Winery, you mentioned Bailey Donovan. D&D did some background checks for the company we initially used to produce my DVDs. Bailey Donovan signed off on some of those reports. So when the sheriff didn’t seem to be getting anywhere finding my parents’ murderer, I gave them a call.”
“The detective who called my family about my car being on fire is the older brother of the other half of D&D, Sam Desdune.”
“Client confidentiality,” Tyler said as if he knew what she was thinking. “Besides, there’s no reason they would have known to connect us. I’m contracted with the L.A. branch of D&D. But either way, Sam Desdune would not have called his brother one day and said ‘hey, guess who I’m working with’ and Detective Cole Desdune would not have called Sam and said ‘hey, guess whose car just caught on fire’.”
“But Cole did just that,” she said with a shrug. “Still, I see what you’re saying. They would not have known that we were together. So did they find anything else in the reports?”
“They found that for about ten years money was slowly being siphoned from the ranch’s main operating account,” Tyler told her.
