Page 43 of His Cowboy Heart

Too loudly.

Jules began shushing me but since BJ had stopped, we were far away enough from the others that they hadn’t heard me. I got BJ moving again.

“Yes and no. I mean, I’d have to look it up to see if that is legally one of mine or my father’s.”

“Your father?” I asked in confusion.

“Either way, the deed has the name Julian Graves somewhere on it.”

“Graves? As in the Graves real estate empire?” I responded, unable to keep the shock from my voice.

“Well, I guess it’s safe to say your city-boy speak is up to par. I think Dad’s ultimate goal is to be a multiverse or something, but I think you have to be worth more than a couple billion dollars to join that club.”

“Okay, sweetheart, you’re going to need to talk me through this one,” I said. “I guess I shouldn’t be calling you that, huh? You probably have a certain title like Your Majesty or Your Highness that I need to start calling you by,” I joked.

To my surprise, Jules’s fingers covered the hand I had at his waist.

“Sweetheart’s good” was all he said. The way he said it answered most of the questions bouncing around my head.

“Sweetheart it is,” I said softly before dropping a kiss to the top of his head.

“Brooks doesn’t know. He only knows me by my mother’s maiden name. I learned the hard way what it meant when it came to having friends and endless amounts of cash at your disposal.”

“No one will hear it from my lips,” I assured him. I paused for a moment before saying, “Speaking of lips?—”

“Your turn,” Jules interrupted. “Frank and Titan,” he reminded me.

I chuckled. “Right. So I guess you could say Frank and his wife sort of adopted me in spirit. Once Frank realized he couldn’t get rid of me, he started teaching me stuff about horses. In the beginning, I was only sleeping a few hours a night because I had to get up early in the morning to get to Frank’s. I’d get a couple hours of training in before I had to get home to do my real job. When I was done for the day, I’d wait until the house was quiet before I’d sneak back to Frank’s and work with his horses some more. My brother was the only one who figured out what I was up to.”

“Your twin? West?”

“Yeah. He covered for me as long as he could, but I didn’t know how much he paid for protecting my secret. All us kids got knocked around now and then, but West was the one who stood up for our younger brothers and sisters. While I was playing horse whisperer, West was getting his ass kicked left, right, and everywhere in between. I was too selfish to even notice.”

“You couldn’t have known,” Jules responded.

“Problem was, Ididknow. I saw him change. It was slow, but it was there. West was smart and resourceful. He was also a thousand times stronger than me, but nowhere near as selfish. I wanted to escape the life I was supposed to be living so I did. I pretended that Frank and his wife were my family. I had this bright spot in my life for the first time I could remember, and I didn’t want to let it go. I built my dreams around the one Frank and his wife had. They weren’t rich or well known. They weren’t finely educated, they didn’t lose themselves in drugs, alcohol, or gambling. So while I was reaching for that same dream, I lost sight of the life I’d been born into. When West finally called me on it, we had this huge fallout. I didn’t realize it at the time, but he’d started doing more than just moving the drugs our family made.”

“He became an addict,” Jules offered.

“Full blown. We basically turned on each other, though I was the one who deserved it for leaving him behind like I did. Frank’s wife had died by then, so all Frank had in his life was Titan and a few other horses. Those horses were the only thing that kept that old man going. I was still going to see him every day, but there was nothing I could do for him. A couple months before I turned sixteen, I went to see Frank like I always did. I knew something was wrong as soon as I set foot on their property. It was quiet. All kinds ofwrongquiet.”

I must have gone silent as I relived the moment because the next thing I knew was that BJ had stopped and Jules was saying my name over and over. The warmth of his fingers rubbing over mine helped bring me back from the ugly, dark path I’d started to mentally wander down.

“Flynn…”

“I’m okay,” I reassured Jules. “Sorry.” I got BJ going again. Jules didn’t pressure me to continue, nor did he urge me to stop. He gave me the freedom to choose.

“It seems like a lifetime ago and yet…”

“It’s always there. Right beneath the skin. Hidden from the world to see but impossible to outrun,” Jules said.

He was exactly right, though I didn’t need to confirm it. He’d admitted to running away from home, but he hadn’t meant escaping the city for a while or taking a break from any dysfunction in his life.

It ran deeper than that. So much deeper.

“The vet from the next town over was at Frank’s. When I saw her truck, I ran directly to Titan’s stall. He was… he was dead, and Frank was nowhere to be found. The vet told me that she’d gotten a call about Titan suffering from a severe bout of colic a couple hours earlier. When she got there, Titan was dead. He’d been shot in the head. She never saw Frank, but she said that he would have known how badly Titan was suffering. He probably knew there’d be no way to save his best friend, so rather than wait the additional time it took for the vet to get to his place, Frank put Titan down himself.”

Tears were stinging the backs of my eyes and my voice was catching, so I took a few breaths to calm myself down. Jules had linked his fingers with mine at some point, so I used that to ground me in the present.

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