Page 65 of Wild and Unruly
“Hey, if you move, can I have your apartment? Mom’s driving me nuts,” Jax says, half joking.
Logan looks over at him, then he puts his finger against our brother’s shoulder and pushes, making Jax yelp and nearly fall, given that his foot is still in a boot. I nod a thanks at Logan, who shakes his head at our brother and starts dragging him away, talking about adoption.
I get into the arena and step on my horse, watching the woman I was madly in love with do what she did best. I can’t imagine not seeing her every day. That was going to be a hard fucking adjustment, and I wasn’t sure what I was going to do about it.
The way she looks to me for comfort, the way she melts into my arms when she needs me, tells me that these feelings were mutual. She wants me as badly as I want her.
The problem we had to face now was distance.
I was willing to find a solution because I was not letting the woman I love slip away.
24
bonnie
Man,I really didn’t want to be here again. It wasn’t that I was afraid or wanted to give up pursuing this lead, but the whole place gave me the creeps.
Him giving his little comments at that horse show made me see that underneath the façade that he initially showed me, he was still a slimy asshole who drugged his horses. It was shown in the face of all of his horses that still had sweat marks after too long in the arena, where he pushed them because, under those drugs, the horses didn’t fight back.
The barn was still a hub of activity, turning horses out, grooming them, rinsing some off. Some assistants were getting horses saddled for the other two trainers who worked there, but Tommy was nowhere to be seen.
I was running out of time.
I don’t technically need to have this storyline done right now, but I desperately want to. I want to finish both articles and thenhave the last few days up on this mountain be completely about Stetson and me.
It was going to be some time before I could get myself back up here, and I wanted to savor every second of it.
Not to mention, the more I saw my brother in his depressive state, the more I wanted to nail this asshole to the wall and make sure he got what was coming to him.
I turn a corner, keeping my eyes peeled for anyone I know, for Tommy to come and ask me what I was doing, but instead, I bump into a tall, willowy figure that blinks at me in surprise.
“Celina?”
The woman stares in shock for a moment before glancing around the arena. She grabs at my arm a moment later and yanks me into a tack room, pressing me against the wall with her hand over my mouth.
I frown at her, my heart rate ticking up with every second she’s holding me here. “You’re the reporter.”
I blink and muffle a confirmation against her hand. Realizing this, she releases me, and I nod. “Yes.” My gaze flicks to the halfway-closed door. “I’m here to do a story about Tommy.”
Her gaze narrows on me, looking over my body as if she could just sniff out the lie. Hell, maybe she can. “What kind of story?”
I stare at her, wondering what she would do if she knew the truth. She was apprehensive about my presence at Three Rivers, and I’m sure finding me here has come as a surprise, but so is my finding her.
“You don’t want to say,” she answers for me when I stare in silence. With a nod, she says, “Good. That means you’ll expose him.”
I tilt my head to the side, placing a blank look over my features, “I’m not sure?—”
“He was behind your brother’s accident.”
The sure and confident way she says that has me locking up for a second, my frown replacing my look of indifference. “How do you know that?”
“Because…” She waves her hand out the door where, any moment, I am sure someone is going to come barging in. “He’s behind everything. He hurt my horse, hurt Dani Trevors’s horse, he tried to…” She trails off, her gaze wandering to the side as she seemingly recounts some part of her story she wasn’t quite ready to share. Celina’s eyes catch mine. “The timing is too suspicious. Your brother was training with him when that happened, then he just disappeared? The autopsy of the horse was never released?”
Her accent grows stronger the longer she talks, and I hold my breath, wondering if I was about to find my first real witness.
“I need your help,” I say quickly when I hear spurs clanking against the concrete floor outside. I freeze for a moment before I whisper in a rush, “I need your statement. I need as many as possible. I need proof?—”
“I have proof.” She frowns. “But the board didn’t care.”
