If she’d ever experienced a perfect moment in her life, this would be in the top five—and she didn’t want it to end.
* * *
“AS KIDS, KANE AND I used to race each other across this field,” he shared with a grin. “I was always a better rider than Kane, although the horse you’re riding, Amelia, dumped me on my ass a fair number of times. She gets skittish when she’s irritated.”
“Oh, sure, give me the antsy horse,” CoCo teased. “It’s good for you that I can handle a skittish horse. My favorite horse back in Italy was a black Thoroughbred named Gypsy. She was very spirited and wouldn’t let anyone else ride her but me. My dad wanted to sell her but I wouldn’t let him. He was afraid that she was going to throw me and I’d break my neck but she and I had an understanding. Not that she didn’t give it her best shot in the beginning. But I proved my worth and I earned the distinction of being her only rider.”
“Do you still have her?”
She shook her head. “No. She got colic and we had to put her down. We tried everything but she just kept getting sicker and sicker. Finally, it was more of a mercy to put her down gently than to let her continue suffering. I never really found another horse like her. Maybe that’s why I stopped riding seriously.”
“It’s hard to lose an animal like that. They find their way into our hearts and stay there.”
She agreed, though she’d never realized before that moment that Gypsy’s death had likely had something to do with the reason she’d found other pursuits. “Well, I was fifteen and I’d just started to realize the benefits of being an heiress,” she admitted. “That was right about the time I talked my dad into letting me go to high school in LA. And coming home to Italy for summer and winter breaks.”
“You attended LA schools?”
“Sort of. I was mostly homeschooled here in the States, and then I had a tutor back in Italy so I didn’t become an ‘uneducated American girl’ as my father put it.”
“Harsh.”
“Yeah, my dad was pretty opinionated when it came to my education. Unlike my mom, who was more interested in how being homeschooled would affect my social life.”
“Your mom homeschooled you?”
“God, no. She hired a teacher to come to the house.”
“So what’s your relationship with your mom like?”
CoCo shrugged with a sigh. “I don’t know. I don’t really have a relationship with her. She’s too busy with her new husband to think of me. Azalea has always been a social butterfly according to my dad. That’s what broke them up. He was always too busy to take her out and she felt neglected, I guess. Sometimes I think my dad wishes he’d made more of an effort but I want to tell him that he wasn’t missing out on anything. My mom is inherently selfish and only thinks of herself.”
“Does she know what’s going on with you right now?”
“No, and I didn’t see the point in telling her. She’s much happier when I don’t bother her with my life.”
Rian wondered what his own mother would’ve been like. Would she have been better than his father? He tended to give her a pass because she’d died but who knows, maybe she would’ve been just as bad. “I’m sorry,” he said, sharing a look with CoCo.
“It’s okay. I no longer care about that stuff.”
“I don’t think we ever stop caring,” he said quietly. He must’ve struck a nerve because she didn’t offer a flip response, just accepted his comment. “You know, Warren used to tell us that how we deal with the hand we’re dealt is the measure of our character. It would’ve been easy to use our dad’s shitty example as an excuse to act up but we tried to be better than people expected of us. I know that Warren is a big part of that but my brother was determined to get out of this town and make something of himself. Warren must’ve seen that in him and decided to act on it. Thank God he did. He changed our lives and that’s why we’d do anything for him.”
“That’s beautiful that you feel something so deep for him. I love my father like that. I’d do anything for him.”