Chasing Ribbons (Show Jumping Dreams ~ Book 19)

by Claire Svendsen

  I didn’t know what I was going to do. What if he bolted, trampling the sunbathers and running down little kids? What if he hurt someone? Or himself? Or me?

  I pulled on the reins but Arion ignored me. Drummed my heels against his sides but they were as dead as wood. I couldn’t get through to him. For one stupid moment I thought about getting down and leading him away from the mayhem but deep down I knew that was ridiculous. One spook or rear and he’d snatch those reins away before I even had a chance to stop him and then he’d be gone, a flash of gray literally disappearing from sight.

  “I don’t know what to do,” I said, blinking back tears.

  People had started to notice that there was a horse on their beach. Tourists from out of town that had maybe never even seen a horse up close and personal before. Kids pointed at Arion curiously like he was some kind of freak. All I needed was one of them to run up to him and he’d go crazy.

  I kicked him and he took one shaking step forward.

  “No,” I said desperately. “Turn around.”

  But it seemed that Arion didn’t want to go back. He actually wanted to face his fears and investigate the water that was splashing up on the sand. Only a hundred people stood between him and that goal. People who would reach out to pet him or flap towels near him. People who would do stupid things that would freak him out.

  Then I saw her. Someone coming closer. A girl in a bright yellow bikini with a blue towel wrapped around her waist. Her hair was short and wet and she was tanned and lean.

  “Please don’t come any closer,” I said, holding up my hand. “My horse is very frightened right now.”

  “I know,” she said with a sly smile. “I thought you might like some help.”

  “Jess?” I said.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  She didn’t really look like Jess but somehow I knew it was her. She’d filled out, no longer angular and sharp but now sporting muscled abs and firm arms. Her face was full, the pinched brows gone and replaced with a warm smile. She’d had her long hair chopped off into spikey tufts and the dark ends had been bleached. She looked like a super model, a chic, edgy super model and she was smiling at me and being nice.

  “Do you need a hand?” she asked.

  For a moment I thought about saying no. Telling her to get away from me and my horse and that of course I didn’t need her help but the truth was that I did and I was glad of it. Even if she told everyone how I’d ridden my horse to the beach and then hadn’t been able to get him to move and even if they all laughed about me, it was better than having to call my father and tell him that my horse had dumped me off and run away.

  “Yes,” I said, swallowing my pride. “That would be great.”

  Jess patted Arion’s neck.

  “What’s the matter?” she said. “Never seen the sea before?”

  Arion was momentarily distracted by her. He relaxed his neck and sniffed her outstretched hand where she held a lemon ice.

  “Want to try some?” she said.

  He sniffed it and then stuck out his tongue and licked the frosted treat.

  “He likes it!” Jess cried, laughing.

  She genuinely didn’t seem to care that my horse was slobbering all over her frosty treat and she let him lick the whole thing. When he was done, she put her hand on the reins and gently pulled him away, back towards the tree line and he followed her like a puppy dog. She led us through the trees like a lead line student until the sound of the waves and the tourists became muffled. Eventually I felt Arion relax.

  “Thanks,” I said awkwardly as Jess stopped and let go.

  “Don’t mention it,” she said. “As soon as I saw you guys I knew you were in trouble. What on earth made you ride to the beach in the middle of the day? You had to know it would be crowded.”

  “I forgot,” I mumbled.

  “I didn’t even know you could ride to the beach from Fox Run,” she said, looking back towards the trail. “That’s pretty awesome, you know, for days when there aren’t like a million people out here.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “And this pretty boy is the one from the hurricane, isn’t he?” Jess stepped back to look Arion over. He followed her, sniffing for more treats. “I don’t have anymore.” She laughed, pushing him away. “He’s filled out nicely.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  I kept waiting for Jess to say something mean, something about how I was stupid or my horse should have ended up as dog food. All the things she used to say but none of them came out.

  “Well,” she said. “I should get back. My friends will be wondering where I am.”

  “Thanks for helping,” I said.

  “Don’t mention it,” she said.

  The old Jess would have told me that I owed her. Would have blackmailed me with something to stop her from telling anyone else what had happened. But as the new and improved Jess ran back up the hill and my soppy horse tried to follow her, I had no doubt that she wouldn’t tell a soul what had happened and I wasn’t sure why.

  CHAPTER SIX

  I rode back to Fox Run feeling kind of confused, like I was stuck in some sort of alternate universe. I’d been nice to Jess and she’d been nice to me. In fact she’d almost seemed like a different person, like it wasn’t Jess at all. For a moment I thought I’d been fooled. Maybe it hadn’t been Jess after all but her twin sister, Amber. That was it. It had to be. But deep down I knew it was Jess. Amber was shy. Timid. She never would have strolled up to me like she owned the whole beach like Jess did. But Jess never would have offered to help. At least the old Jess wouldn’t have anyway.

  When I got back to the barn, my father was frantic.

  “Where have you been?” he said. “The new horse is almost here. Put Arion away right now.”

  “Alright,” I said, jumping to the ground on legs that still felt like jelly. It could have been bad. Really bad. And my father could never find out.

  “I can’t believe you,” I said as I untacked Arion. “Freezing like that and embarrassing me and then slobbering all over Jess like she was your new best friend. What on earth got into you?”

  But I wasn’t mad with my horse. I was mad with myself for putting us both in a very dangerous situation that could have ended a lot differently if it hadn’t been for Jess.

  Arion seemed to have forgotten already. He rubbed his face on me when I took his halter off and left a black mark on my arm. I was in the bathroom scrubbing it off when I heard the trailer arrive. I didn’t know what the big deal was anyway. It wasn’t like we hadn’t had a million horses come in before. Well maybe not a million but we got new horses in all the time. I didn’t know why this one was any different.

  “I thought you liked getting new horses,” Dad said as I went and stood next to him still feeling all grumpy.

  “I do,” I said. “But don’t you think we have enough?”

  My days were already filled with working Bluebird, Arion and Four, not to mention the school horses that seemed to need tune ups faster than I could give them.

  “Well I never thought I’d hear you say that,” Dad said. “I can send the trailer away if you want?”

  “Don’t be silly,” I said.

  “Buck up kid.” Dad slapped me on the back. “Whatever it is, it’s not the end of the world.”

  I wasn’t so sure. Jess being nice did almost seem like a prophecy of doom, I just couldn’t tell him that.

  The trailer pulled up and the hauling guy jumped out and banged down the ramp. Usually I’d be jumping up and down to see what new horse was about to be unloaded but all I could think was how tired I was and how there weren’t enough hours in the day to work another horse. Was this what burnout felt like?

  The horse backed quietly down the ramp, a shiny bay rump followed by the rest of him. He stood there blinking in the sunlight, then let out a trumpeting whinny. A horse in the barn answered.

  “Hashtag?” I said.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Hashtag was one of Jess
’s cast offs but he hadn’t really been a cast off at all, he’d been the best of the bunch. The cream of the crop. The horse that had gone the best for her until she messed him up but I knew that was only because she was trying to get back at her father. Her relationship with him had been even worse than mine was with my mothers and that was saying something. But she’d liked the horse, in fact deep down I think he’d always been her favorite.

  “What have you done?” I asked my father.

  I’d just had a pleasant encounter with Jess, now all that was going to go to hell.

  “How on earth did you get Mr. Eastford to sell him to you?”

  It seemed highly unlikely that he’d sold the horse willingly since Mr. Eastford hated my father almost as much as Jess hated me after he kicked them out of Fox Run.

  “I didn’t,” Dad said. “A third party intervened on my behalf.”

  “Oh Dad, how could you?”

  “What do you mean?” Dad asked, looking at me like I was highly ungrateful.

  “Jess loved him. If Mr. Eastford sold him it was only to get back at her about something. Don’t you think this is going to make some sort of retaliation her priority now?”

  “If she can’t hack it then she shouldn’t have let her father sell him,” Dad said with a shrug.

  “Look, you want to stand here all day discussing it or do you want the horse?” the hauler asked.

  “We want the horse,” Dad said.

  He took the lead rope from the guy and gave it to me. Hashtag sniffed me and seemed to remember that I was someone who had once scooped his poop and fed him breakfast. He walked into the barn looking like he was really happy to be home. He made little snuffling noises and some of the horses answered him. I settled him into an empty stall. He still looked good, fit and healthy. Usually by the time Jess’s horses were sold they looked pretty rough and were defective in some way. I couldn’t help wondering if he would still jump like the old Hashtag or if Jess had broken him.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” I told the bay horse.

  He was always a big old softie, a teddy bear that didn’t have a mean bone in his body. A horse that was talented enough to take Jess to the top, if only she’d let him.

  “I thought you’d be happy,” Dad said as he came to stand outside the stall.

  “I am,” I said.

  “You don’t seem very happy.”

  “It’s complicated,” I said with a sigh. “I don’t like having people hate me.”

  “Jess doesn’t hate you,” Dad said. “She’s just jealous of you, that’s all.”

  “What’s there to be jealous of?” I said. “She has looks and money and pretty much everything she could ever want.”

  “But she doesn’t have your talent,” Dad said. “And that is the one thing that money can’t buy.”

  “I suppose,” I said with a sigh as Hashtag pawed at his bedding until he’d made a little hole in the middle and then pooped in it.

  The Jess I’d seen at the beach hadn’t been jealous at all. She’d been kind and nice and pretty much someone that I’d like to get to know better. Or she could have just been a wolf dressed up in sheep’s clothing, waiting for the moment when she would turn on me like a venomous snake and having Hashtag here in our barn for me to ride? Well that was just the perfect opportunity to knock that smile right off her face and I didn’t feel like I had the energy to deal with that sort of drama right now.

  “Maybe we could just keep the fact that he is here a secret?” I said hopefully.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Dad didn’t think very much of my idea. He said you couldn’t show a horse without letting people see it. He was right but that didn’t help me out any. Later in the day I turned Hashtag out in the back field. When I took his halter off he stood there for a second licking my hand like he was saying thank you, then he just wandered off and started to graze. He didn’t run around or act silly or even drop and roll. It was like he never even left Fox Run in the first place. I wondered where he’d been. Dad said that the construction on the Eastford barn had finished and he’d seen horses grazing out in the paddocks but back when he kicked them out of Fox Run, their barn was still a tangled mess of wood and metal, a reminder that the hurricane of the summer had left lasting damage in its wake.

  I hung on the gate for a while, watching Hashtag just in case he decided to go all mental. I’d put boots and bell boots on him just in case. I had no idea how much my father had paid for him but this wasn’t some cheap resale project. Hashtag was a quality horse and I really couldn’t understand why my father had brought him here. He was already trained and probably wouldn’t have any more resale value than what we’d paid for him in the first place. The only reason I could think of was that Dad thought he’d be a backup for Bluebird, after all he knew the horse well and had even seen me ride him once. Perhaps he was thinking what I was thinking, that one day I’d need a really good horse when I outgrew Bluebird. Arion could be that horse but he had a long way to go. Years of training and experience to acquire and maybe he’d never be a Grand Prix horse. Maybe he’d max out at three foot six. Or two foot six. Horses with the talent and temperament to jump large, technical courses were few and far between and that was why they cost so much.

  After I was pretty sure that Hashtag had settled and wasn’t just faking, I went back to the barn and did some school work in the office. It wasn’t fair. Everyone else was on summer vacation but virtual school meant that I was working through. The only plus was that I was hoping to graduate early. If I did maybe I could convince my father to send me to Europe to train. That would be awesome and part of the reason I was working so hard even though I hated math and science and all those other subjects I was pretty sure I’d never use again. If you had a calculator and Google, you could pretty much figure anything out. As far as I was concerned, school was a waste of time and I was never going to use any of that stuff in real life.

  I had just closed my laptop when Faith arrived for her afternoon group lesson. She came running into the office as soon as she saw me.

  “Is that a new horse outside?” she asked excitedly. “It is, isn’t it?”

  Nothing got past Faith, especially when it came to new horses on the farm.

  “It is,” I said, standing up and stretching my sore neck muscles. “But he’s not exactly new.”

  “It’s Hashtag isn’t it?” Faith cried.

  I nodded.

  “I knew it,” she said. “But what is he doing here?”

  “My father bought him,” I said.

  “Oh you are going to be in so much trouble.” Faith shook her head.

  “Why would you say that?”

  “Duh, Jess. She is going to be so mad when she finds out you have her horse.”

  “That’s what I said,” I replied, sinking back down into the chair.

  “It’s pretty cool though,” Faith said, tapping the door frame with her crop. “I mean he is a pretty super cool horse and you’ll probably win a bunch of ribbons on him, until Jess kills you.”

  “Nobody is killing anybody,” Dad said as he came into the office. “Now don’t you have a pony to tack up?”

  “Yes.” Faith nodded sheepishly.

  “Well you’d better hop to it then,” Dad said, shoving Faith out of the office and closing the door.

  “See?” I said. “I told you. I’m not the only one who thinks that this is a bad idea.”

  Dad sat on the couch and propped his feet up on the table with a sigh.

  “I’m not being ungrateful, honestly I’m not,” I said, afraid that if I kept it up he’d never buy me another horse. “It’s just that you know what Jess is like.”

  “Maybe she’s changed,” Dad said.

  “Maybe.”

  And she had seemed different so maybe she had changed. Or maybe not.

  “Well, I’d better go and make sure the group are ready for their lesson,” I said.

  “Wait,” Dad said as I stood up. “I need to talk to you
about something.”

  “What is wrong now?” I said, knowing from my father’s tone that it wasn’t anything good.

  “Your mother is in the hospital,” he said.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Dad didn’t know all the details. Apparently my step sister Cat had called him and she wasn’t even supposed to do that. What had happened was sketchy at best but involved stairs and my mother falling down them. That wasn’t like her. She wasn’t clumsy like I was. She was careful. In the back of my mind was the thought that Derek had pushed her but I didn’t tell my father. If I did he would get in his truck, drive straight to Wisconsin and kill Derek with his bare hands.

  Instead I busied myself helping the kids tack up their ponies. The ones who had their own, like Faith, didn’t need help but there were always kids who rode the lesson ponies that you had to keep an eye on so that they didn’t go out to the ring with an upside down martingale or a backwards saddle pad. After all since taking over Fox Run we’d generally encouraged all but the snobbiest of students to tack up their own horses but that didn’t mean we just left them to their own devices.

  By the time I’d straighten everyone out and sent them off to the ring I was sweaty and disgusting. I thought about riding back out to the trail and swimming in the pond but the splashing had sort of put me off. What if there really was an alligator in there? And after my failure at the beach, I didn’t see myself riding out that way again anytime soon. I sat in the tack room and pretended that I was cleaning my bridles when really I was just sitting in front of the soap and the bucket, thinking about my mother.

  I’d tried to warn her about Derek but she hadn’t listened. Maybe if I’d told her everything. Explained about how he came at me with the wrench in his hand and menace in his eyes. How he was only seconds away from hitting me around the head with it. But I hadn’t seemed to be able to find the words and even if I had, she probably wouldn’t have believed me anyway. She didn’t know the same Derek that I’d known, only now maybe she did.