Headstrong

by Bonnie Bryant

  “I know.” Scott smiled briefly. “Believe me, I understand. That’s why I don’t want to add to what you’re going through right now by putting any pressure on you.”

  “What do you mean?” Lisa asked.

  Scott took a deep breath. “I mean, I’m going to back off for a while,” he said. “Give you some space to figure things out, decide who you really want to be with. You know where to find me if you want to, but I’m not going to be in your face anymore.”

  Lisa opened her mouth to respond, then closed it again. She wasn’t sure whether she was more surprised, confused, or disappointed by what Scott was saying. If he likes me as much as he claims, why would he do that? she wondered. I mean, Alex would never—

  She cut off the thought before she could finish it. Scott wasn’t Alex, and Alex wasn’t Scott. Wasn’t that sort of the whole point?

  “Okay,” she told Scott softly. “Thanks for being so honest. I—I guess you’re right. I’m not sure what I want to do right now.”

  Scott nodded. “Okay then,” he said with another subdued smile. “Merry Christmas, Lisa.”

  “Merry Christmas,” Lisa replied, feeling strangely unsettled as he turned and walked down the stable aisle without another word.

  “Mmm,” Cam murmured, burying his left hand in Carole’s curly hair, which had come loose from its ponytail. “Now this is what I call a merry Christmas Eve.” His right hand wrapped itself around her waist, then slid slightly lower as he pressed against her, pushing her against a soft pile of loose hay behind her.

  Carole didn’t answer. She was feeling too breathless. They had been making out since the moment they’d climbed into the hayloft for some privacy. It hadn’t been long before things had gotten a little more intense than usual, though Carole wasn’t quite sure how it had happened.

  Still kissing him, she sat up a little straighter, dislodging Cam’s wandering right hand in the process. Almost immediately, Cam rolled her over against another bale and slid his free hand under the hem of her sweater.

  Carole froze. As Cam’s hand continued to explore, she felt her heart starting to pound faster. Things were definitely starting to go further than usual. Gathering her wits, she shoved Cam away and sat up fast. “Stop,” she blurted out.

  “What’s the matter?” Cam asked, sitting up and picking some hay out of his shirt collar. “Why did you stop? Is something wrong?”

  Carole gasped for breath, trying to calm her racing heart. “It’s—I just—we can’t,” she stammered. “I don’t think we should, well …”

  Cam blinked, looking confused. “I thought we were having a nice time,” he said huskily, moving closer and taking her hand in his. “Weren’t you having fun?”

  “S-sure,” Carole said uncertainly. “But things are moving, you know, kind of fast, and I’m not sure … Well, I’m not really sure I’m ready to, you know …”

  “It’s just that I’m going to miss you like crazy this next week, Carole.” Cam’s fingertip traced a pattern on her forearm, making her shiver. “I don’t know if I can stand it.”

  “Oh.” Carole gulped. “Uh, I’m going to miss you, too. I just …” Her voice trailed off as Cam bent over her, pressing his lips on hers once again.

  “Carole! Yo, Hanson, where are you?” a voice called from somewhere below them.

  Carole broke away, feeling strangely relieved. “Oops. That sounds like Stevie,” she said, brushing the hay off her clothes as she stood. “Um, I’d better go see what she wants.”

  Cam frowned. “Don’t go,” he said, standing and grabbing her around the waist. He buried his face in her neck, kissing her softly. “Please stay. Just for a little while longer.”

  “I can’t.” With a serious effort of will, Carole pushed him away again. “I’m sorry. I have to go. But we’re still on for New Year’s Eve, right?”

  Cam sighed loudly, finally stepping back and shoving his hands in his pockets. “New Year’s Eve,” he said, his voice a bit sullen. “If I survive that long.”

  “Sorry.” Carole stood on tiptoes and kissed him softly and quickly on the lips. “But I’ll make it up to you then, I promise.”

  “Merry Christmas!” Stevie exclaimed breathlessly, peeking over the half door of Starlight’s stall. “Sorry I’m late. I had to dig your gifts out of my cubby. They sort of fell down behind some other stuff.”

  “It’s okay,” Lisa said.

  Carole smiled. “And a merry Christmas to you, too.”

  Stevie noticed that Lisa looked a little distracted, but she didn’t comment on it. She had seen Scott leaving a couple of minutes earlier, and from the subdued expression on his face, she guessed that maybe the Starlight Ride hadn’t been quite as romantic as he’d hoped. She couldn’t help being relieved at that, though she felt a little guilty about it. Unlike Alex’s new relationship—if one could call it that—with Nicole, it wasn’t so easy to dismiss Scott’s interest in Lisa. Stevie liked Scott, and she wanted him to be happy. But what if his happiness depended on taking Lisa away from Alex forever? What was she supposed to feel then?

  Of course, it might not matter either way if Lisa’s mother goes through with her crazy moving plan, she reminded herself with a flash of worry. Let’s just hope she gets over that whole thing soon, or Scott is going to be the least of our problems.

  She stepped aside as Carole and Lisa let themselves out of the stall, latching it behind them. The Starlight Ride had ended well over an hour before, and most of the other riders had already left to celebrate Christmas Eve with their families.

  But the three friends had one more thing to do. “Ready to see your fabulous gifts?” Stevie asked them, thinking ruefully of her exchange with Phil. How had she let herself get so caught up in how great those chaps were that she’d totally missed the fact that Phil didn’t really want them?

  “Ready,” Carole and Lisa said in unison.

  Soon they were all seated cross-legged on the clean-swept floor of an empty stall. Each of them had brought gifts for the others. As they unwrapped the brightly wrapped packages and oohed and aahed over the contents—a sweatshirt for Carole from Lisa, a dressage video that Carole had chosen specially for Stevie, and more—Stevie thought once again of how silly she and Phil had felt after all their grand plans had turned out the way they had.

  I guess I should have known better, she thought, holding out her arm so that Lisa could help fasten on the bracelet that was her gift. The point isn’t to spend a lot of effort picking out things. Things aren’t really all that important. It’s good friends that are the best gift of all, the one that keeps on giving.

  She smiled, wondering exactly when her own thoughts had started sounding like some kind of greeting card. But just because the sentiment was a little corny didn’t mean it wasn’t true. And Stevie was sure that, no matter what happened—with Scott and Alex, with Cam, with Lisa’s mother’s plans—that feeling would never go away. Not for the three of them.

  “This is nice, isn’t it?” she said suddenly, reaching out to envelop both of her friends in an impulsive hug. “Merry Christmas.”

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Pine Hollow series

  ONE

  “Did you decide on your music yet?” Stevie Lake asked Denise McCaskill as she stepped into the stall where an Appaloosa gelding named Chip was sniffing at his empty grain bucket. The horse cocked his head at her hopefully. “Sorry, boy.” She gave him a pat. “Not dinnertime yet.”

  She continued to stroke the horse as Denise entered the stall. At twenty-four, Denise was only eight years older than Stevie, but she had a lifetime of experience riding and caring for horses. That was why Max Regnery, the owner of Pine Hollow Stables, had made her his full-time barn manager.

  “Well?” Stevie asked expectantly when Denise didn’t answer.

  “You mean for the reception?” Denise sighed and checked the dosage of the dewormer she was holding. “No. I guess that’s one more detail to think about.”

  “Oh, but you�
��ve got to think about that!” Stevie exclaimed. She wrestled Chip’s head down so that Denise could shoot the dewormer into his mouth. The gelding pinned his ears back, shook his head, and rolled his eyes distastefully. Stevie gave the gelding’s shoulder a comforting pat and glanced at Denise. “The music is important. You don’t want to be scrambling at the last minute. Or dancing to one of Maxi’s or Jeannie’s CDs.” She grinned at the thought of what kind of music Max’s five- and three-year-old daughters liked as she followed Denise down the aisle to the next stall. There, a tall chestnut mare named Calypso was eyeing them suspiciously from the farthest corner. “But don’t worry. I’m sure Deborah can give you some ideas.”

  “I’m sure she can. I just hate to lay one more thing on her when she and Max are already being so generous.”

  Denise sounded frazzled, and Stevie shot her a sympathetic glance. Max and his wife, Deborah, had offered to throw a New Year’s Eve wedding for Denise and her fiancé, Red O’Malley, who was the head stable hand at Pine Hollow. The couple had been together for years, but recently, when Denise discovered she was pregnant, she and Red had decided it was time to get married. Now the wedding was less than a week away, and although Denise seemed more than a little nervous about the big event, Stevie could hardly wait.

  Stevie entered Calypso’s stall and stroked the mare soothingly as Denise prepared the next dose of dewormer. “Don’t worry, all the fast planning will be worth it,” she assured the bride-to-be. “Phil and I are totally looking forward to it.” She smiled, imagining how romantic it would be to dance the old year away and greet the new one with her longtime boyfriend, Phil Marsten. For once they would have New Year’s Eve plans worth mentioning. “It’ll be a real change of pace for us from last year,” she added. “Of course, nothing can compare to listening to my brothers have an hourlong argument about whether Batman could beat Superman in an arm wrestling contest, but we’ll just have to make do with a nice, romantic wedding instead.”

  “I’d vote for Superman myself.” Denise smiled, then glanced at the roof as a sudden gust of wind howled around the building. Stevie followed her gaze with a shiver, even though it was warm and cozy inside the stable. Until just a day earlier the weather had been unseasonably mild. But suddenly, on Christmas Day, winter had arrived full force, making the northern Virginia town of Willow Creek feel more like the North Pole. The temperature had dropped about fifteen degrees, and a cold wind had been moaning around the eaves and jostling the bare branches of the trees for the past thirty-six hours.

  The conversation paused as Stevie and Denise focused on getting a full dose of dewormer into Calypso, who was always difficult to treat. They had just finished and were heading for the next stall, which belonged to a longtime Pine Hollow school horse named Diablo, when Stevie heard someone in boots approaching from the far end of the aisle. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw George Wheeler hurrying toward them.

  The pudgy, pale, somewhat socially awkward sixteen-year-old was a familiar sight around the stable. George boarded his Trakehner mare, Joyride, there. Like Stevie, he was a junior at Fenton Hall, Willow Creek’s oldest and most respected private school. But although their paths crossed several times during the average day, Stevie couldn’t say she knew George well. He had a way of disappearing into the corners of life that made him hard to notice at all, let alone know. Shooting him a polite smile, she prepared to follow Denise into Diablo’s stall.

  George cleared his throat. “Stevie?” he said in his soft, uncertain voice.

  Stevie stopped and glanced at him again. “Yes?” she said, expecting him to mention something about his mare’s deworming schedule.

  “I was just wondering,” George said hesitantly. “Um, have you seen Callie lately?”

  Stevie blinked in surprise. It had been painfully apparent for some time that George had a monster crush on Stevie’s friend Callie Forester. At first Stevie had found the whole thing cute, especially when it had seemed that Callie was making an effort to befriend George. But lately George’s attention had become so relentless that it was making Callie uncomfortable, and the last Stevie had heard, her friend had told George in no uncertain terms that she wanted him to leave her alone. “As a matter of fact, I haven’t seen Callie in, like, three days,” she said. “I guess she’s been busy at home. You know, what with Christmas and all.”

  “Oh,” George said, looking disappointed. “Right.”

  Suddenly Stevie realized why George must be looking for Callie now. Three days earlier there had been some sort of accident out on the trails. George had been hurt, and Callie had been the one to call the paramedics. Stevie still wasn’t quite sure of all the details. She figured Callie would fill her in when she saw her next, but as near as she could figure it, George had been kicked by his horse while he was picking a stone out of her foot, and Callie had happened by in time to see him hit his head on a tree.

  Feeling a little more sympathetic toward George—after all, even with everything they’d been through, surely Callie would allow him to thank her for helping him out of a crisis like that—Stevie smiled at him. “Don’t worry,” she said kindly. “I’m sure she’ll be along sometime today. After all, she’s got a new horse to take care of, remember?”

  Noticing that Denise was waiting for her inside Diablo’s stall, Stevie shot George one last smile and hurried inside to help, thinking about Callie’s new horse. Callie had been a junior endurance champion in her old hometown on the West Coast. About six months earlier, her family had moved to be closer to her congressman father’s office in nearby Washington, D.C. Callie had been injured in a car accident soon after the move, but she was finally back in training. Less than a week earlier her parents had bought her a horse to train with, a spunky Appaloosa named Scooby that had all the makings of a fantastic endurance partner.

  As Stevie and Denise emerged from Diablo’s stall a few minutes later, Stevie noticed that George had disappeared. At the same moment she heard a familiar voice calling her name. Turning to glance down the aisle, she saw one of her best friends, Lisa Atwood, hurrying toward her.

  “Hey!” Stevie called brightly. “What’s up? Merry day after Christmas!”

  Lisa grimaced slightly in return. “Thanks. Same to you.”

  Stevie peered at her closely. “What’s the matter?”

  Lisa shrugged and sighed. “Oh, just the usual,” she said with a touch of bitterness in her voice. “I just finished having another lovely discussion with Mom about moving.”

  Stevie winced. By discussion, she knew that Lisa actually meant argument. There had been a lot of “discussions” going on in the Atwood household ever since Mrs. Atwood had decided, out of the blue, that she wanted to move to New Jersey, where her sister, Marianne, lived with her family. Stevie knew Mr. and Mrs. Atwood’s divorce had been hard on Lisa, but it had been even harder on Mrs. Atwood. Lisa’s mother had never really recovered from the blow of having her husband of twenty-seven years walk out on her, and she wasn’t afraid to share her pain with those around her, particularly Lisa.

  Denise greeted Lisa and then glanced at her watch. “Since we’re done here, I suppose I’d better go see if Maureen needs any help with the schedule,” she told Stevie.

  Stevie wrinkled her nose slightly at the mention of Maureen Chance, Pine Hollow’s newest full-time stable hand. She wasn’t sure why that reaction came so automatically. Stevie tended to like most people until they gave her a reason to feel otherwise. And Maureen certainly hadn’t done anything to her in the three and a half days she’d been working at Pine Hollow. Well, not unless you count sneaking a cigarette in the bathroom, Stevie added to herself, remembering how she’d caught the woman smoking despite Max’s strict rule against it. At the time she’d planned to say something to Max, but after thinking it over, she’d decided that was too much like squealing. Instead, she had determined to keep a close eye on Maureen whenever she could. If it happened again, she would have to say something. Stevie wasn’t a tattletale, but she knew be
tter than to take any chances when it came to fire safety around the stable.

  “Do you need us to do anything else?” Stevie asked Denise. It was a long-standing Pine Hollow tradition that all riders helped out with stable chores. That allowed Max to keep his staff small and his prices low.

  Denise scratched her ear and shrugged. “If you wouldn’t mind, Patch and Congo need to be brought in from the south pasture,” she said. “Red is using them in a lesson this evening, so don’t worry about grooming. The students can do it.”

  “Sure, no problem.” Stevie waved as Denise hurried off, then turned her full attention back to Lisa. “So let’s hear it,” she said bluntly. “Did she change her mind yet?”

  Lisa sighed. “No. In fact, she seems more excited than ever about the whole idea. It’s like she thinks New Jersey is some kind of promised land where all her dreams will come true, and I’m the evil grinch who wants to steal her happiness.”

  “Really?”

  “Just about.” Lisa rolled her eyes. “Anyway, she really does seem psyched. She talks to Aunt Marianne like every hour on the hour, practically.” She grinned weakly. “Hey, maybe if I’m lucky, she’ll eat up so much money on long-distance bills that there won’t be enough left to pay for a moving van.”

  Stevie smiled automatically, though she didn’t think anything that Lisa was saying was very funny. She sounds as if she’s starting to accept this, she realized uneasily. It sounds like she doesn’t think there’s even a chance of changing her mom’s mind anymore.

  The thought was very disturbing. If Lisa wasn’t going to fight to stay in Willow Creek, what was stopping her mother from packing them up and leaving right after New Year’s as she planned?

  For the first time the full weight of that possibility started to sink in. When Stevie had first heard about Mrs. Atwood’s plans, she had scoffed—no way would any mother force her daughter to move right in the middle of her senior year. Mrs. Atwood might be a little nuts, but she wasn’t totally crazy. At least Stevie hadn’t thought so before this had happened. Now she wasn’t so sure.