Claiming Christmas (Alex and Alexander Book 3)

by Natalie Keller Reinert

  I sighed. Kerri’s formal education aspirations were taking her away from her valuable job of helping me do absolutely everything. “I’m not going to pay you more when you have an Equine Science degree, you know.”

  “I know it.” Kerri pulled the golf cart up in front of the barn entrance. Several horses nickered a hopeful hello, evidently suspecting an early supper might be offered. “That’s why I’m going to start my own business.”

  “You wouldn’t. You can’t live without me.” I leaned my head back against the seat. “Grab the training book from the tack room, wouldja? I want to go over it with Alexander tonight.”

  Kerri cast me a withering look, which said all she wanted it to about my decision to be lazy in the golf cart while she did the rounds to check bandages, buckets, and hay nets. I closed my eyes in response. Baiting Kerri was better than ice cream.

  ***

  Linda called while we were going through the training log. Alexander took one look at me that meant business, so I got up and picked up the phone. “Hi Linda,” I said warily. “How are things.”

  “ALEX!”

  Oh, dear God. Enthusiasm was so tiring. “That’s me.”

  “I have news.”

  “Okay.” I rolled my eyes at Alexander, who took a long sip of wine and smiled at me.

  “Little Wendy is very excited! She is going to meet you on Saturday morning at the security gate. Her Aunt Karen is bringing her, but she doesn’t know a thing about horses so you will have to be vigilant! And keep an eye on her! Her aunt might not know any better and let her get too close to a horse!”

  So far, Linda was using far more exclamation points than I was comfortable with. She was also asking me to do the impossible. Baby-sit a kid and her aunt on a race day — on a stakes race day. Something told me she would never have asked her husband’s racing trainer to do something so ludicrous. “Linda, you understand I have a horse in that day, right?”

  There was a pause on the other end. I imagined Linda’s carefully made up face collapsing into a frown of confusion, then realized that of course that wasn’t possible thanks to Botox. I settled for Linda looking blank, which was her normal expression when I was forced into stilted conversation with her, so actually that was much easier to picture. “Of course,” she finally said, a hint of a stammer in her words. “But you did — we agreed — she is coming with you to the races, that was the entire request —”

  “I know that. I’m just saying that I can’t be the chaperone for a little kid here. I am a racehorse trainer, I am not a baby-sitter —” I paused to throw a wadded-up napkin at Alexander, who was chortling at my predicament — “And you’re going to have to be sure whoever is the baby-sitter doesn’t need me watching them every second of the day. They can show up and they can watch, but they have to stay out of my way and not bug me. Tell them that… nicely… will you please? I don’t want them to think I’m some sort of tour guide. I’m a professional —”

  “I understand you’re a professional,” Linda said in a more steely tone.

  “Well, good.” I chewed my lip for a minute, trying to think of something else to say. Linda was helpfully silent. Alexander had given up teasing me and had gone back to the training ledger. I saw him frowning at a work-out time and decided I’d wasted enough time on Linda. “Tell them I’ll see them Saturday,” I finished. “Night, Linda. Appreciate all your hard work.”

  “Yes, thank you —” Linda was saying, but I hung up.

  “I see you questioning that time,” I told Alexander. “Here’s what happened…”

  CHAPTER THREE

  I have to admit, I obsessed a lot about the kid on the long drive to south Florida. Because Kerri was right — I wasn’t a person kids liked. Or talked to. Or looked at without running away. I would never have told Kerri that all her teasing the other day had gotten under my skin — she would have felt terrible — but I had to admit, this one really worried me.

  I thought kids could tell I didn’t like them. Kids are like dogs or horses — they still have all their natural instincts in place. They’re still half-wild, feral creatures, trying to decide if they want to follow the rules or run away and live in the woods. They sense things that adults do not, because adults have given in to following the rules, and don’t need those survival senses anymore. That’s my theory, anyway, as half-baked as it might be. Some people attract children like magnets; I do not, and I have never really let that bother me. Horses are far more interesting, in my opinion. And you can leave them in the barn at the end of the work-day.

  But this kid wanted to meet me. What was that about? Why on earth would anyone want to meet me, for starters, kid or not? Who was I? Just a horse trainer with a few wins, nothing special. I was used to being in Alexander’s shadow, that much was true, but even then, Alexander was only horse-famous. No one outside of the racing world had a clue who he was, and very few people even in the industry would have recognized him on the street, or even on the backside. And neither of us were exactly setting the world on fire with our horses. Personal Best was doing nicely, but Luna was training like a dud in south Florida. She hadn’t won a race since Saratoga. The others were all holding their own at their levels, but I just didn’t have a world-beating stable right now. And that was okay — it just made this situation particularly strange.

  Alexander wasn’t much help; he found the whole thing equal parts amusing and bizarre. “I don’t know, why would anyone want to meet you?” he teased when I asked him what he thought, and I nearly drove off the road when I reached across the sedan’s interior to give him a well-deserved smack over the head.

  “You’re not helping,” I told him, and he laughed.

  “This is what you get,” he went on after he had laughed his fill. “Just think, if you hadn’t been playing hooky from the telephone you could have picked it up and said no to Linda without my ever knowing a thing.”

  And that was when I knew he’d told Linda I’d escort the kid around the racetrack just to get back at me for my vacation from the world. “You’re the worst,” I told him.

  “You love me.”

  I turned up the radio then. Because I did, but he didn’t need to hear me say it to know it was true.

  And anyway, I wouldn’t have said no to a little girl’s Christmas wish. Would I?

  ***

  Personal Best had picked up this way of leaning out over his stall webbing to see me, his ears pricked and his eyes bright, bellowing out a welcoming whinny as if he had thought he’d never lay eyes on me again, and then retreating to the back of his stall and refusing to come and see me until I offered him a peppermint. It was not at all becoming of a great racehorse, who should be professional and workmanlike at all times, and it was also absolutely adorable. I leaned over his webbing and crinkled a piece of plastic in my hand to let him know I had the mint he was waiting for, all the while admiring his hind end. Big muscled quarters, defined and gleaming, with his tail, that finally reached his fetlocks, freshly brushed and shimmering. “You’re not a baby anymore,” I told him. “Look at that tail.” He cocked an ear in my direction and turned to look at me. I held up the mint and he acquiesced with a sigh, walking to the webbing and digging his nose into my palm for the candy.

  “Sweet boy,” I told him, leaning my head against his for just a moment. Then he pulled back, abruptly, and regarded me with his soft brown eyes while he chomped at the treat. Mint breath spilled from his mouth as if he had just brushed his teeth. “Minty fresh,” I said, and moved down the line to see Luna, who was waiting for me, leaning against her webbing, alert to the possibility of peppermints.

  She took her mint more daintily, with a little wiggle of the upper lip to scoop the candy from my fingertips; Personal Best would have eaten my fingers if I tried to just hand him a treat like that. While she crunched down on the peppermint I admired her funny-face blaze, the big blob of chestnut smack in the middle of the white streak that ran from forelock to nose. “I love your silly face,” I told her
, and she snorted, blowing peppermint breath all over me.

  I sighed with happiness, because these were my children, my two chestnut children, and I had missed them so much.

  Alexander was talking to Brian, the trainer who was handling our horses while they were in south Florida. I thought about joining them, then let my gaze wander down the shed row, past the nodding heads of the other horses, out to the dazzling sunshine at the end of the barn. Twenty more white barns, glowing in the sunlight, marched away on a tree-lined training track: Sunshine South was a lovely training center in the western reaches of civilization, just before solid land tipped into the water-meadows of the Everglades.

  The Everglades seemed to influence the weather here, keeping the air sopping wet and the sun scorching, just the way the swamp liked it. Here it was mid-morning and already hot and humid; the Miami area had another climate completely from north Florida. It was still summer here, even if the calendar claimed it was already November. I fretted about the heat for a few moments. Personal Best ran okay in the heat, but I hadn’t forgotten the night he’d been so sick in Saratoga — it had been hot then, too, while we waited for the weather to break and the rain to come at last. I wished we were back up at Tampa already, where the temperatures would be a little more sensible, and we were closer to home. I pushed Personal Best out of the stall door and peered in at his water bucket; it was half-empty.

  “Good boy,” I told him. “Stay hydrated.” I didn’t pull water buckets before races; the very idea of not allowing an athlete water on a hot day confused me.

  My phone buzzed then; I looked down at it while Personal Best lipped at my hair, pulling strands from my pony tail. Sunshine South security. “Hello?”

  “Got visitors here for Cotswold Farm?”

  “Barn three,” I said tightly.

  “Gotta send an escort.”

  I sighed. “Be right there.”

  ***

  Have you ever seen someone light up, truly light up, as if there is an incandescent bulb suddenly switched on underneath their skin? When Wendy turned the corner and saw Personal Best, that’s exactly what happened.

  She was a plain little thing, with a pinched, nervous face. When I first saw her, she was clinging to the shirt of her chaperone — her aunt, I supposed. Her t-shirt had a picture of a sparkly pony on it; her pink leggings were a little baggy around her skinny legs. With dark hair pulled into a tight ponytail, highlighting that sharp little face, she reminded me of a frightened mouse. But I guessed she was just another poor rural kid, growing up in a rusty single-wide and wearing hand-me-downs. I felt a pang of sympathy, thinking of her and so many kids like her, the ones I saw every time I drove to the feed store or into town. This was why I didn’t like kids, I realized, walking up to meet her. Because I hated to see their confusion and unhappiness when the world got too big and real. I hated seeing their dreams tempered by reality.

  After a few awkward hellos, Wendy followed me back to the barn silently; her Aunt Karen, who appeared to be about twenty-one and utterly fascinated by whatever game she was playing on her phone, trailed behind. I took a couple quick glances behind me as we walked up the drive: Wendy was gazing around her with wide eyes, taking in the world of racehorses that she was excluded from back in Ocala; Karen flipped her finger across her phone and occasionally stumbled on a rough patch of asphalt.

  Once in the barn, though, once she saw Personal Best, everything changed.

  That pinched little face, nervous and suspicious and worried, became utterly illuminated. It was as if she was another person entirely. She stood still in the shed row, staring at Personal Best’s white-blazed face while he regarded her calmly, her eyes wide and her mouth open, and we all just stopped in our tracks and watched her, impossibly moved by what we were seeing.

  And then Personal Best neighed, shook his head, and disappeared into his stall.

  That was his trick for me.

  I stood still for a moment and tried to digest what had just happened. My colt was a traitor, that was what had just happened! How could he have whinnied like that for someone else?

  But then I had to get over it and get moving: Wendy was already making a beeline for his stall door, and I had a feeling the little snot would dive under the webbing and dart right into the stall if I wasn’t there to stop her. He might have told her something in that whinny, but it wasn’t an invitation to go into his stall and wrap her skinny arms around his neck, I knew that much.

  Sure enough, I grabbed Wendy by the arm just as she started to stoop under the webbing. “Easy there, princess,” I drawled, dragging her back from the stall door. Inside, I could see Personal Best’s hindquarters turned towards the door. Either he had expanded this trick to include all visitors (in hopes of getting more peppermints) or I had just been seriously betrayed. “No matter how nicely they talk to you, they don’t want you in their house, okay? Trust me on this one.”

  She scowled up at me, and I was taken aback by the ferocity in her gaze. Though she be but little, she be fierce… from Shakespeare to my shed row, that much was for certain. But this was a girl who had been made tough by misadventure, I reminded myself. She had been knocked around, and things were only getting worse. If she learned to fight for what she wanted, so much the better for her — just, it needed to be tempered with common sense. “Listen up, Wendy,” I said in a lower voice, so that the spectators behind us couldn’t hear. “The best horsewoman in the world still has to learn her barn manners from someone older. So listen to me and I’ll teach you what you need to know, okay?”

  She regarded me sullenly for a moment, her hazel eyes boring into mine with an adult-like glare that was unsettling, to say the least. Then her features seemed to soften, as if she was letting go of tension, and she nodded. “I can listen,” she muttered. “I want to learn.”

  I was a kid once. I know, I know, it’s shocking. But I remembered — I remembered being a kid and being obsessed with horses and reading about them constantly and thinking that I knew what was up. And I remembered, suddenly, how mean I thought my first riding instructor was. The way she wouldn’t let me do a thing without her hands on mine. The way I couldn’t make a move without her permission, her supervision, her constant instruction. And the way I somehow, without knowing it, not only stopped resenting her for that, but stopped needing her for that. She knew when it was safe to let me go, let me get hurt a little, without scaring me away from horses forever.

  I needed that wisdom now. I was a trainer; now I needed to be a teacher.

  Start small, see what the horse knows already.

  “Have you ever touched a horse before?” I asked Wendy, who crinkled her brow in response. “I’m not going to tell on you,” I added.

  “My neighbors have horses,” she whispered, casting a side-long glance at her aunt, who was standing with her arms folded, watching us suspiciously. “I’m not allowed. But I’ve petted them. And… I’ve gotten on one’s back. He didn’t do nothing.”

  “Oh Wendy,” I whispered, joining in with her spirit of conspiracy. “You’re so bad!” And I grinned to take the edge off the accusation. “Don’t do that anymore, okay? You need to learn how to handle horses safely or you could get hurt, right?”

  Wendy nodded slowly. “He didn’t do nothing,” she repeated. And then, resolutely: “Okay. I’ll listen.”

  “So here’s what you’re going to do…” I took her hand in mine and put a peppermint in her flat palm, slipping it out of its plastic wrapper as I did so.

  Personal Best immediately turned his head, ears pricked. I crinkled the wrapper again and he was heading for the door in an instant. “Pig,” I giggled, and Wendy did the same. The laughter seemed to relax her; she let me take hold of her fingers and bend them backwards so that there was no way they could end up in the colt’s mouth. “And here we go — ” I put her palm up to Personal Best as he leaned over the webbing and chomp took the peppermint, his teeth just scraping at her palm. Wendy’s eyes widened but she didn’t move
; I had to lower her hand for her.

  “And that’s how it’s done,” I said, moving her back a step or two so that the colt couldn’t dribble minty drool on her pink pony t-shirt. “You fed Personal Best his favorite candy.”

  Wendy’s face was a sight to see: something between ecstasy and terror. That’s horses, I thought. That’s working with horses in a nutshell.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  After that things became more interesting. My nerves relaxed, and I settled into my teaching role with pleasure. I had a few hours before we had to get Personal Best over to the track, and Alexander and Brian were more than capable of making sure the gear was ready to go and the horse was tidy, so I decided to give the kid a thorough look at my world.

  I started seeing the day with the racehorses through a more wondering lens, taking in the striking beauty in the everyday sights that I had grown hardened to. The steam rising from the backs of hot horses as they were bathed after their work-outs, the pattern of footfalls on concrete as horses were jogged up and checked for soundness in the parking lot in front of the barn, the constant rumble of nickers and shrill whinnies, the shouts from riders as young horses danced and jigged and hopped in their athletic excitement. The racetrack, the training center: they were the backdrop of my life, and their charms had grown questionable as the daily grind took over the enchantment of finding myself in the place I had grown up dreaming of. But it was all new for Wendy, and her very delight was thrilling to me.

  “What’s that?” she asked about everything in the tack room, as I pointed out the training yokes, the different bits, the latex wraps, the wickedly long safety pins we used on bandages. “What’s it for?” was even better — explaining how the yoke helped riders keep young horses straight and in line, how the neckstrap was like a little extra security handle, how velcro fastenings might become loose and dangerous when a horse was galloping and how bandage pins kept their wraps safely in place. She’d read books, that much was obvious — she understood bridles and snaffle bits and girths and saddles. But there isn’t much literature for kids about horse racing, and however much it looks like English riding with very small saddles — it isn’t.