Ambition: (The Eventing Series Book 1)

by Natalie Keller Reinert

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  About the Author

  Keep reading with Natalie Keller Reinert’s equestrian

  For Cory - You are always my support.

  Ambition

  Copyright © 2014 Natalie Keller Reinert

  All rights reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. All resemblances to places or people, alive or dead, are purely coincidental.

  Cover Photo: Holly Tonini - www.hollytonini.smugmug.com

  ISBN: 1499527985

  ISBN-13: 978-1499527988

  CHAPTER ONE

  Use one word to describe yourself.

  Dynamo leaned over the stall webbing and nudged at my shoulder. I smiled and tickled his chin whiskers, prickly where I’d let them stay a little long. I didn’t like to cut a horse’s whiskers too short; they were little antennas, keeping a horse from bumping his nose in the dark. Of course, Dynamo rarely experienced total darkness. Even when he was outside at night, there was a light burning over his paddock. I liked to be able to see him, at any time, day or night.

  “If I were to describe you with one word, Dyno, it would be adorable.”

  Dynamo retreated into the stall, clearly affronted. As well he should be, I figured — he was an athlete, he was a very manly horse. Not a kitten, but a panther.

  Still adorable, though, no denying it.

  “You two are really close,” a voice said, sounding impressed. “That’s nice.”

  I glanced down the stable aisle. A girl was sitting on her own tack trunk, dressed like I was in boots and breeches, polo shirt in her barn colors, hard hat at her side. The stall door next to her was closed; I saw a dark horse within, watching us through the stall bars. “He’s my baby,” I admitted reluctantly. “Doesn’t yours like to socialize?”

  “This princess?” The girl looked over her shoulder at the horse behind her, as if she hadn’t known the horse was lurking there. She shook her head at the mare, and the horse disappeared into the depths of the stall. “She bit me an hour ago. I’m surprised you missed that. I shouted like a little kid. So now she’s on time-out.” She considered, then got up to undo the latch. “I should probably let her apologize, since our ride time is coming up soon. Otherwise she’ll go out there swishing her tail and cranky, and we’ll have a terrible ride.”

  I was sorry I’d said anything.

  She slid the door open and leaned over the stall webbing. “Amber… come on over… come on, Amber.”

  The horse ignored her. The girl shook her head ruefully. “She’s never really liked me.” She watched Dynamo for a few seconds — he was rooting around in my pony-tail now, rubbing his upper lip around the elastic band. He loved to pull it down and make me look even messier than usual. “I’d love to have that kind of relationship with a horse,” she said wistfully.

  “We’ve been through a lot,” I replied simply, and looked the other way, out the stable doors where the green grass and black-board fences of Ocala went rolling by in gentle swells. I wasn’t here to make friends or tell my life story to nosey competitors.

  I was here to win.

  I didn’t have enough money to be in the horse business, that was the simple truth. It didn’t matter how many people told me that showing horses was a rich man’s sport. There wasn’t anything else for me to do. There wasn’t anything else I cared about.

  My parents caved early and paid for riding lessons. All through elementary school and middle school I rode once a week, jouncing around a ring for an hour on a bored school-horse, and that was supposed to be enough. When it wasn’t, I managed to find ways to work for riding lessons. My riding instructor, Laurie, knew a good thing when she saw it. I was willing to do anything at all to ride for an extra twenty minutes. Scrub out drains, clean out gutters, muck out stalls. I was child labor and I was proud of it.

  Working at the riding stable ate any social time I might have had, and I didn’t care. There were no parties, no dates, no prom nights. I wandered through my school years drawing windswept manes and pricked ears onto the brown paper covers of my text books, and, as soon as I realized no one was going to notice or care if I wasn’t sitting slumped in the back of the room, skipping class to strip out stalls instead. Laurie was a fantastic rider, a decent riding instructor, and a very savvy businesswoman. She dangled rides on half-broke ponies in front of me in exchange for barn chores, and I snapped up every chance to climb onto her auction finds and rodeo rejects.

  I didn’t have the money to ride good horses, but I was willing to risk life and limb and expulsion to get on any horse I could. And so I happily agreed to ride outrageously bad horses: horses who bucked, horses who bolted, horses who flipped over and horses who lay down in the dirt when they were tired of working. But all that badness made me a supremely confidant rider, able to stay in the saddle through just about any display of dangerous behavior.

  My happiest hours were spent in the saddle, with brief time-outs when some auction bronc managed to get me out of it. I always got back on. Always. Laurie loved me. “I can put you on anything and in six weeks I have a lesson pony,” she’d brag when she showed me off to friends. I’d shrug and blush and go get on another horse. I didn’t know what else to do.

  No one else at the barn loved me, of course. I was a working-class kid in a rich kid’s world. Laurie financed her dressage and eventing career by teaching kids to ride on the auction ponies I had taught some manners, then selling their parents on very expensive push-button show-horses. Osprey Ridge catered to extravagantly wealthy girls, and by the time we were teenagers together, the lines had been drawn. I was on one side, the hired help, and they were on the other, making my life difficult.

  Those girls cemented my distrust of humankind. They delighted in nasty little teases like throwing their horse’s sweaty tack in the dirt so that I’d have extra work to do in that night’s clean-up, or “spilling” a drop of shampoo into a water trough I was filling so that I had to spend twenty minutes rinsing out the ensuing foam volcano that came frothing over the trough’s edges. The trouble they made for me was demoralizing like nothing else in my life. I was never ashamed to throw horse manure into a wheelbarrow in exchange for some saddle time. But those girls thought I should be, and they did everything in their power to let me know that I wasn’t like them. I wasn’t good enough for them.

  Which made me more determined than anything to be the very best. If you c
an’t join them, beat them and rub their noses in it, that was my motto. The horse show ribbons that I managed to bring home were strung up along the school ponies’ stalls for months. They grew flyspecked and mildewed, but I didn’t care. I didn’t need the ribbons in my bedroom; I needed them at the barn, where the other girls could see them and be reminded that I could out-ride them on Laurie’s auction nags any day of the week.

  They laughed when I brought home Dynamo, too. They didn’t laugh so hard when we won the Novice Regional Championships two years later, or the Training Regional Championships the following year. By the Preliminary Regionals, most of them had gone off to college in Tallahassee or Gainesville or farther afield. I won anyway, for fun. With any luck, a few of them still had subscriptions to The Chronicle of the Horse. I smiled very, very broadly for the camera. You could open up to the Eventing section and count my teeth, grinning at the world, but especially at Ashleigh Cooper and Winnie Hill and Elizabeth Rothsberg, busy failing English 101 while I made my dreams come true.

  And I went on making my dreams come true, while they were off studying or going to frat parties or whatever it was college students did. My grandfather had left me college money — the only stroke of luck I’d ever had.

  I took it and bought a farm with it.

  Of course there was a fight. I had been arguing with my parents about college for two solid years. They wanted me to go to school — anything would have pleased them at this point. Equine science, veterinary medicine, business administration… anything. I was working for Laurie full-time at Osprey Ridge, mucking in the morning, riding problem horses in the afternoon, and working with my own auction find, Dynamo, at night after evening feed.

  Dressage in the moonlight: it sounds so romantic! But there are mosquitoes in the moonlight, too. We practiced our half-pirouettes and our tempi changes, and swatted at bugs in between movements. We bathed in citronella and pyrethrins. But we got better, without anyone to bother or tease or demand my help or slam a car door at a key moment to make my horse miss a distance or flub a transition. Aside from the occasional lesson from Laurie, who helped me get over the troublesome hurdles like flying lead changes and skinny fences, we worked alone.

  Until that was the only kind of happiness I knew — just me and my horse.

  I told my parents that Dynamo and I had something special, something that couldn’t be put on ice while I wasted time at college. They disagreed, of course. How could I give up the college fund? Did I know how lucky I was to have a college fund?

  I saw that money as a cash prize, for getting through my entire childhood years as a rider without a dime to my name. And I knew exactly what I was going to do with that cash, too, as soon as I could get my hands on it.

  I waited. I worked, and I rode, and I showed, and I waited. Until I turned twenty-one, took that money, and found a place to be alone with Dynamo… and a few other horses, to pay the bills, of course.

  Green Winter Farm, my own little ten acres in a dryish corner on the outskirts of Florida’s horse country. My own (used, slightly dented) dually pick-up. My own (used, slightly more dented) horse trailer. My own barn, my own paddocks, my own double-wide trailer. Or manufactured home, as the realtor put it. But who cared? It was a place for me to sleep. I would have taken a stall in the barn, if only to have my own farm.

  Green Winter Farm, my first great brush with luck. Here was where it would all begin: my stunning career, my name in lights, my magazine covers and my shiny medals, The Star-Spangled Banner playing in the background as the flag was raised on high. This was it.

  And here I was, a year later, sitting cross-legged on a tack trunk with my head tipped back against the wall of Dynamo’s stall in the show barn at Longacres, waiting for my audition ride in front of the Athletic Charities for Equestrians judges. Broke. Down on my luck. Jaw set with determination.

  Ready to win.

  The application hadn’t been too long, in keeping with the common conception that horsemen and women were too busy with the everyday struggles of running a farm, training horses, and teaching snot-nosed kids how to ride, to be expected to spend anything more than twenty minutes or so word-smithing their talents in a desperate grab for all of their hopes and dreams on a platter. So there was no essay question or anything like that, despite the fact that most horse people are artistic, creative types who could write like a Rhodes Scholar if they’d spent any time paying attention in class instead of working out how they were going to turn babysitting money into a full season of events and how many favors they’d have to do for their trainer in order to bum a ride in the horse trailer to the next show.

  Most of the questions were straight-forward: what level have you ridden at, what level have you trained a horse to, how many times have you competed, at what level, etc. But the one that had me stumped, the one that made me stand up and walk away from the clutter of papers and Diet Coke cans that passed for my kitchen table, was the one that couldn’t be easily quantified or backed up with a file folder full of entry forms, dressage tests, and hand-scrawled receipts from event secretaries.

  “Use one word to describe yourself.”

  Were they kidding? I was stumped. I didn’t describe myself. I didn’t think about myself. I didn’t worry about myself. I worried about my riding, I worried about my horses.

  But it had to be answered.

  I finally sat back down at the table, picked up my pen, and wrote “ambitious.”

  It’s not the worst thing in the world. It isn’t a bad word. Ambitious is kinder than ruthless, softer than self-absorbed, less damning than hard-hearted. Ambitious wants to get ahead and works hard, ambitious is dedicated and a go-getter. Ambitious doesn’t necessarily run rough-shod over the competition, doesn’t implicitly indicate a lack of compassion or empathy or normal human emotion.

  Ambitious just wants to be at the top, to be the very best, more than anything else in the world.

  And what’s wrong with that?

  CHAPTER TWO

  A shadow fell over the barn aisle. I got up and inspected the sky: there was a big black thundercloud, promising the usual afternoon storm. They were the double-edged sword we all loved and hated here in Ocala. Whether you were a farm laborer or a horse trainer or a convenience-store-loiterer (all common jobs in northwest Marion County) you simultaneously longed for the break in the heat, and cursed the lightning and floods that came along for the ride. The temperature today was off the charts for June, the mercury pressing against the top of the thermometer somewhere near one hundred degrees, and the torpid air sat heavily in my lungs and clouded my vision. I kept waiting for the drumroll of fat raindrops on the steel roof, but it seemed to be hovering just out of range, keeping its cool breeze and its refreshing rainfall selfishly to itself. I sighed, hot breath on hot air.

  I felt sleepy and stupid and useless.

  It was the biggest day of my life.

  I wandered back over to Dynamo’s stall and leaned against the wall. Dynamo leaned over his stall guard, straining the brass snaps and the blue vinyl with his chest, and pressed his big chestnut head against my shoulder.

  “Sweet baby,” I murmured, cupping one hand over a fluttering nostril, “Stop nudging Mummy in her poor tired back.”

  His boney face was damp in my hand. Even with a box fan blowing into the stall, Dynamo was hot just waiting for our audition ride. We were the last team on the schedule, and the weather had grown thicker and more Amazonian with every horse and rider combination who had gone clopping out of the barn and towards the arena at the top of the hill. They’d all come back drenched with sweat, red-faced with heat, but I had a sinking feeling that it would be worst of all for Dynamo and me. The last ride, in the very middle of the hot afternoon — what kind of luck was that?

  I’d always thought of myself as having pretty bad luck, and it looked like Dynamo shared it. Poor boy, I’m so sorry. In another life, I must have done things wrong. I must have refused to share my rag doll in some nineteenth-century nursery;
I must have lied and cheated to get ahead when others were starving during the Great Depression or sacrificing all during great wars. If we are the same person born again and again, then I probably wheeled and dealed and lied and stole to get my paws on some big chunk of land or a particularly fine piece of horseflesh. I surely earned my champagne taste, my beer budget, and this afternoon’s oppressive weather in another misspent life.

  Ha-ha, the joke’s on you, universe, I thought, running a finger down Dynamo’s jagged white stripe, ear to nose between his dark eyes. I’d do it all again. I will have horses, I will be the best, with or without the help of luck.

  The girl from down the aisle led her horse out, throwing me a lopsided grin as she went. Her horse was sweating between the hindquarters, already feeling the heat. “Good luck,” I said without conviction, and she nodded her thanks. Just beyond the stable door, the rider who had just returned was throwing down her sweaty tack in a heap in the aisle before she dragged her tired horse towards the outside wash-rack.

  “You’ll be fine,” I whispered to Dynamo. “You’re a Florida-bred, and so am I. We can handle a little June heat, can’t we?” And I kissed him on the nose.

  “You love that horse,” a male voice observed.

  I’d forgotten there was anyone else in the barn and I jumped, startled. But I looked down the aisle and there he was, curled up with his feet on his tack trunk, flipping the pages of a dressage magazine. He appeared ridiculously calm, considering he was here for the same reason that all of us were, a big fat financial grant from ACE and an upper-level horse owned by a corporate sponsor. His name was Peter Morrison, according to the schedule the committee had sent, and his horse was Regina. They’d be the second-to-last to audition today, going before me.

  I was dimly aware of his presence in the eventing world. We had competed against one another in large preliminary competitions over the past year, but he hadn’t been at the Southeast Championships. I thought he might be from California, or New York. Not that it mattered. I didn’t know him, and I didn’t intend to get to know him. Other people were only a distraction from the prize — and he wanted the same prize that I did.