Ambition: (The Eventing Series Book 1)

by Natalie Keller Reinert

  There wasn’t a bang or anything to mark the end of the call; angry, explosive, cathartic, phone-shattering slams just don’t happen in this modern life anymore. We were denied that with cool technological efficiency. She pressed the red button on her phone, and that was that. Back to her air-conditioned, modern life, making deals or whatever it was she did all day. My mother was in property management. It was a new career; she liked to change careers. I didn’t ask what property management meant; I didn’t care. It didn’t affect me, did it?

  The only thing that mattered was my farm, my horses. They were my future. I wasn’t interested in what other people did with their time. They weren’t me, so what difference could it possibly make what they did?

  I sighed and slid the phone into the back pocket of my threadbare cut-offs. The silence of the barn echoed around me. The horses were outside, enjoying a little freedom before I brought them back in for shade and the manufactured breeze of their box fans. I loved it when the barn was occupied: twelve little horsies, neat and tidy in their boxes, heads poking out to watch me while I swept up the aisle, nickering their encouragement each time I disappeared into the feed room, ears pricked with their eternal hope for surprise grain or bonus hay. It was like living in a snow-globe, or a magazine advertisement for a stabling architecture firm; it was like the fairy-tale existence I had always known would characterize a life spent with horses.

  But right now, the reality of life was very much in my face. A hay, dirt, and manure-strewn barn aisle. Eleven dirty stalls (and one half-cleaned one). A hay pallet that was discouragingly empty of hay. A low rumble from the west that signified the Gulf of Mexico was already stirring with plans to flood my riding arena and trump my carefully-plotted training calendar.

  Sometimes, I was very much afraid that my mother was right.

  I worked in silence for a little while longer, dumping wheelbarrows into the bin situated beneath the old ramp of the loading dock. Once this had been a broodmare barn on a much larger breeding farm, and the loading ramp, covered in grass and fenced on either side with crumbling wooden rails, had been for the huge semi-trailers that were used to transport racehorses and high-end breeding stock around the country, or even, in this case, from one section of the farm to another. I didn’t have such fancy transportation for my horses, though. Just the four-horse trailer parked out along the edge of the parking lot, waiting for the next event. Which wouldn’t be anytime soon, I thought regretfully, wiping sweat from my face with the front of my tank top. It was too damn hot. I really shouldn’t even be training in this weather.

  But there was no time to spare.

  I just had to be careful and watch the horses.

  And myself. I had nearly ended up in the back of ambulance in all the confusion at Longacres yesterday. I blushed to think of it; the way that Peter Morrison had held my wrist, checking my pulse, calling over his shoulder that my skin was cold and I was going into heat stroke.

  “No I’m not,” I hissed through numb lips. “Give me my horse!”

  “Shush, take it easy,” he said, leaning over me, and I wasn’t so far gone into heat stroke or shock or PTSD to not notice what chiseled cheekbones Peter Morrison had, or what shockingly blue eyes, brilliant as the sky at that magic hour after sunset, shining down at me from sun-browned skin. I stilled for just a moment, arrested by his touch and his gaze, and for a strange moment I wasn’t thinking about horses at all.

  Ugh. I was disgusting myself. I was mucking out a stall, surrounded by manure and soiled shavings and stinking to high heaven of ammonia and I was the most disgusting thing in it. How could I even think things like that? Lying there in the dirt, with my hard hat pushed back and sweat trailing muddy rivulets down my dirty cheeks, gazing up at that entitled shoe-in for the award I wanted, I needed, while God only knew what was going on with my horse… looking at him like some kind of love-struck Juliet…

  Well, that was my name.

  Another reason to be angry at my mother this morning. I mentally added it to the list. Why would you name your daughter after someone who fell in love with the wrong person and died heart-broken? It was like she had been wishing bad luck on me. I already have quite enough on my own, Mom, I thought viciously, pulling the dirty water buckets from the stall. I staggered down the barn aisle, wishing that Monty would just finish his damn water instead of dunking all his hay in it, and threw the water out in the parking lot.

  And then I set down the buckets and looked out at the empty parking lot.

  It was big, made for all the employees who had once worked here to park their cars. When the realtor had left me to walk around and imagine my domain here, I had looked at this lot and thought it would be perfect: lots of room for clients to store their horse trailers, lots of room for their SUVs and luxury sedans to park when they came to see how their horses were doing. Room for my working student to park her car when she lived here, working in the barn for room and board and riding lessons.

  Nothing in it now but my trailer, off in the corner, and my truck, pulled up close to the barn. The few clients I had with horse trailers took their rigs home, to ferry around their other horses. The SUVs and luxury sedans had never materialized. And my working student, Becky — well, she was part-time and didn’t even live here anymore. Which was why I was doing the stalls instead of riding this morning.

  I sat down on one of the railroad ties that lined the parking lot’s edge. It was another hot day, and I was sore from falling off yesterday, and dammit, I deserved a break, didn’t I? Of course, taking even a short break meant I wouldn’t have time to get on all my horses today. But who was I kidding? I had a barn to clean, the skies were already growling, and my elbow felt like I had shut it in a car door. I must have landed on it after Dynamo fell. I was lucky that was the least of my injuries. Poor Dynamo had some heat in the suspensory area of one foreleg last night, with just a little swelling. It was gone this morning, but the creeping fear remained: we both could have gotten seriously injured yesterday, and all for nothing.

  Becky had thought so, too, but for different reasons. I chewed at my lip. Becky.

  The way she had looked at me, when I’d pulled into the lot last night and taken Dynamo off the trailer and put him straight into the wash-rack. The way she had looked at the dirt on my breeches, the scrape on my face. And then she had given Dynamo a long assessing look. The sweat on his haunches, the hollows above his eyes, the flare of his nostrils, the scrapes on his sides.

  She’d unwrapped his legs while I poured Diet Coke down my throat, dry as a bone after the day in the stifling heat. “There’s a little filling here,” she’d announced. “What happened?”

  “We fell at a fence,” I’d admitted. “Or — the fence fell, in the wind, right as we got to it. So we kind of all fell together.”

  “Dynamo fell?”

  “Yeah. It was ugly.”

  Becky looked at me as if I was something scraped from the bottom of her shoe.

  I went into the tack room to wipe off Dynamo’s sweaty bridle.

  She’d appeared later, in the doorway. Her nose still wrinkled, as if I smelled bad. Worse than her? I doubted it. We had both spent our day sweating in the sun, surrounded by horses and manure. “I put a sweat on his leg,” she’d said. “Wrapped the others. And gave him a liniment brace.”

  “Thanks.” I attempted to smile, to pretend we were still friends, the way it had been when she had first come to work for me. Before she decided I was a nobody.

  Becky nodded. She leaned against the doorframe for a moment, an unusual moment of relaxation for her. Her pony-tail was coming down and her straw-colored hair was falling around her tan face. “I love that horse,” she admitted suddenly, her voice warm. “He’s so grateful for everything you do for him. When I was running the sponge over his withers, he was reaching around to try and groom me back.”

  “He loves having his withers rubbed, doesn’t he?” I smiled, trying to capitalize on the moment, keep it going. “He had a hard life b
efore I got him. I think he really is grateful for every little thing now.”

  “That’s why you shouldn’t take advantage of him.” Becky’s voice turned frosty again. “He gives and he gives and he gives for you. He’ll never tell you no. He’ll kill himself for you.”

  I took an involuntary step back, surprised by her accusation. “I’m not taking advantage —”

  “You keep pushing him. You said yourself he’s not an international horse. You said he was really going to be maxing out at prelim, then you start talking about taking him Intermediate. And then you pull stunts like this today, taking him to this audition ride, in this crazy heat, and look, he comes back injured — ”

  “He has a little heat in his ankle, he’s not broken-down or something — ”

  “Not today.” Becky shoved away from the doorframe, obviously finished with me. “I have to go.”

  “They haven’t eaten supper yet.”

  “I have a paper to write.” She turned away, and a few moments later, I heard her car rattle and whine to life.

  I’d stood there for a few minutes, alone in the tack room. And then I just shook my head and hung Dynamo’s bridle back on its peg. I wasn’t taking advantage of my horse. If Dynamo didn’t want to do something, he’d tell me. We had a closeness, after our years together, that Becky couldn’t even begin to imagine. And if Dynamo and I had to masquerade as Intermediate-quality, even Advanced-quality, I had no doubt that for a little while, anyway, we could pull it off. Not forever, because that would be pushing him too hard. But just long enough to get the horses that I needed, the owners that I needed, to make the masquerade become the truth.

  The implication that I would hurt Dynamo, or purposely push him too hard? I shook my head. She was insane.

  “Screw you, Becky,” I’d told the empty tack room, and the horses had nickered their approval (or really just that they wanted supper), and I’d gone out to take over where my working student had left off.

  Now Marcus, my fat beagle, came padding out of the barn and shoved his nose in my lap, wagging his whippy tail. He loved it when I took a break, which wasn’t very often. It freed up my hands to rub his ears. I stroked his silky hound-dog ears with both hands, while he licked his nose with pleasure, and looked around my domain.

  The parking lot shimmered in the heat. Beyond, the line of scruffy turkey oaks that blocked the highway from the farm swayed gently in a humid sea breeze, their tough little leaves rattling, a sound that promised rain. I heard a whinny from the paddocks behind the barn, and a high-pitched squeal in reply. One of the mares must be in season, and Passion, the brat pony, was all about that.

  There was work to be done, to Marcus’s sorrow. But first, I decided, a few affirmations to make the universe understand that I was a force to be reckoned with.

  “I want to fill this parking lot up,” I said aloud now, my voice spooking a lizard that had been sunning on the railroad tie. He went scurrying into the nondescript bushes that grew, scraggly and untended, against the barn’s front walls. I looked at them without pleasure. “I want flowers here. I want twenty horses in the barn. I want a working student who gives a shit and shows up every day and doesn’t leave until the work’s done. I want sponsor’s names on my saddle pads and owners with nice horses who pay their bills on time.”

  Okay, that last part of the affirmation might just be a pipe dream. “I’ll accept just owners with nice horses,” I assured the universe.

  Thunder growled somewhere in the west.

  “I’ll take that as a get to work.” I hopped up, giving Marcus a farewell rub around the ears.

  Marcus stepped away, disappointed, and then went toddling off in search of shade. Lucky him. But I made up my mind. I wasn’t going to finish the barn right now. I was going to ride, right now, while I could. I’d do the damn stalls later, while it was storming. I’d work right around the horses if I had to.

  Because now, while no one was showing up, while no one cared, what difference did it make if the barn was spotlessly clean? I had to get attention, and mucking stalls wasn’t going to get me any attention. Showing horses, and winning, was going to get me attention. And clients. And sponsors.

  Step one: ride.

  Step two: win.

  Step three: clients.

  Step four: fame.

  Whatever it took.

  I rubbed my elbow one more time and then headed for the house to change into boots and breeches.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Eleven o’clock at night was an ungodly time for a horsewoman to be awake.

  The green numbers glowed at me from the kitchen, shimmering, ghost-like, on the microwave display. I narrowed my eyes at them. 11:02. Absolutely brutal.

  I hadn’t been up this late in months. It was enough to make a girl cry, thinking about how little sleep I was going to get. And how exhausting tomorrow was going to be. A Monday, which meant Becky was in classes all day, which meant I had all the barn chores and all the riding to get through, yet again. Last Monday, when I’d experimented with riding first and cleaning after, it hadn’t gone too well — I’d found myself still in the barn at eight that night, finally sweeping up the aisle. And I’d thrown out about six extra wheelbarrows of ruined shavings, since the horses were inside trampling filthy stalls down all day. But I wasn’t sure what else to do, besides start chores at four a.m.

  You know, in five hours.

  “I have to get a new girl,” I muttered, shaking an empty Diet Coke can and tipping it back for the dregs. “I can’t do all this shit myself. Especially if I’m not getting any sleep.”

  Maybe I placed too high a premium on getting a night’s sleep. But I was a horsewoman, which meant, basically, I rose before the sun, worked like a dog all day, and passed out on the couch with the television still on before I remembered to heat up some dinner. The term “sleeping in” only applied when I had two criteria in place. One, it must be raining and two, someone else was going to feed the horses at their usual hour.

  Morning rain in the summer was unusual, and there was no else to feed. So there would be no sleeping in, even if I could have spared the training time. There wasn’t even a possibility of “accidentally” over-sleeping by “accidentally” turning off the alarm clock.

  There was no need for an alarm clock, after all, when you kept twelve horses just outside your window. Especially if you had a brat like Passion in the bunch. That pony was better than a rooster for announcing the arrival of the new day. He liked to gallop up and down the fence-line of his paddock, neighing continuously, as if the end of the world had come and he didn’t want anyone to sleep through it. Such exuberance was contagious, and it wouldn’t be long before my poor double-wide would be shaking with the rumbling of hooves outside.

  Sleeping in, hah! The horses knew who was in charge of this little asylum. It was my responsibility to get to bed on time, so that I could be up at their appointed hour and make sure the sweet feed was slung, the fans were switched on, and their day of eating and napping (with a 45-minute work break) was begun on schedule.

  But I couldn’t go to bed. I was waiting for my phone to ring. A new horse was on the way. A new lay-up boarder, a horse I hoped would be in training with me someday, was being shipped to the farm by a commercial van company. And they were taking their sweet time getting here.

  At three o’clock that afternoon, I’d called the shipping company and asked when to expect the truck. The operator estimated they would arrive at six that evening. Which was inconvenient, since that was when I fed supper and turned out for the night, but okay.

  Six came and went, a late thunderstorm roaring overhead that kept the horses in the barn. I threw extra hay to all the restless inmates and ran into the house through the massive raindrops, figuring that if the storm cleared by the time the horse arrived, I could turn everyone out.

  And I’d heard nothing more about him since. I called and called, but the shipping company’s phone number directed me straight to voicemail. The hours crawl
ed by. Rain clattered down on the roof, and thunder rumbled almost without ceasing. I watched my potential sleep window grow smaller and smaller, obsessively calculating how many hours of unconsciousness were being left to me before the six o’clock alarm. I reminded myself, again and again, that this horse would be completely worth the bother. Just a little trouble to begin with, but down the road, once I had him in my training program, all would be made worthwhile.

  But, my unhelpful brain reminded me, I had known this horse would be nothing but trouble.

  Not that it was the horse’s fault. He sounded perfectly acceptable, an off-track Thoroughbred who had been loafing in a paddock for six months, going on little hacks and trail rides, jumping cross-rails, learning not to lean on the bit or run away, that sort of thing. No bad habits, no tricks, no vices. Just a horse, but a particularly good-looking horse with a lot of raw talent that seemed to reach out through the computer screen and grab me by the arm. You want me, the gray horse cooed through still photos, and I couldn’t help but agree. I really wanted this horse.

  It was his owner who concerned me: she seemed like she might be a bit of a crazy woman. She had emailed me two months ago, asking if I knew of any eventing trainers in Florida. Confused, I had emailed her back assuring her that I was an entirely capable eventing trainer. For the next two months, I answered her persistent emails, many of which were asking questions about rival trainers in the area, with something along the lines of “I’ll give you whatever deal you want, just send me this horse.”

  I didn’t have a lot of marketing strategies up my sleeve right now.

  And still she teetered back and forth, between several local stars who had been making the covers of the horse show rags over the past few months, and, improbably, me. Lacey Wright, my one and only student outside of Becky, began asking me for weekly updates on “my crazy lady.”

  As in, “Does your crazy lady still think that training horses requires a gold medal and a shit-eating grin? Because you really don’t have either, so I don’t know if this is going to work out.”