Ambition: (The Eventing Series Book 1)

by Natalie Keller Reinert

  And that look I’d gotten from Peter. What had that been about?

  I hadn’t wanted to see him at all this weekend. Or ever. I’d thrown away the notice that he’d won the ACE grant. Then I’d fished the paper out of the garbage, ripped it up in a few pieces, and thrown it away again. And I’d resolved not to think about him again unless it was because I was busy kicking his ass at an event.

  It was hard not to think of him, and blush at the way he had looked at me today.

  Who cared what Peter Morrison thought of me, anyway? Not me. I didn’t care. No sirree.

  I finished the beer and called Marcus. God knew it was past my bedtime.

  Once in the house, though, I felt restless all over again. I roamed around the living room, the kitchen, the office, peering into dark shadows, looking for things that weren’t there. Marcus padded after me wearily, his jaunty hound’s tail at half-mast, a look of solemn duty on his face. That I didn’t sleep normal hours was a constant sorrow to my beagle.

  Then I went to the kitchen window and leaned my head against the glass, damp with the air conditioning’s chill. The orange globe of the barn light illuminated his empty paddock, and I knew what I needed.

  The storm door slammed behind me, causing a few sleepy whickers from the kids in the fields. The whip-poor-will chirped sharply, as if it would be too much trouble to sing out his entire call, and a frog peeped weakly from beneath the porch. Marcus just sat down and sighed as I went clumping down the steps in my flip flops. He’d wait for me here, thanks, his long-suffering expression said. That was fine. I loved Marcus, but his wasn’t the company I needed right now.

  In the barn, Dynamo was waiting for me, his ears pricked and his head over his Dutch door, silhouetted black against the light outdoors. I savored his straight Thoroughbred profile, his sharp ears, his teacup chin, the way his forelock floated above his eyes. And then I walked up to him and let him sink his great head into my arms, pressing his forehead against my chest.

  We stood like that for goodness knows how long, my cheek pressed close to his poll, the sharp hairs of his forelock scratching at my nose. He was warm, and alive, and real, the most warm and alive and real thing I had ever felt in my life. More than a horse, more than a person, more even than a faithful fat beagle — Dynamo was vividly himself, and totally mine. I closed my eyes, my fingers tingling along his cheekbones, in the soft fur beneath his jawbone, and felt him breathe against my stomach.

  Finally he let his breath flutter through his nostrils, gently signaling that the embrace was over, and carefully lifted his head from my arms. I raised my head and let him play his muzzle along my forehead, wiggling his upper lip along the loose locks of hair that had slipped from my pony-tail, tickling at my skin until goosebumps raised along my neck and arms. I turned around and let him work his lips along my shoulders, massaging at my back and up to the nape of my neck, until the teeth came out and he began to nibble along my pony-tail and pull at my t-shirt, forgetting that I wasn’t a horse, too. When his teeth finally pinched a hunk of flesh I jumped away with a shout, and Dynamo threw up his head, as if he didn’t know what to do with me.

  I cupped his chin in my fingers and kissed him on his outraged nose. “I wish I was a horse,” I told him. “We could groom each other all day long, and I wouldn’t even mind if you bit me like that.”

  He whuffed hot horse-breath in my face, and I laughed, feeling ten times lighter than I’d felt a few minutes ago. “Why do I sit alone in my house when I have you out here to play with?”

  Dynamo pulled his chin back from my hands and took a step back into the stall. Then he turned his head away from me, looked back out towards the paddocks where the other horses grazed, and whinnied. From the distance, I heard Daisy’s lilting neigh in reply, and Passion’s sharp, shrill shriek of a whinny. A few others joined into the chorus, filling the night with rumbling horse-song, and my smile faded just a bit. I folded my arms across my chest, suddenly feeling a bit of a chill in the damp night. “That’s why,” I said, nodding resignedly.

  I wasn’t a horse. No matter how hard I might like to pretend. But Dynamo was still my people.

  I gave Dynamo a final stroke between the eyes, on his nobbly-edged star, and left him there in the barn. He neighed after me as I turned the corner. “You can go out with your friends tomorrow,” I told him. “Stay inside tonight and rest.” And I went back to the house and climbed into bed, to the infinite pleasure of Marcus.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Lacey had been my working student for two weeks when it happened. The big moment — it — the one I’d been waiting for.

  My phone was humming away industriously, wiggling its way across the kitchen counter as if carried away with its own importance. Lately Lacey had been picking it up and pretending she was my secretary. She had a globe’s worth of mock foreign accents, all of them equally pathetic, stored up for just this cause, and fortunately the poor quality of cell phone reception in the rolling hills of Marion County were enough to disguise the deception from the sizable proportion of our clientele who had actually been to some of these countries she was so glibly mocking.

  But at this particular moment she was busy at the stove, making us some eggs for our mid-morning breakfast. Breakfast was a new word in my vocabulary. Apparently it meant a meal you could eat in the morning which staved off dying of starvation before your two p.m. lunch eaten standing up over the kitchen sink. Lacey had somehow managed to add it to my schedule, and I liked it. It wasn’t the only change my new working student had precipitated. The girl was efficient in an entirely different way from the mirthless, nose-to-the-grindstone Becky. She got stuff done and she bossed me around in order to make it happen, but always with a grin on her irrepressible face. It was ten a.m. and we were done with morning chores and I’d ridden two horses already. I was even toying with the idea of moving our morning start time back to seven a.m. Lacey hated six-thirty as much as I did.

  “The barn sucks at six-thirty,” she announced with her usual eloquence. Every morning, it was the same. “It would be better at seven. When, you know, the sun is up?” And I had to admit, she had a definite point.

  But it was hotter that way, and I wasn’t spending my day in the barn with a fan on me the way Miss Lacey was. I was out in the arena, under the full sun, wearing black riding boots and a black hard hat. So the decision was still up in the air.

  Now I snatched up the dancing phone and trilled “This is Jules!” with all the pent-up glee of a woman who has done half a day’s work and is about to be fed a hot breakfast that someone else cooked for her.

  “Jules! You sound wonderful!”

  My overall sense of well-being was so great that I was only a little annoyed to hear Mickey’s owner from Michigan on the other end.

  “Well, hello, Eileen, how nice to hear from you!” I said with exaggerated cheer, and by the stove I saw Lacey’s shoulders shaking as she suppressed her laughter. “I hope everything is good?” It occurred to me that she might be moving Mickey at last. Maybe she had made her decision about his trainer. And maybe it wasn’t going to be me.

  A little sparkle went out of the morning. The midsummer sunshine, dancing on the table between little fingers of palm frond shadow, seemed overly bright, and I found myself wishing for a nice gray rain cloud, a wash-out, stabbing lightning and howling winds, an afternoon in bed. What lucky trainer would be taking that lovely horse, and adding him to their stable of champions?

  “Everything is great, Jules!” Eileen exclaimed, startling me with her excitement. I guessed she really liked this new trainer. I held the phone a little further from my ear. “I’ve just been talking to my friend Carrie. You must know her. Carrie Donnelly —”

  “Carrie Donnelly?” I interrupted, unable to stop myself. “Carrie Donnelly who owns Donegal Seamus and Lucky You?” I named two of the top event horses in the country. At the stove, Lacey stopped giggling and was standing utterly still over her smoking pan.

  “Yes, that’s h
er! What fun, do you know her? She was my roommate in college… we studied English Literature at Sweet Briar. Total waste of course, but we had the best time. This one time we snuck out to the stable after midnight… oh, I won’t waste your time. But she’s a doll. You must know her. She’s been in Florida every winter the past five years.”

  “I — um — we’ve met a few times…” I was lying. I may have bumped into her once at an event while we were studying stadium jumping courses stapled up side-by-side on the same bulletin board. She would have been with one of her riders, studying the Advanced course. I would probably have been memorizing Novice or something pathetic like that. I’d probably had to shove a ten-year-old girl in pigtails and jodhpurs out of the way in order to see it.

  “Oh, good, well, I was talking to her after your nice win at Sunshine State a couple weeks back — that was your first Intermediate, right? I thought so. Congratulations on winning your first time out at that level! And on such a great score! Practically unheard of! Anyway, Carrie and I have been talking about where to send Mickey, and — oh, maybe I didn’t tell you, but Carrie’s actually a half-owner, she’s the one who first saw him at Turfway Park last fall — anyway, dear, we thought we might leave him with you. To compete. Would you be interested in that, dear?”

  I was not breathing. My heart was not beating. And the phone was trembling dangerously in my bloodless fingers. I felt my mouth gaping open like a fish, and Lacey had slowly turned around and was staring at me with alarm, the greasy spatula raised in her right hand. She should slap me in the face with it, I thought. Or crack me over the head with that cast-iron frying pan. Because this couldn’t be true. And I knew it, and she knew it, so we were both trapped in the same impossible dream.

  Maybe we should slap each other.

  It just couldn’t be true. Carrie Donnelly, heiress to a food company fortune. Carrie Donnelly, the wealthy benefactress of the lucky female event riders on the United States Equestrian Team. Carrie Donnelly, who owned three of the top ten event horses in the country. Carrie Donnelly, whose horse Donegal Seamus won the Rolex Kentucky Three Day Event last year, whose horse Lucky You went to the last Olympics and brought home the individual silver medal, whose horse Lord Melbourne won the Advanced division at the Sunshine State event while I was busy taking home Intermediate — Carrie Donnelly knew Eileen. Mickey’s neurotic mother-hen owner Eileen.

  Carrie Donnelly bought Mickey from the racetrack, Carrie Donnelly was half-owner of a horse in my barn. And she was going to give the ride to me.

  This was it. This was it. This was happening. I gulped.

  “Jules? Are you there?”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, Eileen…” I tried to pull my thoughts together enough to speak a coherent sentence. Something dignified and professional, something that wasn’t just “Yippeeeeeee!”

  Lacey sat down across the table from me, dropping two plates of slightly burnt eggs and jaggedly buttered toast between us. The plates clattered when they hit the wooden table, and I gave her a fierce look in rebuke, trying to send the message, Life-changing conversation going on here, keep it down! via furrowed eyebrows and a frown. She folded her hands in her lap obediently. We had grown pretty good at the mental telepathy.

  I took a deep breath and managed to speak in a remarkably steady voice. “Yes, Eileen, I would love to take him on. I think Mickey’s an amazing horse. He hasn’t been doing anything but standing around and eating, but you can tell that he has a good mind and a great physique.” Physique. Like he was a male model. Ugh. Could I not even speak properly now, like a horse trainer? But it was so hard to concentrate enough to even form words. My mind was sparking in every direction, like a transformer struck by lightning. I could practically see the blue and white explosions that were my own synapses on overload, in whatever part of my brain was designated to picture the Future and Possibility and Plans.

  And sweet, sweet Ambition, the fuel to every move I made.

  “Oh, good,” Eileen said, sounding relieved. “I’m glad you’ll take him on.” As if there was some possibility that I might have turned her down. Eileen lived in a fantasy world, and I envied her. “Well, I’ll tell Carrie we’re all set. I know he’s been getting fat on you while we made up our minds, but this will be good. He needed that time off from the racetrack, anyway. His last race was in August last year. But he’s been started over small jumps and he knows the basics, so you can start just as soon as you like and put him into competition when you feel he’s ready. Send me the training contract and I’ll get it signed.”

  Somehow, I managed to tell her I’d get right on it. Somehow, I managed to tell her thanks. Somehow, I managed to hit the “end” button on the phone with my trembling fingers. Then I set it down carefully on the table and looked at Lacey. She looked pinched and white, rather as if she might have stopped breathing some time ago. “Thanks for the eggs!” I told her, and started dumping hot sauce on them.

  “What’s going on?” she gasped. “Tell me what just happened!”

  “What did it sound like? These eggs are awesome. Bit burnt, but I like the crispy parts.” I spit out a shard of eggshell. That wasn’t the crispy part I meant.

  “It sounded like Carrie Donnelly bought you a horse to ride. Like Mickey is Carrie Donnelly’s horse, which… that just can’t be true.”

  “Why not? He’s a nice horse. You’ve seen him move in the pasture.”

  “That’s true.” She considered this. “I just never thought of him as… but how can you be eating eggs right now? This is incredible!”

  “Sure is, and oh my GOD, Lacey… this is it!” I dropped the cool veneer, as fun as it had been to torture her, and threw down my fork, and we started dancing around the room, our feet heavy on the hollow floors of the double-wide trailer.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  My fax machine was rattling when I came back into the house a little while later, drenched in sweat from riding the Twins and in search of Diet Coke to refill the tack room mini-fridge. I went into the office and saw a cascade of paper spilling down from the fax machine and pooling on the moss-green carpet.

  “What the hell?” I muttered and picked up a few sheets. And then I smiled.

  It was Mickey’s life history.

  I hadn’t had much information on him before. I hadn’t known anything about his history, other than that he’d been a racehorse, and then hung out in Eileen’s backyard for a while, her niece be-bopping around on him and jumping little x’s, before she sent him to Florida to get serious. Now I was looking at his backstory, told by a trail of documents which apparently had followed the signed boarding contract. I gathered up the papers as the humming fax machine switched itself off and spread them out on the cluttered desk, taking in the old vet reports, the racing record, the Jockey Club registration, the scanned photos of his clumsy first attempts at cross-rails.

  For all the paperwork, the information was spare. His registered name was Danger Mouse, he won three races as a three-year-old, none as a four-year-old, and retired as a sound five-year-old. Now six, he was green as grass, but sound as a dollar. The paperwork assured me of that. My own knowledge told me he was possessed of the athletic potential and the mind to go to the top. To jump the moon. I studied the jumping photos, squinting at the bad print job, taking in his square knees, his tight fetlocks, his pricked ears, his eager eyes. And if my own knowledge wasn’t enough to assure me, the bold signature of Carrie Donnelly on the training contract certainly did.

  For a few minutes I sat there on the stained old carpet, looking over the forms and photos, as if they held some key to training Mickey. I’d been given a gift, I’d been given a second chance after losing the ACE grant to Peter Morrison. Now I had to do everything right.

  Outside, thunder rumbled, a low echoing growl that shook the windows in their frames.

  I threw down the papers and ran back outside. I still had three more horses to get on today. And that didn’t include Mickey.

  But it rained.

  A
nd it rained.

  And it rained.

  “A deluge,” Lacey said morosely, letting the blinds drop back into place. She turned away from the living room window and threw herself on the couch. “We’re going to wash away. Does this trailer float?”

  “It’s a mobile home, not a boat,” I sighed, putting down an events calendar I’d been running through, trying to find a good show-jumping spot for one of the sales horses. August wasn’t the best time of year to sell horses, but his owner had sent an email yesterday, and the tone had been a little antsy. She was tired of paying bills on a horse that was supposed to be selling for a profit.

  Unfortunately, all of the horse shows right now seemed to have unpleasant names like “the Summer Sizzler.” I’d done Sunshine State Horse Trials because it was the right time for Dynamo and I wanted to have him ready for the fall season, but it didn’t mean I was happy about putting myself out there on a hot summer day with anyone else’s horses. I didn’t want to sizzle anymore than they did.

  And the usual summer heat wasn’t anything compared to the soupy tropical mess we were getting this August. The unending rain was making life impossible.

  “Soon we won’t even be able to turn anyone out,” Lacey grumbled. “The paddocks are a mess.”

  I chewed my lip. She was right about that. It had been raining nearly ’round the clock for seven days straight, and Florida seemed to be threatening to sink right back into the ocean from whence it came. The paddocks were looking more like ponds. Dynamo’s hooves, which were prone to abscesses, weren’t going to be able to take it. And I wasn’t too thrilled with Mickey’s hooves, either. A little flat and shelly, they were easily his worst feature. He would be just as susceptible to hoof infection as Dynamo. I had only just started riding him, and already I was worried about potential time off for abscesses.

  “They’re going to destroy the grass… we’ll have nothing but mud,” Lacey went on. “Not to mention white line disease from their hooves being wet all the time. Mickey and Dynamo already have such awful feet, this is going to wreck them.”