Ambition: (The Eventing Series Book 1)

by Natalie Keller Reinert

  Lacey rested her cheek against the window, and was silent.

  Until we arrived.

  I saw the wooden sign, hanging elegantly next to the road as the asphalt followed another hard left. This time the road was trying to avoid disturbing the farm, instead of a sinkhole or a spring. “Briar Hill Farm — Peter Morrison Eventing,” Lacey read aloud. She cast her eyes along the green hedge that ran for hundreds of feet on either side of the approaching driveway. “Is all this his?”

  I didn’t know. But I had a guess. I set my jaw and flicked on the turn signal.

  “Oh. Oh my goodness,” Lacey sighed as we turned into the driveway and came to a slow stop. Black iron gates rose before us, a trotting horse elegantly silhouetted across them. Through the bars, the driveway curved to the right, and all that could be seen was four boards of black wood fencing, marching up the rising ground to meet the blue Ocala sky.

  “He’s like a king on a mountain,” I grumbled, shaking my head.

  “It’s like a plantation!” Lacey exclaimed rapturously. “I’ll bet it’s like Gone With the Wind in there. I’ve always wanted to see one of these farms.”

  “Don’t be so sentimental,” I snapped. “It’s just rich people showing off.” I motioned her to shush as I rolled down the window and leaned down to the call-box. I pressed the “Call” button and there was a mechanical ring.

  “Briar Hill,” answered a brisk, business-like voice.

  Becky. I swallowed, decided to play it off as if I didn’t know her voice.

  “This is Jules Thornton, here with the Burns horses. We’re at the gate.”

  “One moment,” my former employee said without a hint of recognition, and there was a loud beep as she pressed a button on her phone. The gates began to swing back, the trotting horse retreating from us. His front end detached from the left-hand gate and was suddenly left hanging in space, as if he was trotting off a cliff. I imagined the descending feeling in his gut was roughly the same as mine.

  “The first barn to your left, please,” Becky instructed from the call-box. “There’s a loading dock — you can park just past that if you don’t need the ramp.” The call-box clicked as she hung up her phone.

  She knew very well I didn’t need a ramp. I looked over at Lacey in silence. She shrugged and looked away.

  “Let’s go,” she told her reflection in the window, and in the trailer behind us, The Twins echoed her with a few impatient bangs and kicks.

  “This is a load of crap,” I told all three of them, and shoved the truck into gear.

  The truck’s engine was at a roar by the time we finished our ascent of Mini-Mount Morrison, and I was bitching not-quite-under-my-breath about the stupid egos of men which make them build driveways that go straight uphill after the truck has been at a standstill waiting for their portcullis to rise, and how I was now going to have to have the oil changed, and how I’d gone through a half a tank of gas just on this stupid driveway, etc., but when we reached the level ground and I got a chance to look around, I could honestly see why he — or whoever built this farm — had done such a thing.

  If I had a piece of land like this, a long green ridge, crowned with massive live oaks which clustered around neat green and white barns, with a sprawling stucco house just beyond a brightly colored show-jumping course, and skirted on all sides with black-fenced paddocks and pastures which disappeared into the rippling folds of tree-lined hills, I’d build on the mountaintop, too. To be surrounded on all sides by the vista of rolling horse country — it felt as if we were somewhere in the Appalachians, but without the annoying blizzards.

  It was perfect.

  And it was ridiculous bullshit. He had won a grant for promising young trainers who needed a boost just three months ago. What was he doing with this million-dollar-spread?

  “Damn him,” I muttered, and Lacey just shook her head.

  The first barn on the left was a gleaming white shed-row, with green rails lining the breezy aisles, and horses leaning over their green stall guards, gazing fixedly to the right. Following their pricked ears, I saw a small man with a wheelbarrow heaped full of buckets, making his way from stall to stall.

  “He feeds lunch,” Lacey observed. “We should be feeding lunch. So good for their digestive system.”

  “We don’t have time to feed lunch,” I replied sharply, but I was only angry because I knew she was right.

  The loading dock appeared at the end of the barn, and I swung the trailer around in an approximation of a U-turn, pulling it up in the gravel of the horse-path next to the barn. Tree branches scraped the aluminum roof of the trailer and set Twin One, Avril, to kicking. I knew it was Avril, because she hated every little noise. I knew everything about her, and her brother. And I was losing them.

  I supposed I would have to be professional and tell Peter about her noise problem, that and her butterfly phobia. No one told me, of course — I had to figure out everything about those two silly beasts myself — but it was the proper thing to do, and it would make the horses’ lives easier. It wasn’t their fault Sue Burns thought I was an incompetent nobody. The fault was mine. How had she put it? Something like this: A few of my friends called me after Lochloosa. They were a little concerned that you were in over your head with the young horses.

  Exactly like that. I heard her voice over and over in my head, tinny through the cell phone. I would never forget those words. In over your head.

  “Is that a butterfly jump?” Lacey hopped out of the truck and was looking excitedly at the neighboring show-jumping arena. On carefully raked clay, colorful fences that could have been stolen from the Grand Prix championships in Tampa were set at careful angles around the ring. The butterfly fence was particularly impressive, with six-foot-high butterfly wings flanking rainbow-striped jump poles. It looked remarkably like the one I had crashed at Longacres. “He’s got everything but the Shamu jump.”

  “I don’t think they do the Shamu jump anymore. Anheuser-Busch realized that their drinkers weren’t watching show jumping — they’re too busy with NASCAR.”

  “Too bad, it was my favorite when I was a kid.”

  “Avril’s gonna love that butterfly jump.”

  I turned away, about to go into the barn in search of Becky, when she appeared around the corner of the shed-row, wiping her hands on her jeans. She looked tan and healthy and happy, the opposite, really, of how she looked at my farm, as if the few months here had been good to her. I wondered, yet again, what it was about me that she found so toxic.

  “Jules!” she called out, seeming almost cordial. I blinked. “How are you?” Her gaze flicked to the left and her smile grew more fixed. “And you, Lacey…” she trailed off.

  “Great, thank you!” I said brightly, more than willing to keep up the pretension of friendship, and Lacey mumbled something similar, but with less enthusiasm. She disappeared into the trailer tack room in search of lead shanks, and I was left alone, trying to keep things from getting too awkward.

  “Is Peter here?” I asked, leaving off the formal “Morrison” with difficulty. Best to pretend, after all, that we had happy healthy working relationships. Becky was certainly leading the way in that department. The snake.

  “Probably just on his way back,” Becky said. She shielded her eyes and looked past the jumping arena, where the ground sloped gently downward into a vast pasture. “There — you see? He’s riding up the hill there… out schooling a baby on the cross-country course.”

  Of course. I had to drive twenty miles and pay a grounds fee to school my horses on a cross-country course. Peter Morrison had his own course. “How fun,” I said, declining to follow her pointing finger. If I could avoid seeing him at all, I’d consider this day half-salvaged.

  “We can unload them, though. I have their stalls ready.”

  In response, Avril stamped restlessly and whinnied her shrilly cry. Instantly, every horse on the property was shouting back.

  “Let’s get them out, then,” I told Lacey over th
e din, and we pulled down the ramp and clambered inside to snap on lead shanks so that we could lead our old horses to their new stalls. Avril, completely worked up, nudged me hard in the chest, and I hauled back and whacked her in the muzzle with everything I had. When I turned around to lead her out, I saw Becky standing with her arms folded, head cocked, looking disapproving.

  But who was she judge me? My former working student, who couldn’t even be bothered to work for me full time? I bit down on the inside of my cheek. This was all getting to be a little too much. Really, Universe, wasn’t it enough that I had to give up two paying clients? I had to deliver them to Peter and her?

  I was just preparing to turn Avril into a deeply-bedded stall when a small Latino man appeared out of nowhere, held up one finger, and crouched beside the mare to remove her leg wraps. His fingers moved like lightning.

  “Go, si,” he said as he hopped up, arms full of my leg wraps, and nodded towards the open stall.

  “Thank you, Ramon,” Becky said sweetly, but her triumphant smile was all for me. “Ramon’s the grooms,” she told me from the stall door. “He’s very good. Their legs will be perfect in his care.”

  She couldn’t possibly be implying that I was hard on horses’ legs. “Neither of them have had any leg issues.” I tried to keep my voice even, but if Becky had been telling Peter that my barn had lameness problems, I was sunk. My business couldn’t take another hit from bad gossip.

  But Becky was wide-eyed innocence — when had she learned to be coy? — and denied any hidden meaning. “I just want you to feel good about Avril and Sam. I know you care about all the horses you have.”

  Becky had changed. All these little smiles, all these sweet remarks — where was the somber, silent, expressionless girl that moped around my farm for so long? Something happened since she came to work for Peter. It was almost as if she met someone.

  Ramon raced past us suddenly, and everyone turned to see the rider rounding the shed-row corner, and I cursed my own heart for beating so fast when I saw him sitting his horse like a marble statue.

  I turned my eyes away, and saw that beside me, Becky was watching the horseman with a rapt expression.

  It was like that, then.

  Ramon took the horse’s reins, and Peter dismounted while the horse was still walking. His boots hit the dirt of the shed-row with little clouds of dust, and he slapped the horse on the neck affectionately before he stepped back and let Ramon lead him on past. The groom was fumbling with the sweat-slick straps of the bridle as he walked past us, loosening the horse’s tack without halting him and risking any cramped muscles. I watched the pair walk past and then turned back to wait for Morrison as a sudden thought struck me — why wasn’t Becky taking Pete’s horse? Wasn’t she his working student? Wouldn’t grooming his horses fall to her? The whole point of a working student, besides training them up to be good advertisements for your coaching ability, was to avoid having to pay for a groom.

  Something was going on here.

  And it was making me feel just a bit unwell.

  Then Peter Morrison was standing in front of me and holding out a calloused hand, and his genuine smile made me catch my breath.

  Dimly, somewhere deep inside, I thought, you’re so goddamned perfect.

  Despite hating him for being a client-stealing thief, I couldn’t help myself and smiled widely in return. There was no denying his grin. “Peter, it’s so nice to see you again,” I fibbed, but the words sounded so true I had to wonder if they were.

  I wondered what the hell was wrong with me.

  He nodded, eyes sparkling with pleasure. “Likewise. It’s been too long.”

  It had been a week. I blushed. I realized suddenly that I owed him a Coke. I wondered if he’d mention it. I wondered if I’d mention it. I wondered if that would be weird. I wondered what I could possibly say to him that wouldn’t make me sound like an idiot, and then I hated myself, viciously, without reserve. It was not a feeling I was used to having and it almost startled me out of my nervous silence.

  But Morrison had already turned to greet Lacey, and then he was off to look over the horses, his boots sinking into the sandy shed-row dirt. He was wearing swan’s neck spurs, the brass buckles tarnished and the straps worn with age. His dress boots didn’t have zippers down the back like most did these days. They were old guard, traditional riding boots, sunk into deep folds around his ankles, hugging his calves like a second skin. He had been wearing those boots for a very long time. He looked every inch a true horseman.

  Damn you, I thought. Why are you so hard to hate? I usually didn’t have such trouble despising my enemies. Despising enemies was sort of my hobby at this point. It fed my ambition, kept my dreams afloat through the worst of nights and the most depressing of bank statements.

  He leaned over Sam’s stall guard and peered inside. The fat beast was already nosing around the hay in the corner. Nothing got him down for too long if there was food involved. The old carthorse wasn’t a bit shaken up by having left my barn for the greener pastures of Briar Hill. “Really top shape, Jules. I’m impressed — it isn’t easy to keep horses fit in weather like we’ve been having this summer.”

  Becky suddenly darted away, ducked under the shed-row railing, and looked out at the eastern sky, shielding her eyes against the sun. “We only have another hour or so,” she called. “It’s going to storm again.”

  “Do I have another horse tacked?” Peter asked, attention diverted from my gorgeous horses and tip-top conditioning work. Typical.

  “Ozzie. Ramon has him ready — tied in his stall.”

  “Perfect,” Peter replied, smiling at Becky, and when she smiled back at him I feel my insides twist with rage, and hurt, and jealousy. I bit down on my sunburnt lips and looked away from him, back out to the fields that went sloping down towards the patchwork of Ocala below us.

  Jealousy. Which was ridiculous, of course, because he was nothing to me but a rival, just a client-stealing has-it-all rich Big Name Trainer, and there was no reason at all why I should care if he shared a familiar smile with Becky. None. At all. I was just angry that Becky had found such a happy home with him, after she had deemed me useless to her. I was jealous of Becky’s shift in affections, if anything.

  Not Peter Morrison’s warm smile and twinkling blue eyes, not his tanned strong hands or the muscles beneath those tan breeches and dusty black riding boots.

  “We should hurry home,” I blurted out, and he shook his head, looking back at me.

  “There’s no rush. The horse can wait a few moments. I wanted to show you around…”

  “If there’s rain coming from the east, we can get in another couple of rides, too,” I said, shaking my head. “We’re further west than you. Lacey? Help me with these wraps? And the lead shanks?” My hands fumbled with the leather leads and cotton wraps. I couldn’t get away from that warm smile fast enough. Peter Morrison was trouble with a capital T.

  I muttered a flustered goodbye, ignoring his quirked eyebrow, and went racing down the shed-row at a power walk, Lacey scuttling after me with standing wraps trailing from her arms. I flung the leads into the truck, hoping for a quick getaway, hoping to never run into him again, but by the time we had the trailer ramp fastened, he was at my shoulder. I took a deep breath and stood very still, willing him to go away.

  But of course he didn’t.

  I waited.

  “Jules,” he said softly, his voice husky in my ear. I bit the inside of my cheek, the only way to stop from shivering with the goosebumps that fluttered across my skin. “Come on, Jules, I’m sorry about this. I didn’t ask for this.”

  I turned, slowly, and took a step backwards to widen the gap between us. But the trailer was just behind me, and my back was against the hot metal. I had nowhere to go. Peter stood inches away from me, looking down with concerned eyes, skull cap unbuckled and the strap hanging past his chin, smelling of horse and sweat and leather, and looking every bit a horseman’s horseman. My heart fluttered, an
d in my mind I cursed it.

  “I’m sorry about the horses,” he went on, voice low. “I never intended to take your clients. If I can send business your way, I will. You’re a good trainer. You’re a horsewoman. I believe that.” And he sighed and took a step back, as if the admission had taken something out of him.

  My nostrils flared. That was it? Sneaking up on me, whispering in my ear, turning on the charm with those sky-blue eyes of his, all so that he could tell me he’d throw some cheap clients my way? That son of a bitch! “Well,” I began stiffly, looking at the tree beyond him, looking at the ground, looking at the threatening clouds stacking up in the east, looking at anything to avoid looking at his lusciously curved mouth, his perfect nose, his — stop that — “I appreciate that. This does leave me with a few open stalls, and I’m always looking for prospects…”

  “Next time someone offers me a nice amateur project, I’ll give them your number,” he said. “You’re really good at training the packers. That’s good money, too — ”

  “Packers?” I snapped, finally able to look at him without feeling my insides tremble. Bastard. “I can do more than break in robots, Peter Morrison. Might I remind you that I have two upper-level prospects in my barn! Between Dynamo and Danger Mouse, I have four-star horses in the making. The packers will just pay for my vacations.”

  His face fell. “I didn’t mean to say that you aren’t good enough, Jules,” he said, shaking his head in apology. “I just think training solid, safe horses for amateurs is your niche right now. You’ll climb, I have no doubt. But — I know where you’re at right now. Can I offer advice? As someone who’s been there? Hell, as someone who is there, right there with you?”

  I tightened my jaw. “Sure.”

  “Slow down.” He put a hand on my arm. I felt goosebumps rise obediently, as if my skin had been longing for his touch. I would have liked to have shaken him away, but my arm would have none of it. “I know what you’re doing. Don’t. Enjoy the levels, take it easy. You say packers pay for your vacations, Jules, but come on, let’s be friends and let’s be honest with each other. When’s the last time you took one?”