“You ought to take a pair of clippers and give yourself a haircut,” I said, and then blushed instantly. Had I really said that? Where had that come from? What was he going to think when I started making comments about his appearance? That I liked him, that’s what he was going to think. I felt my cheeks grow hotter yet.
But Peter just smiled at me, and the warmth of his eyes, from across the table, was like a caress on my flushed skin.
Becky snorted. “He never bothers with a haircut, he just complains about hair in his eyes. You just like complaining, Pete.”
Peter put his hand on his heart and looked wounded. “Me, complain? I haven’t said a word about anything! I’ve just been eating my chicken over here.”
“You don’t need words to complain,” Becky sniffed. “It’s in your mannerisms.”
“You should listen to her, she’s an expert on this sort of thing,” I drawled.
Becky shot me a furious look, her pale eyebrows knitting together, and there was an uncomfortable silence. I smirked back at her until she turned away, busying herself with buttering a slice of bread. Next to me, Lacey gave me a shove in the side that nearly made me tumble out of my chair. Peter rubbed his face wearily, and I considered how nice it would be if the earth would open up in a sinkhole and swallow me whole.
Everyone ate in silence for a few moments, working their way through what was left on the plates. Then Becky stood, dish in hand. “I’m going to bed,” she announced.
“Goodnight,” Peter said, standing up. He was standing up? What century was this? I looked at Lacey, eyebrows raised. She shook her head slightly. Don’t make a scene. But Lacey misjudged me. I wasn’t going to make a scene. I already regretted every single thing I’d said at dinner tonight. My new goal was to remain utterly silent, starting now, and running until we moved back to our own place. Whenever that might be. It seemed like a very attainable goal. The only thing I stood to lose was utter embarrassment and self-loathing, after all.
Becky disappeared into the house, her back stiff and her jaw tight in a posture that was much more recognizable to me than the more friendly version I had seen with Peter in earlier interactions. It was amazing how much that girl had come to hate me. I really didn’t know how it had come to this, but I did know one thing for sure. We weren’t about to have any sort of reconciliation.
“You two don’t get along,” Peter said.
I looked at him. “You’re a regular Sherlock Holmes.”
“What happened?”
“You mean, between when she quit working for me and started working for you?” I took a long swig of iced tea and wished it were something stronger.
“No, I know exactly what happened then,” Peter said seriously. “She quit working for you, wasn’t around horses for about five days, and ran into me hanging up a flyer for a working student at the Tack Shack. She practically begged me to hire her. Said she’d messed up at her last job and she needed a second chance.”
My eyebrows practically lifted into my hairline. That didn’t sound like Becky at all. At least, not the recalcitrant, pissy Becky I had known for the past few months. The one I had met originally… maybe. “And you took her on based on that kind of credential? She screwed up at her last job? Come on, Peter, you must have known you could do better than that.”
“I wasn’t really impressed by her wording, no,” Peter laughed. He reached for another piece of chicken. That man could eat. “It was when I asked her who she’d worked for, that she caught my interest.”
I narrowed my eyes. He caught a glimpse of my suspicious expression and hastened to explain himself.
“Not that I wanted to steal your student,” he said around a mouthful of chicken. “It’s that your horses always looked perfect. Turned out immaculately. I didn’t know what happened between you two personally, but I knew she did a great job with your horses.”
Well, this was true. But still. I looked down at my plate, the barbecue sauce congealing into reddish-brown goo. Beside me, Marcus panted, fully aware that there were forbidden chicken bones just waiting to be stolen, chewed into bits, and thrown up later in my shoes. I put my hand on his head. Disgusting darling dog. At least Marcus was honest with me.
“She did a great job with your horses, and you obviously trusted her,” Peter went on, sounding a bit uneasy with my silence. “And I’ve known, ever since I saw you with your big chestnut at Longacres, that you love your horses.”
I looked at him then. He was gazing at me with those vivid blue eyes, and there was a world of emotion in them. More emotion, I thought, than I could ever be willing to share with another human being.
But it was tempting.
“I love Dynamo,” I said cautiously.
“You love them all.” Peter leaned back in his chair and smiled. “You try to hide it, but I think the little girl who loves ponies is still in there. I see her sometimes, when you flip back your pony-tail and give your horse a kiss on the nose.”
“You see me as a little girl?” That was alarming.
“No — no —” he backtracked quickly. “I see you… I see you as a horsewoman.”
I smiled. That was more like it. “Go on,” I suggested, voice light. Flirtatious? Me? Maybe. It had been a rough couple days. I was punch-drunk.
“A horsewoman who devotes herself to her craft, and to the happiness of her horses.” Peter smiled, returning the favor, and I felt warm inside. “A horsewoman who doesn’t care about her own comfort, as long as her horses are fed and safe and bedded down in at least twelve inches of shavings.”
“Especially if someone else paid for those shavings,” I amended, my smile turning into a grin, and Peter laughed.
“Stay as long as you like,” he repeated. “But try not to bankrupt me while you’re at it, or I’ll ration your bedding!”
“You wouldn’t dare.”
“Try me.” Peter leaned forward, his eyes dancing, and I felt my heart quicken, thudding against my ribs. My lips fell open, and I waited, arrested in my chair, for him to make his move.
What would happen afterwards, I had no idea.
His eyes lost their mischievous gleam, replaced with a look altogether more hazy, more mysterious, and I knew what was going to happen, and I closed my eyes and gave in to it, accepting it as one of the crazy, terrible ideas that sometimes you just have to surrender to —
— And there was a crashing and shattering sound that sent me flying out of my chair, banging my forehead into Peter’s chin. He recoiled backwards, hand to his abused jaw, while I spun around and faced my very, very, very bad beagle, who was slinking away with a chicken bone in his mouth, the broken plate he’d knocked down in pieces behind my chair.
CHAPTER THIRTY
It took me a few days to start riding again. I felt so drained after the days spent on moving horses, more rummaging through the wreckage of the farm, and the hours spent on hold trying to get through to an insurance agent, sitting awkwardly in Peter’s big office in the main house and looking at more pictures of that old man and his horses, that I just didn’t have the energy to get in the saddle. Lacey held down the fort in the barn, mucking stalls and doing the chores. I checked everyone after morning feeding and then left her to it, so that I could get back to the boring business of cleaning up my life.
But it wasn’t going so well. The insurance company was backed up for weeks, and they had no one to send to the farm to do an assessment. I told a tired-sounding agent that she didn’t need much of an assessment — the guts of the house were strewn across two riding arenas. The barn roof was torn off and laying in the parking lot — but she insisted that there was nothing that could be done until someone had taken a look at the damage first-hand. And that wasn’t going to happen… she paused, and I pictured her eyes skimming through a spreadsheet of red ink and x-ed out days… until the beginning of October.
“October!” I cried.
“Assuming we don’t have any more severe weather,” she sighed, sounding pessimistic.
<
br /> I thanked her, ended the call, and leaned back in the leather office chair until I felt like I could face the outside world without bursting into tears.
It took about twenty minutes.
I walked down to the annex in my riding boots and a pair of spare show breeches I’d kept stored in the trailer tack room, stepping around leftover puddles in the gravel drive. The weather had changed dramatically from summer to autumn after the hurricane — now it was hot and dry, with a yellowish hazy sky in the afternoons. I missed the shade of the clouds, and the thought of my dressage arena drying out at last, now that I couldn’t use it, was incredibly frustrating.
The annex was a broodmare barn, a holdover from the property’s early days as a breeding farm. It didn’t have its own arena, which meant I was going to have to ride back up the drive, about a quarter mile, to use Peter’s riding arenas. It would add a lot of time to each ride. I figured that if I was going to get back to a normal workload with each horse, I was going to have to have Lacey bring horses for me to ride, and take the worked ones back to the barn for me.
It sounded pretty highfalutin’, really, having a valet bring me my horses. I smiled to myself. Look how fancy I was getting!
Lemonade, please, and lots of it. I had a bumper crop of lemons.
Lacey was finishing up the stalls when I came into the barn. Dynamo, in his customary spot by the center aisle, was the first to see me. He trumpeted a whinny to welcome me, and she popped out of Passion’s stall, brushing hair out of her face with dirty hands. “Look at you coming down to the barn in the middle of the day!” she said with a grin. “I thought I’d seen the last of you once you disappeared into the office again.”
“I finally got through to an agent,” I sighed, giving Dynamo a rub behind the ears. He lipped at my pony-tail. “And they said they might be able to assess my claim in October.”
Lacey leaned her pitchfork against the wall. Passion promptly stuck his head over his stall chain and knocked it over. “You little shit,” she snapped, straightening it up again. And then, to me, “That’s weeks away. Can we do anything in the meantime?”
I shook my head. “Not a thing. But even if I could, there’s no one available to do any clearing. If their phone works, they’re already out on jobs. And most of them don’t have working phones. There’s black-outs all over the place.”
“I heard on the radio. We got lucky here.”
I forced a smile. “We did get lucky,” I admitted, although at the moment it didn’t feel like there was any such thing. My black rain cloud had intensified into a hurricane, and marooned me here, on an isle of equestrian delights, with a temptation of a landlord and an uncertain future. Was it good luck or more bad? I shook my head a little to clear it. A wasteful thought process, when there were horses to ride.
“So you’re in boots. Who do you want tacked up?”
“Mickey,” I said immediately. “And after I’ve been gone about half an hour, bring me Dynamo. Then we’ll work our way through the rest of the bunch. You can ride Margot later, too.”
Lacey brightened at the thought of riding her favorite. “You got it,” she said, and pulled Passion’s stall grill shut. He squealed in protest and went darting around his stall, kicking the wooden boards that lined the concrete walls. “You can ride that mess later too, okay? He needs a job. He’s been making me crazy since we got here.”
“If I have to,” I agreed. “Last pony I ever take in.”
“Amen to that.”
Mickey and I made our way through the sunny afternoon by darting from shady patch to shady patch, longing for the overhang of the next oak tree before we had even left the last. The gravel driveway was cleared of tree debris from the storm, but on either side there were branches and twigs flung around, and piles of leaves, palm fronds, pine needles. The black-board fences were sporting a few raw yellow replacement boards here and there, but all in all, Briar Hill had not suffered as badly as many other places. “Well,” I reminded myself. “It was a tornado that took out my place. Not the same thing.”
Mickey’s ears flicked back to hear my voice, then went straight forward again, watching the road ahead warily. He wasn’t happy about being here, and he wasn’t happy about this ride; his head was held high and his neck was already darkening with sweat. I sat deep, my fingers loose on the reins, resting gently on his withers. I didn’t want him to feel claustrophobic and rear up like he had done at Lochloosa. But he was making me nervous, and by the time we neared the cluster of buildings where the arenas were situated, he was already starting to feel explosive. I tried slow breaths, sinking heels, a deep seat, anything I could think of to help him relax, help him hold it together. “Come on Mickey,” I whispered. “We have to do this right. We have an audience now.”
We came up to the in-gate of the big jumping arena and Mickey stopped at the entrance, his breath coming hard and loud. There were two riders in the ring, Peter and Becky. Peter was cantering a leggy chestnut towards a gymnastic set up at the far end; Becky was sitting still in the center of the ring, reins loose on a sweaty dark horse, head turned and watching me. I thought I could see the smirk on her face from all the way over here. “Let’s go Mickey,” I chided. “Get on into the ring.” I gave him a nudge with my calves, then a fairly solid kick with both heels when he failed to acknowledge me. “Get up, now!”
He gathered himself, prancing a few nervous steps, and I instantly threw myself forward, arms around his neck, when I realized what was coming. It was a good thing — Mickey went straight up, head to the sky, and he was a tall horse. I saw the ground slipping away beneath me, felt my saddle sliding gently down his back, and then as he began to sink towards the earth again he leaped forward, a huge convulsive flight like a novice attempting a capriole. Then he landed on all fours, square and head low, braced like a frightened dog, and I kicked my boots free of the stirrups and leapt to the ground.
There it was, the dull glassy-eyed look, the red-rimmed nostrils, the foamy sweat rising up from behind the bridle straps. I tried to move him forward, and he trembled and refused to move.
Oh my God, I thought. This horse is completely messed up.
“What happened?”
I turned around. Peter was walking up slowly on foot. He’d given the reins of his horse to Becky and left them both at the other end of the ring. His face was concerned. I winced that he was seeing me like this again — a novice, an amateur, completely unable to figure out the tremendous horse I’d been gifted.
But I didn’t have an answer for him. I just shook my head.
He paused a few steps away, looking the horse over with an expert eye. Searching for clues — pain signals, twitching muscles, anything that might give it all away. Nice try, Peter, but I’d already been there. He wasn’t going to see anything I hadn’t.
I hoped not.
“What happened?” he asked again, stepping back. He hadn’t seen anything. Good. That meant I hadn’t missed anything. I couldn’t imagine dealing with him if he caught something I hadn’t. The shame of it would make living here impossible.
“The same thing that he did at Lochloosa,” I explained, voice gentle to avoid setting the horse off again. But Mickey was in a world of his own; he wasn’t paying attention to me or anything else around him. He had gone completely inside himself. “He decides he won’t go forward, he rears and plunges instead, and then he just withdraws into himself. It’s like he can’t deal with stress.”
“Well that can’t be right,” Peter said, furrowing his brow. “He was a racehorse, wasn’t he?”
“Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe he can’t figure out why he isn’t a racehorse anymore.”
“I could see that if he was bolting and challenging other horses, but refusing to move forward… that’s kind of the opposite response, right?” He stuck his thumbs inside his belt loops and fixed his gaze on me. His face was full of concern. “I’ve never seen anything quite like this.”
So it’s not just me. “Nope,” I admitt
ed, shrugging. It was nice to be able to admit it without worrying he’d show me up. “I have no idea what to do about it.”
“Well, a vet check-up for one thing,” he said seriously. “A complete exam, radiographs, the whole nine yards, to make sure that it isn’t a pain response.” Peter looked downwards at Mickey’s legs again. “His hooves are very flat, aren’t they?”
Mickey’s hooves were very flat, and the wet summer had only been aggravating them. But we knew that already. “He gets treated regularly for white line,” I said defensively. “My vet says they’re fine.”
Peter nodded slowly. “Have you had x-rays done of them, though? Just to see what’s going on in there?”
“I haven’t.” And just like that, a terrible fear was slowly unfurling itself in my stomach. “What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking,” Peter said thoughtfully, approaching the horse slowly and crouching down beside him, running his finger along the sloping curvature of Mickey’s fore-hoof, “I’m thinking that every step might cause him pain, and he doesn’t know how to deal with it when he thinks hard work is ahead.” He looked up at me. “Like a race.”
We stood still for a few moments, watching the heaving sides of the catatonic horse. I looked him over with a sense of utter despair. He was supposed to be my big break, not a psychological case study. He was supposed to take me to the top… and soon, not down the road, years and years away, after I had spent half our years together figuring out his messed-up racehorse brain. Racehorses! I had spent the past two years doing almost nothing but retraining racehorses, and they’d all had quirks, but nothing like this. Nothing like a mental breakdown that left them unable to simply move forward.
Ambition: (The Eventing Series Book 1) Page 27