Ambition: (The Eventing Series Book 1)

by Natalie Keller Reinert

  Pete blinked. “I went for it because I needed it.”

  I sat up a little too quickly and needed to take a minute to stop the room from spinning. Then I waved my arm around the living room, which was nearly as big as my old trailer had been before the tornado took it out. “You live in a mansion on a hundred-acre farm! You needed it? Let me help you out with words, Peter. Need means if you don’t have it, something bad will happen. You’ll fail. You’ll die if you don’t get it. Excuse me, Peter, but it looks to me like you already have it.”

  I threw myself back on the cushion, exhausted with anger and the effort of my speech. The tequila was starting to make me sleepy. That was no good. I needed energy if I was going to have my say and then get the hell out of his house without looking like an idiot.

  Pete just shook his head and looked down at his wine glass. When he finally spoke, his voice was tight. “Jules,” he said slowly. “I only own a few things in this world besides my clothes, my tack, and Regina.”

  “A few hundred acres, you mean.”

  “No. No. I don’t own this place. How could I ever afford a place like this? This belongs to my grandmother — my grandfather made her swear not to sell if I made it onto the United States Equestrian Team.” He swallowed and turned his head, looking at one of the myriad black-and-white photos of that mystery horse and rider team. I chewed at my lip, starting to understand.

  “She hates horses,” Pete said after a quiet moment. “He had a bad fall, and broke his hip, and never really recovered. She was angry at him for riding at all — he was in his seventies. But it was all he had ever wanted to do.”

  I understood that. I leaned forward, resting my elbows on my knees, and waited while Pete worked out the words he wanted to use. My head wasn’t spinning so much, my eyes weren’t so heavy. I wanted to know. I wanted him to tell me everything. I wanted to understand Pete Morrison in a way I had never wanted to understand anyone — I knew that now. If I was honest with myself for just twenty seconds or so, knocked all the ambition and jealousy and rage out of my heart just long enough for a few moments of clarity, I’d know — I cared about Pete Morrison in a way I had never cared about anyone.

  “I have two more years,” Pete went on. “Two more years to get into team competition. And if I don’t make it, then I’ll have to find some other way to support myself…. I’ll have to find a farm to rent, with enough facilities to keep the clients I’ve got… they won’t be happy with a little place, even if I could make that work. They come here and they see the tree-lined drive and the cross-country course and the show jumps and they think that’s horses. If I had to downgrade to a little barn with a few jumps, I’d lose at least half of them, even though I could make it work.” He looked at me, blue eyes flashing. “Like you make your place work.”

  For a moment, I was held captive by his gaze, and downright flattered by his words. Like I make my place work. And then I remembered. “Pete, I don’t have a place anymore.” The words were like a knife in my heart. “I’m as bad off as you. If the insurance doesn’t come through, I’ll be bankrupt and homeless. And even though you’ve taken me in, I just lost two more clients over this. No one thinks I have any stability. At least you have a safety net for another two years while you try to make this happen.”

  Pete smiled sadly. “You have a safety net for as long as I do, Jules,” he said gently. “Don’t call yourself homeless again. I won’t let it happen.”

  I grinned. “So two years, huh? We have two years to become top international riders and make the US Equestrian Team, and then you get to keep your farm and I get to be your tenant for good?”

  He nodded, grinning back. “You’ll have to start paying me rent once I’m your landlord and not just the benevolent trainer helping out a colleague.”

  We were gazing into each other’s eyes at this point, rather enchanted with one another, the alcohol bubbling up in our bloodstream and assuring us both that we were much wittier than we actually were. And there’s really no telling what might have happened if Lacey hadn’t come storming into the living room looking for me, apologized to Pete for my rude behavior, and dragged me off by the elbow.

  I looked over my shoulder, though, as I went obediently with my working student. And he was watching me, that eyebrow of his quirked, those lips of his curled up in a quizzical smile. And I knew I was in serious trouble.

  Which is why, after Lacey went to bed, I went straight back to that kitchen window and knocked again.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  How long did it take Ocala to recover from the storm? Depends on who you asked. Some people said a month. Some might have said it took six. For some, the Ocala we knew never came back.

  A bulldozer cleared away the wreckage of my farm, and my old Ocala was gone forever. There was just enough insurance money to pay for the final destruction of my house and my barn. The fences stood, though (mostly) and the arenas were good, so somebody could move in and start over again on the bones of my old farm.

  But it wouldn’t be me. I had no more money, and no choice — the red and blue realty sign was put up where the old Green Winter farm sign had stood for generations. Its post was sunk right into the same hole in the ground. I took the farm sign back to Briar Hill with me and stowed it in the tack room. Maybe it would come in handy someday. Or maybe I’d give it to the new farm owner.

  I wasn’t the only one bidding farewell to my dreams. Half the properties in Ocala seemed to be for sale, in earnest this time, and not in the usual “let’s see if anyone will give us a boatload of money for this” manner which had always characterized Marion County’s largest and grandest farms, their monumental entrances oddly punctuated with a swinging Sotheby’s sign.

  No, this time the swaying wooden signs with their mugshots of smiling husband and wife teams (or, popularly, agent and horse teams) were for real. Leighann “Your Dream Farm Awaits” Anderson stopped sending me weekly emails asking about Passion’s sales prospects; she was too wrapped up in taking photos of stallion barns and gourmet kitchens. Ever hovering on the edge of bankruptcy, the hurricane pushed the horse industry straight into the abyss. Beyond the wrought iron gates and rubber-paved, horse-safe driveways were shattered fences, boarded-up windows, and roofs covered with blue tarps. The roofs that weren’t missing, anyway. There wasn’t enough money to replace the roofs. Or, if there was, there weren’t enough workers to do the jobs. The construction industry was booming, as the lucky few with the credit or the insurance money to pay were lining up to have their shattered homes put back together.

  The rest of us just put our soggy, ruined dreams in trash bags and drove them to the county dump.

  It didn’t sting quite as much as it could have, though. Because, well, because of Pete.

  And I wouldn’t have had Pete in my life if it weren’t for the storm. Yes, I needed a barn collapsing around my ears during a cataclysmic cyclone and a subsequent domino effect of business and personal disasters to push me into admitting my feelings for Pete, but what could I say… I’ve always been a difficult person.

  Perhaps more than he even could have realized, when he made the error of trying to help me with my horses.

  “And why,” Pete asked, after I had been toiling with Mickey’s trot-canter-trot transitions for twenty tail-wringing minutes, “why won’t you encourage Mickey’s assertiveness and independence, no matter how irritating you might find it?”

  “Are you asking me why I’m demanding perfection from a horse that must perform a dressage test?” I snapped, shaking out the reins so that the tired horse could stretch his spine out again.

  “Are you answering a question with a question?”

  “Are you my trainer, all of a sudden?”

  Pete clenched his jaw and clucked to his horse, trotting away and leaving Mickey and I alone along the rail.

  This part, anyway, was exactly the way I had always imagined dating a horseman would be: he thought he knew best, all the time, and that I ought to be taking his adv
ice… even soliciting his advice. As if! He was no better than me, for all his grandfather had been an international rider, for all that he’d done an apprenticeship to an Olympian in Australia while I was still mucking out Laurie’s stalls in trade for my riding lessons on green-as-grass auction fodder. We were at the same level, and I wasn’t going to take his arrogant “let me help my poor little girlfriend” shtick for one second.

  It was exactly the way I had always imagined it… but it was one thousand times better, too. A good-morning kiss when we came down to the arena, tipping our hard hats back so that our lips could meet without the ritual clacking of the hat-brims. Lunch in the kitchen, stretching out our tired feet, freed of boots for a few minutes, while Becky excused herself to her own apartment and Lacey watched us twinkle at one another with a mixture of envy and disbelief. Evenings… evenings that weren’t sprawling on the couch and watching TV until I fell asleep of boredom, we’ll say, and leave it at that. He made me happy, in every way, and I thought I made him happy, too. We laughed, and laughed, and laughed. And I forgot about my little black rain cloud for whole stretches of time.

  But when he tried to critique my riding, I drew the line. No further, that was what my line said. We could be friends and lovers, but we weren’t going to coach one another. When I wanted coaching, I’d ask for it.

  Lacey arrived at the arena with Dynamo and I nudged Mickey towards the gate. My chestnut horse was just what I needed after this ride. Mickey and Dynamo’s preferences were like night and day — Mickey demanded my respect and a gentle explanation for every new move, while Dynamo, after years with me, seemed simple and automatic. I shifted, he shifted. I turned, he turned. I looked forward to riding him like a vacation from the hard work of the young horses. Mickey especially.

  I wasn’t in tune with this horse, I thought, looking down at his bobbing head. I wasn’t getting him. And it was really worrying me.

  “How’s Mickey today?” Lacey asked. She looked at his sweaty neck and wide nostrils, and chewed at her lip. “Not great?” she guessed.

  “Not great,” I confirmed, kicking my feet from the stirrups and jumping down to the ground. “We’re not making much progress on canter transitions. He gets all flattened out and runs into the canter, then he bunches up and gets mad and crow-hops into the trot. Everything seems to piss him off. I miss the happy-go-lucky guy he used to be.”

  “Do you think his feet still hurt?”

  I looked down at Mickey’s hooves, the yellow patches where plastic molding had been injected to replace diseased wall. The farrier had used a Dremel tool to dig out the ruined hoof. He’d been so precise, and labored for so long, that I found it hard to believe there could be anything left in there. “I don’t know,” I admitted. “I didn’t think so. And he isn’t doing the freezing-up stunt anymore, either.”

  “That’s true.” Lacey took his reins and handed me Dynamo’s. “What does Pete say?”

  “I haven’t asked Pete.” I said airily, and threw myself into Dynamo’s saddle. “It’s not his horse.”

  But Pete couldn’t seem to follow my rule about no coaching without permission. Every time he came into the arena while I was arguing with Mickey, he had something to say about it. Like the day I spent half an hour trying to get Mickey to put a precise number of strides before a fence. The horse jumped long, every time. And though he did it handily, it wasn’t good enough for me. Why wouldn’t he wait until I told him to jump?

  Pete had an opinion, of course. “It’s really important that you stop disciplining Mickey when he tries to make his own decision, and instead encourage his assertiveness and independence. No matter how annoying you find it. Do you know why?”

  “Because it will make his sweet widdle heart happy?” I panted, not too tired to be snippy.

  “Because it will save your neck one day on the cross-country course,” Pete said, ignoring my attitude. He dropped his feet from his stirrups and slumped a little on the gelding he’d been riding. “One day you’ll be in a sticky spot and not know what to do, and he’ll make the decision for you. Because he likes to do his own thing and not wait for you.”

  “I thought that was bad,” I said, frowning. Laurie hadn’t liked it when I let a horse decide where to take off before a jump. She insisted that a horse ought to listen to his rider, first and foremost. “One day, that horse will decide to put in two strides where he ought to do three, and flip over a log and kill you,” she had told me after a particularly fast cross-country round on a young Dynamo. “You tell him where to put his feet. You know best.”

  “Who knows best about where to put his feet? You or him?” Pete quirked his eyebrow skeptically at my explanation. “Let me tell you a story. I rode this horse of my grandfather’s, Wazzoo, when I was a kid. He was hard to work with, but he could save your life. He once slid down a slope going to a water complex. A four foot log like a redwood just three strides away. I could have reined him back and sat him on his hindquarters to stop from crashing. I could have spurred him to take two big strides and just leap it. I knew there wasn’t a third option — there was nowhere else to go. But Wazzoo knew the third option, and he decided to take it — three tiny strides and a bunny hop over the log. Nearly straight up in the air and his hind legs scraping the log on the way down. All I could do was stay out of his way. He saved our asses that day. If we’d hit that fence, we would have flipped right over it.”

  “Did you win the event?” I asked, just to annoy him for being so right as usual. Obviously winning wasn’t the point of such a story — living to tell it was.

  “As a matter of fact, we did,” he smiled, beating me again.

  “So you’re telling me, let Mickey jump how he wants.” I was skeptical, but I had to admit that Pete’s story had legs to it. A rotational fall on the cross-country course was an eventing reality no one wanted to think about, let alone experience.

  “For now, for the little jumps. Later, when you’re doing the bigger fences, you’ll have enough partnership through your dressage to understand one another without getting too pushy.” Pete patted his horse on the neck. “I mean, what’s the worst that could happen? You’re jumping two foot three. He’s not going to flip over.”

  He had a point.

  I just hated being reminded that we were still jumping baby novice jumps. Autumn was rolling on, and now that his hooves were put back together and his training was back in full swing, I wanted to start thinking about starter events again. It was time to put the memory of Lochloosa behind us and start getting some show-ring mileage.

  There was just one problem with this plan — there weren’t any events.

  “Holly Hill regrets that their Fall and Winter Horse Trials will be cancelled this year due to substantial storm damage to the cross-country course and grounds,” Pete read aloud. It was the first of many postcards flooding the big cast-iron mailbox at the foot of the drive. A photo of a leaping horse on the front, an apology on the back. And I morosely drew more and more X’s through the plans optimistically jotted onto the big training calendar in my tack room. Vineland… Two Oaks… Summerfields… day by day the October, and then the November, events were cancelled, until the calendar was looking very bleak.

  “Pete, where are we going to compete these horses?”

  It was late October and the sky was still wearing that unrelenting blue that says it will be hot but sorry kids, there won’t be any rain today. We were riding up on the rise behind the arenas, with Marion County spread out below us in a scatter of farms and jumps and training tracks and, further on, the interstate and retirement homes and shopping plazas that kept the other half busy while the rest of us were riding and flinging manure. The horses were hot, we were hot, everything was hot. It was ten o’clock in the morning.

  Pete’s expression was pained. He was just as desperate to compete as I was. “I don’t know. South Carolina… Alabama… I hate to travel that far, though. Especially for a starter event.”

  “I know,” I agreed. “It’
s hard on them.”

  “And expensive,” he went on, clarifying his meaning.

  Expensive, yeah. Funds were tight and growing tighter. Hay and feed and bedding had doubled in price since the hurricane. Feed stores, crunched by defaulting accounts as more and more farms went under, were putting up signs: “NO CREDIT.” Skinny horses in failing fields were being shipped to auctions in Georgia and Tennessee and never coming back. The winter season appeared to be all but cancelled, and the northern riders who came south to buy and sell and keep Ocala in business were making alternative plans. Our precarious little ship of cash-strapped farmers and rich benefactors had begun to capsize at last, with everyone, including Pete and I, gripping the slanting railings for dear life.

  “I heard the equestrian team is staying in Aiken this winter,” Peter said glumly. “I didn’t remember to tell you ‘til just now…”

  “That’s bad.” I leaned forward and rubbed my cheek on Mickey’s damp gray mane so that he wouldn’t see the sudden pucker around my mouth. “That’s a very bad sign.” It was a terrifying sign. What if there wasn’t any competition at all this winter? What would we do? We might have had a place to stay in Briar Lane, but, as I’d found out, the money to keep it going wasn’t going to last forever. Pete had only been able to get it up and running with the grant money, and that was rapidly running dry as the prices went up and up, and the sales horses went nowhere.

  “We’ll just have to pick and choose carefully, get the most bang for our buck. If we sell anything this winter, it won’t be in Florida, I can tell you that much.” Pete looked over at my gray horse, who was blissfully relaxed after our jumping session, neck stretched out long and his ears flopping sideways, concentrating on nothing at all. He had appreciated my change in riding from the get-go, and I’d had to admit that Pete had been right — a painful moment in my life. “But you can’t take this horse on the road for his first outing, Jules. Too much stress, and we still don’t know how he’s going to react to a change in scenery.”