Luck: The Eventing Series - Book 4 Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Books by Natalie Keller Reinert

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Your Next Read

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2018 Natalie Keller Reinert

  Cover Photo: iStock

  Cover Designer: Natalie Keller Reinert

  All rights reserved.

  Also by Natalie Keller Reinert

  The Grabbing Mane Series

  Grabbing Mane

  Flying Dismount (2021)

  The Hidden Horses of New York

  The Alex & Alexander Series

  Runaway Alex

  The Head and Not The Heart

  Other People’s Horses

  Claiming Christmas

  Turning for Home

  The Eventing Series

  Bold (A Prequel)

  Ambition

  Pride

  Courage

  Luck

  Forward

  Prospect

  The Show Barn Blues Series

  Show Barn Blues

  Horses in Wonderland

  The Catoctin Creek Series

  Sunset at Catoctin Creek

  Snowfall at Catoctin Creek

  Springtime at Catoctin Creek

  Sign up for a free book at nataliekreinert.com

  I WAS DREAMING about dinosaurs. I stirred and kicked at the sheet wrapped around my ankles, struggling to free myself. The guttering orange light of an ancient street-light flickered across the horse trailer’s sleeping loft, an oblong spotlight in the dark little space.

  Why on earth had I been dreaming about dinosaurs? Prehistoric monsters roaring through the night, their heavy tread shaking the ground, and we’d been running through the jungle, cold wet palm fronds slapping us in the face, trying to escape. Mentally, I flipped back through the shows we’d watched on Pete’s iPad lately, looking for clues to tie my brain’s wanderings back to reality.

  The dinosaur roared again, just a couple dozen feet away.

  I sat up like a shot and promptly hit my head on the aluminum roof. I sank back into the thin pillow and rubbed at my forehead. Beside me, Pete rolled over and pulled his own pillow over his head, apparently still asleep. I wondered what the roaring sounded like in his dreams. Maybe his subconscious brain was more practical than mine, just like his annoyingly sensible waking mind. Pete was the level-headed member of our partnership, and I prided myself on my ability to appreciate his calming presence during one of my rages, even if all I really wanted was someone else to throw things on the floor with me.

  Roar!

  This time the racket was followed by a thudding on the cold ground outside. Now, that was a recognizable sound. I sighed and threw off the sheet and the blanket, goosebumps rushing to my arms as the cold February air swept over my bare skin. I grabbed the flannel shirt I’d discarded along the side of the bed and threw it over my head, wondering what time it was.

  ROAR!

  “Stop it,” I sighed, more to myself than to anyone. “Stop it, stop it, stop it.” I slid myself down to the end of the bed and hopping gently to the trailer floor. The thin mat of stubbly carpet was cold beneath my feet, and I had to scrabble around for the pajama bottoms and socks I’d abandoned down here when I climbed into bed—I glanced at my phone, 2:35 AM—four hours ago.

  There’s no way to quietly wrestle oneself into flannel pajamas in the claustrophobic living quarters of a horse trailer, and by the time I’d shoved my feet through the folds of fabric and started struggling into the Wellington boots waiting by the door, Pete was pushing back the covers. Of course, the sound of a racecourse just outside was pretty helpful in waking him up, too. The horses’ hooves were thudding up and down along the fence-line outside, and the wobbly clay soil was transmitting every vibration directly to our feet and ears.

  “I’m sure I’ve got this,” I called back to him as I opened the door. Marcus twined his sinuous beagle body between my legs and hopped down the two metal steps to the stubby wet grass that served as our doormat, lawn and front porch; as if he’d planned the whole thing so he could get in some extra sniffing time.

  February in north Florida is fog season, and there wasn’t much light outside the dim circle cast by the flickering old street light, mounted on the lone electric pole on the property. The two trailers parked beneath it glowed a gentle orange, their silver aluminum skin beaded with water as the fog skimmed their roof-lines and trailed ghostly fingers down to the brown winter grass. It absorbed the ambient light of the night, so that when I turned my back on the trailer door and faced the pasture a couple dozen feet away, all I saw were the faint silhouettes of the fence-posts, and the stark-white electric tape of Regina’s pen.

  Luckily, I didn’t need light to know Pete’s mare had broken out of her tiny pen and was leaning over the pasture fence, starting trouble with the boys. Her nighttime wanderings, looking for love, were becoming a semi-regular occurrence. With the approach of breeding season boiling in her veins, she’d gone slightly insane, apparently channeling all of her frustration about being out of work into a deep desire for Dynamo, my previously mild-mannered chestnut gelding. Flattered, of course, by this massively talented and usually standoffish mare’s attentions, Dynamo’s ego was through the ceiling.

  Her flirtation went a little something like this: wait for a fault to knock out the juice to her pen, shove through the inch-wide tapes when they were no longer electrified, saunter over to the pasture where the boys lived, lean over said fence, nicker to Dynamo, squeal and kick at Dynamo, repeat. Mayfair, the young mare who was turned out with the boys, grazed as far away as she could without sacrificing the safety of the herd. She thought they were all idiots, and I had to agree with her.

  Naturally, all the boys went crazy for her antics, prompting Dynamo to turn into a jealous range-stallion. That’s where all the galloping up and down the fence came in, and the enraged roaring. That’s where nightmares about running away from dinosaurs entered the subconscious of a perfectly sane horse trainer.

  There they went again: the ground rumbled beneath my feet as four or five fairly fit event horses went tearing up the fence-line, only to wheel at the corner and come thundering back for more flirting with the farm fancy woman.

  I didn’t bother telling any of them she was only behaving like this because she was on lay-up from a serious injury. If Regina had been in work all winter, every ounce of her a
lmost boundless energy would be consumed with tackling both arena work and cross-country courses with absolutely astonishing prowess. She wouldn’t give boys the time of day when she was in training. This was one tough mare, with the endless grinding work ethic of a champion. Horses like this didn’t handle bed-rest very well.

  My eyes were used to seeking out dark horses in a darker night, and I could see their shenanigans as I got closer. Regina nibbled at Dynamo’s neck and he leaned over to return the favor; she squealed and stomped, Dynamo jumped back, nearly colliding with Jim Dear, who was watching all agog like a nerdy sidekick who didn’t understand how the hero got all the girls. Jim tumbled away from Dynamo’s hindquarters and stumbled against Barsuk, Pete’s dapple-gray gelding, who pinned his ears and lifted a hind leg in warning. Jim wisely took off galloping, and Barsuk took off after him. Mayfair watched them for a moment and then followed, as if going for a pointless gallop was better than being third-wheel to Regina and Dynamo’s doomed love affair.

  I sighed in exasperation, my breath leaving a white trail in the frosty night air. It was all fun and games until someone got kicked in the knee.

  “Can we not?” I asked the herd of insanity.

  Regina, remnants of her fence-tape dragging around her heels, fastened me with a doleful look as I approached. She could have run away from me, but what she wanted was Dynamo, and he wasn’t leaving her side. They were glued to the fence that separated them. So romantic. I rolled my eyes.

  She didn’t protest when I snatched her halter by the cheekpiece and gave her a hard look. Any other horse would’ve run off along the fence-line, shouting for the herd to follow, but Regina played her own game. She was too dignified to protest. The herd of fog-addled idiots reappeared briefly, gathered up Dynamo in their club, and then took off running again. They disappeared behind the slight rise in the pasture, and their hoofbeats slowly faded into the night. I hated it when they went down to the far end. It was a very large field with lots of trees at the end, the kind of field where horses could hide from your sight for hours, making you worry a bit if you were a particularly nervous kind of horse-owner, or simply, like me, one who had experienced more than her share of bad horse luck.

  Regina tugged at my hand and neighed, disappointed that her lover had left her. I glared at her. “Was all of this necessary tonight, of all nights? It’s foggy. It’s cold. I just want to be warm in my bed.”

  Regina rolled her left eye at me, the sclera tinted orange by the street light behind me. Why would I care?

  As I gave Regina’s halter an impatient little yank, getting a sharp head-toss back in response, the night suddenly turned a luminous blue. I looked up and saw the clouds pulling away from the moon, a fat wedge of gray-white with a grinning face. I didn’t appreciate being laughed at, but I sure did like the extra light. “Thanks,” I said, and gave the moon a little wave.

  “You’re welcome.”

  I turned around quickly, because while it wouldn’t have surprised me if the moon started speaking to me, the voice was at ground-level. Pete went sloping by in a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt, the wet grass slapping at his boots, a spool of electric tape and the fence-tester poking out of his back pockets. He looked half-asleep still. I started to tell him to leave it alone, that we’d just put her in the half-finished stall we’d been slowly building in between riding and jobs, but let the words die in my throat. Pete liked to have things done, and every minute things weren’t in order around here was an ongoing pain for him. He’d see fixing the electric fence as the least he could do before he’d be able to sleep again tonight.

  I dragged the stubborn Regina over to the pasture gate where a tangle of lead-ropes and halters were hung over a massive fence-post, waiting to be made useful, and extracted a faded cotton rope from the pile. I snapped it onto her halter and let her drop her head to browse through the brown winter grass while I knelt and pulled at the tape dragging around her forelegs. She’d gotten the nylon webbing wedged under her therapeutic shoe again, the one that was helping hold her cracked hoof together while new wall grew in, agonizingly slowly. In the fall she’d caught her leg in a wire fence and nearly damaged the coronary band, among other things. The farrier thought that with six months of new growth the coronary band might heal and the hoof would resume growing naturally. Or perhaps grow in with a slight wavy, wobbly pattern in the hoof.

  Or at worst, the crack would never mend itself and she’d be forever reliant on therapeutic shoes and no more than a dicey broodmare prospect. For a horse who had been so close to her first Advanced Level three-day event, the uncertain prognosis was hard to live with, but it was better than no hope at all. We hadn’t had much at first, but the months of healing she’d had so far had been good to us.

  Apparently her second chance at life hadn’t taught her to stop pawing at fences.

  I tugged and seesawed at the tape wedged stuck between the shoe and hoof until it popped free, frayed and tearing. Regina grazed on, ignoring me. At this point in Regina’s life I could have completely reset all four shoes without her looking up from her grass. Her hoof had been prodded and poked so constantly for the past few months, she’d given up caring what we did with any of them.

  “I’d give anything for you to just stay in that damn paddock, Regina,” I told her. “You’re making this life way harder than it needs to be.”

  “That’s her motivation,” Pete said from somewhere down the fence line. Sound carries on these cold foggy nights. “She’s the easiest horse in the world… when she gets her own way.”

  “Such a mare.” I started to sit down in the grass, then stopped, remembering it was drenched with chilly dew. I sighed and straightened up again. “How bad is the fence?”

  “Just one panel is down,” he called. “But then I have to figure out why the electric turned off again. So I won’t be back in bed for a little while. Go without me.”

  He knew I wouldn’t go to bed without him, but it was nice of him to offer. He always did. Yes, this was happening with enough regularity that I could say “always.” It was high time we finished that stall so we could stick her inside at night, I decided. Tomorrow. If there was time. I ran through the day’s calendar in my mind. There wasn’t enough time.

  “Come on, miss.” I tugged at Regina’s lead rope until she reluctantly lifted her head, and we walked down the pasture fence towards her little pen.

  Regina’s paddock was located about a hundred feet away from our little homestead of horse trailers out of necessity. The “farm” we were renting was essentially a huge rectangular pasture with a strip of open grass running alongside the western short side. There was enough room on the strip of grass for our trailers and trucks, and the half-hearted shed we were hoping to turn into a one-sided shed-row. And for a rectangular pen built of electric tape and metal stakes, with an extra strip of tape running over to the pasture fence, where it connected with a solar-powered electric fence charger some former tenant had hooked up and left. There wasn’t any sign of electric fence anywhere else on the property, so we didn’t know what they’d used it for. Maybe they’d had a great idea and not enough cash to see it through.

  I could certainly identify with that.

  Regina dipped her head again to graze as I stopped at the hot-box. It was mounted to the fence on a rickety platform of rotting plywood, and the dimly glowing orange light indicated it was on and charging. It was ticking rhythmically, a constant sound like a click-bug which never stopped, day or night.

  You could hear it in your dreams.

  Well, the fence was definitely on, so something was killing the charge somewhere along the fence. Time for a recon. I started to pick up the slack in Regina’s lead when the night suddenly went pitch-black around me. Pete cursed with the eloquence of a man who just wants his bed. I looked up at the swath of cloud that had just enveloped the moon.

  “For heaven’s sake,” I said thoughtfully. “Isn’t that just typical.”

  Once I might have started jumping aro
und, swearing, pissed off at the world and not afraid to tell anyone about it. But things had gotten too strange and too extreme to bother getting that upset over a cloud anymore. So it got dark for a few minutes. So the fence was broken. So I wasn’t going to get a full night’s sleep. So what.

  I’d just wait it out.

  I listened to Regina’s teeth pulling at the deep dry grass and the occasional thud of her hoof as she took another step forward, her entire being immersed in the constant struggle to find more, better green stuff to devour. Horses were so powerful, so majestic, so emblematic of everything strong and enduring, and yet they were really just interested in eating grass. There was something very comforting about that at three o’clock in the morning. All our hard work and ambition was just feeding our silly human egos, while our horses nosed around looking for sweet clover.

  A whip-poor-will rustled, probably shaken from sleep by our noise, and began to sing in the pine woods at the end of the fence: whip-poor-will, with a little chuckle at the end of each note, as if he thought Will’s predicament was the funniest thing he’d heard all night. I looked up at the sky again; the moon was still buried in cloud. I couldn’t even see if it was going to clear up again shortly or if this was some mass of northern cloud soaring in to overtake us for the next day or two. That happened in the winter sometimes, making everything gray and depressing, making me long for the unbearable heat and humidity of summer, because at least we’d have some damn light. I was a true Floridian. I’d lived here all my life, and I was addicted to glaring white tropical sunlight, long hot days, and the growling of distant thunder.

  I tucked my straw-colored hair into a pony-tail, bound it up with a rubber band that had been wrapped around a bundle of track bandages from the feed store, and leaned against the fencepost where the fence charger was propped.

  Less than a second passed before I jumped away, grabbing my arm. “Ouch! Damn!”