Courage (The Eventing Series Book 3) 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

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  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 © 2016 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

  THE BAY FILLY eyeballed me, her dark iris small against her bright white sclera, her expression nervous.

  “I agree,” I told her sympathetically. “I think this is a terrible idea. But here we are.”

  There was every chance I was going to get hurt this morning. Jules Thornton, professional three-day event rider, injured in training track accident. Reports are the rising star was just trying to keep her head above water, both financially and emotionally. The racing stable head trainer was heard to say “that girl has no business getting on racehorses, but we’re short-handed this morning so leg her up.”

  Except no one seemed to be planning to give me a leg-up. I was alone with a small, wild-eyed Thoroughbred filly, and I had no idea what to do next.

  Down the barn aisle, there was a bang of hooves against wood and a harsh voice shouted. I was jolted out of my imagined obituary as neglected hinges shrieked a few feet away, and suddenly there was a clatter of horseshoes on hard ground before another young horse appeared, prancing nervously outside the stall where the filly and I lurked. Balanced on the horse’s tiny exercise saddle was a sharp-faced little man who was glaring through the stall bars at me like a malevolent forest elf. A squash-nosed cookie-making elf, not a noble Tolkien elf. I had an absurd urge to whisper Keeeee-blerrrrr in his ear and see if baked goods manifested themselves from his pockets. I could really use a cookie right now. Probably the filly could, too.

  “What’re you waitin’ for? Let’s get goin’!” His voice was so Appalachian it went beyond the country twang prevalent in Ocala. This elf’s accent was a full-on banjo, plucking a new string with every syllable. I could barely understand him, but that didn’t matter; it was easy to tell what he wanted: me in the saddle and caught up with him in the next thirty seconds. He kicked his horse on and the wide-eyed little Thoroughbred beneath him jumped forward, flimsily-shod hooves sliding on the asphalt barn aisle. “Hurry up!” he shouted as they disappeared from view. “We goin’!”

  I looked at the stirrup dangling in the vicinity of my left ear and wondered how on earth he expected me to mount up. The little exercise saddle wasn’t what I was used to, and I was pretty sure most exercise riders got a leg-up from grooms. But something told me this ramshackle shed wasn’t your typical racing barn. The center-aisle barn with its pony-sized stalls and rock-solid paved aisle, for example. Where was the shed-row, with soft equine pavers or dirt or plain old mulch to ride on? Maybe I’d never ridden a racehorse before, but I’d seen where they lived, and none of the training barns I’d seen before looked like this place. I’d been expecting an airy shed-row like Pete’s barn when I drove in this morning. That was normal.

  This was not.

  I was getting the distinct feeling I’d chosen my first gallop-girl position very poorly.

  Down the aisle, a tinny radio was switched on by an unseen groom, presumably the one who had tacked up this filly and left her for me to find, tied in her stall.

  “It’s six a.m., time to rise and shine Ocala! We’re rocking on the wind with all the classic hits you love!”

  Well, if I really needed the impetus to find a way onto this horse and out of this barn, the end of the commercial break on Ocala’s six-song classic rock station was a strong contender. I’d heard about as much of their limited playlist as I could handle—WIND was the soundtrack of every feed store, farm supply and gas station in town. North-central Florida seemed to have a serious Pink Floyd problem.

  “Okay, little girl,” I told the filly. “I’m gonna lengthen this stirrup and get on you, so no freaking out on me, got it? You’re getting plenty of warning.”

  The filly shook her fuzzy black forelock out of her eyes and gazed anxiously through the stall bars, hoping to see her work-mate waiting for her. When she realized he really had left the barn without her, she whinnied plaintively and started turning a circle in her stall. I went with her, pulling down the left stirrup as she wheeled. The moment she stopped, I hiked up my leg, stuck my boot in the stirrup, and mounted.

  Well, almost mounted. The tiny exercise saddle, lacking a tree, didn’t exactly stay put on her back. Instead, it slid halfway around the filly’s barrel the moment my weight hit the iron, leaving my right foot back on the ground where it had started. I nearly laughed, but the filly snorted and kicked at the saddle with her near hind hoof, narrowly missing my thigh. I danced out of her way just in time, the smile wiped off my face. I felt my temper rising, along with a dangerous desire to march right out of this barn and go straight home to my own horses and my own saddles, which stayed put when I mounted up.

  But that wasn’t an option.

  We regarded each other for a moment. The filly spoke first, blowing out her breath in a ruffling horse sigh.

  “Shit,” I sighed in return. “Shitty shit shit.”

  While I struggled to get the saddle back in place and girthed up more tightly, I heard the nasal voice of the Keebler Elf cussing me out from somewhere outside the barn, where he was wondering what was taking the new girl so long. This guy was
going to be my coworker, I thought grimly. This was my life now.

  I wished I could just go home. Take my hard hat and my whip, my safety vest and my coffee mug, and get back in my truck, and drive back to Briar Hill. I’d slip through the front door of the low-slung stucco house, walk down the hallway lined with photos of Pete’s grandfather eventing around the world, and creep back into bed, where I’d pull the covers up tight and try not to wake Pete. We’d steal an extra hour in the luxury of cotton sheets, and I wouldn’t have to feel nervous and sick about being in someone else’s barn, riding someone else’s horses, trying to make someone else happy, when I had no idea what I was doing.

  No chance of that, though. Life had changed, yet again, just when I thought everything was coming together. Pete wasn’t even home, and if he had been, he wouldn’t have wanted my company. Things were a bit strained at the moment.

  I’d come home in late August from a summer apprenticeship at a show barn near Orlando, ready to slip back into my old life. No—ready to be better at it. I had all sorts of lofty goals. I would be a better partner for Pete, who’d taken me in when my farm was destroyed by a hurricane over a year ago, and who then became the one thing I swore I’d never have: an equestrian boyfriend. I was determined to be a better trainer for my horses and for my clients, who deserved a rider who truly dedicated herself to three-day eventing, even if that meant riding a lot more dressage than she liked.

  Why stop there? I’d decided I would be a better person in general: less harsh-toned and thin-skinned, more caring and mellow. I’d spent the summer learning to swallow my pride and accept I could always do better than my best if I just listened to someone besides myself. I wasn’t the best. I had more to learn. That was a lesson which went beyond riding.

  So naturally, the moment I had a self-improvement plan firmly in place, the earth tilted beneath my feet.

  Briar Hill, the farm we loved, might not be our home for much longer. For years, Pete had lived with the reality that his grandmother planned on selling the farm where his grandfather had raised champion event horses. She couldn’t let go of her bitter hatred of the sport which claimed her husband’s life, and before Pete could prove to her that she would be saving his life, not destroying it, if he was allowed to keep the farm, she’d died. Her death had come suddenly, leaving Pete in shock and with me the only one to comfort him.

  Even if I wasn’t already terrified of losing my home twice in less than two years, I still would have been terrible at playing nurse to Pete while he tried to wrap his mind around his grandmother’s death. Sympathy wasn’t something I’d been offered much in life, and unfortunately, in my case it appeared to be a learned behavior. I barely knew how to offer anything more than a few stuttered words, most of which were incoherent gibberish, when I was in the presence of any extreme emotions. Pete’s tears rendered me speechless.

  There was also the awful fact that Pete didn’t particularly want my comfort. He didn’t know what he wanted from me these days. I’d threatened all summer to give up the apprenticeship and come home, which would have cost us the sponsorship we badly needed to keep the farm running. I was learning that Pete didn’t take disloyalty to the cause lightly. I’d promised him I’d stick it out and then I’d tried to get out of the promise half a dozen times. He didn’t trust me anymore. He watched me warily, and when I made one of my signature big, bold proclamations about our glorious future of fame and fortune, his smile was twisted ironically. He was waiting for me to get bored or mad or both, and leave.

  It wasn’t all terrible. Sometimes he forgot he was still angry with me. Sometimes he looked at me with a twinkle in his eye and quirked that damn eyebrow of his and I thought he’d forgiven me. But not always, and not often. There was a wall between us that not even shared worry and grief could bring down, and my fumbling gestures and stuttered words of comfort were not helping me scale its heights.

  All I could do to try and fix our problems, both with the farm and with each other, was work. I was good at working. I’d been working since I was ten. That was thirteen years of nonstop hard physical labor.

  Lucky for me, that was exactly what we needed. We were going to try and keep the farm, but that meant money, money for attorneys, but also for insurance premiums and taxes and a hundred other bills that had previously bypassed our mailbox. Who knew Pete’s grandmother had been paying for so much? I should have known; Pete had told me that he was hanging on by the skin of his teeth, but the size of the farm had always dazzled me a bit. I’d always figured he was making enough to pay for it. I could never have guessed how much a property like this actually cost in upkeep. Life, I was beginning to understand, would remain a struggle even if we managed to stop the sale of the farm.

  Either way, here I was, in someone else’s barn yet again. Just like summer, I told myself, just like working for Grace. I knew that wasn’t true, though. This time, I was in way over my head. I gazed at the filly and she gazed back, the tension in her muscles palpable under the dim glow of the stall’s bare lightbulb.

  “I have to get on you,” I said. “You need to chill the hell out and let me get up.”

  “Need a hand?” I turned at the Spanish-accented voice as a groom slipped into the stall, and, without any judgmental looks or anything, grabbed the saddle’s billets and tightened the girth strap a few more notches. The filly grunted in complaint.

  “Sometime they get the swelling,” he explained, shoving the girth up another hole. The filly staggered a little as he threw his weight into the job. “The hematoma, you know? But you put it up all the way anyway. They gonna get tough after a few time, and you don’t lose the saddle while you galloping.”

  That sounded like a fair trade-off on a morning straight out of hell. I would feel bad if the filly got a hematoma under her elbow, but I’d feel worse with her hooves slapping against my face when the saddle slid under her belly mid-stride. I nodded and smiled to show my appreciation for his life-saving girthing-up.

  The groom grinned at me companionably. He was a young guy, Latino, wearing a blue Gators shirt and a flat-billed Brooklyn Nets cap, the holographic sticker still shining on the brim. He looked like he’d be perfectly at home on a city street, instead of standing in the stall of an Ocala racehorse training barn, holding the reins of a green racehorse-to-be. “I get you up there,” he assured me. “You watch this.”

  He held the stirrup away from the filly’s side until the stirrup leather was taut, then slapped the strap against the saddle a few times. The filly’s ears swiveled in alarm and she shifted, standing up straight and tall. I realized it was a clever little trick to get a horse to pay attention and straighten out their backs. A horse with a high head couldn’t hold a hump in her back, couldn’t throw a buck as soon as a rider mounted. Well, would you look at that. Six-oh-five in the morning and I’d already learned something new.

  The groom cupped his hands, the universal symbol for a leg-up. I breathed a sigh of relief that my vaulting would not be put to the test a second time, and put my left knee in his palms. “One—two—three!” I pushed off the ground with my right foot as he pushed my knee up, and just like that, I was on top of the bay filly at last, nudging my feet into the short stirrups while she circled the stall impatiently, shuffling her hooves through the dirty straw.

  “Make ’em longer,” the groom instructed, taking the filly’s reins and pulling her up to an uneven halt. She flung up her head and clicked her teeth together, but he ignored her with the aplomb of a racetracker, an easy-going attitude which came from either innocence or experience, I couldn’t decide which. “You know the saying? The longer you ride, the longer you ride.”

  That didn’t sound like any saying I’d ever heard. I looked at my knees, bent close to the pommel of the exercise saddle. I certainly looked like a jockey. “Really? I thought I was supposed to keep them short in this saddle.”

  “Nah, mommy. Only for breezing. And you ain’t gonna breeze this baby. She just going for a gallop. So make ’em long
and keep your feet in front of you, okay? You got this.”

  I lengthened the stirrups until they were closer to my regular jumping length, banging just above my ankle bone when I let my legs hang loose. The groom nodded. “Jus’ hang on and follow Billy Joe,” he advised, pronouncing the elf’s name Beel-ee. “You be fine. No problem.”

  I poked my boots back in the irons, and realized they didn’t have any tread. No rubber pads, or even a thick wrapping of latex to give me some grip. “No stirrup pads?” I raised my eyebrows at the groom. “Seriously?”

  He shrugged and turned away, opening the door as wide as it would go. “You be fine,” he repeated. “Remember you duck you head on the way out.”

  The filly made a beeline for the open door, and I fumbled with the fat racing reins, hastily tying a knot in the impossibly long stretch of nylon between the rubber and the buckle.

  I have my doubts, I thought. I have my doubts.

  There was a pit of nerves in my stomach, and I briefly considered leaping off and leaving the wide-eyed filly with this guy. He could explain how the fancy English-riding girl got nerves and couldn’t hack it as an exercise rider. He and the elf could laugh about how those eventing girls acted so tough when they didn’t even have the balls to take a horse around a racetrack. It was fine. I didn’t mind at all. The alternative, which was rapidly appearing to be my imminent death, seemed a pretty high price to pay for my reputation, and I wasn’t as concerned about the way others saw me as I used to be.

  Still, the other, other alternative was not having enough money to keep a roof over my horses’ heads, to say nothing of my own. I had a barn-full of horses at home. Them, plus the constant specter of Pete’s distrust, made my mind up for me. I’d never really had a choice, anyway.

  I shoved my feet home as far as they’d go in the slippery stirrups and guided the filly through the door, swaying dangerously in the unfamiliar flat saddle, remembering at the last second the groom’s warning to duck as we went through the door.