Pride (The Eventing Series Book 2) Read online

  Pete was managing to look nonchalant about the incoming scores, maybe because he was first after the dressage and had a clear stadium round. He’d picked up a couple of time faults in the cross-country, which had put the next finisher within a hairs-breadth of beating him… until that unlucky challenger picked up a refusal. There’d be a blue ribbon on our truck’s rearview mirror tonight… it just wouldn’t be mine.

  “Looks like you’re still on track to take fifth,” Pete observed unhelpfully, surveying the white-board with the results scrawled across them in an uneven attempt at a grid.

  “Mmhmm,” I agreed around a gulp of Gatorade. Yay hurray, fifth place. I hadn’t come all the way up here to the arse-end of Georgia on a boiling hot day in hopes of a pink ribbon, but I didn’t bother saying that. He knew already. He knew I didn’t even like pink.

  “Too bad it isn’t first, I know, but, hey—you got around without any problems. That’s a good sign. No sloppy mistakes, no messy fences, right? At least, none that I saw. Good job, hon. You two have come a long way.”

  From anyone else I considered my eventing equal, I would have bristled at these words. Pete got a pass. He’d been around since the rocky beginning. He knew that Mickey and I had overcome a few misunderstandings to get to this point—and by misunderstandings, I meant training issues which had exploded with roughly the power of your average island-destroying volcanic eruption. If it weren’t for Pete’s intervention, Mickey and I might not have been competing at Training Level today, or ever.

  Owing people a debt of gratitude was not really my favorite thing, but, luckily, Pete was pretty high on my list of People That Don’t Suck. In fact, he was at the very top…

  …which made it kind of hard for me to lie to him.

  I peered over the lip of my Gatorade bottle at Pete. He squinted back at me. “Something you want to tell me?”

  “We were kind of messy in the end,” I admitted.

  “The skinny hedge? Yeah, I could see it. That could’ve been tighter.”

  Sure, the skinny hedge. Let’s leave it at that. Why mention blowing the take-off at the road hazard fence, or the monumental scramble we’d had over the two-stride log fences on the second sweep through the forest? We’d gotten over them, hadn’t we? We’d almost missed that damn hedge, though, a v-shaped little skinny positioned at the base of a hill, just where Mr. On-His-Forehand Mickey was nearly impossible to guide. Well, we hadn’t missed it… just barely.

  I shrugged, willing to leave it at the skinny hedge. At least it was late in the course, which meant I could use heat and weariness as an excuse. “I just couldn’t hold him together anymore. He was so heavy on the forehand by that point, just dragging himself around the course.”

  “He’s not fit, you’re saying. What do you think he’s missing, in terms of conditioning?” Pete looked ready to get scholarly; he loved discussing the science of conditioning and nutrition. I didn’t feel up to a research forum at the moment, though. The steward was over by the board, writing up some numbers… my stomach clenched and released as another pair of riders were added to the list of clean cross-country rounds.

  “We’ve done the same fitness works as you and Mayfair,” I said, averting my eyes from the white-board. “But she’s ready to go out and run a race, and Mickey was blowing before the course was over. I guess we have to change something. Still, it was a clean round. No time penalties.”

  Pete smiled absently, no doubt thinking of how angelically perfect his little Mayfair had been. She might have been a hair slow, but Pete wasn’t really bothered with time penalties so long as he got an absolutely beautiful round. He truly rode his novices every stride of every course, showing them where to put their feet and when to jump the fences, using their dressage schooling to create picture-perfect bascules. He said that over-riding a horse a little in the lower levels gave them skill and confidence they’d be able to use to his advantage in the upper levels.

  Personally, I thought he could use fewer cues from dressage and a few more from racing. Poetry in motion was lovely in theory, but optimum time was no joke. At the upper levels, only a few quarter-time penalties might divide the top three finishers—and at a big event, that could be the difference between paying off the show bills, or skipping Starbucks on the long drive home.

  Pete seemed to live with a placid understanding that there would always be time to fix these things down the road, a complacency I couldn’t understand. I needed everything to be top-notch, all the time. I needed to win, I needed to know I was drawing ahead, I needed to know I was getting better all the time. I needed to know there was light at the end of this tunnel. Very simply, I needed to know there’d be enough money for a venti black coffee with a shot of espresso when I was schlepping horses back home from an exhausting weekend, to say nothing of gas for the truck. Living on the edge of bankruptcy was exhausting. I wasn’t sure how much longer I could take it.

  That was why a fifth-place finish hurt so much. It wasn’t a leap closer to any of my goals. It was just the same piddly little stepping-stone I’d been on before I’d gotten here. I couldn’t see any point of having come at all.

  I scooted out of the way as the steward came over with a dry-erase marker and added the last score to the white-board. I peered over her shoulder while she totted up the figures and started scrawling in the final placings. My eyes narrowed as I squinted at her bubbly handwriting. The woman wrote like a teenager. Well, it made the big round o’s in Morrison stand out, didn’t it? There you had it: Peter Morrison and Miss Mayfair were first in the Novice Horse division. A few rows down, Juliet Thornton and Danger Mouse were fifth in Training Horse. Well, we’d already established that, so with no interesting surprises, it was time to get moving.

  “I’m just going to get my pink ribbon and go home,” I said, starting for the registration tent, where the prizes were being arranged on a card table while a few Pony Clubbers looked on with undisguised glee. I scowled at their beaming faces. “Wait until they figure out satin ribbons don’t pay the farrier.”

  “Hey!” Pete caught my arm as I tried to slip past him. “This is good news!”

  I gave him a skeptical look. “Excuse me?”

  “You had a good round, right? So you didn’t get a top three finish. I know you wanted to take him to the AECs later, but if you’re not going to qualify by now… why worry about it? Don’t spend your summer worrying about getting two more qualifiers. Just concentrate on getting ready for your first prelim event.”

  I had to admit, it was a nice thought. Still, the plan had been to go to the AECs all along. “I want to move up, but… it’s a championship.” What a magical word that was. The American Eventing Championships had felt like an attainable goal a few months ago when I’d first moved Mickey into training level. We’d only got one qualifying finish though, when we’d won first place last month at Sunshine State. I was aware part of the win had been the venue—we’d shown so much at Sunshine State since last year, the expansive show grounds just south of Ocala had started to feel like our second home. Mickey knew all the permanent jumps and had even started to look for some of the most reused temporary ones while we were out on course.

  “A training championship,” Pete pointed out. “What does that prove, when you’re trying to get a horse ready to go advanced someday? This time next year, you could have done your first three-day event. That’s the goal. That’s what you should be focusing on.”

  Those were the magic words: three-day event. I started flicking through calendars in my mind, penciling in horse shows and events that hadn’t even been announced yet. A one-star three-day event in the spring—compete all next summer—run a two-star in the late fall—then just like that we going advanced and competing with the big boys, for the big medals. Hey, you spend enough rainy afternoons reading the United States Eventing Association Omnibus, you know exactly what weekend belongs to which event. I could see the next eighteen months unfurling before me with thrilling clarity, and the thought of spendi
ng another moment worrying about the Training Level championships suddenly became laughable.

  “You’re right,” I breathed, and threw my arms around Pete’s neck. “It’s time to think bigger!”

  Pete stumbled back under my embrace, but he was laughing. “Oh my God,” he chuckled. “Those are the most frightening words Jules Thornton could ever say.”

  PETE’S MOCKING WORDS had their tiny sting, but I guess you could say that I had a little bit of a reputation, and it wasn’t for my modest, retiring ways. In fact, the only way I was allowed to share a truck cab with Pete on the way to and from events was if I promised to keep my mouth shut about plans, points, or priorities for the upcoming six months. I had a bad habit of living in the future, he said, and not spending much time in the present. But it was such an interesting future, I argued, how could I be blamed for spending most of my time there?

  This evening, as the sun sank in a lavish yellow spectacle over Georgia’s rolling hills, I had mentally fast-forwarded past the hot summer ahead. My mind was on the upcoming fall and winter seasons. Through summer, I’d take Mickey to a few moonlight jumper shows to keep his stadium jumping game sharp. We’d skip events in August, run at training level in September for a tune-up, and then we’d make our prelim debut. With some good placings over the winter, we could qualify and enter a one-star three-day event by spring. I gazed out at the endless pines and saw only cross-country courses and cheering crowds.

  “Yes,” I sighed aloud, so content I forgot the ban on audible ambition in the truck.

  Pete grimaced at me from the other side of the cab. The blue, yellow, and pink ribbons of our rosettes were fluttering between us, dancing in the ripples of cold air from the laboring air conditioning. The yellow one was mine as well as the pink; Dynamo had taken third in Intermediate, proving once again that he was my stable’s solid work-horse, although I had no doubt Pete thought he would’ve beat us if he’d brought along Regina.

  “Stop planning,” he scolded. “Relax for a minute.”

  I laughed. “Not in my DNA.”

  “How many Olympic medals have you won by this time in ten years?”

  “Oh, dozens.”

  “Ms. Thornton, you’ve won the three-day eventing gold medal four Olympics in a row! Any plans for retirement?”

  “Never,” I announced. “Never, ever.”

  Pete grinned. “I believe, it too.”

  “What’s wrong with that? I love eventing. It’s everything to me. Why would I ever give it up?”

  He reached across the wide truck seat and gave my thigh a squeeze. “No reason,” he said fondly. “Every now and then I like to pretend I’ll get you to take a vacation with me, that’s all. I figure you’ll have to reach the pinnacle of your sport and get bored before you’ll consent to a week off.”

  “Hah!” I snorted. “A vacation. You’re a very funny man.” As if either of us would ever have the time for that. With three competition horses in the trailer behind us, and two barns’ worth of horses in training waiting for us back at the farm, there was hardly a chance of anything more than an afternoon off in our near future.

  Not that I minded one bit, of course. This life was everything I’d ever wanted, and I was so close to having it all. A few more horses in my barn, a few more dollars in my pocket—well, it was the same complaint year after year, but I had to be closer now than I had been a year ago, right? A year closer, anyway.

  “Heard anything new about sponsorships?” I asked idly, flipping through my email on my phone. I had been hoping a championship run would send a few brands my way. I would be happy to sit in just about anyone’s saddle and give it total credit for my wins, but so far, no one was responding to any of my pitches. Meanwhile, the flaps on my cross-country saddle were wearing to wafer-thin beneath my knees and calves, and my dressage saddle’s billets and tree had been born in different generations.

  “Just… no. Nothing.”

  I turned and looked at his profile. “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure.” He chuckled.

  I thought the laugh sounded forced. “You can tell me,” I said, making an attempt to sound like a reasonable and empathetic person. I wasn’t either of those things, which is probably why Pete laughed again, for real this time, and told me there was absolutely nothing going on.

  “You’d be the first to know, obviously,” he reminded me. “Because I’m not taking anything that doesn’t include you. We’re a package deal.”

  I reached across the truck cab and put my hand on his leg, squeezing the muscle appreciatively. I knew he meant it. Pete wouldn’t leave me behind. He’d said so a hundred times, to the point where I was finally starting to believe him.

  I guessed we’d win or lose together, depending on whether or not we could convince a company to help us pay our staggering expenses.

  It was near midnight before our exit finally appeared in the truck’s headlights. We went bouncing down the rutted country highway, west into the heart of Marion County, winding through the endless black-board fences and moss-hung live oaks. Yearlings woke from startled slumber and peered at us from their pastures. A white-tailed possum gamboled across the blacktop, its eyes reflecting our headlights like bright golden coins, and when Pete braked to avoid running it over, there was a barrage of complaining kicks from the horses in the backseat.

  As Pete turned the truck up our own road, I felt a new surge of excitement at the thought of getting home, even though in these late hours there would be no one to greet us—or help us put the horses away. Lacey and Becky, usually our show grooms, had stayed behind this time, and they’d be long asleep. That was just fine; I was too tired to give a recounting of the event, who had been there, what they had been wearing, what their horses had been wearing, who had won what. I was just looking forward to the long walk back to the house from the annex barn, where my string of horses lived, with the bright Ocala stars over my head and the dark Ocala hills sloping away beside me, gazing up at the infinite beyond and knowing exactly where I belonged in the big sweeping universe.

  Mickey and Dynamo were settled into their stalls, the tack and trunks had been shoved into place in the tack room, and there was no reason to put off heading home for a shower and bed. Still, I lingered, peering into stalls one by one, and the horses looked up from their hay and wondered why I wasn’t leaving them to their nighttime rituals.

  I didn’t know, either.

  I just found it tough to leave tonight. There wasn’t any particular reason. Certainly not because the weather was particularly nice, or even a little bit nice, or even tolerable. The hot, still day in Georgia had faded into a hot, breezy night in Ocala. Although the palm fronds along the barn drive were rattling with every gust, the sea breeze, having traveled a hundred miles from the coast over scorching hot land, did nothing to cool the night. I could tell already, we were going to have an unreasonably hot summer. Extreme weather was the new normal: last year an unusually stormy rainy season had featured a devastating hurricane, then an unusually dry winter had given us blazing wildfires all through spring. Why should this coming summer be any different?

  My barn wasn’t exactly a cool refuge from the summer weather, either. Briar Hill Farm had two barns: the big gorgeous training barn, built in the shed-row style with open aisles around all four sides and high, open ceilings; and the annex barn, built in an old-fashioned broodmare barn style, with thick cinder-block walls, low rafters, and a center aisle running between the dark stalls.

  Pete had the training barn, and he would have been happy to share some of his bright, airy stalls with me, but I didn’t think I had the temperament to share a barn with anyone, let alone a boyfriend. He might tell me I ought to make a feeding change with a silly horse, or something else which would be relatively minor to anyone with any sense of rational behavior, but which in my case would spark a days-long argument. Oh, I could be honest about my shortcomings in the girlfriend/colleague department! I was well aware of my prickles. I just wasn’
t sure how to soften them.

  So in the interest of domestic tranquility and sanity, I kept my little string of trainees in the annex barn, a good fifteen minute’s walk from the house and the training barn. At least as a former broodmare barn, it boasted big stalls and a wide center aisle, designed to give protective mares and their silly foals plenty of room to bounce around. That was the good part. It had been built back in the sixties by horsemen from up north, which was the bad part. Those guys might have known how to build a nice sturdy barn, but they hadn’t understood the basics of outdoor living in a place like Florida.

  So naturally, instead of being sensibly built with the barn windows facing east and west, to catch the sea breezes from the Gulf and the Atlantic, my barn’s windows looked northeast and southwest. Nothing good ever came from either of those two directions—at least, not in Florida. The southwest breeze was a herald of a hot, dry day; a northeast breeze usually came on the tail end of winter cold fronts, and bit with the icy teeth of the North Atlantic.

  The upshot of all this was that the barn was cold all winter and hot all summer.

  At each stall, a box fan was roaring away, speed set on high, blowing back the horse’s forelocks when they pushed their noses up against the grill for some extra air. The fans’ white noise was part of the summer soundtrack—everyone learned to shout a little louder, and turn the radio up a couple notches, when the fans were on. When the horses went outside and the fans were switched off, the silence was deafening.