Pride (The Eventing Series Book 2) Read online

  Dynamo was still king of the barn. The red chestnut Thoroughbred was fighting fit, with the build and swagger of a prize fighter. I’d kept him eventing at Intermediate level for the past season, holding onto my hope that he could go up to Advanced, despite misgivings he just didn’t have that extra bounce in his stride for the bigger, wider jumps at the top level of eventing.

  If Dynamo was king, I considered Mickey to be prince and heir-apparent. The good-looking ex-racehorse had matured over the past year, and was now a stunningly handsome performance horse with all the right proportions: long legs with plenty of bone; a deep, wide chest; powerful hindquarters, and an elegantly muscled swan’s neck, which gleamed nearly white in the glaring Florida sunlight, all crowned with a salt-and-pepper mane. With those flashy good looks, his kind dark eye was a blessing. At seven years old, Mickey still could and did dissolve into a jittery juvenile from time to time, but for the most part, he was developing into a thoughtful horse who considered the things I told him and mostly agreed to do them.

  I didn’t own Mickey, but that was okay. Every now and then, when I felt like torturing myself, I imagined what life would be like if his owners pulled him from my barn and sent him to a bigger, more accomplished, arguably far more deserving trainer than myself, and I would walk around the rest of the day with a creeping sense of unease, jumping every time my phone rang or a truck’s tires rattled over the gravel drive.

  Of course, there was no real reason to imagine they’d take him away—not when they’d left him with me this long. I’d kept Mickey sound and happy through a year of Novice and Training Level eventing, going slowly as they had asked me to. I was doing everything right in their books.

  In my version of the future, Mickey and I were together forever, from Novice to the Olympics to retirement, a storybook saga as rich and beautiful as the one I had with Dynamo, only better because I was further along as a rider now, so we could fast-forward some of the early scenes and get right to the good parts. He was the shiny white pony of my childhood dreams, the sleek gray sport horse I’d sketched into school textbooks in my teenage years, before I’d replaced that dappled hero with an emotionally damaged red chestnut who was at least real.

  “Jules!” Lacey’s insistent voice cut into my musings at just the right moment. “Jules, come and help me turn out, will ya?”

  “Can’t you do it? I have to go over my training calendar.” I picked up the little agenda where I wrote detailed descriptions of daily rides, temperature-pulse-respiration numbers from fitness days, and hopeful training epochs I expected to reach in the future. Today being Monday, of course, I’d just written “day off” or “hack” across most of the horses’ entries.

  I blinked at the words in surprise. I’d completely forgotten what day it was. I really did need more sleep. “Never mind, I just did it,” I called.

  “Duh,” Lacey said, leaning in from the aisle. She had Margot’s lead rope in her hand, because these days Lacey was obsessed with the bay mare and always turned her out first, hayed her first, gave her grain first… kind of the same thing I did with Dynamo and Mickey, my wonder boys. “It’s Monday, goofball. It’s our day of rest.”

  “Good, then I’m going home and you handle this mess.”

  “If you go home, I’m going home.”

  “If you go home, who will clean all these stalls?”

  “Becky,” Lacey suggested coyly. “We’ll just tell her we’re sick.”

  I laughed. The idea had merit. Becky would never let a barn go uncleaned. She’d do all of Pete’s stalls and then march right down here and do all of mine. We’d never get away with it, though. “Pete would find out,” I said regretfully.

  “You ought to be able to manage Pete,” Lacey sighed. “It’s a shame you caught Pete and not me. He’d be putty in my hands. He’d think he was in charge and it would be me the whole time. With you, he’s just plain in charge.”

  “He’s not in charge. Well, he’s not in charge of this barn.”

  Lacey smirked and towed Margot along. “Let’s just get these animals out of the barn so we can mop up their filth, and then you can tell me how you do whatever you want and Pete’s not the boss of you and I’ll try not to laugh. Sound good?”

  “Whatever,” I said, queen of comebacks as always. “Get out of my barn, and take that bitchy mare with you.”

  Barney, a rough-coated Thoroughbred-draft cross with rolling white eyeballs, shoved his head over his stall grill as Margot went by, whinnying with desperate love. Margot aimed a hind leg in his general direction to let him know what she thought of his romantic advances.

  I waited until the bay mare was a safe distance away, then snatched up Barney’s halter and lead, sliding the strap behind his ears while he was still watching his lady sashay out to the mare pasture. “She doesn’t love you,” I told him, “and she never will.”

  Barney wasn’t very smart, though, and he cried after her all the way out to the gelding pasture, and then proceeded to run the fence-line for the next fifteen minutes, shrieking out his endless passion, while we turned out Maybelline (also known as the Chestnut Mare of Doom), and the geldings Mickey, Dynamo, Jim Dear, and Hart, none of whom paid the slightest attention to lovesick Barney. We were all used to him. After a while, even Barney realized Margot’s shapely hindquarters were turned to him in an act of rejection, not forbidden love, and he suddenly gave up and went to quietly grazing with the other geldings.

  “Now, to muck,” Lacey announced. “I guess you’re helping, since you turned out your horses instead of riding them.”

  “We can hack them out together after we do the barn, and take a nap this afternoon.” I felt in dire need of an easy day after melting in the Georgia heat all weekend. “Sound good?”

  “Sounds awesome!” Lacey started flinging manure rakes and brooms into a wheelbarrow with fresh enthusiasm. Then she flipped the radio back on. That was the problem with Lacey, I decided, as she began to belt out the lyrics to a song I didn’t even recognize. She didn’t appreciate silence nearly as much as I did.

  For me, cleaning up a silent barn is a form of meditation. You scoop and you fling, you rake and you dig, you smooth and you spread, all of your movements fluid and mechanical—after all, raking up manure and wet bedding and wasted hay isn’t exactly rocket science. Your brain is free to wander. I usually did my best thinking when I was mucking out. I planned out training calendars, worked through complicated math sums to figure out if I could afford grain, gas, hay, a new set of open-front boots for Dynamo—all while emptying wheelbarrows, filling water buckets, throwing flakes of hay. Nothing in the list of chores was intellectual enough to interrupt the flow of words through my mind. I could probably have written a book while I was shoveling shit, quietly dictating the words into a little clipped-on microphone, if I’d had the patience for fiction. I was pretty set on reality, though.

  I’d hoped for a little quiet time this morning. Between the long, hot, bad-food-decision of a weekend and the post-event-bill blues, I’d counted on a morning of meditative brooding, something prevented by Lacey’s current decision to howl along with the Foo Fighters. I felt cheated out of a good wallowing worry. Nothing really brought home how little money I was making quite like going to an event, which was basically a large festival you threw money and time at, worked your ass off to win, then came home from empty-handed (except for your pretty ribbons), just hoping someone with money had seen you and been impressed. So far, no one had.

  Meanwhile, the horses I owned seemed destined to stay with me forever. Dynamo was a given, but Maybelline and Margot? Why were they still with me? It had a little something to do with their personalities and their talents: one had too much personality, one had no talent.

  Maybelline was an Empress of Evil, a chestnut off-track Thoroughbred who went off the deep end every few months. Last month she’d been performing a solid First Level dressage test; this month she would have been more suitable for a bucking competition.

  Her pastur
e-mate, Margot, was polite enough as a sort of advanced school horse that I could justify keeping her around for the occasional students who floated in and out of my daily planner. Lacey adored her, but there was nothing above-average about Margot.

  Unfortunately, selling mediocre Thoroughbred mares in this market was next to impossible. Everyone in Ocala knew that if you wanted a mare, you just drove up to a breeding farm and asked for one until someone handed you a lead-rope with a horse attached. There were always open mares after breeding season, mares who hadn’t gotten pregnant or wouldn’t stay pregnant, and didn’t have any other use for their owners. To stand out as a Thoroughbred mare in Ocala, she needed to be a goddess amongst horses, talented beyond belief and regularly winning at rated shows.

  Much like broke event trainers, average horses were a dime-a-dozen in this town.

  I had a couple of nice sales horses sent to me by a few friendly owners who weren’t in a hurry and didn’t want to pay higher fees for a more established trainer. Hart, Jim Dear, and Barney were all learning to event so they could be sold as amateur-owner mounts. I was pretty good at making solid yes-ma’am type horses who jumped what they were pointed at and stopped when they were told. It was a useful skill, because push-button horses are expensive. The check for my last packer, Virtuous, was paying this spring’s bills. I wasn’t sure who was going to pay the summer ones to come.

  I emptied a pair of water buckets out of the stall window and peeked out at the grazing horses, dotting the hillside below the barn. Such flimsy things to base a life on! Four-legged animals who lived on grass—but not too much grass, or they’d founder and die—and which we taught, for no readily apparent reason outside of the fact that we loved doing it, to first dance like ballet dancers and then leap over large, solid objects.

  Well, there were opportunities on the horizon. Things weren’t all bad. Pete had been in talks with a potential sponsor, someone who would step in and throw some money at us in exchange for being their brand ambassador, using their tack, hashtagging them on Instagram, talking them up at competitor’s parties, that sort of thing. It was more about Pete than me, since he had Regina placing nicely at the Advanced Level and was getting some buzz on the eventing websites for being young, hot, and talented. (The attention I got was mainly for being the crazy eventing diva who managed to ensnare #SweetPete, and entire comment threads on Facebook were devoted to how lucky I was to have him/how I didn’t know how good I had things. The Eventing Chicks blog had an entire category for us in their archives.)

  Still, Pete insisted any sponsorship deal would be for the trainers (plural) at Briar Hill Farm, not just Peter Morrison (singular).

  I slammed my manure rake on the metal wheelbarrow, knocking a few stubborn road apples out of the tines. “If I could get Dynamo running Advanced, they’d pay more attention to me,” I told the wheelbarrow. “I wouldn’t be the crazy girlfriend anymore.”

  Lacey’s freckled face peered around the stall door and I nearly jumped out of my skin. “Jesus Christ, Lacey, where did you come from?”

  “What were you muttering?”

  “I wasn’t muttering. I was trying to get this fork clean on the side of the wheelbarrow. Did you finish the other stalls already? Can you pull out some shavings for me?”

  “You were muttering.”

  “What if I was?”

  Lacey’s grin was diabolic. “You’ve been looking at Eventing Chicks again.”

  “No, I haven’t. I don’t have time for blogs. I have real, actual work to do.”

  She leaned against the wall and crossed her arms. “I saw what they wrote about you this morning.”

  I hadn’t even looked at that stupid website this morning. For God’s sake, what had they done? Vicious, anonymous, horrible people who probably couldn’t even ride a Novice course—who told them they could have a blog? “What? What did they write?”

  “A haiku devoted to Pete’s ass in white breeches.”

  “That’s about Pete, and I hate them, and what about me?”

  “You’re not worried about the haiku to Pete’s ass?”

  “That’s Pete’s problem.”

  Lacey raised her eyebrows. “Some people might think it was a girlfriend’s problem?”

  “Fine, I’ll just look myself.” I wriggled my phone out of my back pocket.

  “It’s just a little comment,” Lacey hedged. “Not even a full article.”

  “Thank God for that.” I typed in the blog’s address—of course it popped right up when I hit the “e”—and skimmed the morning entry. There was the haiku to Pete’s ass, just charming, and there was my name:

  “Jules Thornton was in over her head this weekend, which is pretty bad considering she was actually in contention for the AECs. The championships will be a little less interesting without her personal brand of crazy, but a little safer considering the way she took some of the cross-country fences this weekend. All we can say is, Jules might want to invest in either some tougher bits, or some tougher riding lessons. Otherwise her horses are going to run away with her, and we don’t think her boyfriend will be far behind. How much longer will Pete Morrison stick around with a girl who rides like that?”

  I chewed at my lip and read it again.

  Then again.

  “Goddammit,” I muttered at last, and brushed away something hot and ticklish that was definitely not tears from my eyes. “They suck.”

  “I know they do.”

  “What do I do with this? Is it libel? Can I sue them?”

  “Sue them—for God’s sake, Jules, it’s just a blog. They’re just jealous of Pete. It’s probably a bunch of high school girls sitting in the tack room after riding lessons looking at their iPhones and giggling. You do not need to do anything about them. Or…” she looked thoughtful.

  “Or what?” I was hoping for a sweet tale of vengeance.

  “You could be nicer, and give them less to grab hold of. You’re always trying to be alone. That’s what they can’t stand about you. That’s why they pick on you. You’re never at the parties. You’re never at the rail chatting. You’re never meeting up with anyone on the course walks. You’re hardly ever with Pete. And it makes them all think you hate them, and hate Pete, too.”

  “Why should they care about me and Pete?”

  “Because they all want to be with him, dummy,” Lacey hissed. “He’s their celebrity crush. Do you pay attention to anything besides horses?”

  Lacey marched off to finish bedding stalls, leaving me alone to seethe. It was all about Pete, wasn’t it? Pete and Regina, mare extraordinaire. Sweet Pete in his white breeches, winning everything in sight and looking cool as a cucumber while he was doing it.

  “When’s my name going to be in lights?” I asked the empty stall, tossing manure into the wheelbarrow with a vengeance. “Why should I be the celebrity’s girlfriend?”

  “That’s the million-dollar question,” Lacey called down the aisle. “That’s what they all want to know—why you?”

  I guessed there was a cold comfort in that.

  WE WERE SLOGGING up to the house for a late lunch. There were dark clouds billowing up in the west and the magnolia tree near the dressage arena turned from dark green to white as the wind flipped its leaves over. “Here it comes, just in time for our break,” Lacey remarked.

  “Polite of it to wait.”

  Pete came out to meet us as we passed his barn. He took off Rolex Kentucky cap and ran a hand through his sweaty reddish locks, but there was no escaping the sort of hat hair one acquired after a long hot morning squashed into a riding helmet.

  All mine, ladies, I thought, turning up a squeamish cheek so he could give me a peck without his sweaty face accidentally connecting with my sweaty face, a fate we were both determined to avoid.

  Pete grinned at our mutual revulsion. “I’m disgusting.”

  “You and me both.” I felt like I’d taken a dip in a hot tub and followed it up with a roll in the sand. “I’m showering; I don’t even car
e if I have to take another one later.”

  “You’re the soul of conservation.”

  “Drought’s over, smart-ass.”

  Pete laughed ruefully. “Thank God. If we’d run out of water, I have no idea what would’ve happened.”

  I shrugged. It hadn’t happened. There were enough real catastrophes to keep me busy; I didn’t need to rehash all the might-have-beens.

  Pete held open the door for me, and I sighed with simple pleasure as the cold air came billowing onto the patio, raising goosebumps on my sweat-damp skin. I loved air conditioning. It was probably my favorite thing in the entire world. Especially this year, which seemed even hotter than usual.

  Pete hadn’t been joking about the water holding out. Plenty of farms had lost their water this past spring, especially out west in the drier counties. Spring had been almost as anxious as a hurricane season this year. What would come first, a blazing wildfire or an empty well? That was the question on everyone’s minds as Florida’s population, both horsemen and civilian, watched the leaden skies, coils of yellow smoke curving along the horizon, and prayed for rain.

  The rains came in with a fury of their own at last. Now we couldn’t get through a day without an inch or two dumping on the barn, fat tropical drops pelting our hard hats like nails while we tried to keep working the horses in between lightning bolts. At least the plant-life was happy. Ocala’s fields rebounded immediately, flourishing into a carpet of rich green grass stretched across its spongey bed of limestone. Horse country reinvented itself in the course of a week: the pastures went from topaz to emerald, the training tracks went from dust storms to canals, the nights went from a tense, silent waiting to a cacophony of singing, jubilant frogs. The smoke cleared from the sky and we all knew we’d survived another fit of Floridian nature.