Pride (The Eventing Series Book 2) Read online

  I stared at him, pancakes forgotten.

  He’d never told me things were this bad.

  Pete looked away, as if he couldn’t bear to meet my gaze.

  “Pete—”

  The kitchen door slammed back on its hinges and Amanda the Hunter Princess came bouncing into the room, all gleaming boots and Tailored Sportsmans and blonde pony-tail and perfect teeth.

  “Good news!” Amanda trilled, gazing around the room as if she couldn’t imagine anything but utter joy at her arrival during our dinner.

  “Apparently you’re still here,” I snapped.

  “I was in the barn chatting with Becky,” Amanda explained, smiling brilliantly at me.

  I frowned at her. A likely story. No one chatted with Becky. Becky was not a chatter. She thought small talk was for weaklings and fools.

  “Becky says hello,” Amanda added.

  Liar, I thought. Becky wouldn’t bother to say hello.

  “Anyway, I was in the barn and a client called me and good news! Had to come tell you!”

  “Tell me?” I raised my eyebrows. Amanda was still looking at me for some reason. She was Pete’s business partner, not mine. “You mean tell Pete?”

  “Tell you, silly! I have a client for you! She’s so great and she has a horse who is just dying to be an eventer!”

  This was a strange turn of events. I didn’t recall asking Amanda for any leads. Why wasn’t she giving this one to Pete? I glanced back at Pete. His face reddened, giving him away at once.

  I sighed. “Well, that’s very… unexpected,” I said carefully, turning up the corners of my mouth as far as they would go. “I guess I thought you would partner up with Pete on client leads.”

  Amanda went on beaming, evidently still amazed at the wonderful news she’d brought me. “Well, you know, she doesn’t really like male trainers. She’s kind of particular.”

  “Particular… how?” Particular was not a word you wanted to hear in a potential client. Particular was the opposite of hands-off, laid-back, understanding—now those were the words you wanted to describe your clients. Your magical, unicorn clients who existed only in a dream world, I reminded myself. “Would you call her difficult?”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” Amanda plopped down at the kitchen table and slid the Dressage Today Pete had been reading around to face her. She flipped through a few pages, wrinkled her nose, and laughed up at Pete. “I don’t know how you spend all day doing this,” she chortled.

  “I don’t spend all day on dressage,” Pete protested. He smiled at her benevolently. “But dressage is exactly why Mercury is such a nice horse, and why you like him so much and why you’re going to tell your student to buy him.”

  “And then you’re going to take me out to dinner in thanks,” she said, practically sparkling with delight in herself and in Pete.

  I narrowed my eyes. These two needed to be separated. “About this client?”

  Amanda looked blankly at me. Then her eyes went round with surprise, as if she’d forgotten what we’d been talking about. “Oh! I’m sorry, Jules! About Tony. Tony Pinto, isn’t that the funniest name for a horsewoman? She’s from Naples. She breeds Gypsy Vanner horses, I am not even kidding you, she actually breeds these spotty draft horses! I can’t even! Anyway, she has a crossbred who is just not what she expected. He’s five years old and moves like a Hackney. I am not kidding. His knees go up to here. Terrible. She really only drives now and wanted to sell this guy as a hunter, but of course with that kind of trot he’s going nowhere in the hunter ring, I don’t even care how flashy he is. But he’s big-boned and he’s really beautiful if you like that sort of thing.”

  We all shook our heads simultaneously; none of us liked that sort of thing. Amanda laughed with delight. “I know right? But a lot of people do like paint horses. Or pinto. Is it pinto or paint? One’s a color and one’s a breed but I always forget which. Paint’s easier to say. One syllable.” She shrugged. “Anyway. She’s going to come see you tomorrow. She’s only in town for a couple of days. If you can make him an eventer and get him sold, she’ll make it worth your time, I promise. She has friends and they all have cash.”

  Amanda left on that tantalizing note, turning down Pete’s over-friendly (in my opinion) offer to make her a plate of pancakes. The kitchen faded a little when her larger-than-life presence went bouncing out the door; the lights grew dimmer, the yellow wallpaper was less sunny. I liked it better that way. I started on my pancakes.

  “Maybe you could suggest to Amanda that she come during business hours,” I said after a few minutes of silence.

  “Do we really have business hours around here?”

  I glowered at him, but he kept his eyes on his plate. After a while I tried again. “Did you ask her to find me a client?”

  Pete pushed his empty plate away and fixed me with a steady look. “I’m just trying to keep this place afloat,” he said after a moment’s silence. “I thought if you were making more money, I could ask you to contribute a little more to expenses.”

  That had to hurt. I had to give him credit for that. “You didn’t tell me things were that bad. I would have tried harder.”

  Pete rubbed at his forehead. “Would you have, though?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You don’t do things you don’t like to do. You don’t like people, so you don’t put yourself out for them… and so your barn is nearly empty and you don’t do a thing about it.”

  I sniffed and took the plates to the sink. For a while I splashed around, washing dishes and making a mess. I cracked a juice glass and threw it in the garbage with more force than was necessary, enjoying the shatter. Pete sat at the table and looked at the wood-grain. I finished mopping up the water I’d gotten all over the kitchen and sat back down at the table, at a loss for what to say or do next.

  Pete spoke up first.

  “So you aren’t going to consider the offer at all?”

  I was flustered. “I never said I wouldn’t talk to her. She’s got a horse, I’ve got open stalls.”

  “The Rockwell offer,” Pete said, voice strained.

  I looked up at him, alarmed at the edge to his voice. He was gazing at me steadily, without a hint of his usual humor. He looked pretty pissed, actually. “You mean, to go and be a working student all summer.”

  “Yes.” He leaned back in his chair and folded his arms across his chest. “And gain a sponsor for fall.”

  I shook my head. “It’s not even that great a sponsorship,” I said dismissively. “A saddle and some money, it’s not like they’re buying me a horse. I’d be better off gaining some paying clients.”

  “It’s a start. And a new saddle, and some notoriety, and maybe appearing in some magazine ads… for God’s sake, Jules, how is that not a great sponsorship? What do you want from them?” His voice was raising, his face was flushing, and I realized with shock that Pete was really, truly angry with me this time, no more haha Jules is making another silly decision, haha Jules thinks she’s so tough but I know her best, haha Jules…!

  No, this time he was getting up from his chair and sliding it back so hard it hit the wall with a bang, and he was leaning his fists on the table, the better to shout at me. “Jules, you can be as jealous of me as you want and it will never, ever affect me, I promise you. But for you to throw away an offer like this is absolutely bat-shit crazy, and not only that, it’s insulting. It’s insulting to Rockwell and it’s insulting to me. We both have to succeed if we want to keep this place, Jules, don’t you know that? What happens if my grandmother turns it over to us, like we want? What then? Taxes and insurance and repairs… do you realize we’re actually going to start losing money when this place is ours? We’re going to have to work a hundred times harder to make this place work.”

  He sat back down and put his face in his hands. I sat very still, riveted, staring at him. I’d never seen Pete so angry. I’d never seen Pete so passionate.

  I’d never heard him call the f
arm ours before.

  He sighed into his hands. “Things are only going to get tougher.”

  I looked down at the ground, and saw his half-chaps lying on the floor, the broken zipper still stuck halfway. He must have tired of trying to pull it down and had just wrenched the chap off. He was really going to have to wrestle to get that thing back on over his boots and breeches tomorrow. That stupid zipper. Those stupid cheap half-chaps. This stupid, stupid life.

  I leaned back in the hard kitchen chair and closed my eyes, hoping the answer would come. Anything would do, any alternative at all to taking this humiliating offer, any scenario except for the one where I was forced to hand over my life to some show barn trainer in exchange for a summer of dressage and stable slavery.

  I couldn’t go back to that life. I’d come too far, and I just couldn’t go back.

  Pete didn’t know what he was asking me to do. He came from a riding family, he came from a childhood where horses and showing were normal parts of existence, not dearly cherished privileges bought through a combination of sweat, tears, and social exclusion. He’d never been left behind to muck and water while the other kids rode. He’d never been laughed at for riding in Wal-Mart hiking boots because actual riding boots were too expensive. He’d been part of the gang. He’d been on those rides I’d watched leave the barn without me. He’d been well-dressed and turned-out and looked the part I had longed for. He might have broken half-chaps now, but his childhood had been far more forgiving than mine.

  Mine had hurt, and I couldn’t forgive any of it.

  “I’ll get this client,” I heard myself say, as if from a long way away. “Things will be fine.”

  Pete lowered his hands and looked at me, and his face was so pale and drawn, my heart crept up into my throat and stayed hiding there, choking me with its terror. “If you don’t get this client,” he said softly, sadly, “Then you have to go this summer.”

  THROUGH A CAREFULLY orchestrated performance of the usual nighttime rituals, which involved pretending to be suddenly and violently struck with exhaustion/drunkenness (neither of which was the case, since I was wide awake and completely sobered up after my walk down to the pasture), we both managed to avoid the subject, or any subject at all, again that night. No one went to bed angry, that fabled harbinger of a doomed relationship.

  Still, we slept on opposite sides of the bed that night, facing the blank walls where we had never hung any pictures, in the bedroom we had never had the courage to decorate, for fear, I was realizing, we might have to leave it behind. For a long time I didn’t sleep at all, I just looked at the pattern the moonlight picked out through the half-closed blinds, the spectral leaves dancing across the drywall, and thought about the things Pete had said.

  About our farm, about our money, about my leaving.

  Ever since I’d lost my farm, I’d tried not to think of any thing as permanent. Barns could blow away, houses could tear apart. Horses were loaded onto trailers and never seen again. Books were scattered to the four winds, their shredded pages festooning the hedges and drowning in puddles. Everything could collapse at any minute; that was the lesson I’d learned last year.

  I loved living at Briar Hill, and Pete was happy to have me here, so I’d left it at that. There were no guarantees, though, that this would last through tomorrow, let alone for years to come. Even if the house and barn and fences stood for another fifty years, someone else might be sleeping in this bedroom, other horses might be standing in the stables and grazing in the fields. This might be Pete’s farm someday. It might not. Either way, I’d never thought of it as my farm. I was just a tenant here… or so I’d thought. Maybe Pete saw things differently. Maybe Pete saw our lives as more intertwined than I had ever imagined.

  I rolled over and studied the back of his head for a while, long hair in need of a trim, curling darkly against the white pillow-case. My partner, I thought. Was he my partner outside of the house? We shared things inside these walls. We used the same tube of toothpaste; no one said anything about who bought the last loaf of bread or who picked up the milk or whose turn it was to buy peanut butter, although occasionally we did bicker over extra crunchy versus creamy. (Pete was learning to live with crunchy peanut butter and I knew he would be a better man for it.)

  Out in the barns, though, we did our own thing. My barn was my barn; Pete’s barn was Pete’s barn. I didn’t go borrowing hay when I was running low, or rummage around in his tack room, as tempting as that was, because we were running our own operations out there. We had two different businesses, with our own bank accounts and our own plans.

  Then again, I thought, what about when we went to horse shows and events? We went together whenever we could. We presented ourselves to the world, to the media (such as it was), to potential clients, as a team. Look at Rockwell: that whole mess, this nonsense of going to their little summer camp and getting up to their standards, that never would have come up if Pete hadn’t told them we were a package deal. I would have just kissed Pete good-bye and held down the fort until he came home.

  Maybe Pete hadn’t seen me as a tenant. Maybe, all this time, he’d been quietly consolidating our separate lives, and I simply hadn’t noticed.

  Well, that shouldn’t surprise anyone, me least of all. I rarely noticed anything that didn’t have four legs and a tail.

  Pete took a deep breath and shifted, and I slid a little closer to him, pushing the sheet away; the air conditioning was doing its best, but it was too warm for two people under the covers. He was comforting to be near, even in his sleep; I could lay awake and imagine catastrophe after catastrophe, and Pete would dream on, care-free, reassuring in his enviable ability to just relax, just be quiet, just be.

  I had no such ability. There were questions about life to be analyzed, while the clock silently flicked through its numbers. Like: what did “our” farm mean, exactly? Were we a settled couple, then? Were we going to… I didn’t know, get married or something?

  I thought about being married to Pete. More questions arose to keep me awake. Did he consider such a thing possible, or even inevitable? Would he be crazy enough to link himself to me permanently, or at least legally? Pete, who thought my moods were funny. Pete, who let trouble roll off his shoulders like a duck surfacing from a pond, while I flapped and floundered in the shallows, always fighting unseen enemies. Pete, of whom one Internet commenter had once remarked, regarding his improbable affection for me, “Well, he doesn’t seem like a masochist…”

  We shared bread and peanut butter and toothpaste and a bed. We bickered and made up. That sounded like marriage, when one came right down to it. I wasn’t sure what else there was to be being married.

  Just legal things. Like property.

  Would my name go onto the property, with all the rights and responsibilities that entailed, once his grandmother was happy and the inheritance was approved?

  I thought of being part-owner of all this land, and my heart beat a little faster. My poor lost farm had been nothing special, in the grand scheme of things. A clutch of acreage that was close to Ocala, but not part of the rich, rolling horse country the world celebrated. There was no equestrian street cred, no country life social cache, in my rural route address, tacked onto my rusty mailbox with reflective numbers from the hardware store. It had been a tiny slice carved from a once-mighty cattle ranch, its pastures cut into little ranches and dotted with mobile homes because that was what the market out there could bear, and my neighbors had been hobby farmers and hermits, some trying to scrape a living on the outskirts of the equestrian epicenter, some trying to hide from society behind high fences and security cameras. It was typically weird, nowhere special, forgotten countryside.

  Briar Hill, in contrast, was smack in the heart of horse country. I could easily have gone my whole life coming to these green hills for riding lessons, and then trailering home again after my hour was up, the meter run out on my time in the sun. Imagine staying here permanently—something I’d never allowed myself to
imagine. Imagine my name on the farm—a wish only a genie could grant.

  I’d never be able to repay Pete if he put my name on the farm. Not if we were married for a hundred years and I was the nicest wife in the world. (Which, I think, everyone would know was a little out of my range.)

  Pete sighed and rolled over in bed, his arms reaching out to catch at me. I wiggled backwards and stretched against his solid warmth. What a feeling, to be loved! What a feeling, to be safe!

  All he wanted of me was to give up my freedom for three months, to go work for someone else, to put up with her demands, to train and train and train and put a professional sheen on my dressage. All he wanted of me was to help carry the burden of the farm, the home—yes, it felt like home now—he was trying so hard to keep. All he wanted of me was to make this sacrifice for the both of us, now, so we could stay here, safe, forever, on a home base we would never have to give up so long as we were willing to work for it.

  I closed my eyes and put my hands over his. Maybe it wouldn’t have been so much to ask if I’d been anyone else, with any other background. Still, even with so much riding on my answer, what he was asking me to give up was nothing less than the identity I’d struggled to make for myself. I’d shed the skin of the poor girl who begged for rides, but the replacement was still flimsy and new. I’d be lying to us both if I’d said I wasn’t scared I would lose it.

  I’d give it one last try. I’d prove to him I could turn business around. If I could get more horses in my barn, I’d look more attractive to other owners. The more owners I had, the more attractive I’d look to sponsors. There would be money. It would work. It could work. It had to work.