Pride (The Eventing Series Book 2) Read online

  Could I be neutral with Amanda the Hunter Princess?

  Of course not. I’d say nasty things about her form over fences, make snarky remarks about hunters always jumping fences because they knew the poles would just fall down if they hit them, and finish up with some pointless commentary about her spotless Tailoreds that would just come off as jealousy.

  I sat back down at the table.

  “Good girl,” Lacey praised me. “I’ll make you a sandwich and leave you alone to pout for a while. That’s your reward. No need to thank me.”

  Sometimes it was amazing how well Lacey got me.

  I SPENT THE next morning alternating between excitement and dread. On one hand: yay, a new client! I’d have a new summer project to get ready for some baby novice events in the fall, get him going Novice Level over the winter, sell him as a nice Christmas present for someone, and start the new year with some cash in pocket. I’d also have a few extra dollars in my pocket each month from board and training fees. What wasn’t to love?

  On the other hand, I couldn’t imagine any client coming from someone like Amanda would be easy to handle. Amanda’s clients tended to be in another stratosphere, financially speaking. I worked with professionals who had a little extra money to play with horses. Amanda worked with daughters of Hollywood and high finance. Even if this Tony Pinto was just another horsewoman, if she was used to playing with Amanda, she was used to playing with big bucks. Gypsy Vanners were another giveaway, too—the overgrown draft ponies with their black-and-white coats and feathered legs were basically large living toys, the kind of thing a wealthy woman with My Little Pony dreams tended to go for in a big way.

  Tony was supposed to arrive around one o’clock, when I was usually sneaking back to the house for a break from the sun and sweat, so I settled into the tack room rather reluctantly while Lacey went back to the house, Marcus trailing behind her, rejoicing in her unimportance as the working student. Left alone to wait with only a rumbling box fan for company, I cracked open a Diet Coke and flipped through my training book, reading old entries and mentally working out a training schedule for Tony’s horse. If he was already jumping courses, we’d be ahead of the game, I thought. Maybe in July we could find an evening dressage show to get him used to showing, and then in September, the events would begin…

  I tipped my head against the wall and gazed at the calendar until the numbers blurred and finally faded into darkness.

  “Hello? Hello!”

  Oh, holy hell! I snapped out of sleep and spun around in my chair, frantically pushing my loose hair from my face. I glanced at my phone on the desk. Two-oh-five. Jeez, this lady was late. I guess taking a nap hadn’t been the worst idea.

  I saw her in the doorway and immediately changed my opinion. The nap had been a very, very bad idea. This was not the sort of person you wanted to catch you sleeping.

  The woman glaring at me from the barn aisle was tall, thin, and completely terrifying. Long red nails tapped impatiently on the door-frame. Long black hair framed an equally long, narrow face, with a sharp nose, snapping dark eyes, and a peevish expression on her downturned red mouth. I took in her irritated stance, her impractical black blouse and loose trousers, and the clanking array of silver bangles on her wrists, and one thought rang in my brain: Oh shit.

  “Well? Are you Jules’ groom? She is supposed to be here to meet me. I told Amanda I would be here at one o’clock on the dot. I go to the barn, there is no Jules. I talk to a groom, she says go here, go there, she is in another barn. Now I am walking through this empty barn in the dirt, wasting my time, when I should be getting this meeting done so I can get back home. Can you go and get Jules please? Tell her I am in a very big rush.”

  Her voice was big, imperious, demanding, with a Spanish accent. The accent made her vowels sharper and made her words slip out faster, tumbling out on top of one another, and so her rapid demands made my heart rate skip up to high gear, flushing my cheeks and sending a tremble to the tips of my fingers. If she’d been a horse, she would have been nervousness personified, a spooky, impatient, opinionated, impossible mare I’d do anything to get out of my barn. As a human, she was just nerve-wracking from the get-go. I was supposed to do business with her? She was supposed to save the day and bring me new business?

  Crap. Maybe this had been a bad plan.

  “Well?”

  I stood up and licked my dry lips. “I’m Jules. You must be Tony.”

  She regarded me for a moment. Should I have said Ms. Pinto? Well, I wasn’t going to say Ms. Pinto. That wasn’t how the horse business worked. She wasn’t my superior. She was my client, not the other way around.

  She snapped her fingers. “Well! You are not what I expected. Neither is this barn. I hope Amanda is not wasting my time. I have to get back to Naples. I have a closing to get to. Amanda told you I am in real estate? No? Well, I have big clients waiting for me. Show me what you can do for me and let’s make it fast.”

  I took a few deep breaths. I would be nice. I would be polite. I would be good. “Let me show you around,” I suggested. “Of course, this isn’t a large barn, but we do have all the great training facilities around the property… the cross-country course, the jumping arena, the dressage ring…”

  “Where are these things?” Tony whipped her head back and forth, as if the riding rings would magically appear in the center of the barn aisle. “I do not see anything like that here. Only this dark barn. You should light it up,” she instructed. “It’s no good for horses, this darkness.”

  Strange words from the queen of darkness in her black robes, I thought. “Oh, we have lights.” I flipped the switch for demonstration, as if electricity was a new and impressive concept, and the fluorescent lights flickered to life. “I leave them off when we’re not working, to conserve power.”

  “You should leave them on. Horses like lots of light. At my barn, we have the big windows.” She peered into Mickey’s stall, and the gray horse glanced at her incuriously before he went back to his hay. She frowned at the window at the back of the stall. “Bigger windows than that little one. To let in the light. And we have skylights also.” She looked up at the roof’s cobwebby rafters and sniffed. “This is not good. I expected more, from Amanda’s recommendation. I am used to good barns.”

  “I can leave on his stall lights,” I said hastily, and flipped up the switch next to Mickey’s stall door. A wan lightbulb lit up the stall, turning Mickey’s luminous gray coat a dirty yellow. “I can get him a nice daylight-type bulb, so he feels at home.” I felt like an idiot just saying the words, but Tony nodded in appreciation.

  “It’s good. You’ll get the light. And what about this cross-country course? I see arenas on the way in, all the way back there?” She pointed into the glaring sunlight beyond the barn door. “That’s where you ride? It’s too far. Why do you go so far? You need something closer. You waste too much time with all this back and forth.”

  Well, this was super-fun. I really, really enjoyed being told all the ways I was a total screw-up as a horse trainer. Especially the parts I couldn’t control, like how far away the barn was from the arenas. Maybe she thought I should just drop twenty grand on a nice new arena right next to my barn to save on my commute time. Maybe that’s what Tony Pinto, realtor to the stars, would have done. “I think the extra hacking time between the arena and the barn is good for the horse,” I improvised, making more sense than I had initially expected. “It gives him a built-in warm-up and cool-down time, without having to keep looking at the walls of the arena. He understands that ring-time is work-time.”

  Not half-bad, Jules! It might even be true!

  Tony looked at me like I was insane. “I do not think this is necessary. But if you like it, okay. And the cross-country? I need to see it. Quickly, I am running very late.”

  I glanced over at her Lexus SUV and put the kibosh on asking her to drive out to see the course. It was a show-piece, not an actual off-road vehicle. If she got manure or mud on that baby, it
would be my fault, and she’d probably make me clean and detail it herself, telling me all the while she was late and I needed to hurry it up. Still, there were only two easy ways to survey the cross-country course without a leisurely thirty-minute walk: on horseback, or by vehicle. I certainly wasn’t going to put her on a horse, but my truck was back at the house. What to do, what to do… Tony looked at her watch and back up at me, her long arched eyebrows coming together in an elegant frown.

  I held up a finger and pulled out my phone, calling Lacey.

  She answered after a few rings, sounding utterly panicked. I guess I did usually text her instead of actually calling. “Jules? What’s wrong? Did you get hurt? Why are you calling me? Shouldn’t you call 911? Can you speak? Jules! Speak to me!”

  I rolled my eyes. “I called you because I’m in a hurry. No one’s dying. Can you please borrow the golf cart from Pete’s barn and hustle down here?”

  “Is it that lady?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is she awful?”

  I couldn’t help but grin. “Of course.”

  Tony bristled. “Can we hurry up please? Why are you laughing on the phone? I have been telling you I only have a few minutes. If you want my business you are going to have to give me better service than this. Amanda would never take so long. She knows I do not have time for all these laughing on the phone and showing me dark barns and letting me wander around empty driveways instead of meeting me—” Tony went on and I tuned her out, smiling vapidly and nodding occasionally so she would think she had an understanding ear.

  “Is she a total psycho?” Lacey breathed, obviously having heard the complaints for herself. “I’m going to get the golf cart. It’s right out front. Are you sure you don’t want to just kick her off the property and be done with it?”

  “Mmhmm, thanks, please hurry,” I replied, and Tony narrowed her eyes at me.

  “You were not listening to me,” she scolded.

  “I can only listen to one person at a time,” I explained, slipping the phone into my pocket. “Sorry about that, my groom was talking in my ear.”

  “You tell her to wait until I am done and then she can talk to you!”

  What was actually happening right now? Did Tony Pinto think I was a servant or something? Was she possibly from the past? That had to be it. She was a time traveler who thought grooms and horse trainers were beneath her aristocratic notice. That didn’t explain how she knew how to drive a car, or her modern clothes, but it was still the only plausible explanation for the way she was speaking to me.

  I tried to show off the finer points of the barn while we waited for Lacey to come to the rescue, but she just hmm’d at the shining mountain of wood shavings in the storage stall, and humphed at the wash-stall we’d rigged up with old rubber mats and a hand-dug trench that occasionally worked at channeling water out into the grass. I was never more aware that I wasn’t exactly operating a showplace here, and Tony’s disdain was turning my earnest desire to please into something rather more Jules-like.

  Don’t—go—all—Jules!

  I had to be nice and I had to be professional and I had to kiss her stupid ass if I was going to survive this summer. “Oh look, here comes my groom with our ride!”

  “It’s about time!” Tony looked at her watch theatrically, as if she would die if she had to stand in my horrible little barn another second. “I am supposed to be in Naples right now closing on this house! I am making an exception for you, but only because Amanda assured me you were just the right person for Baby!”

  “Baby?” I asked wanly. Oh, don’t be that horse’s name. Please don’t let that be the horse’s name.

  “Baby, he is my horse, you know this!”

  I slid into the seat Lacey vacated and waited for Tony to settle in, tucking all her extra swaths of fabric beneath her. A horse named Baby—now, maybe it’s just me, but horses named Baby tend be spoiled beyond belief. They usually nip, they always kick, and when they don’t get their own way under saddle—well, let’s just say they choose a variety of ways to show their displeasure, including balking, bucking, rearing, crow-hopping, bolting, and, of course, throwing themselves flat onto the ground in a massive tantrum. It’s just the sort of thing that happens with horses named Baby. I can’t explain it. I don’t make the rules.

  “Where is this cross-country course?” Tony wailed as we went rattling across the field behind the barn. “I was supposed to be in Naples an hour ago!”

  “If there’s another day that would work better for you—”

  “No! We are here now, let’s finish this now. I need to get Baby in training and sold. I don’t have room to keep him.”

  Poor Baby, I thought. Mommy changed disciplines, so Baby needs to get the heck out. “Have you done any eventing yourself?” I asked casually, hoping to take her mind off the time (although she seemed to have a very loose relationship with time, since in the twenty minutes we’d spent together, she’d gone from needing to be in Naples in a few hours, to being an hour late to her appointment in Naples).

  “Oh no, never.” Tony shook her head vehemently. “I only do hunters. For years. And now I drive. I don’t know why I did anything else! Driving is an art form. You must be extremely sensitive to drive. Only great horsemen can drive well. It is nothing like riding. Anyone can ride a horse.”

  I bit my lip and said nothing. Very good, Jules. Quiet girl, good girl. Good girls get paid, bad girls go broke.

  We bounced over a narrow track in the grass and came to the top of the hill above the broodmare barn. I brought the golf cart to a stop and pointed out the fences. “You can see most of the course from here. The full course has Novice to Prelim options, and there are a few Intermediate-sized spreads out there too. It goes into those woods over there, and the beginning and ending jumps are near the jumping arena and the other barn.”

  A smile came to my lips as I looked over the green hills, dotted with wooden fences. Sure, business was tough, but nothing was going to force me away from here. I’d make things work. I’d suck up to this old bag and ride her damn spotted Baby and sell him for big bucks, and in the meantime I’d suck up to six more old bags and get hold of their stupid Babys, and by the time Pete came home from England everything would be fine.

  I just—had—to be—good.

  “This is no good,” Tony complained. “We need to go look at the jumps. Why did you bring me all the way up here? You are wasting my time! Take me down to look at the fences.”

  Deep breaths. “It will take at least forty-five minutes to look at all the fences. I know you’re short on time, so I thought this was the best way.”

  “No, no, I don’t have time for that. I need to see the jumps.” She shook her head, long black curls slapping her slim arms. “Take me to see that one, right there.” She pointed with one red talon at the nearest fence, a maxed-out Prelim picnic table I privately called The Nightmare. Foolishly situated on top of a slight rise, it was painfully difficult to give a horse the long stride he needed in order to stretch over the wide jump. With a bad distance, a horse was liable to panic and lurch hard on take-off, meaning the landing was tough and just might fling a rider right over his head. I didn’t take young horses over The Nightmare. I didn’t take anyone over it, in fact, but Dynamo… and we’d only done it two or three times.

  “That’s not a jump your horse would go over,” I said. “Now that fence over there, that’s one of our Novice fences…”

  “Are you refusing to show me that fence? I want to see it. Take me to see it.” Tony turned her dark eyes on me for the first time since we’d driven away from the barn. “I don’t think you want my horse. A trainer who wanted my horse would be taking me more seriously.”

  “Of course I want your horse,” I said stiffly. Choke it down, be good, don’t be Jules. Prove you can handle this, prove you don’t need to be sent off to reform school. “Because you’re in a hurry, I’d like to show you the fences your horse would be training over.”

  “Why
can’t he train over that fence? He already knows how to jump! You think he’s not good enough for your big ugly fences? He’s a good hunter, you know. I bred him myself. You think I can’t breed a horse?” Tony was getting shrill.

  Fine! I slammed my foot down on the accelerator and we went jouncing down the hill. Tony shrieked, grabbing for one of the struts, her silver bangles catching the sunlight.

  “Let’s go see the fence,” I growled.

  “Be careful, I almost fall out of the cart!”

  “So sorry!” I sang out. “Hang on, here’s another bump!” I floored the pedal and the golf cart actually achieved a glorious half-second of airtime. We came to the earth again with a crunch and kept sailing down the hill. Tony, holding on with two hands, finally shut up.

  We made it to the picnic table and I hopped out, clenching my fists so she couldn’t see how my hands were shaking. My face was red, my heart was pounding, and my blood was up—I wanted to tell her off in the worst way, inform her that her stupid clumsy horse could never make it over this fence, not unless he sprouted wings from his shoulders, and then I wanted to leave her here to trudge back to the barn in the hot sun. Maybe it would rain, too, maybe a nice obliging thunderstorm would blow up out of that rare cloudless sky and drench her to the bone, just for good measure.

  Then what?

  I’d feel better.

  I wouldn’t have a client, though. I’d be right where I started. Pete would be so disappointed in me. And I’d have to go to Seabreeze.

  I wouldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t go back to being a working student. I stood very still and let Tony walk in a circle around the jump. She shook her head and clucked at me as she went. My fingernails dug into my palms. I would be good.

  “This is so stupid,” Tony finally announced. “My horse should not be jumping things like this. Too big, too hard. It’s dangerous. Why would you do this to a horse? I think you’re a bad trainer. I think Amanda was wrong about you. Maybe it’s all eventers, I don’t know. Maybe it’s not just you.” She held up her hands helplessly. “I don’t want you to think it’s just you, okay? Maybe you’re good. But this…” She looked back at the picnic table. “This is wasting my time.”