Turning For Home (Alex and Alexander Book 4)

by Natalie Keller Reinert

  “What the hell are you playing at?” I snapped. “Trying to take my head off? Get up, get up!” I punctuated my shout with another wave of the lead-shank.

  Tiger pinned his ears and shook his head. A warning, I realized. He was telling me what was going to happen next. Well, damn. He’d gotten more pig-headed and snotty than I’d realized. Love is blind. I considered my next move while he gazed at me with challenging eyes. Then I bent down, picked up a handful of sand, and pelted it right at him.

  Tiger leapt away from the onslaught and picked up a sharp gallop along the circumference of the round pen, his outside hooves slamming against the boards as he went. His ears were pinned so flat I could barely see them through flying forelock and mane, but one finally flicked in my direction when I shouted “that’s right, get up now, get up get up get up!”

  He increased his speed, going dangerously fast now in the tight confines of the pen, but I kept him going because I figured as long as he was galloping hard he couldn’t make a sudden left-hand turn and charge me. From the way he’d been looking at me when I first tried to get him moving, the idea had definitely crossed his mind. Whether he’d thought it would make for an excellent game or he’d truly been angry at me for bringing him to the round pen after three weeks of downtime, I couldn’t say. But I wasn’t going to give him any chances.

  Instead I turned quickly as he barreled around the ring, making sure my outside shoulder was always pushing him forwards, as if I was standing just behind him instead of walking a tiny circle at the center of the round pen. I kept my eye on his, a forceful go away glare, so that he would not make any mistake about my demand that he move, move, move.

  “Keep it up now,” I growled when he started to falter, turning his head a little towards me as if to head back to the center. “Get up now.” I shook the lead again and the sand flew from his hooves as he lurched forward.

  Three weeks hadn’t been much time off, I had to admit. I watched him barrel around the pen with an athleticism that was dismaying, to say the least. He was still too muscled, still awfully fit. His last race would be as fresh in his mind as if he’d run it yesterday.

  I twirled around and Tiger found himself galloping right towards my forbidding shoulder, my waving lead-rope, and my angry glare. He stopped short, sand flying from his hooves, and then spun around and took off the other way. “Good boy,” I called, impressed. Some horses just kept going when you first tried to teach them to change directions, and you practically had to leap in front of them with a buggy whip before they figured out that they were supposed to turn around.

  I wasn’t keen on jumping in front of Tiger in his present mood.

  I kept him galloping until the veins were popping from his neck and the sweat was starting to darken his flanks and drip down his shoulders, swapping directions every few minutes to keep his mind on the task. Then I stopped moving and turned away, letting him come down from the gallop at his own pace. His steps quickened at first, as if he was nervous that I was playing some new trick on him, and I felt a little bad—it wasn’t nice to make your own best friend distrustful of you like that. But we had to re-establish the rules, I reminded myself. Lucy had repeated that several times. It wouldn’t be pretty, not at first, but it had to be done.

  It took Tiger fifteen minutes to get up the nerve to approach me. I kept my back to him and my eyes on the ground, watching the ants wander through the sand on their ant-journeys. The sun came out from behind a layer of heavy clouds that had been aimlessly rolling through the sky and beat down on me; sweat trickled down my back. I listened to Tiger move restlessly around the round pen, snorting at the high walls, at his own deep hoof prints in the sand, at me, incomprehensibly ignoring him.

  Then, at last, he came up behind me and stood still. I waited, hopeful that he’d reach out and touch me, but after a few minutes I realized that was too much to ask from the first session. I turned around and reached out to touch his lovely face, and Tiger lowered his head so that I could rub his poll.

  “Good boy,” I told him, scratching his sweaty head. “Such a good boy.” I thought about what I’d write in the training journal later on: resistant at first, good at body language, gave in after fifteen minutes but didn’t touch me.

  Better than expected.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “Thanks Wallace. No, no, you are absolutely right. Of course. Well, let’s talk again very soon. There’s no rush, as you say.”

  Alexander put down his cell phone and looked at it with a decent amount of rage.

  “Alexander?” I was prying off my riding boots at the front door, pulling with all my might against the bootjack. I had thought it would be fun to try using my old dress boots from before I started galloping racehorses, without considering how very different my calf muscles were these days. If I ever got these boots off, I was going to take them straight to Quarter Pole for zippers and an elastic gusset to be added. If I ever got them off. “Who was that?”

  “No one,” he said, with an admirable attempt at absent-mindedness.

  “No one you want to tell me about,” I panted, and my right boot came off with such force that I nearly took out my front teeth with my knee. “Christ almighty these boots are tight.”

  Alexander got up, but not without putting the lock-screen on his phone. “Sit on the couch and I’ll pull that one off you.”

  “You’ll go flying backwards when it comes off,” I warned, but I went over to the couch anyway, leaving the other boot to lay limply on the tiles of the entry and think about what it had done.

  Alexander took hold of the heel of the boot. “Now pull,” he instructed.

  I pulled back. “Who was on the phone?” I asked between tugs. My heel slid up slightly and the pressure on my ankle was eye-watering. I grunted and tugged harder.

  “Nosey tonight, aren’t you?”

  “I’m trying to take my mind off the loss of my foot due to poor blood circulation,” I explained. “Since I’m losing the feeling in my toes and all.”

  “You have to pull harder,” he instructed. “Don’t worry, I’ll cut the boot away before the foot has to go.”

  “These are Vogels! They were custom-made for me! You can’t cut these off!”

  “Custom-made for sixteen-year-old you. It might be time for new boots.”

  I considered the thought of new custom dressage boots with deep pleasure, before realizing that Alexander was just distracting me so I’d stop asking him who Wallace was. Usually I let him conduct his business without bothering too much about it, but for some reason I really wanted to know about this one. Wallace… Wallace… where had I heard that name? I should really start taking something for my memory. Last week it had taken me ten minutes to remember the dam’s name of one of the client horses. In front of the client. Alexander had not been amused.

  “Almost there…” He pulled and my foot slipped slowly upwards and I closed my eyes and grimaced and the boot came free—

  Alexander went stumbling backwards, dress boot in hand, and I sat forward in excitement. “Wallace is the person you were talking to before Tiger’s last race! You guys are in on some business deal together. You have to tell me now, I guessed.”

  “Did we agree this was a guessing game?” Alexander put the boot neatly next to its companion that I had left sprawling on the floor.

  “You’re right, it’s a business partnership. Silly me. Now you really have to tell me.” I peeled away my sweaty boot socks. “Or suffer a boot sock to the face.”

  Alexander sat in the easy chair farthest away from me and my socks. “It’s like dealing with a twelve-year-old sometimes,” he grumbled.

  “Ain’t easy being a cradle-robber,” I agreed cheerfully. “Now tell me—Wallace?”

  “He owns March Hare,” Alexander said reluctantly. “And he’s looking for a Florida farm to stand him at stud when he retires.”

  I dropped my socks, astonished. “March Hare! Didn’t he win the Florida Derby last year? And the Sunshine Milli
ons Classic?”

  Alexander nodded. “Four years old and pointed at the Breeders’ Cup this fall. But if he doesn’t make it—and there’s every chance he won’t, as he’s been having abscess problems—Wallace doesn’t have a farm of his own. And he’s a Florida-bred with plenty of good nicking to every broodmare in Marion County, so there’s no reason to send him to Kentucky. Or so I’ve been trying to convince Kevin.”

  “Kevin?”

  “Kevin Wallace. He’s the majority owner of March Hare Syndicate. The final say is his. They’re all having a hell of a time trying to agree between Florida and Kentucky, and I think I have him on my side now.”

  Kevin Wallace. Wait… The hot excitement in my veins slowly chilled to ice. “Have you done business with him before?”

  Alexander nodded. “A while ago. He bought out the one foal we did a share on, then sent it on to another trainer for finishing. That was before you came along,” he added generously, “and took the training center to the next level. My last training foreman wasn’t anywhere near as effective as you.”

  I remembered. Joey Berman had been an alcoholic who managed to hide his addictions from an overworked, overextended Alexander with an expertise that did not extend to his ability to start, train, and condition young racehorses. I counted myself lucky Alexander hadn’t known an addict was running his training barn when he hired me. That had given me the chance to move up and take over the barn, a break I might not have had otherwise. Then, of course, the business had grown so explosively that we’d both been completely run ragged. Now that we only took on a few select clients, and saved the rest of our stalls, and our time, for our own home-breds, poorly thought-out partnerships like the one with Sunny Virtue need never occur again. We could keep an eye on all of our horses now.

  But as for this Wallace guy… he’d already had one strike with us, in my book. Why give him a second chance? I had to admit, having March Hare would be a huge coup… but what would we be giving up in order to do business with this guy? Someone who Alexander had clearly already had a falling-out with in the past?

  I had to put a stop to this right now. Which wasn’t going to be easy, considering how sold Alexander was on getting a big stallion for the farm. Once I told him about Sunny Virtue, though, things might change. Maybe the threat of bad publicity would be enough to end this budding partnership before things got out of hand.

  “I got a call about the foal he bought out from you. From the CASH people.”

  Alexander looked up sharply. “CASH people? What the hell are you talking about?”

  “A horse at Fort Erie that’s dropped off the map after some bad races. Seven years old. They traced him to me. Well, to the farm. He was by Virtuous. I looked him up—there was a colt by Virtuous out of Sunny Susan that matches his age, who was a foal-share with a Kevin Wallace. Pretty obvious it’s the same guy. Dropped the horse into bottom-level claimers instead of retiring him… you want to do business with him again?”

  Alexander shrugged. “Seven years sounds about right. What of it? Why shouldn’t we try again? Both of us are in better financial situations now. Obviously he is, if he has a horse like March Hare in his stable. This could be very good for us. Let me worry about my past business relationships, Alex. I have first-hand knowledge of him, which you do not. I’m sure you’ll find him perfectly agreeable.” With that, he reached for his iPad as if the conversation was over.

  Don’t you dare blow me off. I bit back a short reply and took a deep breath, opting for continued calm instead. A raised voice would get me nowhere. I was going to have to convince Alexander that something he wanted very, very much was simply not going to work. That required a seriously cool head. “Alexander, if he’s somehow involved with a broke-down claimer that CASH decides to publicize, that’s going to look very bad for us. Especially if we find ourselves in business with him again. Don’t you think?”

  Alexander glared at me from over his reading glasses, and even from across the living room I could feel the iciness in his gaze. I found myself pressing back against the sofa pillows to get away from it. What was all this animosity? Was he blaming me for all of this trouble? The implied accusation cut deep. Wasn’t he the one in the wrong here, if anyone was? I wasn’t involved with either of these horses. These are your mistakes.

  But when he spoke, his words were clipped, only his frosty tone betraying his deeper anger. “I won’t be coerced by some anxious housewives with an Internet connection and the spare time to research slow horses. If they were worth my time at all they’d be able to see that we never owned the damn horse. Whatever Wallace did with him is none of my concern. March Hare, and getting a good roster up in the stallion barn now, that is my concern. You worry about the broodmares and the foals we have, and play with Tiger, and stay out of the rest until this nonsense has blown over. I’m not going to lose business because your racehorse retirement god-hood is coming to an end.” He went back to his iPad and began flicking things about without missing a beat, as if he hadn’t just rebuked me like an unruly child.

  Or washed his hands of my problems as if they only mattered to him in a purely financial manner.

  Well, fine. I would fix this on my own. There were more things to tell him—about Mary Archer renting the farm next door, about the bag of hate mail, even about starting Tiger and what a disaster/triumph that had been. It had been a very long day, I thought wearily. Had all that happened just today?

  I didn’t have the energy to talk about it all, especially since we had already begun the evening on a sour note.

  I quietly got up and left the living room, balled-up boot socks in my hand, and found myself a bottle of red wine from the rack above the fridge. I tossed the sweaty socks on the kitchen table, letting them roll to Alexander’s accustomed place and appreciating the timely insult, then dug around in the silverware drawer for the corkscrew. When the cork had been sufficiently mangled and liberated from the bottleneck, I tipped the bottle to my lips and took a long, pleasant swig.

  The over-sweet flavors washed over my tongue and flooded down my throat, sweeping away the lump left there by Alexander’s callous words. I put the bottle down and wiped my face with the dirty back of my hand, unheedful of the mud I was probably smearing on my chin and cheeks. Then I considered the glasses in the cabinet above my head before reaching up for a decent-sized tumbler, a galloping horse etched on its side in ghostly white, and pouring myself a healthy helping.

  “You need to sit for a minute,” I told the dark red wine once it was poured. “I might be an ignorant child, but I know that wine needs to breathe.” I opened the fridge door and took out a chunk of gouda cheese, its golden warmth nestled within a red wax wrapping, and disappeared into the pantry for a box of the English water crackers that Alexander preferred.

  I laid it all out on the marble counter: the cheese and the crackers and the tumbler of wine, and I considered it for a moment. When I had come here five years ago, I’d never had any of these things. Gouda or water crackers or wine of any color—if I had ever thought about them for a moment, and I hadn’t, I would have probably said they were for older people, wiser people, richer people. I had been a child running away from home, with nothing but a saddle and a dream, and it hadn’t even been the right kind of saddle.

  I’d made the dream come true, easier than some other people had done, for sure, but in other ways, maybe it had all happened too fast. Maybe too much had been given to me, when I should have had to claw and grasp and fight for it. Maybe I wouldn’t have been such an easy target; maybe the community would have been quicker to draw ranks and defend me.

  “Those that can’t, are first to tear down those who can.” My grandmother had told me that, when I was little and crying over some criticism of my riding, a missed lead or trotting on the wrong diagonal in a short stirrups class.

  Cassidy Whomever-She-Was had outed herself as the ringleader of the Anti-Alex campaign from CASH. But I was willing to bet her reasons were more personal than just so
me overzealous love of the horse. No one would chase me around on such flimsy accusations unless they were desperately snatching at straws, looking for some way to bring me down.

  Well, I had a computer and I had basic Google skills.

  I could figure out who Cassidy was and why she had such a problem with me, easy as pie.

  The wine and cheese would help, too.

  On my way out of the kitchen, plate of crackers and cheese in one hand and tumbler of wine in the other, I paused, looked back at the wine bottle, and then doubled back. I tucked the half-empty bottle under my arm.

  Sleuthing was thirsty work.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  “So, who was she?”

  I grunted as the mare slammed me against the wall, her big anvil of a head nearly crashing into my nose, and gave her a resounding slap with the end of the shank. “Could this wait?” I panted. “Like, until after this foal comes?”

  “This is a maiden mare,” Kerri said reasonably, safe in the barn aisle, with a wooden door between her and Princess Zelda, who was not at all happy with the current state of affairs. “The foal might not come until tomorrow night. And I want to know about all of your cyber-stalking. Are you going to drive to her house and leave a dead squirrel on her porch?”

  “That would be weird, so no.” Zelda groaned and flung up her head at the pulse of another contraction and commenced dragging me around the foaling stall again, shambling through the knee-deep straw. “And wouldn’t she just assume her cat had brought her a present? Why a squirrel? Why would you even think of that?”

  “It would be very symbolic,” Kerri explained, apparently unaware that she was insane.

  I didn’t ask of what. Sometimes Kerri’s ideas defied logic. “Whoa, Zelda, give me a minute—” I unsnapped the lead and ducked away from the pain-addled mare. “I can’t chase her around all afternoon. I still have Tiger to work today, if she ever drops this damn foal.” I leaned against the stall door and watched the big bay mare pace the stall. She was young and still lean from her racing days, with only her great bulging belly to give away that she had been retired for a year and was about to give birth to what we hoped would be the first of many foals.