Claiming Christmas (Alex and Alexander Book 3)

by Natalie Keller Reinert

  “She just misses riding,” I said. “And she doesn’t want to ride any of the racehorses.” I went back to my coffee and the newspaper on my iPad; it was a damp November day and I wasn’t going back outside today unless I had to.

  “Why not? She’s obviously a capable rider. Foxeeloxee just crow-hopped and she stuck on. Oh, I take that back, she just slipped off sideways and landed on her ass.”

  “Is she okay?”

  “She’s fine.”

  “Yeah she doesn’t want to ride the youngsters until she’s done with her degree. She doesn’t want to get hurt and miss classes.”

  Alexander favored me with one of his eloquently arched eyebrows. “But she will ride a broodmare around the pasture with nothing but a halter and a lead-rope.”

  I shook my head. “No idea.”

  He grunted and sat down at the breakfast table with the training ledger. We sat in silence for a while, a rare quiet afternoon in the middle of a farm that never ceased its demands. A Christmas song came on the radio, playing tinnily from atop the fridge in the kitchen. Alexander started humming along. It took me a moment to name it — Winter Wonderland. A funny song, for Ocala. I’ve Been Dreaming of a Brown Christmas, that would be more accurate. Christmas on my mind, I considered the seasonal necessity of ordering turkeys and putting the velveteen ribbons on the farm gates. Just add it to the to-do list, already a hundred miles long.

  I tried to pretend there weren’t a thousand things I could be doing out in the barns, and that I wasn’t nervous about the way Alexander’s brow creased as he ran his finger down the hand-written training notes and times. But he finally closed the book with a sigh and a satisfied nod. I read a book review about a history of the state of Florida and highlighted the name of it as if it was something I was going to have the time and brain cells to read.

  The phone rang.

  Alexander looked at me. “You’re on phone duty until I say otherwise.”

  I got up and dragged myself to the wall. It was my own fault. “Cotswold!” I announced cheerfully, making a face at Alexander. “This is Alex! Who is this!”

  Alexander shook his head at me, as if there was no hope for me and he had given up entirely. I smiled.

  Then I frowned.

  “Alex? It’s me — it’s Wendy.”

  “Hi Wendy,” I said warily. Not that she wasn’t a cute kid, but I had been hoping I’d heard the last of Wendy. I didn’t have time to be a big sister, after all, and the Rodeo Queens were supposed to be setting her up with a local hunter/jumper trainer to teach her riding lessons. I’d assumed she was someone else’s problem now. “What’s up?”

  “I was wondering…” She hesitated. “I was wondering if I could come over.”

  “Come over… here?”

  “Um… yes?”

  “Why? I mean — what do you want to do?”

  “Hang out with you?” She sounded timid, as if she was second-guessing her decision.

  “Hang out with me?” I repeated, baffled.

  I looked around the kitchen as if the cabinets held some sort of wisdom. Specifically, a way to tell this kid no way, she could not come over, we were not going to be buddies in an upcoming 80s-style zany comedy. Alexander help up a finger: hang on a minute.

  “Hold on, Wendy, okay?” I said urgently, and put my hand over the receiver. “What?”

  “She can ride Betsy,” Alexander whispered. “Tell her she can come over one afternoon and the two of you can go riding.”

  “She doesn’t ride,” I whispered back, not even ready to digest the fact that Alexander was allowing some kid he barely knew to ride his beloved Betsy. “She needs lessons. I’m not qualified to teach her anything.”

  “Teach her to hack and have fun,” he suggested. “Let someone else teach her the hard stuff. She needs to just enjoy herself, too. The kid’s had a hard life. Give her a couple hours. You might have fun, too.”

  I nodded slowly. He was right. I’d had fun with Wendy last Saturday, at least when I’d been free to show her around, give her the tour, answer her questions. I’d like the way she’d looked up to me. I didn’t get that a lot. “Thanks, Alexander,” I said, and I meant it.

  I uncovered the phone. “Wendy? How would you like to come have a ride with me on a real racetrack?”

  Alexander went on humming the Christmas song.

  ***

  She looked so cute on Betsy I could hardly stand it. “You were born to ride,” I told her admiringly. “Look at those legs.”

  Wendy’s face lit up in that astonishing way that it had, and my heart squeezed. I loved seeing her happy. “Do you mean it?” she breathed.

  “Absolutely. I mean everything I say.” And it was true: Wendy’s gangly body just worked on a horse. Her long skinny legs reached far down Betsy’s barrel; her slim little upper-body was ram-rod straight in the Western saddle, and her hands were holding the reins gently and with empathy, not gripping them tightly with nerves and lack of experience. She looked like she’d been riding all her life. “Are you sure this is the first time you’ve ridden a horse?”

  “With a saddle,” Wendy giggled, and I remembered her telling me about jumping on the ponies in the pasture next to her house. I had to grin.

  “Well let’s walk around the shed-row to start,” I suggested. “Just like we’re taking the horses out in the morning.” Leaving her with Betsy to wait in the aisle, I took Parker, already tacked up, out of his stall and swung into the saddle. I came up next to Betsy and slipped a leather strap through her bit. “Now I’m ponying you, like you’re on a rotten baby who can’t be trusted on his own.” Wendy giggled again, and then shut up very quickly when we started walking forward. I saw her bite her lip in concentration, trying to figure out how to move with the horse’s motion.

  “Just loosen your body and let her swing you around a little,” I suggested. “Don’t worry about how you look, worry about how you feel. Your fancy hunter trainer will teach you how to look.”

  “Okay,” Wendy said stiffly. “I can do that. She moves more than I thought she would.”

  “Wait until you gallop.”

  Wendy just grinned, clearly in love with the thought.

  We made our way around the shed-row a few times and then I suggested we walk down to the racetrack and do a loop. “Just at a walk,” I added, seeing her face pale a little behind its deep tan. “Betsy already worked today and she’s not in any hurry.”

  When we were done with the ride, I showed Wendy how to untack the horse and give her a shower. The November day was warm and Betsy’s coat was long, ready for fast-moving cold fronts and sudden freezes, so it took a while to get the sweat out of all that fur. By the end of the shower, Wendy was soaked and filthy. I told her she looked like a true horsewoman now, and was rewarded with another one of those brilliant smiles. I was starting to like having this kid around.

  I walked her up to the house to wait for her aunt to come and pick her up. According to Wendy, her grandma was too tired all the time to drive her places. “But she’s going to feel better after Christmas,” Wendy assured me. “That’s what she told me. That’s when her medicine will start working.”

  I didn’t know what was going on with Wendy’s grandmother, and I didn’t want to know. But I sincerely hoped that if anything happened to the poor woman, the kid wouldn’t end up with that aunt of hers. The lack of interest that Aunt Karen displayed was nothing short of appalling, and I wasn’t exactly the most warm-hearted and engaging person in the world. But even I could see that whoever was living in that girl’s phone was much more intriguing to her than anything happening in the real world around her, her little niece included. “I’m glad your grandmother will feel better after Christmas,” I offered, not really sure what else to say. “Are you going to celebrate Christmas with a tree and all?”

  “Oh yes,” Wendy said, dancing around on the gravel drive. “We have a tree in the closet. It’s plastic so it doesn’t make a mess. Nana says I can put it up after Thanksgivin
g.”

  “That sounds nice. Do you know how to put it up though?”

  “I put it up last year. It took me all afternoon. It wasn’t hard — just a lot of branches to stick on. I have a horse Christmas ornament. He’s chestnut like Personal Best.” She paused to watch the yearlings in the pasture by the driveway; they were playing in a big herd of kicking hooves and snapping teeth. “I need one that’s dark bay like Christmas,” she went on.

  Yikes, she was still thinking about that filly we’d sent to Jackson’s. Don’t ask about her, I thought. “We have a nice dark bay — a couple of them. Next time you come I’ll introduce you to Tiger. He’s in one of the paddocks behind the training barn today.”

  “How is Christmas? Have you heard about her?”

  I hesitated just a moment. “She’s fine,” I said lightly. “Haven’t heard of any problems.” That much was true.

  “Does her new trainer like her?”

  “Loves her.” I kicked a stone and shied a rabbit from a patch of high grass in the pasture. “Look, a bunny!”

  “Is he going to race her?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I want to go down and see her race. Do you think we could do that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Wendy was quiet for a few minutes. We were nearly to the house when a little red Kia appeared in the drive. “There’s your aunt,” I said helpfully.

  “Yup.”

  “It was nice riding with you today.”

  Wendy stopped suddenly and smiled up at me. “Thank you so much!” she announced and gave me a bear hug. I squeezed her back, feeling a great blossoming of happiness within. I wanted to keep her. I wanted to buy her a pony and feed her ice cream sundaes.

  Where had this kid come from? She made me feel like a million dollars — at least when I wasn’t feeling guilty for lying about that horse she liked so much. “Come back really soon, okay?” I asked, and I meant it.

  “Next weekend?”

  I nodded and smiled. “Definitely.”

  Wendy ran for the car. Then she stopped, just before she opened the passenger door. Her aunt sighed and glowered at her. “You can tell me how Christmas is doing next time,” she called, and then ducked into the car.

  Great.

  CHAPTER NINE

  I took Tiger out for a spin on the track the next morning first thing, before any of the other sets were out. It was chilly and foggy, with dew-drops clinging to the hairs on my arm and soaking my shirt as we galloped through the blowing clouds. The occasional streetlights that were posted along the track morphed into strange orange spheres that lit up the fog around them, just enough to tell us we weren’t going to run into the rail. Tiger loved it, dragging his head down against the bit so that he could try to pull me around the track, so I had my feet out in front of me, standing nearly straight up, using all of my body to hold him back. But it only encouraged him. Tiger was a typical older horse: he knew all the tricks and he used them for fun. He didn’t want to get me off his back, he just wanted to get me off his mouth so he could run as fast and far as he liked.

  I let him go as we came around the final turn, if only to give my arms a break; I was starting to feel like my shoulders were being wrenched from their sockets. But as soon as I leaned over his neck, planting my hands a little above his withers to balance myself, I knew he’d been pulling so hard because he felt that I wanted to run, too. And he was right — Tiger knew me best.

  It had been a while; I didn’t gallop much anymore, preferring to watch from horseback alongside the track while the exercise riders put the horses through their paces for me. But ever since I’d watched Wendy drive off with her aunt yesterday, I’d felt restless, like I wasn’t doing enough somehow. All the business of running the farm, of training from my pony, were ultimately not why I was in the racehorse business. Wendy reminded me, with her boundless enthusiasm and incredible joy in the saddle, that my passion was out here on the track, on the back of a fast horse, two minds set on one goal.

  And so I needed this: the wind in my face, causing my eyes to tear; the cold mist in my face, the hot horse churning beneath me. We flew down the stretch hard on the rail and I listened to his hooves drumming and his breath coming loud and fast before I finally stood in the stirrups and slowly asked him to pull up.

  We were halfway around the first turn again before his canter strides slowed to his long smooth trot, and I turned him back towards the gap and sat down, asking for a walk so that I could drop my feet from the stirrups and relax. I was breathing hard; so was he: neither of us were in the best shape. His time off while I was in Saratoga had not translated into better, stronger works once we started up again in September, and I had been going extremely easy on him, afraid I might be seeing the end of his racehorse days. Tiger was a gelding and there would be no spot in the stallion barn for him; I didn’t think he’d like being a pony and we didn’t need another one, anyway, but I didn’t want to think about finding a new home for him. I wasn’t ready yet.

  So instead I thought about Christmas. Tiger settled into his long-strided, ambling walk, nodding his head and flopping his ears, and I retreated into myself to worry about this horse that hadn’t meant a thing to me a week ago. Christmasfordee, her grandmother calls her Dee, it’s almost Christmas — what were the chances, honestly? And that eerie way the filly had zeroed in on her, focusing her white-rimmed eyes that probably never stayed very long on any one thing, watching the girl as if she had the face the filly had been waiting for her entire life… odd, that was all. Odd.

  Wendy definitely had a magnetic effect on certain horses: Personal Best had been enamored with her, of course, and she’d made the opposite impression on Luna — although Luna was a pretty choosy filly in her own way. The more fit she became, the most snooty her attitude, although she didn’t back it up by running any bullets in the morning. When Wendy had visited yesterday, no one in the training barn had seemed particularly overwhelmed by her presence, whether for good or for ill. What she had with Personal Best, and with Christmasfordee, was definitely a rare thing.

  But that didn’t mean she was somehow entitled to the horse, I reminded myself, turning Tiger’s head inward, towards the inner rail, before we rode out through the gap and onto the path back to the barn. An emotional connection meant nothing in this world. The filly was a racehorse, however an unimpressive one, and in all likelihood after her retirement she would become a broodmare, if only because Joey really liked her. She’d spend her life in pastures with her foals, who hopefully would not be as lack-luster and poorly built as she was, although the chances of that were slim, and Wendy would go on riding school horses, learning to jump, helping out with barn chores at her hunter barn in exchange for extra riding lessons and show fees, until someday she either gave it all up or went professional. She seemed too intense to be a casual rider, although that could just be par for the course for a girl of her age.

  But either way, she was going to have to forget about Christmasfordee, chalk it up to a funny coincidence of names of horses she had once known, and embrace the dozens (or hundreds, or thousands) of future horses she would come to know throughout her life.

  And one or two of them, with any luck, would have the same emotional connection that she had found with Personal Best and Christmas. I ran my hand down Tiger’s hot neck. Every now and then, you find a horse you just love, and who absolutely loves you back.

  Tiger snorted.

  And one who reads your mind, I thought wryly.

  We came back into the training barn, a glowing halo of light surrounding its bustling early-morning atmosphere. The riders had arrived and were mounting up their first set; Alexander was sitting in the saddle on Betsy, who flopped her ears and nodded her head in greeting as we rode down the shed-row. He raised his eyebrows as I approached. “I was wondering what made you leave the house so early this morning.”

  “I want to get him into a race at Tampa,” I explained. “We just ran a really nice half-mile and
he isn’t blowing too hard.”

  Alexander nodded. “One more try,” he said with a hint of warning in his voice, and I pressed my lips together and nodded back.

  In the stall, I accepted the help of the groom who came into hold the reins while I dismounted, then let him halter Tiger while I stripped the saddle and bridle. I dipped the foamy bit in the water bucket as I exited the stall, then turned back to look him over one last time. The groom turned him in a circle, waiting for me to move, yet I lingered, watching his body, his motion. He was moving evenly, perfectly sound. There was nothing to see. But I watched him for a moment because he was mine, and I loved him, and I worried for him… incessantly.

  I felt bad for Wendy then. Because I suspected Christmasfordee was hers, and she loved her, and she was worrying about her. But emotions had no place in this game, and no one was going to give her a four-year-old racehorse, however imperfect, just because she had a hold on her heart.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Goethe was one of those little known Florida hideaways — a massive wilderness of pine and hardwood forest tucked away between the swampy shore of the Gulf of Mexico and the green hills of Ocala. Its sandy trails were a favorite of trail and endurance riders, and I’d even come across drivers, sitting behind their teams of harness horses in specially-made off-road carriages, complete with fat dune-buggy tires to deal with the deep white sand footing.

  I didn’t trail ride much, because who had the time? Recreational riding was a thing of the past in my life. But Alexander suggested it as a Thanksgiving treat for Wendy. After riding with me nearly every afternoon for the past few weeks, she was more than capable of sitting in a western saddle while the sure-footed Betsy picked her way along the well-marked trails, and even if one of the horses spooked at a sudden appearance by a deer or another horse, it was unlikely she’d spook terribly hard and unseat the kid. Betsy was as steady as they came. And Parker, having mastered the streets of New York, had figured out that the bunnies and lizards of country living were not going to kill him, either — he was about as bomb-proof as they came.