Ambition: (The Eventing Series Book 1)

by Natalie Keller Reinert

  The other trainers knew better. Everyone knew Leighann Your Dream Farm Awaits Anderson. Everyone knew her daughter’s pony. Everyone knew he was an equine criminal.

  Nobody wanted him.

  I’d have to take him far afield to get rid of him, and in the meantime, he was still a monster to handle and a devil to ride.

  “Stupid,” I muttered aloud, taking down the bee pollen. I couldn’t afford Flintstones multivitamins for myself, but the competition horses got local bee pollen, to guard against allergies.

  I’d been so excited to land Leighann Anderson as a client. Sell the pony for enough, I’d thought happily, and maybe she’d send me another horse. One thing about Ocala, the most unexpected people were always buying investment horses. The last time I took my truck in to the dealership to have it serviced, one of the salesmen took out his wallet to show me photos of his one and only Thoroughbred foal. He hadn’t been in town six months before he’d decided he had to have a piece of the racehorse pie and bought a mare. A person couldn’t seem to live in this equestrian wonderland without needing to dip their toe into the pool of equine investments — and more than a few had decided to dive in head-first.

  All I could do was hope one of them would let me be their lifeguard.

  And it hadn’t been the most ridiculous notion in the world, that I could fix a deviant like Passion. I capped the bee pollen and went for the kelp-derived micronutrients. Not everyone could ride ponies, but wealthy parents were willing to pay a premium for the good ones. And I was what you might call short, but what I called the perfect height. At five-foot-four, I managed to not look preposterous on your average Thoroughbred, and I was able to ride medium ponies without my feet trailing in the dirt. I had sold one or two in my time, and the money was excellent, once the pony was dead-safe. So if I ever did figure out how to settle Passion down into a packer pony, and schlepped him to a horse show down in South Florida, I’d succeed yet at my little plan.

  Good ponies were good money. The caveat, of course, was having ponies around the farm.

  The first thing I would do as a Big Name Trainer, I thought, stacking the buckets and carrying them into the aisle, to the audible delight of the horses, was turn away all pony business.

  If that day ever came. I dumped feed into Mickey’s bucket first, watching his lips decide if he wanted to eat the oral tranquilizers, breathing a sigh of thanks when he decided to go for it. If I could hang on to Mickey…

  I gave Dynamo his feed next, glancing over the stall door at the now-tight foreleg that had bothered him after the ACE audition. He might not take me to Rolex, but he would give me the practice I needed to get Mickey there.

  And the confidence.

  If I could just hold on to Mickey…

  I took the buckets to the wash rack to rinse them clean, thinking all the while that Peter bloody Morrison probably had three working students, and was already riding his horses while the day was still cool. And then I wondered why I was thinking of him at all.

  Just an enemy, I decided. Just one more mortal enemy to add to the list of people I was dying to beat. And my day would come. I just had to keep working. I could never stop working.

  Dreams were exhausting that way.

  It took a full hour of scrubbing with Betadine and Ivory soap to clean up Mickey. He was very cooperative, although the oral tranqs did not seem effective enough to keep his head low. He was a tall horse, I was a short woman — it did not always work out. So I went for the acepromazine. With a small cocktail administered, Mickey dropped his head and closed his eyes, hanging from the ropes of the cross-ties while I worked the red bubbles into his scalp.

  Afterwards, I eyed the nearly-empty bottle of ace with apprehension; just one more drug to add to the grocery list for the next vet call. The ranitidine for Daisy’s ulcer was nearly out. The Regu-Mate for Margot’s endless PMS was running low. The few pills left in the bottle of bute rattled ominously whenever someone had a low-grade fever or a swollen bug bite. I always seemed to run out of everything at once. My vet bill was going to be crippling this month.

  The red Betadine stained my hands a lurid orange-crimson, which seemed to fit the Fifty Shades of Red color palette of my day so far. It pooled around the drain of the wash-rack, coloring the grayish concrete, and foamed up in bloody bubbles as I scrubbed the horse’s lowered head, rubbing my fingers over his loosely swinging head to draw away the dirt and sawdust and hair that had fouled the broad abrasion.

  At the end of the session, the soap and iodine bubbles sponged away with warm water, I leaned back on the cool cinder-block wall to survey the damage. Contrary to all signs earlier, the situation didn’t look too bad. Less like the end of my career, and possibly the world. More like a big scrape on a silly young horse. The abrasion was a scoop out of his fine gray coat, reaching down in a half moon shape from his ears to just above his eyes. It was pink and raw now, but it was more evident than ever that this was a completely superficial wound.

  And the scarring, I hoped, would be minimal. He was so light-colored already that if the hair grew in white, it would not be noticed. If there was any sort of mark, he could be shown in a fly bonnet to cover it up — they were coming back into style, after all. He would look lovely in navy blue, to match my barn colors.

  As for the forelock… I sighed at the bald patch where a thick lock of mane should have flowed from between his ears and half-covered his drowsy eyes. That had to grow back. I considered clever braiding techniques that might draw his mane forward, to fill in an sparse forelock at horse shows… and of course the fly bonnet would fall in a v between his eyes, obscuring the disfigurement.

  But… I shook my head at myself. Why play with all these scenarios now? Time to be real. I wasn’t going to be the one showing him. He was here on lay-up board only. I was the baby-sitter until some Olympic medalist was selected to continue his training. Eileen had been nice enough to say she would consider me as his trainer, but, seriously, who was I kidding? I couldn’t even keep the horse under my barn roof for twelve hours without his inflicting serious cosmetic harm upon himself, if not physical. An obsessive and over-protective owner like Eileen was not going to take this news well, nor forgive it easily.

  Mickey sighed and licked his lips meditatively, working his jaw as a relaxed horse does. I put my hand on his neck, still damp from the scrubbing, and then leaned my forehead against his warmth.

  “I need you,” I told him, closing my eyes against the twisting knot in my stomach. “I need a horse like you so goddamn bad. All these stupid packers and adult-amateur horses that will never go past training level, and you get here for ten seconds looking like a goddamn rock star and then screw it all up for me.”

  Or I screwed it up for him. I didn’t know. I felt a prickling in my eyes, but I squeezed my eyelids together and waited it out. When I opened my eyes again, they were dry. I was too busy to cry.

  I had to just carry on, keep on fighting, even when the battle was exhausting.

  The sedated horse sighed again, his black nostrils fluttering, and then he blinked his eyes, picking up his head just a little to look to his left and out to the empty paddocks. It was getting hot already, and there were ibis picking through the puddles left by last night’s thunderstorm. Everyone needed turned-out; they would be stiff and angry after having to stay indoors all night. Everyone except this guy; he would have to stay in and sleep off his hangover.

  Mickey turned his head slowly and regarded me through long white eyelashes. His ears and a long stripe running between his eyes were a comical shade of pink, stains left over after the iodine and Ivory soap finished blending their suds together. The more lurid pink of the missing skin between his ears looked like a bright winter cap on his snowy coat.

  It was disturbingly adorable, if you weren’t aware that you were looking at a nasty scalp wound.

  “You’re too cute for words,” I told him, affectionate despite the number-one rule I demanded of myself, don’t fall in love, and he pricked
his ears at my voice with as much energy as he could muster. It was only a few seconds before he had to let them drop back to half-mast. With effort, he shifted his weight to his left side, resting the toe of his right hind hoof on the wet pavement, and drooped his head again, letting it hang from the cross-ties.

  Just wasting time now, I drummed my fingernails on the cement blocks at my back and looked over his physique, admiring his conformation, imagining what he might do in life. Big bones, strong joints, solid hooves, a short back, a long neck… he was made to be an event horse, given by the eventing gods everything he’d ever need to stay sound during long punishing gallops, to twist his body around tight turns and over challenging show-jumps, to elegantly show off the curve of his body and his panther’s grace in the dressage test.

  “I can’t keep you, though, so no hard feelings if I don’t spend a lot of time on you,” I told him, but I was really talking to myself. Resolving, then and there, to have as little to do with this gorgeous horse as I possibly could. I’d turn him out, I’d clean his stall, I’d mind his wound, I’d pick his hooves — but other than that, until he was more than a lay-up on basic board, I wasn’t going to spare him a second glance. I had a rule about falling in love with anyone, human or horse: don’t do it, not allowed.

  I was going to focus on what I did have: my little kingdom, my ten acres of hopes and dreams, and make that it into the best, brightest version of itself that I could.

  And if I got him in the end, so much the better.

  CHAPTER NINE

  By this time it was past eight o’clock, and the tropical day was just warming up. I could see the baking waves radiating above the wet paddocks, warping the images of the white ibis as they made their way through the puddles, digging long red beaks into the earth beneath. Another brutal Florida summer was simmering us all, cooking us within our skins. The horses in their stalls were already dark with sweat, and my tank top was soaked through.

  But I didn’t really mind. I had been born here, running around outside under the summer sun and the vicious lightning of the rainy season. My horses were another story. They were cold-weather creatures, when all was said and done, children of Siberia. Even the Florida-bred specimens tended to overheat when the mid-summer mercury soared into the nineties and the humidity was nearly enough to liquify the air you breathed into your lungs. To say nothing of the risk they bore, four-legged creatures standing on shoes of steel, when the thunderstorms that characterized Florida’s six-month rainy season began crackling and growling every afternoon.

  So I might have been willing to work in all weathers and temperatures, but I did not expect (or allow) my horses to experience them. Last night I had kept them in when that late-evening storm had blown in and raged all night, and turning them out by dark, after Mickey had arrived, would have been a task I was too tired to deal with alone. Besides, it got dark out there. Those far paddocks were too far away from the lonely little streetlamp hanging from the barn’s back wall.

  And so having been pent up all night, and now kept waiting while I was playing doctor with Mickey, the demands for freedom from my captive crew were beginning to reach thunderous levels. From every stall there were bangs, kicks, slams, whinnies, and neighs. Even mild-mannered Dynamo was rattling his buckets together as if he was doing soundcheck before a bongo concert, and the gentlemanly Monty was pawing at his door, rattling its taxed hinges dangerously.

  “The natives are restless,” I told Mickey, and he waggled an ear in response.

  Judging him to be too drunk to cause too much trouble for himself, I left Mickey alone with his thoughts and went into the tack room for a handful of lead-shanks. “Let’s get you buffoons out of here,” I told the barn, and got a chorus of whinnies in response. About time, lady!

  Time was of the essence on a Becky-free Monday morning, and I was already hours behind. I went over my to-do list as I marched down the barn aisle: thirteen stalls to clean, a stall wall to patch, a pool of blood to bleach out of the concrete, a rare riding lesson to teach at eleven. And nine horses to be ridden. Their names spooled down the list, itself an image in my mind of an ever-lengthening sheet of legal paper, empty check-boxes waiting to be filled. There were more check-boxes than hours of daylight, and this was high summer, when the streetlight didn’t come on until nearly nine o’clock.

  Impossible to do it all, I thought glumly, swinging open Daisy’s stall door and clipping a shank to her halter, and then immediately did the only obvious thing and started laying blame. If only my working student wasn’t off wasting her time on college! I should have been harder on her. I gave her too much leeway.

  I remembered the day she first mentioned finishing her bachelor’s degree. I told her that if she wanted to be a competitive rider, she had to focus on riding. She sent in her class registrations anyway. I told her I was going to have to let her go if she wasn’t going to have full, twenty-four availability. She responded by saying she’d stay on until I replaced her. That should have been the end of it. A new ad on a few message boards, a few phone calls, a new girl in her place. Maybe one who knew what she was doing, if I was lucky. But I would have settled for someone who didn’t know a halter from a haystring, if I absolutely had to. I could teach anyone to clean stalls, I supposed.

  But Becky felt bad for me, which was soul-sucking and dreadful in its own way, so she kept coming to feed and muck stalls when she didn’t have class, which was most days, really. And so I kept giving her riding lessons. Just not as many, since she wasn’t working as much.

  I should have fired her altogether and hired someone new, but I was afraid I wouldn’t find another capable student before I was competing at the Advanced level. Before I was actually a desirable trainer, before a working student position in my barn was a position of honor. I was still at a point in my career where most of the girls who answered my ads had never touched a horse before. And while they certainly deserved a chance to learn, the reality was, I didn’t have time to teach someone how to halter a horse and how to muck a stall.

  And I wanted a student who could not only ride, but who would be able to show within a few months, so that my coaching skills would be on display. My mother wanted me to teach, and I intended upon teaching, but not like Laurie had done — God no. I would coach up-and-coming young riders, adults with nice horses and deep pockets. What I wasn’t about to do was run a lesson mill for beginners, and a working student who couldn’t post on the correct diagonal wasn’t going to get me any closer to those clients with the spending power and the free time that I dreamed of.

  I pulled the other two mares out of their stalls, organized one on each side of Daisy, and used a tack trunk to jump onto the tall chestnut mare bareback. I nudged her into a slow jog as soon as we got out of the barn, and took the trio down the mulch lane between the individual paddocks to the big turn-out at the end of the row. The three mares were a trio of witches who couldn’t be trusted with my nice quiet geldings. They spent their turn-out time in a series of popularity tiffs and lunch-room quarrels, like the cast of 90210, while the geldings just wanted to stuff their faces with grass. So they went out back where they could misbehave together without disrupting the rest of the farm.

  True to form, they started bickering before I could even get the gate closed behind them, and I was spitting sand out of my teeth from a bucking bay mare named Louise as I trudged back to the barn, still trying to reschedule my day, still flipping through a mental calendar that was refusing to budge.

  At last I had to concede that it couldn’t be completed — some things would have to go undone. I was fighting an uphill battle trying to keep thirteen horses and train nine without full-time help, and I was starting to slide down the hill. Schedules and to-do lists were nice, but keeping horses was a series of disasters, and more often than not, something like Mickey’s incident would come up to dominate the arc of the day. Oh, not always that serious. Sometimes it was as simple and as frustrating as trying to get a farrier out to tack on a shoe the
day before an event, or finding out what happened to my hay delivery between Ocala and Canada. But it took time, and I didn’t have a spare second.

  I stopped in the barn aisle and looked at my little domain. The remaining horses nodded their heads at me over their old-fashioned Dutch doors, silhouetted against the brilliant white-gold of the sun gleaming through the far end of the center aisle barn. Beyond, the gravel of the parking area, the driveway that led slightly uphill, past the cluster of turkey oaks, to the lonely rural highway, with the crooked mailbox bristling with yesterday’s bills, addressed to the unfashionable western Marion County backwater town where I had made my stand.

  I was going to make it happen. If not today, tomorrow. If not this week, next week. I was going to put this forgotten little farm on the map. I was going to put my name, the name of the working student from Punta Gorda, Florida, that never got to go on trail rides because she was too busy mucking stalls, up in lights. If not today, tomorrow. The every-ten-minute affirmation plan. It was all I had to go on.

  I tossed the extra lead-shanks into the tack room, where they landed in an untidy heap in the doorway, and went to the next stall door, waving the eager horse within out of my way as I popped open the sticky latch. I snapped the lead shank to his halter. “If not today, tomorrow,” I told the horse, a bright-eyed little Thoroughbred gelding, and he nodded in apparent agreement.

  I walked back out into the summer sun, sale horse at my side, resolved to get things rolling again in the right direction.

  And the first thing I needed, although I wasn’t sure how I was going to get one, was a new girl. I needed a working student who was willing to do whatever it took to get ahead. Someone a little more devoted to horses than Miss English Degree. Because if there was one thing I believed about the horse business, it was this: If you have a plan B, then you just don’t have enough passion to be the best.