Ambition: (The Eventing Series Book 1)

by Natalie Keller Reinert

  Lacey’s eyes grew wide as she reached for a towel. I could tell she was already wishing her eyes weren’t so red and her nose wasn’t so snuffly. Sucks to be crying in front of Becky like this, she was thinking. I had to agree.

  “Thanks, Beck,” I said off-handedly, taking the towel. “It’s chilly in here.” I dripped a puddle onto the tiled floor. Marcus ran his tongue over it, disgustingly, and I gave him a nudge with my foot.

  “Peter keeps the air turned down so low,” she said, with a sidelong smile at Peter, and I suddenly clenched my fingers tight around the towel. Wait… just… a minute… “I’m always telling him it’s too cold for me.”

  I felt sick as the realization washed over me.

  Becky was living with Peter.

  She wasn’t his working student… or, at least, she wasn’t just his working student. And how long had this been going on for? I tried to put together a timeline. She was his working student at Lochloosa… he had asked me on a date… what, a month ago now? He’d moved on pretty quick from any crush he’d had on me, that was for sure.

  Lacey was giving me little nervous glances, as if she was afraid I was going to say something inappropriate to my former student about her relationship with my former suitor, but she was reading the situation all wrong. I wasn’t angry that Peter wasn’t into me anymore, I was furious that Becky had so easily insinuated herself into his life, into this beautiful farm and this beautiful house, while the rest of us had to work for what we wanted. How did Becky manage to get the equestrian world on a silver platter, while I had been fighting a fast-moving current against me for my entire life?

  I had worked every day since I was just a kid. I gave up everything for a chance at being a trainer — a social life, vacations, a day off once in a while. And here was Becky, the absolute antithesis of the exhausted working student killing herself to get a shot at the top, handing out fluffy towels as the hostess of a Millionaire Mile farm. I had ten acres and an almost-certainly collapsing barn, a double-wide trailer that probably wasn’t there anymore, a dressage ring and some show jumps (maybe). Just enough to get by. Even if I’d never been across Peter’s property, I could easily conclude that it had everything I could ever dream of. And here, enjoying it all… Becky.

  Who was looking at me as nervously as Lacey was.

  The only one in the room who looked quite comfortable was Peter. “Come in and get some dry clothes,” he said jovially, evidently at ease now that he wasn’t driving through a major hurricane, and we all filed into the house, while the storm outside began to hammer at the steel storm shutters again.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  The trip to Peter’s had taken half an hour, but the trip back to my farm took nearly two hours.

  We weren’t supposed to be on the roads at all. The sheriff had shown up on the news (we were still blissfully basking in the blue electric glow of the television set, thanks to Peter’s tremendous propane-powered generator rumbling away outside) and declared in his Appalachian drawl, which sounded rather like Foghorn Leghorn but with a lower I.Q., that the entire county was being declared a disaster area, so everyone should please just stay at home and let the authorities get on with their duties of clearing live electrical wires off the roads and sawing up the trees that were covering major highways and the like. But Peter just looked at me and shook his head — he knew we had to go back. Horsemen don’t leave their horses.

  He and Becky had gone outside at seven, into the last few sprinkles of rain that were blowing across the pastures and up against the windows — we’d rolled up the shutters first thing — and left me to cope with Lacey, who was still on the edge of hysteria after the trauma of last night. She came around after a few cups of the organic free-trade grass-fed (I don’t even know, I’m making that up) coffee I’d found after some reconnaissance work in the flashy show kitchen, and a handful of mini Reese’s peanut butter cups for sustenance. “Breakfast of champions,” I told her smilingly when I presented it to her in the living room, where she was still parked before the television.

  “Thanks,” she said weakly, smiling back, and sure enough, the combo of highly-caffeinated black coffee, highly-sugared milk chocolate, and the (probably-imagined) protein from the peanut butter brought her back from the edge of madness. It was nice for me, too. I was able to look around the brightening room with fresh eyes, and start to get a more clear picture of just who this guy Peter Morrison was.

  Except, none of the pictures in the house seemed to be of Peter.

  There were framed pictures in the hallway of an older man with several different horses, all wearing the Australian flag on their saddle pads. Cross-country photos, steeplechase photos, hunting photos — all of them portraying a man with an old-fashioned, but fantastic, riding position. In a large photo at the end of the hall, bathed in watery light from a window, he stood on a podium with his hunt cap under his arm, bald head gleaming in a bright southern sun, smiling as he accepted a medal. I studied his face — he was familiar, but I was no history expert. Some member of the Australian eventing team, then, some old legend from the mid-twentieth century. But there was something about his smile that was more familiar than any face from a textbook had any right to be.

  I turned my head and saw the open door of Peter’s bedroom. There was a framed photo on the bedside table. I could just make out a horse’s pricked ears and long profile. That will be him, I thought, and crept into the room, hoping no one caught me snooping.

  It was Peter, pictured with his mare, the lovely Regina. I picked it up gently.

  The picture of them together was touching, not a competition photo of a muscled and bandaged horse leaping a huge cross-country fence, something outlandish like a four-foot-high log with a seven-foot drop into a pond of water on the landing side, as was customary and expected, but of the pair of them standing close together. Regina was still saddled and bridled, and Peter was still jacketed and velvet-capped, doubtless waiting to see the results of the event. The photographer had captured both he and Regina in a moment of extreme interest, the mare gazing forward with wide, bright eyes and pricked ears, so that it looked as if they were both watching the final round of the stadium jumping phase with equal intensity and passion.

  There was something about the picture that I loved, something that seemed to say Peter was an exemplary horseman… of course, it might just have been the luck of the photographer that day, to catch them in such a simpatico position… but it made his connection to the horse appear other-worldly, beyond the reach of ordinary horsemen. I liked it. I gazed at it for longer than was necessary. I smiled at it. I am afraid I may have cocked my head coquettishly at it.

  And then Lacey came into the hallway, looking for me. I whipped my head around, feeling foolish, and she laughed.

  “Whatcha lookin’ at?” she asked in an exaggerated voice.

  “Just these pictures…”

  “Of Peter.”

  “Only the one. All the rest are of some older guy.”

  “You like him.”

  “I do not.” It was getting very sixth grade in here.

  “You like him, you like him, you like him…” Lacey, apparently fully recovered, danced around me in a little shuffle. “You wanna be his girlfriend. You wanna kiss him.”

  “Well he’s living with Becky, so probably it wouldn’t matter.”

  Lacey stopped what she was doing. “That’s weird,” she said in a low voice, although there wasn’t anyone in the house to eavesdrop. “That doesn’t make any sense. He was just after you… just a month ago! Not even that! How is he already living with Becky? And anyway, how could anyone be into you and into her? You two are like, dead opposites.”

  “Maybe that’s why,” I mused. “Maybe Becky is a nice alternative to a bitch like me.”

  Lacey thought about it and nodded. “That’s gotta be it.”

  The front door slammed. “Breakfast time!” Peter announced, and went stomping into the kitchen still wearing his muddy muck boots. Bec
ky slid hers off at the door and followed after him, looking with a wrinkled nose at the filthy tracks left on the floor in his wake.

  “Prude,” I mouthed to Lacey, and she stifled a giggle as we trailed along behind.

  Breakfast was microwaved Jimmy Dean sausage biscuits, an interesting contrast to the save-the-world coffee we were already giddy with. They tasted fantastic but slid down greasily and sat unhappily with the peanut butter cups already settling into a solid blob in our stomachs. I nursed it with more coffee. I supposed I was a little hungover — we’d gotten really drunk at some point last night, right before the barn started to tear apart.

  The barn…

  The barn would be gone. The barn would be gone. I had to get that into my head.

  And the house.

  But not the horses. I had believe they were fine. And they were all that mattered. I put down my empty coffee cup.

  “Are we ready to go, then?” Peter asked. Becky hopped up.

  “I’m just going to go help Ramon with the stalls,” she explained, and left the room.

  Peter looked at me. “She’s going to stay here so that I can drive you two over,” he explained. “We’ll call her to come over if we need anything.”

  “What could we need?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Who knows? But she has a cell phone.”

  “The towers are probably all down.” I remembered the last big storm. The huge dead zones in phone coverage had lasted for months.

  “We appreciate you coming to get us,” Lacey said suddenly. “Really. And it was a luxury to have the TV and know what was going on, because they’re saying on the news that like eighty percent of the county lost power.”

  “I don’t remember the last time I’ve had the TV on for such a long time,” Peter said thoughtfully. “I must ignore it. I barely watch any shows. Too busy.”

  “We leave ours on,” I said. “But we don’t usually see it, either. It’s just background noise. It’s nice to pretend there are other people around. Farms get lonely.”

  “Someone else in the room,” he agreed. “You’re right, farms get pretty quiet. At least you two have each other for company. That must be nice.”

  “We’re not together,” Lacey blurted out. Like that was even in question.

  Peter burst out laughing. And after an embarrassed moment of blushing silence, Lacey and I did too. How else could you react to that?

  “Well, you have Becky here,” I said finally, pulling myself together and touching on the subject I couldn’t leave alone. “Although she is pretty quiet. Must be some company when you live with someone, though, right?”

  He frowned. “She’s only been in the house a few days — her apartment had a leak, which is probably ten times worse now. But you’re right — she’s pretty quiet. I barely notice when she’s in here. Plus, she tends to keep to her own bedroom. There’s a guest suite, you know. Practically its own house.”

  I subsided, sorry that I’d brought it up at all. Of course he wasn’t with Becky. And I had essentially just accused him of sleeping with his working student. Lacey was hiding an I told you so grin. I could tell by the dimples in her cheeks, even though she was covering up her lips with her coffee mug. Peter was looking fixedly at the remote control, as if he couldn’t place just what it was for. And I realized that the whole wound of my declining his romantic company had just been laid open.

  “So we’re going to go back to the farm,” I blurted stupidly, to try and change the subject, and he nodded, and we all got up to find our boots and begin the journey.

  It was as if every tree had been suddenly transported into winter. Their leaves and their needles, their twigs and their branches, were scattered across the ground in every direction, crunching beneath our feet and, later, under the truck tires. The trees themselves were bare and gaunt, with great slashes of white in their brown trunks where the winds had torn them apart. The trees that had succumbed and snapped off across the roadways brought with them great tangles of electric wires, still live and dangerous, for all we knew.

  Marion County has a lot of side roads, and Peter knew them all. Which was a good thing, because we needed them all, or so it seemed, constantly detouring away from blocked roads, slamming on the brakes and squealing sideways across wet roads when we’d come around a bend and suddenly encounter another unexpected obstacle before us.

  The damage was tremendous and terrifying. A massive live oak had fallen through the center of Derby Run’s magnificent training barn, crushing the shining copper cupola which had crowned the central rotunda. The four-board fencing that ran all along Silver Tree’s magnificent road frontage had completely collapsed in an endless wavy row of boards and snapped posts.

  “Where are their horses?” I wondered aloud, and Peter shook his head.

  “Hope to God they’re in back pastures,” he said grimly, “And not running around the roads somewhere.”

  We didn’t see our first loose horse until we were well west of town, but then we all gasped as one. Along the verge of either side of the county highway, entire herds of horses were moving purposefully north, some snatching mouthfuls of grass as they went, some breaking into a jog as others behind them goaded them forward with teeth and pinned ears. A few wore mud-encrusted nylon halters; one had a half-broken halter hanging dangerously from his neck, dangling close to his legs when he swung his head down to the ground to grab a mouthful. I pictured a fine bone stepping into that unforgiving nylon strap — we all did, I’m sure — and shuddered. The rest of the horses were bareheaded.

  “No identification,” Peter said slowly, stopping the truck for a good long look. “They could be from anywhere. Just a bunch of loose horses in a county full of horses.”

  I thought of my own horses and swallowed, unable to speak.

  For a half mile more the scene around us was one of utter devastation. It must have received some sort of super-cell, or a massive tornado, or simply the brunt of the storm’s eye-wall, because the area all around us was decimated. The result was a shattered landscape, as if a bomb had gone off. The fences were all flattened, lying in tidy rows with their boards still fastened together and their posts snapped off at ground level. Horses wandered the grassy median of the deserted highway and jogged across the asphalt lanes. Horses tripped and hopped over the massive felled slash pines as they continued on their journey to destinations unknown. The primal herd instinct to just keep moving had taken over their brains once the fences were out of their way.

  And the horses were mostly unscathed, though a few bore long, jagged wounds where flying debris had hit them, or perhaps where they’d climbed through broken fencing. A little gray filly grazed by the size of the road, seemingly unaffected by the blood welling from a long wire laceration on her forearm.

  We were silent and horrified, passing through the wreckage of a once-familiar enclave of farms. Foxwood Glen, a glossy, million-dollar show-ground for the winter hunter/jumper shows, looked like huge piles of wood left discarded in flooded fields. The other stables along the highway fared no better. And then suddenly, it all went back to normal, or as close to normal as the landscape could possibly be after a hurricane had blown it all to pieces. The fences were upright and there was only the occasional snapped-off tree, but the truck tires were still grinding across the carpet of branches, leaves, and pine needles. Here and there we’d see an old single-wide trailer which hadn’t survived, its insulation and linoleum hanging out of a gaping hole in its side like organs slipping out of a death wound.

  “Crazy,” Peter managed, but Lacey and I sat in dazed silence, unable to think of anything but what might be waiting for us as we drove closer and closer to home.

  And then we were there.

  There was a tree over the entrance to the driveway. A tree. Over my driveway. And on top of my sign, my antique Green Winter Farms sign, the wooden post poking out like flattened roadkill under a truck tire.

  Peter put the truck in park and we sat morosely on the branch stre
wn shoulder of the road.

  The fences were up. At least, the road frontage fences were up. But these weren’t my pastures. My farm was a furlong down the blocked driveway that ran between the pastures, hidden behind a low rise which was picturesque any other time, and positively diabolical now.

  “We’ll have to climb over the tree,” I said decisively, impressed with the steadiness of my voice. It in no way matched the trembling in my limbs, a bone-deep shaking that made me fumble with the door latch. I climbed down from the truck and the others followed after in silence.

  The day was turning bright and blustery — the spinning clouds left over from the storm were pulling away rapidly — and we walked up my rutted, flooded driveway beneath a gleaming morning sun. I guess I could have chosen to take the sunlight as a good omen, but it all just seemed so inappropriate — the way it highlighted the white gashes on the oak trees where branches had torn away, the way it sparkled in the ripples of the deep puddles in the driveway. I didn’t want to see the sun, didn’t really feel like we needed a spotlight thrown on the difference a day and a hurricane can make. But there it was, laughing in the bright blue sky.

  We topped the rise.

  Lacey simply started to cry, and I bit back my own howls with difficulty. The only good thing that could be said was that the horses were there. I did a quick count — everyone was present and, judging by their colors, they were all in the same paddocks where I’d left them.

  Sometimes that’s the best you can hope for with horses, that you go to bed or come home from a trip to the store, and they’re exactly where you left them. That same philosophy, times a million, applied after a hurricane.

  And that was it, that was all that was right.

  The bottle brush tree had been stripped to twigs; all the leaves were gone, the red flowers torn away. Sad. But that was nothing. The lovely old oak tree had come down between the house and the barn, harming nothing but itself, but the pine tree at the far end had come down right on top of my house. Or what was left of my house, anyway, after the storm had stripped its roof and blown out two of the thin metal-skinned walls. From where I stood, still a good distance away, I could see my bedroom scattered across the lawn. My blue sheets were vivid on the green grass; my pillows were piled up against the wall of the barn. The whole stretch of yard between the house and the barn, and the parking lot as well, was strewn with pink insulation and white sheets of paper. I fixated on the paper for a moment. What were all those papers from? How could I have had so much paper?