Johnny looked alarmed at the thought of taking the colt, but what did he know? He would be in far more danger trying to put the feed buckets in the stalls. I chirruped to Personal Best and the colt wearily followed after me, but not without leaning his head longingly towards the feed bins. “Come on, son,” I told him as he trudged after me, heartened at last that he was showing interest in some dinner. “You’re almost there. You’re going to be just fine, and then you can have a bran mash for dinner.” Too bad I hadn’t thought to tell Johnny not to mix up Personal Best’s regular feed; that was a waste. But things had happened so fast tonight; mistakes would happen, and as long as it only hit me in the pocketbook and didn’t affect one of my horses, I didn’t mind.
On the next round, the feed was mixed and Johnny was scrubbing at the molasses on his hand with a wet towel. “You used your hand, huh?”
He paused and looked at me. “There’s a mixer?”
“Spoon on the shelf.”
His eyes flicked up to the supplement shelf and the long wooden cooking spoon lying there. “Shoulda known.”
I shrugged. “One more turn. I’ll hand you off the horse on the next one.”
And then, on the far side, right in front of Roddy’s closed and locked office door, Personal Best stopped despite my hand pulling at the lead shank, groaned, and passed a few hard balls of manure. When he was done, he shook his head and licked his lips, a sure sign of relaxation if I’d ever seen one. I kissed him on his nose, delighted. “Just a little more where that came from, okay buddy? And then we can both take a rest.”
Johnny was standing in the feed room door when we came back around. I whoa’d the colt and held out the lead shank. He took it all in one hand, a big round coil of leather, and I shook my head. “I know he’s sick and he’s dead quiet right now, but still, gotta do things right. Let me show you.” I took Johnny by the shoulders and positioned him to the left of the colt’s head. He went with me, moving his legs stiffly in a little shuffling gait like a marionette, and by the time I had him where I wanted him, we were both giggling. “Idiot,” I snorted. “Now here, the lead shank in two hands … your left here, holding the leather in a figure eight … no, like this, so there isn’t a loop around your hand … ”
“Why?”
“Because if the horse takes off or shies and bolts or falls or whatever, anything that jerks the leather, it can break your hand.”
He didn’t say anything; that apparently took some processing. He had stopped giggling.
I stood behind him; I reached around and took his right hand, positioning it just below the end of the chain. “Just like this, and then you just walk beside him, and if his head gets too far ahead of you, you bring the lead back and give it a little jerk, nothing too rough, to remind him to slow down. And you walk on the hard path here, and let him walk in the rut. Otherwise you’ll trip or get stepped on.”
He spoke over his shoulder, his eyes alarmingly close to mine. His tone was dramatic, as if the Titanic were on her way down. “Do you think I’m going to survive?”
I swallowed, deeply aware of my body too close to his. It had been a game for a few minutes, the seriousness of the colt’s illness almost forgotten, Johnny’s proclaimed chase for me laughed away. Now the former was still receding, as he seemed to be recovering, but the latter was very much, very literally, in my face.
It was thrilling as hell.
“I think you’ll make it,” I whispered hoarsely. “I have great faith in you.” I tried to keep things light, but it was too late for that.
“I hope so,” he murmured back. “Because I’m planning on going out tonight, and I would hate like hell to be dead.” And then he turned away from me and walked the colt away, easy as that.
He left me blinking in the shedrow, staring after him like a fool. I clenched my fists slowly and unclenched them again, flexing my fingers like a boxer before a match. It would have been a pleasure to give that smiling punk a punch in the mouth if I wasn’t so certain it would break my hand. I wasn’t exactly experienced in the sweet science. “You’re a smug asshole!” I called instead, and then I wished I hadn’t, because he turned his laughing face back at me for a stride before walking on beside my horse, and I thought that it was exactly the response that he had wanted, to titillate me past the point of propriety, and then laugh at my discomfiture.
“Fuck him,” I muttered, and went into the feed room, stumbling on the rut in the shedrow like it was a new phenomenon, to get the feed bins. I came back out, two bins in my hands, and nearly walked right into Roddy Ellis.
This day just kept going, didn’t it?
“What?” I didn’t bother being polite and shouldered past him, taking the first bin to Idle Hour and pushing the colt’s pretty head away so that I could snap it to the screw-eye of his stall webbing. Roddy followed right after, as I figured he would. The man had no sense of personal space.
“I heard about the colt,” he said, low. “I wanted to see if you needed help, since Kerri went to Delaware.”
“I have help, thank you, and—” I narrowed my eyes at him as Idle Hour dove into his sweet feed with his jaw gaping like some sort of wolf, “how do you know Kerri is in Delaware?”
He opened his mouth, closed it, and opened it again. He was handsome as all get-out, I’d give him that, but when he was caught out in one of his tricks, his fair skin turned pink and his mouth went round as a goldfish’s. It wasn’t an attractive look. “Gomez told me.”
Gomez was his head groom. “Gomez doesn’t know. None of them know. I did it all from home. Try again, Roddy.” I marched down to Bonnie Chance, fuming. Would she never stop talking to him?
“I’m allowed to talk to her, Alex.”
I stopped.
“You can’t keep us apart just because you don’t like me. That’s not even legal.”
Bonnie Chance flung her hoof out and slammed it into her wire stall door. I flung it open so that I could get at her stall webbing, which she had a tendency to shove right through when she was in a mood, hence the extra door on her stall. She came at me with her ears pinned, another one of her cute tricks, and I feinted back at her with the bucket, which sent her into the corner of the stall, hindquarters towards me. It was a daily ritual which I did without thinking, but it would have been rocket science to Johnny. “It’s not about whether or not I like you.”
“But you don’t.”
“No, I don’t!” I closed the filly’s stall door; she was attacking her grain with ferocity. “I don’t like you, I don’t trust you. I don’t like the way you train horses. And from that respect, I should be able to keep you two apart, because she came here to learn. From me! Lesson one: Choose your friends wisely!” I started back toward the feed room for more feed buckets, Roddy at my heels. We both stopped and flattened ourselves to the wall as Johnny reappeared with Personal Best. He looked curiously at the pair of us as he walked by, but neither of us said anything, so neither did he. There was silence for a few moments as the horse made his begrudging way past us, and then I went into the feed room with Roddy right behind me.
“Who the hell is that?”
I ignored the question. He had to recognize Mike Weston’s nephew. “Is there something going on, Roddy? Are you sleeping with my assistant?” I snatched up two more feed bins; Roddy reached down and grabbed another one. I scowled but didn’t tell him no. “That’s stall four,” I said instead, and let him take it.
We put the feed bins in and I went back to mix up a bran mash for Personal Best, wincing as I dumped several pounds of grain and vitamins from his feed bucket into the trash can. Roddy followed me, but didn’t answer my question. So I didn’t answer his. “Maybe you should go,” I suggested.
He just shook his head. Then: “Kerri and I are very close.”
There was nothing I wanted to say to him. There was a lot I wanted to say to Kerri. Starting with you’re fired and ending with how could you?
But he was probably right. Could you fire someone for
dating a rival? Surely such a relationship counted as a conflict of interest. But I probably should have had her sign some sort of contract stating as much. I’d been naive to think that she would simply follow that unspoken rule on her own.
I’d been naive a lot this summer.
Johnny came back around the corner, a triumphant look on his face. “The pony pooped!” he announced. “I’ve never been so happy about an animal taking a shit in my life.”
I smiled at him. Personal Best’s intestines took priority over Kerri’s betrayal. “I’ll go take a look. Why don’t you take him over to the hose and we’ll give him a nice shower before he gets dinner.”
“Okay.” Johnny seemed at ease with the horse after just a few minutes on the lead shank. He probably wouldn’t feel the same in a few days, when Personal Best was feeling like his usual exuberant self. But it was pleasant to see him slouching down the shedrow in his sneakers, red clay on the cuffs of his jeans, when before I’d only been able to see him as just another New York hipster with little interest in any space that wasn’t paved or any animal that wasn’t a house cat.
Everybody has depths they don’t show the world.
Roddy was still watching me, but the look on his face had changed. He looked amused. I frowned at him. “Don’t you have horses to check?”
I went into the bathroom to run hot water for the bran mash. When I came out, Roddy was leaning on the barn wall, watching Johnny awkwardly graze Personal Best, who was snuffling over twenty square feet of grass, trying to find a blade that met his exacting taste.
“So you and that kid,” he began.
“It’s nothing,” I interrupted, and carried the heavy feed bin to the colt’s stall. With a grunt, I hoisted it up to clip onto the screw-eye in the door frame. “Mike’s nephew. You know him.”
“If you were looking for company, I was right next door, Alex,” Roddy said gently.
Charming! He was faithful, too! I spun on my heel and marched over to him. He looked down at me expectantly, all pink pouty lips and flushed skin, and I enjoyed the look of surprise that came over his face when I slammed both hands into his chest, pushing him back against the wall. “Fuck you, Roddy Ellis, you disgusting bastard,” I growled. “I have a husband. And I wouldn’t look for company with you even if he were never coming back from Australia.”
He recovered himself quickly, slapping on that smooth mask again. “What a strange thing to say, honey. It’s almost like you don’t think he’s coming back.”
“You’re an asshole,” I said levelly, and turned away, ready to grab the hose and give Personal Best a shower. I didn’t need to tell him that Alexander never called me and I always called him, or that I was increasingly frightened of the dark and lovely little Polly and how much comforting she needed with her husband a hundred miles away in hospital, gravely ill and not improving at all. It was none of his business. It was none of anybody’s business. And neither was my making friends with Johnny.
“There was no call for that,” he said from behind me. “It was only an offer. No one’s twistin’ your arm here.”
I didn’t look up from the hose I was uncoiling from its hanger. “If you come over here and proposition me again, or make accusations again, I will tell Mike Weston you’re sexually harassing me. And Kerri,” I added as an afterthought.
“Mike Weston and I go way back, Alex.” Roddy sounded amused; he thought he was going to have his own way in this. Why not? He had his own way at everything this year. Leading trainer by a landslide. He could do whatever he liked around this town. Even harass me. “I think he’s more likely to believe me than you. And Kerri won’t exactly back you up.”
You’re wrong. I turned and smiled sweetly, then nodded my head in the direction of the grassy lawn on the other side of the shedrow rails. Where Johnny was still stumbling after a now-ravenous Personal Best. “I don’t need Kerri. I have his nephew. And I hear Mike’s awfully fond of him.”
I turned my back on Roddy again, vowing this was the end of the argument, and ducked under the railing with the end of the hose doubled over in my hand. Time to shower the horse, get him some dinner, and go the hell home. I’d call Kerri from my bed and tell her to get the filly on a trailer and get back, and then I’d turn out the light before the sun went down. This day couldn’t end soon enough.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The Drought Buster
Kerri called late that night to tell me that she could get the filly on a van, but she herself was a different story.
“The van is full, is what they told me.”
“Full of people?”
“Four grooms is all the driver will take.”
“That is a lot of people,” I admitted, picturing the interior of a horse van. There wasn’t much space in the gap between horse stalls, and even less of it was out of reach of hooves and teeth. “So get a flight. You’re not missing much on the van anyway. Give one of the grooms fifty bucks to keep an eye on her.” I yawned. I’d been fast asleep, but it was just as well I was awake now. I’d drive back to the barn and check on Personal Best.
Kerri sighed. “I can’t get a flight before tomorrow night. Believe it or not there aren’t a lot of airplanes going to upstate New York.”
“They don’t know what they’re missing. Every day’s a freaking party up here.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Nothing. Personal Best colicked.”
“Is he okay?”
“I think so. He was happy when I left. I’ll go see him now.”
“Oh, Alex, tell me if he’s sick again! Poor boy!”
I smiled into the darkness. Nice girl. “I’ll call you in half an hour,” I promised. “And you can tell me what happens with the filly.”
“I’ll get her on that rig,” Kerri promised. “And see you in a day or two, I guess.”
***
Personal Best didn’t colic again.
I fell back into my bed around midnight and stayed there until four, thinking about the filly, and Alexander, and what he would say when he found out I’d claimed her from Roddy Ellis, who had claimed her from Mary Archer, their relationships making it very evident the whole thing had been plotted beforehand. But plotted to thwart me, or plotted because they’d had some grandiose plan to make money with her before she broke down? Who the hell knew? I tossed and I turned and I flipped my pillow and I kicked off my covers, and I fell asleep right before my alarm went off, and I went to work in a terrible mood and left as soon as I could.
“Restless,” Gabe said when I got to the barn again that afternoon. I was so distracted, I didn’t think to ask why on earth he was even there.
“Who?”
“Filly. She come at lunchtime.”
Well, no shit. “Did you call me?”
“I call. You don’t answer. I stay with the filly. She too crazy to leave alone.”
I felt for my phone in my pocket, but it wasn’t there. I retraced my steps since finishing work this morning. I’d sat down at my desk for a few minutes, stared at my phone while I tried to steel myself to call Alexander, and then gave it up for a bad job and went home to sleep all day. Ah yes. My phone was still sitting on my desk then. Gabe probably heard it ringing and ringing while he was standing here in front of the goofy filly’s stall, watching her run in circles.
“So she’s not settling in?”
“She just pace. She restless.” Gabe shrugged.
***
And I could hear her restlessness before I even reached her stall, the rustling of straw and the jingle of halter buckles. When I came within a few feet she flung her head and neck over the stall webbing and pressed her chest against it, staring at me with wide eyes and red-rimmed nostrils, as if she had seen a ghost.
I edged a little closer to admire my prize, stopping just out of her reach.
She was such a pretty little thing, with a long slender head, a teacup chin, and inquisitive brown eyes. The white blaze that flared over her face was wider than her nasal b
ones, spilling down the little cliffs of her profile, before contracting into a tiny curl between her whorls of nostrils. The brown splotch in the middle was a dab of spilled paint. I wanted to plant a kiss on that little question mark of white, but her eyes were too bright and her ears too pricked for me to risk my face close to hers. You can adore a horse but still recognize the chance of her chomping your nose off with no malice or forethought.
And then she shoved that pretty filly face toward me, reaching with questing lips stretched as far as they could go, and when that nose found my navel beneath my grubby tank top, she stopped there and sighed. I felt the flutter of her nostrils, the warmth of her breath, and when I reached out on hand to lie it flat on the great irregular star between her brown eyes, she was still at last.
Gabe came upon us there a moment later and spoiled the communion by tripping over Barn Kitty and dropping the rake he’d been dragging behind him, and the clatter sent the filly back into her stall to resume her wild-eyed circling of her twelve-by-twelve box, dragging the straw bedding in a whirlpool behind her. But she’d proven that she could relax. That was something. Wasn’t it?
Gabe was unimpressed. “She ate her supper in bites while she was still pacing. No hay at all.”
“She’ll get hungry,” I shrugged, making a decent show of nonchalance. Of course I was worried. Not just that the filly might work herself into a colic or drop weight from running herself ragged in her box, but that I'd made a terrible embarrassing rookie mistake in chasing down this filly. Maybe I'd alienated half of the big dogs in racing and squandered money on a lemon. Maybe my heart had been lying, or simply hadn't known what it was talking about.
Other People's Horses (Alex and Alexander Book 2) Page 20
