Other People's Horses (Alex and Alexander Book 2)

by Natalie Keller Reinert

“What you gonna do with her now?”

  I eyed Gabe. He didn’t look annoyed at having spent his entire day at the barn, or that I hadn’t answered when he’d been calling me. I was lucky to have him. “I’m going to stay here with her until she quiets. You’ve done more than enough. Go home, get some rest.”

  “You should go too. Bad night comin’. It’s gonna rain.”

  Thunder rumbled to underscore his words.

  “Thunderstorm’ll just set her off more,” I said. “I’ll stay. Thank you.”

  He looked disapproving, but I waved him away. Who didn’t look at me in a disapproving manner these days? Who thought I was capable of a good decision?

  I was setting up my office chair outside of the chestnut filly’s stall, where she could easily see me, when Johnny strolled into the barn.

  “Boy, am I glad to see you,” I said warmly.

  Johnny stuck his hands in his pockets and did a slow spin in the shedrow, taking in the gathering clouds in the western sky. The sun was hidden and the wind was growing colder. He turned back to me and quirked an eyebrow. “Camping in the barn? You picked a good night for it.”

  “Gotta baby-sit this little beauty.” I waved a hand towards the stall. “Look, my very own neurotic head-case of a filly. Don’t say I never buy myself anything nice.”

  He positioned himself next to my chair and peered across the aisle to the filly’s stall. She came lurching up to the stall webbing and stared past us, head high and ears pricked, at the darkening sky. There was a flash, lightning in the distance, and her eyes widened until the white sclera showed around the dark iris. She blew through her nostrils, a great loud gust of sound. Johnny actually jumped. She flung herself back into the stall, narrowly missing rapping her head on the side of the door, and resumed her relentless pacing.

  “What the hell was that?”

  I grinned. “Just a sound horses make sometimes when they’re alarmed. Maybe a warning or a call for help? I don’t know. But I bet it can be heard for miles by other horses.” From somewhere in the far distance, I heard a cascade of whinnies. A few other horses in the barn took up the call as well. “You see? They’re calling back. Letting her know she’s not alone.”

  “Like drums in the jungle.”

  “Kinda. I guess so.”

  He looked down at me. I stuck my boots out in front of me and crossed my legs. “You got another chair?”

  “You know I do.”

  We sat companionably for a while, letting the cold wind slip around our bare summer skin while the rushed evening settled in and the thunder grew ever louder and deeper, watching the filly trudge wearily around her stall. Johnny produced a backpack full of beer cans, not the day-drinking easy Coors Light that his uncle stocked the cooler with, but a bitter pale beer from somewhere in the Adirondacks, with an alcohol content that gave me a momentary pause before I popped the lid and dove in. And when the storm finally slammed into the barn with a gust that tore a strip of metal right off the roof, and a lashing of cold rain and rattling hailstones that bounced in the grass behind us like so many marbles, we clutched at each other’s hands without thinking as we leapt up from the chairs and pressed ourselves up against the barn wall to get out of the reach of the water and ice, and while we laughed at the rage of the storm, it was thoughtless and unintended the way our fingers remained intertwined.

  ***

  Johnny drove me home, pulling up outside the ivy-covered house and hopping out to open my car door. He leered and winked as I climbed, unsteadily out of his little car. “Will I see you on the morrow, my lady?” he asked in a mock English accent.

  I pressed a hand to my forehead. A silly little Monty Python accent, but still a reminder …

  “Is my lady still indisposed? Shall I escort her to her chambers?”

  “Johnny—goodnight, Johnny.”

  I turned away from my chauffeur and toddled up the cracked sidewalk and through the warped and squeaking screen door of the porch, which was even worse off after the storm, and inside. And I didn’t stop until I was upstairs and in my bed, peeling off my boots from under the covers, wondering what on earth Romeo would have thought if I’d told him my husband’s accent was far superior to his.

  ***

  Alexander called me while I was feeding the horses breakfast.

  “Mason Birdwell has been on the phone with me today,” he said by way of greeting.

  “Good morning, Alexander,” I said stonily, and shoved the last bucket into the last stall, waving away the hungry horse inside. I wondered why it had taken Birdwell so many weeks to get hold of Alexander.

  “Alex, I’ve spent half the morning trying to talk him out of moving every single one of his horses off our farm. Do you recall what I said to you about this account?”

  Don’t fuck it up. “I most certainly do.”

  “Then, Alex, tell me, why did you?”

  “Because he was an asshole,” I said matter-of-factly. “He was also drunk and embarrassing to be seen with.”

  “He has more than fifty horses —”

  “Which doesn’t give him the right to treat me like an idiot, ignore my professional advice, and get completely wasted in front of the rest of the industry. I’m not going to take that kind of treatment from anyone.” I went into the office and began slapping buttons on the coffeemaker. It emitted a rusty sort of chirp and then hissed, getting down to business. “We were fine without him. Let him go.”

  “He’s been the cornerstone of our business for the past two years. Alex, I must say, I cannot understand this blase attitude towards clients. If you want to be a major player in this business, then —”

  “I don’t.”

  “What?”

  I swilled water around in a dirty coffee mug. “I want it to be me and you. I don’t want all these clients and their horses in our way anymore. Why don’t you come home, and I’ll come home, and we’ll just raise our horses in peace. We tried that once. It worked.”

  “I can’t possibly just leave here, Alex. I’m desperately needed. And you … you wanted to be a trainer. And now you are. You’re just going to leave it all behind?” He sounded beyond exasperated. He sounded like he was ready to wash his hands of me and my indecisiveness. And who could blame him? Although all I was telling him I wanted was, well, him.

  “I’d leave behind the part where we’re separated by half a world,” I clarified. “And the part where offensive people with too much money call the shots.”

  He was quiet at that.

  “I bought a new horse,” I offered.

  “What?”

  “That filly. The Littlefield filly.”

  “Oh. . . Alex.”

  The disappointment in his voice was clear. The satellites had no trouble deciphering that.

  “She’s special.” The coffee was spilling into the smudged carafe, black and bitter. My mouth watered. “I had to have her.”

  He sighed.

  “You’ll see.” I spun around the dim little office, flinging open the door to the muddy lawn, laughing out at the pink-tinged sky. The sun was rising after a stormy night. Let him be angry. I had my filly. “I have to get to work, my love. Bye!”

  ***

  “What you gonna do with her?” Manny was already in the shedrow, standing with his fists on his hips and surveying the filly. She had stopped pacing and was eating her hay with gusto, snatching at the hay-net as viciously as Personal Best. Redheads were all alike, I guessed.

  “Dressage,” I replied.

  “What?” The exercise rider looked at me as if I had suggested taking her to the moon.

  “She skipped a few grades in school. Kindergarten through eleventh, to be exact. She doesn’t know how to be ridden. She just knows how to not buck someone off while they’re on her back. Everything else she does is in response to brute strength or exhaustion. So I’m going to get on and teach her the basics. Like she’s a baby.”

  Manny nodded. “That could work,” he allowed.

  “It bet
ter.” The filly snorted at both of us. “Don’t make me look like an idiot, baby. Not more than I already do.”

  “You gonna take her to the track at all?”

  “Nope. I’ll ride her in the afternoon, right over here in the grass.”

  “Sounds good, boss.” He sniffed the air. “You got coffee?”

  “Right this way.” And when Gabe arrived to get the horses tacked and ready for the racetrack, he found Manny and I sitting over chipped mugs of black coffee in the office, plotting how we could own the last month of the Saratoga season.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Slamming Doors

  But starting the filly had to wait a few days, while the world around me threw itself into upheaval, and then settled itself down in new canyons and valleys and seas, leaving me to find new paths to familiar places.

  Kerri came back to the barn the night after the filly arrived and went quietly back to work, carrying her duffel bag in from the cab to the house and passing me as I lay redolent on the brown couch, studying the wood paneling on the walls and drinking a bottle of Newcastle, breathing in the damp smells from the rain outside. She waved a hand and said she was tired and went to bed, and when I got up in the morning she had already gone to the barn without waking me.

  I went to the office and sat at my desk, very deliberately not thinking of the night before, and went back to my usual game of gazing at my condition book, wishing that something magical would have happened since the same time yesterday when I’d been doing the same thing, looking for the right spot for my horses. Idle Hour, to be specific. Bonnie Chance was entered the next day in an allowance, and Personal Best was still on the no-fly list while we waited for his blood tests and a reason for his continuing air of fatigue. With the dark colt’s third place finish in that first start, Idle Hour was turning out to be my closest excuse for a big horse, and I was trying to determine if I was ready to enter him in a stakes race.

  Roddy’s gentle tap on my door was startling; I thought the barn had emptied out after training. Kerri had gone home for a rare nap over an hour ago, saying she was still exhausted from the three-day excursion to Delaware. The grooms and hot-walkers had gone wherever grooms and hot-walkers went during the midday. It had just been me.

  “Roddy,” I said blankly. I didn’t have the energy to fight with him today. He just smiled as if we had never argued at all and waved two massive iced coffees at me. “Want a liquid lunch? I hear you’re trying to make weight.”

  “Oh … ” That. The only fruitful thing I had really managed this morning was to create more bad press about myself. Jackson Price had come up to me and offered to ride the filly — because of course everyone knew I’d sent Kerri to claim her in a remarkable display of sour grapes and poor business sense — and when I’d declined, he’d sneered: “Why? ’Cause I'm too fat to ride your horses?” and I, not wanting to get into the real problems of his known misogyny and women-bashing (literal), said yes. It was stupid, but I was angry and hungover, and so it happened, and since it happened next to the backstretch cafe, everyone watching the works saw it. And if someone missed it, they could read about it later in an “overheard” column in a local horse racing rag. “That was unfortunate.”

  “That was unfortunate,” Roddy agreed. “But you were right. He’s way too big to be getting on youngsters.”

  “People like him,” I said wearily, shoving out the other chair with my foot. Roddy took the hint and sat down. “Just not me.”

  “People got funny taste.” He pushed a coffee my way. “More sugar than coffee in that. Wakes ya up either way.”

  “Great,” I said, pulling a face. But I hadn’t eaten anything yet and was hungry enough that the sugar tasted fine. “I’ve caused more talk than I ever meant to,” I admitted. “I would have liked to fly below the radar and just be allowed to train horses. But I guess my husband made that impossible.”

  “He’s kind of a big deal,” Roddy suggested, in a charming display of understatement.

  “I didn’t marry him so that I could be a trainer.”

  “That’s what Saratoga thinks, though. You can’t change that.”

  “You say that like you’re on my side. I know you’re out there laughing about me just like everyone else.”

  “I’m not,” Roddy said. “But you don’t need my help in getting bad press. That’s just your bad luck.”

  I looked at him for a moment and then we both laughed. “I’m hopeless,” I giggled. “And you’re a bunch of good ol’ boy assholes.”

  He just shook his head, lost in mirth.

  Roddy came to his point when we finally sobered up. “I want you to know I’m not planning on causing any trouble over the filly. She’s a nice filly and we both put in fair claims. It’s too bad we’ve had to fight over her like this. But I hope if you have any problems with her you won’t hesitate to let me know.”

  Now that was a kindness that simply didn’t compute. “And you’ll just come over and fix her up for me, huh?”

  Roddy looked disconcerted by my sudden hostility. He must have thought he’d worn me down with neighborly coffee and a sort of sympathetic ear. “I only meant that I’d be happy to watch her and then we could put our heads together to figure out a solution.”

  I pounced. Betrayal and a lingering hangover could make a girl temperamental. “It’s interesting that you think she has a problem. She wasn’t exactly cheap, and yet you went right after her. And had a race to drop her in immediately afterwards. Feels a little planned and plotted, Roddy. So what did Mary Archer tell you before she bombed that race?” I picked up my coffee and took a long sip, waiting while Roddy struggled to cover up the idiotic expression on his face and find his tongue. He looked exactly like a kid with his hand in the cookie jar. Maybe he thought my stable was his cookie jar, I reflected. He could help himself to my assistant and my horses whenever he pleased.

  “Are you suggesting this whole claim and drop in class was a deal with Mary Archer?” he asked finally, voice tight. “Because —”

  “I’m not suggesting anything,” I hedged. “Did you hear me say it was a deal? All I asked was what she told you. I’m pretty sure I see you guys having coffee most mornings over at the backside. You don’t talk horses, huh? Just politics, right? The stock market?”

  “Look,” Roddy got up and laid his hands flat on the desk. His face was flushed beneath the tan, and his voice was taut. “I didn’t come over here to be accused of doing deals and shady claims, dammit. I came over to be a friend. I came over to be neighborly and put all this bad blood behind us. You don’t like Mary, that’s fine. But Kerri said you could probably some help with this filly, since she’s a little headcase, and —”

  Oh, she did?

  “Do you have any room in your barn for a groom?” I asked, interrupting him. “Didn’t I hear that you had lost a couple of grooms recently?”

  He paused. “Yes.”

  “Maybe you should consider Kerri for the job,” I said coldly. “She’s spending enough time on your side of the barn as it is. And she clearly has no loyalty to me.”

  Roddy shook his head. “It isn’t like that.”

  “What’s it like, Roddy? You treat her like a little star and she tells you all about what’s happening in my shedrow. I just … I just can’t, Roddy. I can’t deal with all this. I have enough on my plate without my assistant in cahoots with the fucking trainer next door … ”

  “Alex, with all due respect … ” he paused, and suddenly seemed to be choosing his words with care. “You have six horses in your barn. You hardly ever run them, but when you do, you get a place or a show. You have no owners to deal with. You have Kerri, for God’s sake, and she’s a phenomenal barn manager. So tell me, in all seriousness, what do you have on your plate? Because maybe I can help. I mean it.”

  I looked at the young trainer for a long moment. He seemed earnest enough; the stiffness of confrontation had left his muscles, and he was stoop-shouldered, leaning on the desk instead of brac
ing against it. His face looked concerned. I wondered just what he proposed to do, when he was one of the people who had been making my life hell. “Roddy, where would I even begin? I have Mary Archer stirring up half the backside against me. Every day there’s a new conflict. Today it’s Jackson Price saying I hate fat people. Yesterday it was Cap McClan claiming that Idle Hour was out of control in the lane during his work and caused his good filly to swerve into the outer fence and get all beat up. God only knows what the fuck is wrong with Personal Best, but he’s acting like he’s a teenager with mono right now. Tomorrow I’ll probably get accused of being a voodoo queen and putting the evil eye on someone’s horses. It’s been one thing after another … Saratoga has not been very welcoming to me, Roddy, let’s put it like that. So I have no reason to believe that you’d be any different now, after three weeks of this bullshit.

  “And besides,” I said with a gusty sigh. “My husband is on the other side of the world, running his brother’s stud farm while his brother is in hospital, and I’m tired of wondering about Polly.”

  Roddy cocked his head.

  I had not just said that out loud.

  “Polly?”

  I’d said it out loud.

  “I have to go,” I blurted, standing up so quickly my chair hit the wall behind me.

  “Why?” Roddy didn’t seem inclined to let me off.

  “Because I’m fucking done with you,” I snapped. “Get out of my office and if Kerri comes back over there after her little beauty rest, tell her she has five minutes to get her ass back to her own side of the barn or she’s fired.” I threw the half-empty coffee cup in the muck tub by the door. “I’m not here to make friends with you or anyone else,” I added, holding the door, ready to slam it shut the moment he removed himself from my office. “This filly has made a bad thing worse. Just leave me alone, will you? And Kerri.”

  Roddy went out the door and turned up the shedrow towards the center aisle, but not without turning back for a last word. “I don’t think Kerri is going to give up on us just because you’re insecure about your marriage, Alex. And I don’t think that’s a reasonable request for you to make.”