Barn Sour (Show Jumping Dreams ~ Book 26)

  BARN SOUR

  BY

  CLAIRE SVENDSEN

  Copyright © 2016 Claire Svendsen

  All rights reserved

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission of the Author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Your support of author’s rights is appreciated.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, places or events is purely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY FOUR

  CHAPTER FORTY FIVE

  CHAPTER FORTY SIX

  CHAPTER FORTY SEVEN

  COMING SOON

  HEART HORSE: CHAPTER ONE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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  CHAPTER ONE

  “It’s too cold,” Cat groaned. “Go away.”

  “You promised you’d help me feed this morning,” I said, nudging Cat with my foot.

  She was a lump under the covers. I couldn’t even see her head, probably because winter had finally come to Florida and it was now freezing. And our house didn’t have heat. Well technically it did but of course it didn’t work. Nothing worked. Last night I wore two sweaters and a wooly hat to bed and I’d still woken up shivering.

  “Come on,” I begged. “Please. Dad went to pick up that new horse and you promised you’d help me.”

  “No I didn’t,” Cat said, her voice all muffled.

  “Yes, you did.” I nudged her again, this time harder.

  “Stop it,” she yelled at me.

  I didn’t blame her. Cat wasn’t exactly a horse person. She was starting to show an interest but she wasn’t like me and all my friends. She didn’t eat, sleep and breathe horses.

  “Fine,” I said, turning to leave. “I’ll just tell Phoenix that you don’t care about him anymore.”

  “Don’t you dare,” Cat cried, throwing the covers off. “I’ll be down in five minutes.”

  I left the room grinning as Cat scurried to throw on warm clothes. Phoenix was our foal and Cat had sort of fallen in love with him. She may not have been as obsessed with horses as I was but somehow Phoenix was different. I think it was partly because he was all small and cute. Being abandoned by his mother, we’d found him a nurse mare but he wasn’t growing as much as I’d hoped. He probably wasn’t going to turn out to be a very big horse after all, which meant my future dreams of turning him into my very own home grown jumper had been smashed.

  But Cat loved him and that was all that really mattered. Of course all that was going to go to hell the day Dad decided to get rid of him because my father was adamant that we only kept horses we could compete on. So far he wasn’t doing a very good job of keeping me in line because we already had Phoenix, the nurse mare Chantilly and Bandit, my miniature horse.

  As I sat in the kitchen eating cold toast and waiting for Cat, I thought of Bandit and how Jordan had given him to me for my birthday. It had been an amazing gift and I’d hoped to repay him by getting him something equally amazing for Christmas. The only problem was that I couldn’t think of anything and then it turned out that he’d gone away for Christmas anyway so I’d been let off the hook.

  But he was coming back in two days and I still hadn’t thought of anything. Maybe if people were gone over Christmas that meant you didn’t have to buy them a gift? I thought of how empty the money tin under my bed was and how I really needed to start making more money. But then I thought of how Jordan was nice and sweet and how Mickey said that he was practically my boyfriend. What would it say if you didn’t get your almost boyfriend a gift for Christmas? I let out a sigh. Boys and dating were dumb. At least the only thing I had to get Bluebird for Christmas was a carrot. My pony was easy to please. Except at breakfast.

  By the time we got outside, Bluebird was standing by his bucket with an angry look on his face, pinning his ears and kicking out with a back leg if any of the other horses came near him. The whole feeding situation was getting a bit out of hand. Bluebird had figured out that if he scoffed his food really fast then he could chase the other horses away from their buckets and eat their food too. I’d started holding him while he ate but it was only a short term solution and not really practical at all.

  “I’ll be one second,” I told him as I ran into the barn.

  He nickered desperately like he was starving, his blankets all lopsided. He’d already wrecked one and it looked like the new one wasn’t lasting either. He was harder on his clothes than I was.

  The horses in the barn nickered and banged their buckets, including Phoenix who was now spending nights inside. We had a foal blanket but it just didn’t seem warm enough and so he and Chantilly got one of our coveted stalls. We didn’t have that many and with the new horse coming in we’d be down one more. Dad said with the training job we’d have enough money to finish adding more stalls but I wasn’t sure I believed him. I knew that he’d been lying to me lately. I could see it on his face. Saying he was fine when I knew he wasn’t. I just hadn’t figured out how to make him tell me what was wrong.

  “You do in here and I’ll do outside,” I told Cat.

  “Fine by me,” she said, rubbing her gloved hands together. “At least it is warmer in here.”

  “Yeah by like five degrees,” I said as we scooped grain into buckets.

  “I’ll take any degrees I can get,” she replied.

  I ran outside and dumped grain for our starving horses, slipping Bluebird’s halter on before he could shove his face in his bucket. Then I sat on the fence and watched them eat. The sky was cold and gray. We hadn’t seen the sun in days and it kept raining. Last month I’d thought that we’d never even get a winter at all and now that it was here, I couldn’t wait for it to end.

  “Oh no you don’t,” I said, tugging on the rope as Bluebird finished his food and tried to make a beeline for Arion’s bucket.

  He pulled against me and I had to snap the rope a couple of times before he stopped fighting me and gave up, coming back to eat the grain off the ground that he’d spilled in his haste to finish first.
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  “You are so silly,” I told him but I loved him so much that I didn’t care.

  Cat and I were in the barn cleaning stalls later when I heard the trailer pull in.

  “He’s here,” I said, unable to keep the excitement out of my voice.

  “Great,” Cat said. “Another stall to clean.”

  But I didn’t think of it like that. Each new horse was like a puzzle waiting to be solved. A book that you hadn’t read yet. You didn’t know what wonders you were going to find until you started riding it and Dad had said that this was a tune up job so I could handle most of it myself.

  “I thought you were never going to get here,” I told Dad.

  He jumped out of the truck looking tired and grumpy. He was supposed to have been back last night but he said there were complications. Then his phone died and I hadn’t been able to find out what the complications were.

  “The horse wouldn’t leave the barn,” Dad said.

  “Well he probably just didn’t want to leave his friends,” I said. “That is kind of sad and sweet.”

  “It wasn’t sad or sweet,” Dad said. “He reared up and nearly hit me in the head. Twice.”

  “He can’t be that bad,” I said.

  “However bad you think he is,” Dad said. “He’s a hundred times worse and you have one month to fix him.”

  “One month?” I said, feeling my palms start to sweat.

  “You wanted this job, didn’t you?” Dad said, slamming down the trailer ramp.

  “Yes,” I said with a gulp.

  I just hadn’t expected my training career to rest on one unruly horse that I only had a month to train.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The horse didn’t want to come out of the trailer. He planted his feet and refused to move.

  “Now what?” I asked Dad.

  He stood there looking tired and frustrated.

  “Go and get some grain,” he said.

  I ran to the barn to get the grain. Cat looked up from her stall cleaning.

  “What is it?” she said.

  “The horse won’t come out,” I said.

  “I thought horses didn’t want to get in trailers. Why wouldn’t he want to get out?” Cat said.

  “Maybe he’s scared,” I replied.

  I tipped some grain into a bucket and shook it. The oats made a rustling noise and the other horses in the barn all nickered excitedly, thinking that they were going to get a second breakfast.

  “Well if that doesn’t work, he’ll never come out,” I said.

  But the grain didn’t work. I rustled and shook the bucket and clucked encouragingly but nothing would convince the horse to move.

  “I give up,” Dad said, raising his hands and backing away. “He can just stay in there.”

  And then he just left. Left me standing there with the horse still in the trailer. I guess when he said that I was training this one, he really meant it. I set the bucket down and walked slowly up the ramp. The horse turned his head and looked at me with big eyes. He was a tall bay with a small star and one white sock. He was cute, his face sweet but I could tell he was shy and scared.

  “What are we going to do with you?” I said.

  I reached out and gently stroked his neck. Dad had already untied him and the lead rope was looped over his neck. I took hold of it and pushed on his chest.

  “Back up,” I said gently.

  Nothing.

  “Back up,” I said again, this time firmer.

  He still didn’t move. I didn’t want to scare him. Our trailer wasn’t that big. Getting into a fight with a scared horse in a small enclosed space wasn’t exactly my idea of a good time.

  “You can stay in here all day if you like,” I told him. “But it won’t be much fun. We have grass outside and fields to run and play in. There are other horses here. Lots of horses and ponies that you can make friends with. And you’ll have fun. We are nice and kind and gentle. We won’t force you to do stuff you don’t want to do but you have to come out of this trailer. You can’t stay in here forever.”

  The horse’s ears flicked back and forth as I talked and in doing so I hoped that I was earning his trust. Getting to know him. I moved my hand down his neck and over his shoulder. He didn’t mind me touching him. He just didn’t want to move. Suddenly I had a flash of inspiration.

  “Maybe you just don’t like to back up,” I said.

  I unhooked the bar and moved it over so that the horse now had room to turn around.

  “Come on,” I said, clicking my tongue. “Let’s go.”

  And this time I said it like I meant it. You could beg and plead for as long as you wanted but sometimes you just had to be a little firmer.

  The horse looked around and suddenly realized that he had more room to move. He lifted one foot and placed it gingerly to the side. Then he moved the other. Inch by inch he turned around so that he could walk straight out of the trailer instead of backing out. For a moment I thought he was going to freeze again on the ramp but Bluebird saw him and nickered excitedly and before I knew it we were out in the dull day.

  “There,” I said. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

  And the new horse snorted, spooked and stomped on my foot. I guess it was that bad after all.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “I got him into a stall,” I told my father.

  He was in the kitchen eating breakfast. My foot was throbbing where the horse had stepped on it and it felt like my toe was broken but I wasn’t about to tell my father that because I wanted to bask in the glory that was the fact that I had been victorious in getting the horse out of the trailer and he hadn’t.

  “Great,” Dad said, shaking his head. “It doesn’t matter. We never should have taken the job.”

  “He’ll come around,” I said. “He just has to settle in, that’s all.”

  “That horse is never going to settle in,” Dad said.

  “What is his name again?” I said.

  We didn’t have proper nameplates for the stalls so I’d found some dry erase boards at the dollar store and hung them on each horse's stall with their name, feed amounts and any extra information like turnout boots or stuff like that. In a small barn like ours it didn’t really matter because we all knew the horses but Cat was starting to pitch in more and I knew she’d never remember who needed bell boots or turnout boots or extra fly spray.

  “Oscar,” Dad said. “Oscar the grouch.”

  “He’s not a grouch,” I said. “He’s just scared. It’s not his fault. Maybe he’s just been sheltered his whole life.”

  “More like babied so much that now he is afraid of everything and don’t forget, a scared horse is a dangerous horse,” Dad added.

  “But we’ll fix him, won’t we?” I said. “Gently so that we don’t scare him even more.”

  “Yeah, okay.” He just shook his head.

  Dad wasn’t exactly the gentle type. He was more the do as I say type and even though he wasn’t rough with the horses, he was certainly firmer than I was. No wonder he’d pretty much thrown the horse at me and told me to train it.

  “Who is scared and dangerous?” Mom asked, coming into the kitchen still in her pajamas.

  “No one,” I said as I walked past her. The last thing I needed was my mother thinking that I was riding another dangerous horse.

  Later I looked at my toe in the bathroom. It was all swollen and purple. It hurt just taking my sock off. I ran it under the cold water, which was actually cold for once because usually in Florida even the cold water was mildly warm. But it was cold outside. And dull. And gray. I’d left turnout sheets on the horses outside and Bluebird had gleefully run off and rolled in a puddle. I hoped the sheet was as waterproof as they claimed it was because my toe hurt too much to limp across the field and find out if he was still dry. In fact I wasn’t sure how I was going to ride at all.

  When my father asked later who I was riding, I told him that I had a headache. And then it started to rain anyway so I was off the hook
.

  I spent the afternoon in Oscar’s stall, getting to know him instead. I brushed him and talked to him and told him all about the other horses here. He didn’t seem to mind. In fact he seemed perfectly happy in his new stall. I knew it was getting him back out again that was going to be the problem. I knew because I’d tried. I tried taking him out to put him in the cross ties and he didn’t want anything to do with it. And that was asking him to go out front ways. It wasn’t like when I was asking him to back out of the trailer. Dad was right. We were never going to get any training done on him if we couldn’t even get him out of his stall. I put my stuff away with a sigh and called it a day.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The next day was just as dull and gloomy. I tried not to shiver as I fed the horses, this time with Dad. Cat was snuggled under her blankets like she had been the day before but today I didn’t have to wake her. Today she was allowed to stay in bed. But in a day or two she’d be starting school. Then she’d be the one who was getting up at the crack of dawn and waiting out on the road to catch the school bus and she’d be just as cold as I was.

  She wasn’t too thrilled at the idea either. She’d wanted to do virtual school like I did but without her father signing off on it that was impossible and no one wanted to contact him in case he found out where we were and showed up to murder us.

  For a while I thought that maybe I’d just blown it all out of proportion, the way he was when he lived with us. But seeing Cat’s scars had brought it all back. The memories just as fresh and hard in my mind as the wrench he’d held in his hand that day in the garage when I truly believed he might hit me with it. And I had my real father to protect me now but it was still scary to think that Derek was out there somewhere, trying to find his daughter and my mother.

  “Going to work Oscar today?” Dad asked as I tipped grain into the new horse’s bucket.

  “That’s a joke,” I said. “How am I supposed to get him out of his stall?”

  “I told you,” Dad said. “It’s your job to figure him out.”

  But in the end Dad relented and it was just as well because it did take two of us. One in front and one behind. Dad was the one behind. I had already been stepped on. I wasn’t too keen to be kicked as well. My toe had throbbed all last night and this morning it looked even worse than it had done yesterday. Just getting my boot on had been torture. I didn’t even want to think about the pain I would be in riding but the good thing was that it was so cold that my toes were starting to go numb anyway so maybe I wouldn’t feel a thing.