Winter Wonderland (Show Jumping Dreams ~ Book 13)

  WINTER WONDERLAND

  BY

  CLAIRE SVENDSEN

  Copyright © 2015 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.

  CHAPTER ONE

  “You forgot to put his bell boots on. Again,” Jess snapped.

  “I’m sorry,” I said as she snatched Hashtag’s lead rope out of my hands. “I could have sworn that I put them on him.”

  “That’s what you said last time,” she said.

  “And I did, remember? We found them in the mud. He’s really good at taking things off.”

  “Well he’s certainly a lot better at it than you are at putting things on.”

  She stormed off down the aisle, dragging her horse behind her. I bit back the anger I felt welling up inside me and tried to forget it. Lately everything had been making me mad and I didn’t know why. I did know that when I agreed to move to Fox Run to live with my father, I hadn’t expected to become the person who had to do everything that no one else wanted to do.

  “You don’t mind, do you?” my father said as I stood there with my suitcases and several cardboard boxes that contained all my belongings. “If you help out around the barn then it means that Bluebird can stay here for free, just like you did at Sand Hill.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Okay.”

  My father was the top trainer. I’d assumed that he would get free stalls or at least a discount on one and that he would pay the rest. After all, he hadn’t paid towards anything for the last nine years of my life. I was sort of hoping that he’d make up for lost time. And Bluebird wasn’t even being treated like the rest of the Fox Run horses. He was living in a sand lot behind our tiny cottage with only a small shelter and once a week, when the barn was closed, I was allowed to put him out in one of the grass fields.

  “I don’t own the barn,” my father had shrugged when I questioned him about it. “I don’t make the rules.”

  But I didn’t have a choice because I didn’t have anywhere else to go. My parents spent the week after Thanksgiving yelling at one another. It was so bad that I thought someone would call the cops but they never showed up and in the end I was the one who was allowed to decide. I chose my father, not because I loved him more, since I wasn’t even sure if I loved him at all but because it would be better for my career. I tried to explain that to my mother but she wouldn’t listen. She spent days locked in her room crying and then she came out and started packing like nothing had ever happened. Only she refused to talk to me. She didn’t even say goodbye. I had betrayed her in the worst way and I knew that but I didn’t want to move to Wisconsin any more than she wanted to stay in Florida. It was an impossible situation.

  “Hey!” Mickey hung in the doorway while I was in the feed room filling the grain bins. “Want to go for a ride?”

  “I can’t,” I said. “I have a million things to do.”

  “You’re no fun,” she said, looking sulky. “I thought you came here to ride?”

  “So did I.” I threw the plastic scoop into the bin and missed. It skittered across the floor.

  “So forget about all these stupid chores. They’ll still be here when you get back.”

  “But I could get in trouble.”

  “Since when did you get so worried about obeying the rules?”

  “Since my pony and I could get kicked out into the street if I don’t.”

  “This is so dumb,” Mickey said. “Why doesn’t your father just pay for a stall and then you could be a boarder like everyone else? What is the point of being the daughter of the top trainer if there aren’t any perks?”

  “I don’t know and keep your voice down.”

  No one at Fox Run knew that Rob was my father and I wanted to keep it that way for as long as I could. I didn’t need the stares or awkward questions that I would be inundated with if people knew. Everyone thought it was kind of weird that I’d moved in with Dad and Missy but they just thought that they’d taken me in as a favor or something. They had no idea what was really going on, until now.

  I heard a snicker and dashed out into the barn aisle to see Jess running off, laughing.

  “Thanks a lot,” I told Mickey. “Now look what you’ve done. You’ve ruined everything.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  I ran after Jess, even though I knew it was a waste of time. I’d never be able to tell her that what she’d heard wasn’t true because it was. I watched as she disappeared out of sight. I didn’t care anymore. She could tell whoever she wanted. I went back to the feed room, thinking of all the things I was supposed to do. The winter show circuit was heating up. All anyone could think about was the Winter Wonderland show. Forget about presents and food and Santa. This was going to be the highlight of the Christmas season and it was all anyone at Fox Run could talk about because whoever won would be guaranteed a spot in the Young Rider clinic. With my Dad and Missy on my side, I felt like I had the inside advantage but so far it hadn’t been working out that way because everyone else had booked so many lessons that they didn’t really have time to teach me at all.

  Mickey was still standing there in the feed room looking all dejected.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Forget it.” I shrugged. “She was bound to find out eventually. Come on, let’s go for that ride.”

  “Really?” Her face brightened.

  “Really.”

  “But what about your chores?”

  “They’ll still be here when I get back,” I said.

  We tacked up our horses and rode past the covered arena where Dad was teaching one of the adult students and then past the outdoor ring where Missy had a group of little kids on ponies trotting over cross rails. It was like living on a show ground twenty four hours a day. There was always something going on at Fox Run. Lessons or shows or going to shows. It was like horse overload every second of everyday and I loved every minute of it.

  “Have you heard from your Mom?” Mickey asked.

  “No.” I shook my head. “I thought she’d at least call me when they got settled in but she didn’t. I guess she’s still mad at me.”

  “Don’t worry, she can’t be mad at you forever,” Mickey said.

  I wasn’t so sure. My Mom could hold a grudge with the best of them. After all, she hadn’t spoken to my father in nine years. I wondered if it would be that long before she talked to me again. After all, I had kind of broken her heart when I told her I wanted to stay behind.

  We rode past the dressage ring and the field where there were logs and ditches for the cross country students. Fox Run was becoming a mecca for everything riding in the area and I thought of Sand Hill and its shabby barn and tumbledown ring and felt guilty that I’d left it behind.

  “We have to do something nice for Esther,” I said, eager to change the subject to anything that wasn’t about my awkward family life.

  “Isn’t she leaving soon?” Mickey asked.

  “Exactly. There are only a few horses left at the barn and when the last ones have gone and the papers have been signed, she’s off to Sweden to spend time with her Dad and who knows when we’ll see her again.”

  “So what did you have in mind?”

  “I d
on’t know. I was hoping you’d have a good idea.”

  “For Esther?” Mickey laughed. “Like what? She doesn’t like surprises or parties or having fun.”

  “Well what does she like then?” I said.

  “Working her students to death?”

  “Very funny. Besides, it’s not much different from here then, is it?”

  “I suppose not,” Mickey said. “When did horses get to be such hard work?”

  “When you don’t have the money to pay for everything, that’s when.” I said.

  We walked on in silence for a while. Fox Run was a tightly compacted farm with the barns in the middle and the rings and turnout fields surrounding it all and there was a trail in a big circle around the border where you could ride around the edge of the whole property. But now the owners had purchased an additional hundred acres of scrubland and we could ride through it all the way to the beach without having to cross roads and deal with cars. The cross country students had already been clearing paths and erecting jumps and we rode past a clearing where it looked like they were building an elaborate table complex.

  “I know,” I said. “How about if we make a picnic and take it to Sand Hill? We could eat it in the barn just like old times and we could bake a cake in the shape of a horse.”

  “Do you even know how to bake a cake?” Mickey looked at me like I was crazy.

  “It can’t be that hard,” I said. “You just get the mix in the box from the grocery store and then add the stuff it tells you to and stuff it in the oven.”

  “Piece of cake,” Mickey said and we both burst into giggles.

  We rode through the wooded part of the land and came out into the clearing. It had once been used for cows and everything had been grazed down to nothing. A cold wind swept across it, lifting the horse’s tails and Bluebird stuck his head up and whinnied. Somewhere out there a horse replied. Mickey and I looked at each other.

  “I didn’t know there were any horses out here,” she said.

  “Neither did I.”

  We rode on for a while, letting Bluebird and Hampton canter but we didn’t hear the horse again.

  “It must have been one of the horses at the barn,” I said when we came to a walk.

  “But Fox Run is back that way.” Mickey pointed behind us. “And the whinny came from in front of us.”

  “It must just be the wind playing tricks on us then.” I wrapped my arms around myself and shivered. “Come on, let’s go back. It’s freezing.”

  “Think how cold you’d be if you were in Wisconsin right now,” Mickey said.

  “I’d rather not,” I said but I knew Bluebird and I were lucky. If we’d been dragged up there we’d be dealing with feet of snow instead of just a brisk wind.

  CHAPTER THREE

  It was a couple of days later when Mickey’s mom picked me up and took me back to their house so we could bake the cake and then take it to Esther. We’d told her that we were going to come over and that she had to promise to be there because we knew what she was like. She hated goodbyes and was prone to disappearing at the most vital of moments. But she reluctantly agreed, telling us that we’d better not make a big deal out of it. I had promised but as I stood in Mickey’s kitchen looking at all the things her mother had bought, I could see that we were very close to breaking that promise.

  “What is this?” I pointed at a banner that said BON VOYAGE in big pink letters.

  “I thought we could hang it up in the barn aisle,” Mickey said.

  “And these?” I pointed to the pink party hats that had purple ponies frolicking on them.

  Mickey put her hands on her hips. “What is wrong with them?”

  “Nothing,” I said, trying to be tactful and failing. “It just looks like a pink unicorn threw up over everything.”

  “That’s all they had,” Mickey shrieked. “Everything else had Santa on it and we couldn’t get those. At least these are horse themed.”

  “If you say so,” I said, picking up the stack of paper cups that had kittens with unicorn horns on them.

  “Well maybe those not so much,” she said.

  “You know what? I kind of like them.”

  I grinned because it was so typically Mickey and as it turned out, I did actually like the unicorn kittens. But the cups and hats were the least of our worries because making a cake into a horse was about a million times harder than we thought it would be.

  “You should have got a horse head tin,” I said.

  “They didn’t have any,” Mickey replied, clapping her flour covered hands together and sending white dust into the air.

  We both had a coughing fit and spent ages arguing over the best way to turn a slab cake into a horse. In the end we cut it up and then put the pieces back together in the shape of a horse only it looked nothing like a horse. It looked more like a deranged dog or maybe an alien.

  “This is hopeless,” Mickey cried as she tried to stick a bit on with icing and it slid off onto the floor.

  We were both almost in tears when Mickey’s mom came in and saved the day.

  “Why on earth didn’t you girls ask for my help sooner?” she asked, sweeping our lumpy cake into the trash and clearing the counter to start afresh.

  “We thought we knew what we were doing,” Mickey said.

  “It came out kind of okay,” I added.

  “You really want to eat that?” Mickey’s mom pointed to the trash can where the cake had broken apart. You could see lumps of flour inside where we hadn't mixed the batter enough.

  “No,” I shook my head. “You’re right, we suck.”

  “You don’t suck. You just have to learn how to do it. You don’t just get on a horse and magically know how to ride it, do you?” Mickey’s mom said.

  “Emily does.” Mickey grinned.

  Word had finally got out about how I’d beaten Jess at the last show on Socks, a horse I’d never even ridden before. A horse that was in fact notoriously difficult to ride and that belonged to Missy. I told myself it was a fluke and that I’d just been lucky but I knew deep down inside that it was more than luck. It was instinct and intuition. I had a gift and it was because I didn’t want to waste that gift that I’d stayed behind with my dad and Missy, who was about to pop out her baby any day now.

  Mickey’s mom showed us how to properly mix the batter and when the cake came out of the oven, she cut it into the right shapes. It still didn’t really look all that much like a horse but it was better than our failed attempt. We mixed up brown icing and slathered it on when the cake was cool and then added white for the socks and the blaze.

  “It kind of looks like Bluebird,” I said, standing back to look at our finished work.

  “You really think Bluebird has legs that thick?” Mickey laughed. “Or a head two sizes too big for his body?”

  “No, you’re right,” I said. “In fact I think this cake looks exactly like Macaroni.”

  Mickey squinted and looked at the cake. “It does!” she finally cried.

  “We should take a picture and sent it to Faith.”

  “But then she’ll want to come.” Mickey shook her head.

  “So?”

  “Well, I thought it would just be us.”

  “Faith and Ethan rode with Esther for a while too, I bet they probably want to say goodbye and besides, the more people there then the less awkward it will be. Esther can’t get mad at all of us, can she?”

  “She might,” Mickey grumbled.

  I texted the picture to Faith, who replied with a lot of smiley faces in varying stages of excitement.

  “She says she can’t wait to eat it,” I said.

  “Gross,” Mickey said.

  “Hey, we made it.”

  “Right but it doesn’t look like our horses.”

  “True,” I said. “But Faith is weird, you know that.”

  Faith and Ethan said they’d meet us at the barn so we packed up the cake and the hats and the silly banner. I sat in the back of the car, clutching the
present I’d made for Esther, a small scrapbook with pictures of me and Bluebird and Sand Hill in it. I didn’t know if she’d like it or not. Maybe she wouldn’t want to be reminded of everything she was leaving behind because I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be reminded either.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Turning down the drive, the farm looked shabbier than ever and it felt like I hadn’t been there in years when in reality it had only been a couple of weeks. Without horses around, it just looked like a tumbledown property that someone had abandoned. All the jumps had gone from the field and the ring and the shavings pit was empty. The tattered blue tarp flapped lazily in the cold wind and a few remaining shavings floated away into the air.

  “It’s sad, don’t you think?” I said, shivering as Mickey’s mom opened the door and an icy wind blew through the car.

  “I guess,” Mickey said.

  But Sand Hill hadn’t quite been the refuge for her that it had been for me. I’d come to escape my home and my life and I’d found a new one. Esther had given me hope when I’d had none. A horse to ride when I didn’t have money to pay and lessons that had not only served me on horseback but in life as well. And she hadn’t just handed me everything. She’d made me work for it and though at times I had resented her for it, I knew that she helped to make me a better person than the one I was when I first showed up there, begging for a free ride.

  “I wish Faith and Ethan were already here,” I said as we trudged into the barn. “This feels kind of awkward.”

  “You worry too much,” Mickey said.

  But when Esther came out of the office and saw us coming with the cake and banner and the balloons that Mickey had insisted on blowing up and had been bobbing about in the back of the car hitting me in the head the whole way there, she burst into sobs and disappeared, slamming the door.

  “I told you,” I said.

  “She’ll get over it.” Mickey shrugged.

  She didn’t seem to care that Esther didn’t want a fuss made over her just like she didn’t care that I didn’t really want to celebrate my birthday a couple of months ago. That was Mickey for you, always dragging other people along whether they liked it or not and even though I felt kind of bad for Esther, I would have felt worse if we hadn’t done anything for her at all.