Dream On (Dare to Dream Book 2), page 1
Dream On
Kate Lattey
1st Edition
Copyright 2014 © by Kate Lattey
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 by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Epilogue
Acknowldgements
Heart
About the Author
* * *
For Marley,
always.
* * *
* * *
Some people talk to animals.
Not many listen though.
That’s the problem.
(A.A. Milne)
* * *
CHAPTER 1
“Did you see him refuse?”
“I didn’t think he knew how!”
“I hope Marley wasn’t watching. It would break her heart to see him going badly.”
“She should never have sold him.”
“She didn’t have a choice.”
Marley hadn’t seen it happen, but she’d heard about it from far too many people by the end of the day to avoid knowing every detail. Cruise Control, her former Pony of the Year winner, had refused a jump with his new owner, Bubbles Deveraux. Everyone had a theory about it – that Bubbles hadn’t balanced him properly around the corner, that she’d dropped the reins at the last minute, that Cruise was just plain miserable without Marley to ride him. That he was a one-person pony and she should never have sold him.
Marley didn’t need other people to tell her that.
What they had failed to add was that Cruise had gone straight over the jump on his second attempt. Nobody had bothered to tell her that Bubbles blamed herself, that she had patted the pony apologetically after he stopped, and jumped the rest of the course clear. Only Bubbles herself found those details to be important – everyone else just saw the faults. All they could see was the superstar pony they’d all admired so much last season failing to live up to his reputation, now that he had a different rider.
If there was one thing that Marley had learned in her sixteen years, it was that life never seemed to work out the way you wanted it to. In a perfect world, she could’ve kept Cruise. Something would’ve happened to stop her from having to sell him – some rich benefactor would’ve stepped in and saved the day, or the bank would’ve given the girls more time to pay off their mortgage debts, or one of her sisters would’ve got a high-paying job out of nowhere, and Cruise would still be hers. But real life doesn’t work that way, and when all other options had been exhausted, Marley had come to realise that Cruise had simply been too valuable to keep.
Selling him was a decision that haunted her every day. All winter she’d dreamed about her pony. The worst mornings were the ones when she woke up forgetting, when she got out of bed and looked out of her bedroom window and expected to see him there, grazing contentedly in the paddock below. And then she would remember, with a cold shiver down her spine, that he was gone.
“Marley!”
Her sister’s voice woke her out of her daydream and Marley startled, sloshing dirty sponge water down her jodhpurs as she turned around to see Kris striding toward her.
“Look what you made me do!” she complained, wiping uselessly at the damp stain on her leg.
Kris ignored her complaint. “You need to hurry up, you’ve got Gothic entered in the metre-fifteen and it’s already halfway through.”
“It can’t be,” Marley argued. “There were about fifty ponies in it.”
“And twenty-five of them have jumped already,” Kris replied. “You haven’t even tacked him up!”
“I’m getting there,” Marley grumbled, opening the hatch on the side of the horse truck and pulling out Gothic’s saddle.
“Laura didn’t send these ponies to us for you to ride, only to have you forget to compete them,” Kris said anxiously. “If you’re not careful she’ll take them back, and then all you’ll have left to ride will be Breeze.”
“All right, all right. Keep your hair on.”
Marley rolled her eyes as she settled the saddle onto Gothic’s broad back. Riding for Laura was going well so far, but Kris seemed to be perpetually concerned that Laura would have a change of heart and take her ponies back. She’d better not, Marley thought to herself. She’d turned down other prospects and even sold Pluto, who she’d owned for years, to have time “to do Laura’s ponies justice”, as Kris so often put it. It had been a busy winter, with Van riding track and breaking in an endless stream of other people’s horses, and Kris giving countless lessons to other people’s children, while Marley had spent the wet, cold days schooling and hacking Laura’s ponies across their farm. She’d become fond of the three of them - placid, easy-going Gothic and his feisty sister Gigi, both black with small white stars, almost identical to look at but completely different to ride; and Seattle, the cheeky young dapple grey, who always had a trick up his sleeve and had a firm aversion to anything that required concentration or hard work. But they were young, just starting out and wouldn’t be ready to jump in the big classes for a long time yet. Breeze had been turned out after Horse of the Year, and since she’d come back into work she’d been in a constant state of flux between one injury and another. When it wasn’t a stone bruise it was a swollen fetlock, then a sore back, a cut fetlock, and just when everything had finally resolved itself, an unexplained nosebleed, which had stopped as soon as it started, but was still troubling Marley.
“We don’t have all day, you know.”
Marley rolled her eyes at her sister’s nagging as she finished buckling Gothic’s bridle. Grabbing the jacket that Kris was holding out to her, she pulled it on, shoved her helmet onto her head and swung into the saddle.
“Check your girth,” Kris reminded her anxiously as Marley slid her feet into her stirrups.
“Check your heart rate,” Marley muttered, swinging her leg forward to tighten Gothic’s girth as she rode away.
Kris sighed, and went to check the contents of Seattle’s water bucket before slowly following her sister over to the ring. She’d hoped that the winter months would ease Marley’s anguish over the sale of Cruise, and that the prospect of competing Laura’s beautiful ponies would be sufficiently distracting, but it was clear that neither of those hopes were going to be fulfilled. And it didn’t help that Kris had barely been able to help Marley all show, being too busy helping other riders warm up, walking their courses with them, offering advice and watching them ride. Kris had built up a good clientele over the winter, but they were all still inexperienced in competition, and none had jumped particularly well today. She sensed their disappointment, wondering if her steady stream of praise in their lessons had given them an overinflated sense of their own ability. She knew that it would just take time, but she couldn’t help wondering how long it would be before some of the more competitive riders abandoned their efforts at correct schooling and returned to using strong bits and training gadgets to cover for their own shortcomings.
It was a warm day, but the clouds hovering over the show grounds appeared ominous, as though a storm was coming in. Kris stopped nearby and cast her eye over the ponies in the warm-up arena, picking out the familiar faces, horse and human. She was startled when a dark bay pony cantered directly in front of her, and had to take a step backwards to avoid being knocked to the ground. The pony’s eyes were rolling and the white foam around its mouth was splattered across its chest. Two sets of reins pressed tightly against the pony’s heavily veined neck, and she caught a flash of red inside its widely flared nostrils.
Susannah? Kris’s head turned quickly to watch the pony cantering away from her, but the rider was tall, with plaited red hair, and on second look, the pony was too finely built to be Susannah’s experienced jumper Buckingham. Kris felt relieved, even as she watched the unknown pony continue to strain at the reins. Susannah Andrews had been Marley’s arch rival last season, and had a habit of working her ponies into that kind of state. But nobody had seen Susannah so far this season. There were rumours going around that she’d given up altogether, but nobody seemed to know for sure. Whether Susannah had known about her brother’s increasingly brutal attempts last season to take Marley and Cruise out of Pony of the Year contention or not was still a hot topic of debate on the show jumping circuit. Kris did her best to stay out of it. The only thing that anyone knew for certain about Susannah was that her ponies hadn’t been sold, so it seemed probable that she would return to the circuit sooner or later. After all, it was only October. The season was still young.
A loud crash jolted Kris back to the present as the unhappy bay pony skidded to a halt at the base of the practice jump, sliding into the fence and sending poles flying. The girl raise d her whip, ready to bring it down on her pony’s flank, and the mare reared in protest, striking out angrily with a foreleg before her rider could hit her. The girl slipped in the saddle, balancing her weight on the reins, and the pony fought desperately for its head. Kris’s heart was in her mouth as she watched, terrified that the mare would go over backwards, but somehow she regained her balance and returned all four feet to the ground.
“Talk about your waste of money.”
Kris turned, recognising her other sister’s voice as Van stepped up next to her, observing the fractious pony with her arms tightly crossed.
“Who is that?”
“Stacey something. Williams? Wiltshire? Something like that. She bought that pony from the UK. No ponies in New Zealand good enough for her, apparently, she had to get one that’s done European Pony Finals. Must’ve cost them an arm and a leg, not to mention the flights, and for what? It won’t even go over the practice jump.”
Kris frowned, taking in the heavy Pelham with its tight curb, double reins and running martingale.
“Do you blame it?”
“When have I ever blamed a horse for anything?” Van asked. “She puts all that junk on its face, then uses roller spurs and a whip – what does she expect? That pony doesn’t know whether it’s coming or going.”
Marley jogged Gothic over to them and halted, then followed their eyes to Stacey’s pony, still fighting against its rider.
“Bit of a wild child, isn’t it? Stacey must be so embarrassed, she talked it up so much before it came and it won’t do a thing for her.”
“Maybe she needs some professional help,” Kris replied fairly, but Marley shook her head.
“Nothing’s helped so far. They sent it to Steph Marshall for schooling after it dumped Stacey at Te Teko, and Steph sent it back three days later and told them to shoot it. And that was after Bruce Goddard did the same thing because it put not one but two of his working pupils in hospital.”
Kris sighed, but Van’s eyes lit up. “Better keep an eye on it then Marley. Sounds like it’ll show up at our place eventually, once everyone else has turned it down.”
Marley grinned. The sisters were renowned for their ability to get even the most difficult horses cooperating, and had been able to train horses that other professionals had written off as unrideable. But Kris was shaking her head.
“Not on your life. It’s not worth it. Besides, Marley doesn’t have to deal with that kind of crap anymore. She gets paid to ride nice ones now, so her days of risking her neck for someone else are over.”
“Tell that to Seattle, because he tried pretty hard to buck me off this morning,” Marley replied. “And you’d better start cutting back Gigi’s oats or she’ll be sending me over the jumps ahead of her again.”
“Noted,” Kris replied. “At least Gothic behaves himself.”
“Only because he’s so lazy,” Marley complained, rubbing the black pony’s neck. “You could give him all of Gigi’s oats and then some, and he’d probably still stop and fall asleep halfway around the course if I wasn’t paying attention.”
“Quit jabbering and go work your pony in, you’re only about three riders away now,” Kris told her firmly.
Marley stuck her tongue out at her sister, but nudged the classy black pony into his smooth trot and rode away. Her sisters watched her for a moment, then were distracted by the spectacle of Stacey continuing to do battle with her dark bay mare. The pony seemed to have set her heart on going out the exit gate, and was bucking and flinging her head around, trying to unseat her rider and flee the ring.
Kris shook her head. “Over my dead body is Marley getting on that.”
“Marley would ride it better than that,” Van said.
“She’s never getting the chance to find out,” Kris shot back determinedly.
“Spoilsport,” Van teased, then checked her watch. “I’d better go, I told Lynda I’d ride Starscraper in the metre-thirty. She fell off him again yesterday and she’s too scared to get back on. I wish she’d hurry up and give him to me, it’d save us all a lot of time and energy.”
Van’s tone was teasing, but underneath her heart was heavy. She loved riding Lynda’s big Warmblood, but she knew that if his owner ever did admit to herself that the spirited horse was too much for her to handle, she’d never be able to afford even a fraction of what Stark was worth. But she couldn’t help dreaming. He was her favourite horse to ride, a heady combination of talent and spirit that never ceased to thrill her, and Van strode away in eager anticipation of spending more time in his saddle.
Stacey rode out of the warm-up arena, her pony still fretting and jibbing, and Kris watched her go with a sigh of relief. Van was probably right that Marley would be able to ride the pony better than Stacey could, but that didn’t mean she wanted to see her sister take that risk. All it took was one crashing fall to end a riding career, as Kris knew all too well. Resolutely ignoring the ache in her back that still wouldn’t quite go away, she went to help Marley with the practice jump.
As her sister rode into the ring a few minutes later, Kris heard her name being called, and turned to see Carmen Maxwell approaching her. Carmen’s daughters Hayley and Tessa were regulars on the show jumping circuit and Marley had been competing against them for years. Carmen made small talk at first, admiring Gothic and asking about his breeding, but Kris knew what was coming, and sure enough, the woman eventually got to her point.
“I saw Cruise go with Georgiana today. He stopped at the wall.”
“So I’ve heard.”
Kris tried to keep her tone even as she wondered what it was that people wanted from her. Did they really expect her to start claiming that Bubbles had ruined Cruise, simply because she had one refusal in one class? Refusals were a part of show jumping, and although it was true that Marley had never had one with Cruise, it was also a fact that Marley had only competed him at a handful of shows. Only his victory at Nationals had allowed him to qualify for Pony of the Year, and his wins in both events had been completely unexpected, especially for a pony in his first competition season. He had been extraordinary, and much admired. How much of that was due to his natural talent, and how much came down to his relationship with Marley was something that nobody really knew, but they were all waiting to find out.
“They’ll get there,” she replied. “New partnerships take time.”
“Hmm.” Carmen sounded unconvinced, and disappointed that she hadn’t got a rise out of Kris. “He’s not the same pony for her that he was for Marley.”
Misty’s not the same pony for Hayley that he was for his old owner either, Kris wanted to snap back, but she bit her tongue. Parents were often willing to criticise other people’s children, but if you dared say anything unflattering about their own child they would fight you tooth and nail. Kris had learned that through bitter experience, and she returned her attention to the black pony in the ring. Her sister rode well, better than most of the other pony riders, and finally she had some quality horsepower instead of other people’s dregs. But the magic was gone. There had been something special about her partnership with Cruise, something that had made people stop to watch, had caused crowds to gather at ringside whenever they competed, and Kris was as disappointed as everyone else that they wouldn’t get to see that again. But there had been no choice. Without Cruise’s sale, they would’ve lost their farm, and everything they had. Kris would never regret making the decision to sell the pony, but she would always regret the pain it had caused Marley. After losing both of their parents, she’d spent years trying to keep her youngest sister from experiencing that kind of grief again, but life simply hadn’t worked out that way.
“How’d you go?”
Marley kicked her feet out of Gothic’s stirrups and looked over at Stacey, whose truck was parked next to theirs.
“Two rails, but he’s still green at this level. He’ll get there.”
Marley didn’t need to ask how Stacey’s round had gone – she’d seen for herself that the pony hadn’t even made it over the first fence.
