Page 1 of Wild and Unruly
prologue
Bonnie
six years earlier
Tension wassomething that I had come to expect after being at horse shows for the last few years.
My first year, my coach was sweet and kind, gently guiding a nervous teenager during her first show after falling in love with horses and wanting to do more with them.
My brother was the first to join, and I quickly followed suit, unsure of where this particular route would take me but eager to be a part of it.
There was joy then, joy whenever I saw my horse, joy when I showed, joy when my brother and I were getting ready, when we would spend every waking minute we could on the back of a horse, loving life and enjoying the freedom that came from it.
But our dad saw potential in our riding. Or more specifically, in my brother’s, and decided the best thing for us was to move to trainers that could take us further.
Now it was business.
It was no longer fun and games.
I bit my lip as I watched my brother’s gaze focus on his horse. He was still obsessed, still loved showing his horse, even in our new environment. But there was something serious there now, something that replaced the joy that used to take hold when he was about to show.
I glanced to my side and noticed Tommy Smith, our horse trainer and coach’s son, looking over at me. He winked, and I turned back to my brother. Tommy was an interesting sort, one that I usually tried to avoid based on the mere fact that he freaked me out.
Not that it mattered.
The one time I brought that up to my dad, he told me to just focus and ignore it. No concern for what the guy wanted or why he was overtly flirty with me.
It gave me this new pebble of resentment toward my father that I didn’t want to have.
Yet, it started a small pile.
Then, he told me that I was going to be showing a different horse, and mine would no longer be coming to shows with me.
Another pebble.
His focus shifted to Mason, my brother, and that was okay, except it left him with no time for his daughter at all.
Pebble.
One by one, the pebbles started to get so high that they started to fall down all around me, and the relationship I once had with my father was not the one I had when I was younger.
I didn’t want to have resentment toward anyone, let alone my own family. Yet, there it was.
I retrained my gaze to my brother’s stance where he’dstopped his horse in the middle of the arena, thirty or so other riders riding around him, kicking up dust.
The show arena was through a tunnel where other contestants were showing before Mason’s turn came. He was showing for the championships in cow horse, and I knew by the tiny puddle of sweat that wore through the back of his button-down shirt and the way he wiped at his sweating head under his hat that he was nervous.
Mason was normally very calm when it came to showing. He held in his nerves well, unlike me, who worried about it constantly and didn’t know how to compartmentalize. But today, I could see his nerves were getting the best of him. I could tell he and his horse weren’t doing their best, and that worried me because I knew how much winning this meant to not just him but our coach and our father.
He moved his horse over to the exit gate, and I made myself move around Tommy to go stand where he was headed, clutching the water bottle he would need and the rag to wipe down before he went in.
“How ya feeling?” I threw the question out and handed him his things while reaching into the bag over my shoulder to grab another rag to wipe down his horse, giving the horse a rub on the head while I was at it. “Dusty seems calm.”
Mason frowned and looked down the neck of his horse, uncapping the water and draining a good portion of it before handing it back to me. “Yeah. Almost off kind of calm.”
I looked over the horse, looking for anything unusual, when Richard, our coach, came up to Mason to talk to him.
They started talking about the run, and Mason nodded as he listened, smiling softly when Richard made a joke about him becoming a big deal after he won this show.
