Change Rein (Willow Bay Stables #1)(3)
“I’ll love someone again?” I urge.
Tugging playfully on the ends of my hair, she smiles. “You’ll love so many things in life, London.” Tears pool in her eyes. “So very many things. But our hearts have to break a little sometimes. How else would we make room for all of that love?”
Satisfied with her answer, although not quiet understanding the depth of it all, I push to my feet and kiss the top of her head. “I love you, Momma.”
“Love you too, sweet girl.”
She was right. I grew to love a multitude of things in the sixteen years since that day, and occasionally, my heart breaks from loving or wanting some of them a little too much. But I don’t regret the passion or the fire that caused me to be this girl, the girl who has the kind of heart that breaks. Because it was just like her, just like Momma, to love so much that she’d sacrifice herself for others, time and time again.
I run my fingers over the letters in stone.
Abigale L. Daniels
I lay the flowers against the green grass. “Love you, Momma.”
Looking over my shoulder, I see Chil eyeing me between the panels of his horse trailer.
“I know, big guy,” I whisper under my breath.
It is time to go home with, once again, another break in my heart.
Standing up, I brush the grass off my knees and glance down at the tombstone one last time before turning back towards the road.
It’s been almost ten years since my mother passed away from pancreatic cancer. She had a long and brutal battle with the disease, but in the end, we were able to hold her hand during her final moments on this Earth. Which was, indeed, both a blessing and a curse. I’d not wish that experience on even my worst enemy.
Stepping up on the wheel wells of the trailer, I reach one of my slender arms between the panels and give Achilles a rub on his nose. “Let’s go home,” I whisper, resting my forehead on the cool metal.
He acknowledges my voice, impatiently stomping his front right foot and shaking his large neck in agreement. Achilles is a four-year-old, dapple-grey Dutch Warmblood. In plain speak? He’s grey with sporadic white patches and a white mane and tail, and he’s absolutely gorgeous.
Sliding—not so gracefully—back down onto the ground, I wince at the pain in my backside. The doctors said I’d be able to do minimal work, so long as it didn’t require standing or sitting for an extended period of time, or any heavy lifting. So, basically, their guidance wasn’t helpful in the least.
Yanking the driver’s side door to my black Chevy open, I groan as my eyes fall onto what has become the bane of my existence. The donut pillow—a.k.a. the medically prescribed ass pillow I must carry with me everywhere, public places included, for the next two and a half months, despite its unique quality to embarrass the ever-loving shit out of me on a consistent basis. It’s ugly, it’s brown, and I absolutely loathe it.
After carefully positioning my ass onto the butt pillow so as not to aggravate my injuries, I turn the diesel engine over and pull out onto the highway.
Alberta is flat prairie land, and this time of year, it’s hot as hell. Thankfully, it doesn’t take me longer than fifteen minutes in my hot box of a vehicle before I’m making a right turn onto a long, gravel driveway—our driveway. When I reach the open gate to our property, my heart swells a little upon seeing the sign hanging above it.
Willow Bay Stables
Home.
My ass protests as the truck and trailer bounce down the winding driveway, and I curse out loud. Of all the injuries I could have gotten, I literally had to break my ass. The stupidity and embarrassment of it all seems like some sick punishment. Truthfully, I should have been home over a week ago. The doctors in Greece released me after only four days, and I was cleared to fly immediately. However, Achilles was not.
As you can imagine, it takes a great deal of time, planning, and—more importantly—money to fly an animal of his size around the world. Harlow promised he would wait and fly back with Achilles, but that was something I could not bear. Travelling was always hard on my equine best friend. Sometimes, it took him days to recover. I protested much like a child and refused to leave the country without him. Thus, here I am, nearly twelve days later, arriving home on the heels of my nationally televised loss and freshly battered from the magazine article that portrayed me as a petulantly ignorant young woman with a hot temper. While the latter may be true, I have and will always have the utmost respect for the sport and discipline of dressage. Even if I’ve become the number one outcast.
As I pull through a clearing of trees, the property comes into view. It’s exactly as I remember it—breathtaking. To the right side, on top of one of Alberta’s few rolling hills, sits the main house. Despite being only a single floor, it’s expansive in size. Daddy had it built to match the design of the existing stables, a mixture of stone rock face and logs, complete with a forest-green tin roof that is perfect for listening to the rain falling at night. A large porch wraps around the outside of the house, and steps lead down to the frontyard.
To the left side sits one of our barns. It’s the larger of the two, housing nearly twenty horse stalls, a full room of tack lockers, and an attached full-size indoor riding arena. Its most unique attribute, however, is the apartment loft. Just inside the large barn doors, painted green to match the roof, there’s a stairwell to the right, which leads up to a thousand-square-foot, fully furnished apartment, with windows that look out onto the pastures lining one wall. The best part about it is it’s mine. As a child, I was frequently sneaking out in the middle of the night to lie in the horses’ stalls or simply muck about in the barn. Finally, the year I turned sixteen, my father simply had enough and converted the existing hayloft into an apartment.