Chapter 1
Hawk
Iwatched as my sister Demi wobbled onto the couch after breakfast and shook my head fondly. She was so damn big now; her twins were weighing her down and kicking the crap out of her in equal measure.
I got up and gave Demi’s daughter, Aria, a kiss on the top of her head. My dad was having a discussion with her about the strawberries she was smearing everywhere. Demi’s twin, Emery, appeared out of thin air, kissed Mom’s cheek, and grabbed a to-go mug of coffee.
“Sorry, I can’t stop; I’m already late!” The life of a doctor at a small-town clinic.
“You need to have breakfast!” Mom watched as he went to check on Demi.
“I’ll have an early lunch. I got a call about a patient, so I’ve got to go.” He placed his hand on Demi’s stomach and smiled. “Bye, babies, see you later!”
Then he said goodbye to Aria and dodged more of the family on his way out. Look, there were a lot of us.
My brother Crew, his partner Malachi, and Mal’s son Payton took their spots at the table. I brought my empty plate to the sink and saluted everyone, then left to escape to the training barn.
We had a massive operation. Several different horse-related businesses that myself and more than half of my nine siblings ran like a well-oiled machine.
I liked walking to my barn in the mornings and walking back in the evenings after work. If I needed to move during the day, I would use an UTV or ATV, unless I was on horseback, of course. We were fairly spread apart on the property, because everyone needed space and we had plenty of it.
Normally, we tried to use the vehicles as little as possible, but I was the farthest away and had some privileges in that area.
Juanpablo, our alarm donkey who had the run of a large pasture closest to the main house, let out a short bray when he spotted me. I tended to give him some carrot pieces when I passed him each morning. Even if I was taking the shortcut to my domain, the training barn, or Barn 4 as it was called in shorthand, I still walked past the donkey because I was one of the few people he actually liked.
It took a good fifteen minutes to walk from the house to B4 if you took the road that connected every barn. I didn’t mind, though. If I were completely honest, the walk was good for my left hamstring that had gotten kicked a handful of months ago.
Nothing had shown up in the X-rays Emery had made me submit to, and I’d been mostly fine after a couple of weeks. Sometimes though, I woke up and felt the injury. It was probably because I slept like the dead, completely still and barely movedduring the night. Mom always said it had freaked her out when I was little.
Some of the hands were already getting to work around the various barns. Lovett slowed his truck as he was passing me, and I hopped into the bed instead of going to sit in the front with him. He took us past the broodmare barn, the weanlings and yearlings barn that also had our quarantine section at one end, and the stock barn.
Since that was Lovett’s destination, he parked by the other vehicles and I hopped off. I tipped my ball cap at him, and he grinned like he did every morning if I caught a ride, not that it was very often. We didn’t really talk. I wasn’t talkative in the mornings. Or ever, really.
It wasn’t long until I made it to my kingdom. We weren’t religious in the least, but I could admit I felt blessed to have been born in a family that didn’t actually bat an eye when one of their youngest kids wanted to build his own business from the ground up.
I was twenty-four now, and for the last six years I’d worked my calling—training horses.
I’d made a name for myself. I was still called a wunderkind sometimes, which was mildly annoying given that I was a grown ass adult, short as I was. My family tended to joke that they were surprised that I hadn’t been born with hooves because I was definitely half horse myself.
Horses had always made sense to me in a way humans hadn’t. Horses I could read. Well, humans, too, I just didn’t care for most of them all that much.
I stepped into the barn and was greeted by a deep, almost rumbly nickering from my heart horse, Humphrey.
“Morning, boy,” I called out as I turned the lights on.
I went to pet him as he hung his large head over the stall door. A Friesian and quarter horse cross, he wasn’t that tall, but hewas perfectly stocky and I liked to think of him as my multitool; he could do so many things.
“I’ll get you your food in a second.” I handed him some carrot bits, then went to the feed room to start the morning routine while the horses began to make noise around me.
I had sixteen stalls in my barn, two of which were for Humphrey and Gemma’s mare, Noemie. My sister was my right hand when it came to training. She tended to take care of the easier cases, including those of our rescues who only needed to learn to trust people again and then be retrained for whatever they seemed suitable for. I trained the harder rescues, sometimes with the help of Humphrey who was the calmest horse I’d met outside Malachi’s mare, Jaina.
For the real income, I took on other people’s horses. I trained them to whatever specifications they needed. Whether it was completely new skills on a young horse or teaching them out of bad habits, I would do it gladly, for a paycheck. I enjoyed the tricky cases the most, because they gave my brain more to work with. Malachi had taken over some of the youngling training, so I could do more of the other stuff.
When Mal came to work with us earlier this year, it hadn’t taken long for us to realize where his real talents lay. Not that he wasn’t great at everything he took on and had an impressive work ethic, but he shone when he got to train horses. I’d poached him from Wyanne at the stock barn, and she still grumbled about it on occasion. It was all in good fun, and he did go help her whenever needed.
I got everyone fed—including the few more skittish rescues we had at the moment—and went up to the hay loft office while I waited for them to be ready for turnout. Then again, Gemma would probably be here by then and start on that as she arrived.
Once my computer was on, I started to check my emails. One in particular made me smile wide.Finally.
