Grabbing Mane, page 1
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Copyright
Also by Natalie Keller Reinert
Introduction
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-seven
Chapter Thirty-eight
Chapter Thirty-nine
Chapter Forty
Coming Soon
Your Next Read
Acknowledgments
About the Author
This story is for all the re-riders, amateurs, and dreamers.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2020 Natalie Reinert
Cover Photo: Jakub Gajda/Dreamstime
Cover Designer: Natalie Keller Reinert
All rights reserved.
Also by Natalie Keller Reinert
The Grabbing Mane Series
Grabbing Mane
Flying Dismount (2021)
The Hidden Horses of New York
The Alex & Alexander Series
Runaway Alex
The Head and Not The Heart
Other People’s Horses
Claiming Christmas
Turning for Home
The Eventing Series
Bold (A Prequel)
Ambition
Pride
Courage
Luck
Forward
Prospect (2021)
The Eventing Series Collection Volume 1
The Show Barn Blues Series
Show Barn Blues
Horses in Wonderland
The Catoctin Creek Series
Sunset at Catoctin Creek
Snowfall at Catoctin Creek
Springtime at Catoctin Creek (2021)
Sign up for a free book at my website: nataliekreinert.com
WHENEVER CASEY HALBACH, age thirty-two, thought about horses, she smiled.
She’d done this for as long as anyone could remember. It wasn’t just any smile, either. It was a delighted curve of the lips which reached right up to her green eyes and made them sparkle.
Her parents had found Casey’s happy horse smile so endearing that they’d taken their little daughter for her first riding lesson when she was only five years old. She was barely able to hang onto the saddle as the chubby lesson pony wandered around the riding arena at a bored walk. She cried when the riding instructor plucked her down at the end of the half-hour. Then she turned and beheld the pony snuffling at her shoulders, and Casey smiled again.
Thus Casey’s destiny of becoming a horse girl was made clear at a very young age. She rode horses non-stop for the next decade, with brief pauses to sleep and go to school and scribble out her homework.
After that decade, though, real life won out. Colleges were jostling for her attention, but all their correspondence really meant was that they wanted her to impress them. Stuck at a crossroads which felt more like a cliff, Casey was forced to choose between spending her last junior year horse-showing and hoping for the best once high school ended, or going all-in on school. Her parents made it very clear which side they were on. If she made it as a professional horse trainer, and that was a very big if, she’d almost certainly struggle her entire life. If she simply worked hard at school and got a good job, she could afford to be as horsey as she wanted without the broke lifestyle. This was the way her parents, teachers, and guidance counselors all broke it down for her, anyway. Her mileage, they stressed, would not vary.
And so, beginning at age seventeen, Casey commenced doing everything she was supposed to do in life: she sold her horse, she concentrated on her schoolwork, she got into a good college, she began a sensible career in marketing, she dated and dumped several unreliable boyfriends before settling on one very good one, and by all measures, she wound up fairly happy.
After four years in Gainesville, Casey settled back down in Cocoa, the coastal Florida town where she had grown up. She live in a rented townhouse with a nice guy who held a good job, and she had her very own desk in her very own cubicle, a square of beige carpet she could roll her chair across in two seconds, located within a frostily air-conditioned office which featured blue-tinted windows to keep the Florida sun at bay.
Casey then proceeded to live her life to the fullest. She never hit reply-all on emails, and she said things like: “let’s circle back on that” in meetings. She spent too much money on cheese. She went on cruises to the Bahamas, and had long weekend brunches with friends. She talked about, but ultimately wasn’t willing to take the responsibility of, adopting a dog.
Casey’s modern life was in nearly every way living up to the ideals her parents had hoped for. Maybe they wondered if she and Brandon were ever going to get engaged, and maybe she wondered if she was ever going to get a promotion, but, all in all, things were good. Things were proceeding at an acceptable pace.
And if a secret smile sometimes played at her lips and creased the skin beside her beguiling green eyes, neither her coworkers, nor her friends, nor even her boyfriend, knew it was because she’d suddenly seen something which made her think of horses.
AT ABOUT FIVE years into employment at Bluewater Marketing Partners, Casey realized she was bored.
She countered this by escaping the office whenever she could. She didn’t look for another job, like some other, more rash person might have done. She had five years of employment there, remember? Things were bound to look up. Sure, all of her moves had been lateral so far, but that would change. Her work spoke for itself. In the meantime, she’d just look for ways to jazz up her days on her own.
Luckily Mary, her accounts manager, liked to extend a little “white-glove service,” as she called it, whenever she thought it might close a deal. This often meant dispatching someone junior to hand-deliver a proposal or a contract, during which time they were expected to show every courtesy possible to illustrate what an exceptional marketing agency Bluewater was. Not just a marketing agency, Mary was wont to lyricize, but a true business partner, every step of the way. You could almost hear the TM at the end of her little slogans.
Casey usually called ahead to the office she was visiting and offered to pick up coffees for the receptionist and the object of her sales-closing desires, and that tended to get the point across.
She’d first put up her hand for a courier job about six months before, on a sparkling-blue November day when she’d suddenly realized that if she wrote one more Thanksgiving-themed marketing email before the holiday weekend, she would simply not be able to tolerate the sight of a turkey and stuffing on Thursday. This would offend her mother, and that would not do. So when Mary stepped out of her glass-walled office holding up an interoffice envelope, Casey stood up and put her hand in the air. It was a job usually given to much more junior employees, but Mary didn’t seem to have the least bit of hesitation in handing it off to Casey.
Which was something Casey had tried not to think about as she triumphantly took the envelope from her boss’s hand.
She picked up the lattes, she closed the deal, she made it to the end of the day without writing another Pilgrim pun, and after that, Casey volunteered for every single errand which could take her out of the office.
It was becoming kind of a joke around the office. She didn’t let that stop her, though. The courier runs became her special thing, and the more she was away from her cubicle, the more she didn’t miss it.
The moment she overheard an opportunity to ditch her desk, Casey put her hand up in the air like an overeager student. She didn’t stop with courier runs, either. Casey answered emails with requests for client site visits or media event reps so quickly, she often eschewed proper punctuation and the confines of professional sentence structure in favor of getting the first response to their inbox.
Which was really something, considering one of Casey’s job requirements as an email marketing strategist was to be a total Grammar Nazi.
Casey couldn’t help it; once she’d found something she liked, she became obsessed with it. What’s more, she got competitive about it. She’d always been like this, ever since grade school—the first one to jump when the school bell rang, the first one standing in her row when the bus pulled up to her stop, the first one lining up when the airpo
Her high school friend Heather, who had dabbled a little in riding lessons herself and would occasionally join Casey for a trail ride on a borrowed horse, used to joke that Casey was like one of those horses who stood for hours with her nose pressed to the pasture gate, testing it every so often in hopes that the chain would give way and set her free.
Her boyfriend, Brandon, who had come on the scene well after her horse phase had passed, just thought she was fidgety and a bit of perfectionist.
Casey would have heartily agreed that she had a perfectionist’s personality and a competitive heart, but there was something else dogging her these days. She felt like there was something better waiting for her, if she could just catch up with it. And so while she wasn’t crazy enough to give up her place in line at her job, she still wanted to get out whenever she could, just to see what else was out there.
As the months went by, the changeable Florida autumn turning seamlessly into two chilly jacket-weather weeks of Florida winter before giving way to the blue skies and warm days of Florida spring, Casey found herself looking harder and harder for something better than what she had.
She didn’t tell any of her friends or coworkers about this feeling, naturally. It sounded kind of striving, or maybe it sounded kind of pathetic, or she was afraid it would sound that way, anyway. She had quite a lot in her life, actually, and if she told her coworkers she didn’t think her life was good enough, wasn’t she also implying their lives weren’t good enough? They spent all day inside at desks, rushing out at the stroke of five to make it to waterside happy hours or to get back home to deal with dinners and homework, depending on the family situation. They lived for the weekend and its rounds of pancake breakfasts and Little League games and gymnastics tournaments and lawn-care, for the family types, or for brunch and beach time for the singletons and the young couples.
Everyone else seemed fine with this lifestyle, Casey reasoned, so who was she to call it unfulfilling? Anyway, she liked brunch, and hanging out at the beach, and invitations to go jet-skiing on the Indian River. Hell, she even liked writing marketing emails (although she could use some more interesting clients). She wasn’t necessarily unhappy.
She just wanted something more, and she didn’t know what more might be, and so she just kept looking. In other office buildings with blue-tinted windows, in the dreamcatcher-hung living rooms of beachside rentals, in the antique-heavy home offices of Mediterranean Revival country club homes, she looked at how other people were living their lives and wondered what she could learn from them. She wondered if they had enough, or if they were just as confused as she was.
And at work, standing around the Keurig as it hissed and steamed, she brushed off her colleagues’ teasing. Casey joked that her office escapes were actually her coping mechanism to help her deal with her crippling perfectionism. After all, everyone knew her tendency to sit at her desk for hours without getting up for a walk or a coffee, squinting at copy until the last possible moment she could send it out and still make deadline. She was known to frequently work through lunch; hell, she’d even sit through mid-morning snack and afternoon gossip sesh at the coffeemaker. These were the unofficial mileposts of an office workers’ day, intended to break up the monotony of spreadsheets and emails with gentle infusions of caffeine and carbohydrates. Missing them was kind of crazy, in everyone else’s view, but Casey generally missed her team’s snack and gossip time at least three days per week, utterly absorbed in her work.
But when she left the office midday and went blinking into the intense Florida sunlight, all of her mind’s tightly wound cogs and sprockets loosened at once. She felt an intense freedom, a lifting of her heart. She would turn her face to the hot, blazing sun and close her eyes and smile. She would stand there for a moment and just bake, letting the sunshine seep into her pores. She would remember the old joy of spending her days outdoors: the fresh sea breeze playing in her hair, the blue dome of the sky, horses grazing green grass, everything gleaming and sharp in the white, tropical light. She would smile.
“So you can see why I needed to drive that contract down to Melbourne,” she’d laughingly explain. “The change in scenery helps me reset my brain.”
“I heard you were here an extra hour the other night,” a colleague might reply, shaking her head. “Casey, nothing we do is that important!”
Casey didn’t find this comforting.
“Plus, it’s so hot,” someone would always add. “I hate going out there this time of year.”
“It’s gorgeous out this time of year!” Casey would exclaim. But being the lone Floridian in the room generally resulted in Casey’s protests being shouted down. No one liked being outside in Florida, especially in summer, unless there was a pool and a drink involved. Those were the hard facts, according to her colleagues.
“Well, I grew up outside,” she had defensively told Marty Barker, who sat two cubicles down from her. He was a brown-haired and pale-skinned Michiganer who had questioned her ability to withstand Floridian UV rays for whole minutes at a time, suggesting that perhaps she was just a crazy person. “I used to ride horses and do chores in all that sun and heat. It just feels right to me.”
“I can’t live without the air conditioning running at all times,” Marty had replied, dead serious. “Sometimes I don’t even think that’s enough. Walking from the office to the car is like torture. I would like an air-conditioned tunnel to my car, actually. Someone invent that, pronto.”
“Hey Casey, do you still ride horses?” This was from Amy Hickstead, three cubicles down, with blonde curls and creamy skin which burned if she opened her living room curtains. She was originally from Pennsylvania. “My sister rode horses when we were kids. I didn’t, though. They’re so big.”
“Agreed,” Marty exclaimed. “Nothing should have that many muscles!”
“I don’t ride anymore,” Casey said with a little shrug. “That was all strictly pre-college. Pre-Real Life, you know?”
Although she’d wondered, after saying it, what exactly was so real about her current life of air conditioning, tinted windows, and long drives to peek at other people’s lives.
“I make things designed to be deleted,” Casey had told a new face at Sunday brunch a few weeks ago, and all of her friends had laughed as if it was the first time they’d heard the joke. In truth, the nature of her work was a little tough on her perfectionist side. Casey was all too aware that as an email marketer, she spent her days writing words so ephemeral, she might as well be outside trying to blow the best bubbles, or count the most falling leaves. She liked writing emails, but the truth of where all of her hard work eventually went—into the trash, either immediately or after a few days—was too painful to think about very often.
Her work title was email marketing strategist. This was a fancy way of saying that she wrote emails designed to get past a spam filter. Of course, her considerable writing skills were not limited solely to crafting emails convincing consumers to Click to Learn More. She was also known for such hits as the pop-up boxes on websites which encourage users to Sign Up Today For Our Newsletter and Save 10 Percent on Your First Order.
Her profession had come up over the past weekend.
“Really? But I love those emails,” the new guy at brunch, a round-faced IT guy named Lee from Brandon’s coding group, had assured her. “I never unsubscribe from emails because I would feel guilty about all the work that goes into them. And here you are, in the flesh.”
“Well, I don’t write all emails.”
“No, but I’m… I mean, I get a lot of emails. Too many, if I’m being honest. But, I don’t unsubscribe. I’m a supporter of your work.” He smiled broadly.
“But you don’t read them all, either,” Casey pointed out.
“Well, no.”
“So eventually your inbox realizes you’re not opening them and classifies them as spam.”
