Rein Me In

Chapter 1: Green-Broke

The colt came off the trailer sideways, all white-rimmed eyes and trembling haunches, and Clementine Tanner thought, Same, buddy. Same.

She caught the lead rope before it could snake through the dust and wrapped it once around her gloved fist, planting her boots wide in the gravel. The colt—a three-year-old bay with a blaze like a lightning strike—threw his head and danced backward, iron shoes scraping sparks from the stone.

"Easy," she murmured. "Easy now. Nobody's asking you for anything yet."

The hill country morning was already thick with heat, the kind that sat on your shoulders like a wet blanket by nine a.m. Clementine could feel sweat tracing the channel of her spine beneath her tank top, her dark ponytail heavy and damp against her neck. Behind her, the barn threw a long shadow across the round pen, and somewhere inside it, Annie was on the phone with the feed supplier, her voice carrying that particular edge that meant the bill was overdue again.

Creekstone Ranch sprawled across two hundred and forty acres of limestone hills and live oak groves west of Fredericksburg, Texas. Their mother, June Tanner, had built it from a foreclosure property and a borrowed trailer into one of the most respected small breeding operations in the state. Two years ago, June had died of pancreatic cancer in the bedroom overlooking the front pasture, and her three daughters had been holding the place together with baling wire and stubbornness ever since.

Annie, the oldest at thirty-two, ran the books and the business side. Libby, the middle sister at twenty-eight, managed the breeding program—the mares, the foaling schedule, the genetics that kept their bloodlines competitive. And Clementine, twenty-five and the youngest by three years, did everything else. She green-broke the colts. She rehabbed the problem horses that other ranches sent them. She mended fences and cleaned stalls and drove the tractor when the hay needed cutting, and she did it all with a ferocity that her sisters recognized as grief but had learned not to name.

The colt snorted and planted his feet, staring at her.

"Yeah, I know," she said. "New place. Scary. You'll get over it."

She led him into the barn aisle, past the row of stalls where their broodmares dozed in the dim light, past the tack room that smelled of leather and neatsfoot oil and the ghost of their mother's perfume. The colt's hooves rang hollow on the concrete, and he spooked at a barn cat that streaked across his path, but Clementine held him steady with the kind of quiet authority that came from doing this a thousand times before.

She'd just gotten him settled in a stall with hay and water when Annie appeared at the end of the aisle, phone still in hand, her red hair pulled back in a clip that was losing the battle.

"Feed order's confirmed for Thursday," Annie said. "And I need to talk to you about something."

Clementine stripped off her gloves and tucked them in her back pocket. "If this is about the farrier bill—"

"It's not about the farrier bill. Well." Annie paused. "Sort of."

Clementine leaned against the stall door. The colt lipped at her shoulder through the bars. "Sort of."

"Libby and I have been talking." Annie's tone had shifted into what Clementine privately called her boardroom voice—careful, measured, the voice of a woman who'd spent four years in Houston doing corporate consulting before coming home to die alongside her mother. "About the auction in October."

"What about it?"

"We've got eight colts to prep in six weeks, Clem. Eight. And three of them haven't been started under saddle yet."

"I know how many we have. I'm the one who's been working them."

"Alone," Annie said. "You've been working them alone, and you're running yourself into the ground."

Clementine felt the familiar heat climb her neck. "I can handle it."

"I didn't say you couldn't. I said you're alone, and there's a difference." Annie held up a hand before Clementine could argue. "We hired someone. A contract trainer and farrier, six weeks, to help with the auction prep."

The silence in the barn aisle felt like the moment before a horse decides to bolt or stand.

"You hired someone," Clementine repeated.

"His name is Cade Hollister. He's got a reputation up and down the hill country—does traveling work, mostly. Colt starting, corrective shoeing, problem horses. Libby talked to four different ranches that have used him, and every single one said he was the best they'd ever worked with."

"And neither of you thought to ask me."

Annie met her eyes. "We thought you'd say no."

"Damn right I'd say no. I don't need some—"

"It's not about need, Clementine." Annie's voice softened, which was worse than the boardroom tone because it meant she was about to be honest. "It's about math. Eight colts, six weeks, one person. The auction is the difference between keeping this place and selling the back forty to developers. You know that."

Clementine did know that. She knew it the way she knew the weight of a lead rope or the sound of a horse in distress—in her body, below thought. The auction had to go well. The colts had to be finished, polished, moving like the kind of horses that justified five-figure price tags. And Annie was right: she couldn't do it alone.

But admitting that felt like admitting something larger, something that pressed against the cage of her ribs. That she wasn't enough. That her mother's death had left a hole she couldn't fill no matter how many hours she spent in the round pen, no matter how many colts she started, no matter how hard she worked.

"When does he get here?" she asked flatly.

"Tomorrow morning."

Clementine pushed off the stall door and walked toward the tack room without another word.

---

She spent the rest of the day in the round pen with the new bay, working him through the basics—approach and retreat, desensitization, learning to yield his hindquarters to pressure. The work was meditative when it went well and maddening when it didn't, and today it was somewhere in between. The colt was smart but anxious, the kind of horse that needed consistency more than anything else, and Clementine gave him that. She was patient with horses in a way she'd never learned to be patient with people.

By late afternoon, the colt was following her around the pen without a lead, his nose at her shoulder, his breathing slow. She scratched the spot between his ears that made his lower lip go slack and felt the small, fierce satisfaction that was the closest thing to peace she knew.

Libby found her at the wash rack, hosing down the colt's legs.

"Annie told you about Hollister," Libby said. It wasn't a question.

Libby was the sister who looked most like their mother—same brown eyes, same wide mouth that defaulted to amusement, same way of standing with one hip cocked like she was permanently unimpressed. She was also the sister Clementine found hardest to stay angry at.

"She told me."

"And you're pissed."

"I'm fine."

"You're hosing that colt's left foreleg like it owes you money."

Clementine adjusted the spray and said nothing.

Libby leaned against the wash rack post. "I talked to Maureen Phelps over at Twin Oaks. She said Hollister started six colts for them last spring, and every single one sold above reserve at the Kerrville sale. She said he's quiet, professional, and he doesn't take shortcuts."

"Great. Sounds like a real gem."

"She also said he's easy on the eyes, if that helps."

"It doesn't."

Libby grinned. "Worth a shot." She pushed off the post and started to walk away, then turned back. "Clem. Nobody thinks you can't do this. We just don't want you to have to do it alone."

Clementine turned off the hose and stood in the sudden quiet, water dripping from the colt's belly onto the concrete, and tried to believe her.

---

That night, she sat on the porch of the small cottage she'd claimed as her own—the old foreman's house, two rooms and a bathroom, set back from the main house at the edge of the tree line. The air smelled of cedar and the last of the day's heat rising from the limestone. Cicadas roared in the live oaks. A barn owl called from somewhere near the hay barn, its voice thin and strange.

She drank a beer and looked at the stars and thought about her mother.

June Tanner had been a force of nature—a woman who could gentle a rank stud and negotiate a breeding contract in the same afternoon, who smelled of horse sweat and Shalimar, who had raised three daughters alone after her husband walked out and never once let them see her break. Clementine had been six when her father left. She didn't remember his face clearly, but she remembered the sound of his truck on the gravel drive, pulling away in the dark, and the way her mother had stood at the kitchen window watching the taillights disappear without making a sound.

Clementine had inherited that silence. She wore it like armor.

She finished her beer and went to bed and dreamed of nothing, which was the best she could hope for.