Lilac's Chance

Chapter Eight

The colt is drop-dead gorgeous.

Dad's been sending me photos of him, several a day, and he reminds me strikingly of Bloodless Day, my dad's Derby horse. They both, at only a few days old, have the same arrogant tilt to their heads, the gorgeous movements, the faraway look to their eyes. But this one is far tamer- already he's been halter broke, and everybody has been handling him. Everything about him screams 'Triple Crown'. Not Derby. Not Preakness or Belmont. Triple Crown. And he's all mine, if only I come home.

But right now I'm in a pickup that sounds halfway dead, rattling towards a track I've never heard of, Last Chance bumping along behind us, Braydon tense in the seat next to me. He's driving at a ridiculously slow pace and flinches at every car that passes us.

"I can drive if you're not comfortable," I offer after ten miles of this. I think a tricycle just passed us. We've barely passed the town Hank and I drove into last week and I'm beginning to think that, quite possibly, we're leaving for the March races of next year. Certainly we'll never reach Sam Houston before December at the rate we're going.

Braydon glares at me. It's dark and gloomy outside, and it's dark and gloomy inside, so his strikingly blue eyes are doubly noticeable. I level him back with a stare, unimpressed. "I'm serious. I think that snail on the windshield could get us there faster than you are."

He snorts and looks back to the road, adjusting the truck when it drifts into the left lane. I don't know why he bothers. Nobody has passed us in three miles. "Driving a horse trailer is supposed to be slow. If we're going too fast and I brake too hard, the horse could get seriously injured or lose her footing."

I mimic his snort, mostly to see what he does. He grips the wheel tighter, and his already white knuckles start to look dangerously devoid of blood. "The whole reason horse trailers were invented was so that we could take our horses to places faster than it would be if we rode them."

With an aggrieved sigh, Braydon forces himself to relax and speeds up slightly- like, half a mile faster. So I drop the argument, but when we pull into a gas station an hour later and he gets out to fill the tank and check on Last Chance, I leap into the driver's seat.

"Oh, give me a break," Braydon growls when he's finished filling the tank and realizes where I am.

"Give me a chance," I counter. In the cup-holder, my phone buzzes. Another picture of the colt. I lock eyes with Braydon, challenging him to order me out of this truck. Aside from wanting to pick up the pace a bit, I need a distraction. Braydon won't talk to me and my phone is nothing but dangerous temptation, so I need to drive.

Braydon looks away first. "If you crash, it's all on you."

"I won't." He gets into the passenger seat and I expertly put the truck into drive and pull out of the deserted gas station, checking the tow haul and the mirrors. This is going to be a breeze. Last Chance is quiet in the little two-horse trailer, and I'm no slouch at trailering. Not that Braydon believes me, but that doesn't matter. Soon we're speeding easily along the two-lane road, passing the grassy landscape beneath boiling gray clouds.

We're going for two hours before Braydon speaks. "When did you learn to trailer?"

I resist the urge to look at him. We're nearing a town, and there's an asshole in a Corvette tailgating us. Driving carefully now, I answer, "Dad and my uncle would let me trailer some of our horses to the tracks. At one point they had me take two horses from Santa Anita to home."

Worst. Drive. Ever. My Derby nominee in a trailer with the most psychotic horse known to mankind, worse than Bloodless Day, and my sister and mother in the cab next to me. I would've preferred riding back to Kentucky over that.