Taking the Reins. Carolyn McSparren

      Mary Anne shook her head, her dark eyes the size of eight balls. “I...I didn’t think they’d be so big.”

      The gray Percheron gelding poked his head over the top of his stall gate, delighted by the attention. He looked straight at Mary Anne and snorted—a big, wet, huffy snort.

      She yelped.

      “He’s a real sweetie,” Charlie said, and scratched his nose.

      “Don’t you have anything smaller?” Mary Anne asked. “Like maybe a pony?”

      “Our newborn foals are bigger than the average pony,” Charlie said.

      Mary Anne turned paler.

      “Are you all right?”

      “I knew I shouldn’t have said I’d do this.” Mary Anne dropped her face into her hands. “But I wanted to get out of that place so bad....” She stared around at all of them. “I lied on the forms. I’m so sorry...I’m terrified of horses.”

      * * *

      “AND THAT PRETTY much put an end to the Great Horse tour,” Charlie said.

      She slipped off her paddock boots and propped her stocking feet on the coffee table in her father’s study. He handed her a cold can of diet soda from the small refrigerator under the wet bar in the corner. She rolled it against her forehead, popped the top and drank half of it in one pull before continuing.

      “I turned the tour over to Hank, since he knows the most about horses and stables. Meanwhile, Mary Anne flew back to the dorm with me at her heels, and locked herself in her room. I knocked and tried to reassure her, but she sounded as though she was throwing stuff around, probably packing. She told me to go away.”

      “You carry a master key.”

      “I didn’t sign on to be a prison warden.” She scowled at her father. “I only met them a few hours ago. You’re the big psychologist. What should I have done?”

      “What did you do?”

      She set her soda onto the end table beside her. “Daddy, sometimes this answering a question with a question is pretty annoying. I spoke to her the way I’d speak to a spooked horse. Gentle, quiet. I kept reassuring her that we’d deal with it, that we’d all help her, that of course we wanted her to stay....”

      “Successful?”

      “If I’d kept trying to talk to her through the door, she’d have sneaked out the window and hitchhiked to town by now.” She sighed. “No, Jake did it. I already knew he had a thing with animals. Seems people like him, too.”

      “People are animals.”

      Charlie struck her forehead. “Wow! What a concept! Why didn’t I think of that?” She tossed her soda can into the big wastebasket beside her father’s desk. “Three points.”

      Jamming her hands into the pockets of her jeans, she started to pace. “The others were pretty upset about Mary Anne. Were we going to toss her out on her rear? If we did that, they’d all leave.... I had to do some fine tap dancing. Then, she and Jake came walking down the aisle like nothing had happened. She’d obviously been crying, but she hadn’t tied that scarf back around her head or rolled her sleeves down.” She braced herself against the edge of her father’s desk. “She was trembling, she was so scared, but she faced us all down. She’s got guts. I like her.”

      “What did Jake say to her in there?”

      “No idea. Maybe he just witched her through the closed door.” She chuckled. “You should have seen him feeding Mama Cat chicken. It’s like he gave up part of what he was when he gave up making decisions, but maybe he got something else in return.”

      “No matter how hard he tries not to, my dear Charlie, he’s forced to make decisions. If he starts with small ones and nothing bad happens, maybe he’ll learn to make larger ones.”

      “You’ve worked with all of them....”

      He shrugged. “Some more than others.”

      “But all you’ll give me is name, age and rank. What’s Jake’s story?”

      He shook his finger at her. “I can only give you the bare outline without contravening the Privacy Act. I can’t, for instance, show you Jake’s file—or any of their files.”

      “So Jake made a decision that caused havoc. Are we talking a full-blown case of PTSD here? I am not competent to deal with that.”

      “He has a bad case of survivor guilt, Charlie. He feels that his decisions resulted in suffering for other people and left him unscathed.”

      “Did they?”

      “Not in the sense he means. It’s a form of magical thinking. Not much different from ‘step on a crack, break your mother’s back.’ Except in degree, of course.”

      Can you at least tell me what he did in the army before he was wounded?”

      “He was G-2.”

      “Intelligence. A spook.”

      The colonel nodded.

      “What about his family?”

      “Never been married.”

      “Can you at least tell me whether or not he’s gay?”

      “From what I can gather, he had an extremely healthy heterosexual sex life.”

      She blew out her breath. “Not that it matters.”

      “Of course not.” The colonel smiled the infuriating “I see all” smile that drove her crazy. “I’ll be down at the hospital at least four days a week, but I suggest we talk every night after dinner. Completely up to you.”

      “Uh-huh.” As if. She was surprised he hadn’t asked her to write him case notes.

      “If you have time, you might prepare case notes to jog your memory.”

      She threw back her head and roared with laughter.

      “What?”

      “No case notes. I am not one of your worshipful acolytes.”

      “This class is a huge responsibility for someone with your limited experience.”

      “Then why the heck did you stick me with it?” She didn’t wait for his answer, but grabbed her paddock boots and started out of the library in her stocking feet.

      “Charlie girl, I’m selfish enough to want to keep you and Sarah around. The way to do that is to keep you interested, involved and employed. Is it wrong to want to get to know my adult daughter and my grandchild? Besides, you must see that I can’t simply turn this place over to you without any supervision. You have no prior experience running an operation this size.”

      “Granddad taught me more in my vacations here than he ever taught you, and I’ve been working my tail off to learn everything I can since we came back. I’m thinking of all those classes and clinics I should be taking instead of teaching these people to drive.”

      “Dad was aware I would never be a farmer or a horseman,” the colonel said. “As a matter of fact, until I came home to look after him when he got so sick, he didn’t believe I’d ever live here after I left for college. He expected me to hire a manager to handle the place after he died until Steve retired and you two came back here to take over.” He shrugged. “I thought then he was living a fantasy. You would never have been able to convince Steve to retire from the army and move to a horse farm. He was an adrenaline junkie, Charlie. They don’t change.”

      “We don’t have to worry about that any longer, do we?” She padded out of the library, shut the door and fought back tears. He was doing the same thing he’d always done when she was growing up. The absentee father shows up, issues orders for her own good and then leaves again. The gospel according