Ride a Dark Horse by Laura Moore

Author:Laura Moore
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: Pocket Books

She was glad she’d kept her promise. Sophie and Jamie looked so adorable astride their ponies, their thin legs struggling to grip the sides of their saddles, their bodies bouncing like large, multicolored Ping-Pong balls as they trotted around the perimeter of the ring. What little troopers they were. Cassie supposed she’d looked just as comical at their age, but fortunately the memories of her early riding years were far too blurry. All she remembered was intense happiness combined with a sense of awe that these majestic creatures would tolerate her presence on their backs. It was a feeling she’d never outgrown.

“Okay, Sophie and Jamie, come on into the center of the ring and you can switch ponies now.” Cassie had devised a method for avoiding squabbles between the twins by strictly enforcing the fifty-fifty rule with the ponies. Each one got to ride both ponies for half the lesson. Anyone who complained forfeited the privilege of a lesson. So far only Sophie had had the temerity to defy Cassie’s rules. Once. She hadn’t liked it at all when she’d been forced to watch her brother benefit from her tantrum by having a session all to himself.

It had been an important lesson for both children. If there was one thing Cassie couldn’t abide, it was seeing kids act like spoiled brats around horses. Horses were a gift, a responsibility, and it literally made Cassie’s stomach turn when she saw the careless manner with which so many kids and adults treated their horses. So she’d laid the law down from the first and intended to stick by it.

But at other times, on other issues, Cassie wondered whether she was too draconian. Whenever she stopped to consider the importance of her role in raising Jamie and Sophie, Cassie felt paralyzed with apprehension. She knew she would always come up short, in her own mind at least, compared to the kind of guidance and parenting Tom and Lisa would have provided. But she loved the twins as fiercely as if they were her own and was determined to instill in them a sense of right and wrong. Tom and Lisa would have wanted that.

Cassie watched as both children steered their ponies to the center of the ring and came to a halt in front of her. They had graduated from the longe line about two months before, but Cassie still watched their every move with an eagle eye, unwilling to risk an accident. Although she knew her children were as strong and nimble as monkeys, the thought of teaching them to canter had her heart in her mouth. Luckily, they had a way to go before they were ready to progress to that stage.

Cassie lightly grasped the ponies’ snaffle bits as Jamie and Sophie swung their legs over the saddles and plopped down to the ground with audible thuds. Following the routine with a familiarity that would have made an army sergeant proud, the twins circled around the front of Topper and Pip and exchanged places.

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