1
Blaine Chappell rode along the northernmost fence on the ranch, just him, the June Kentucky sunshine, and his horse Featherweight. There was no traffic out there, as there were no roads that bordered this side of the ranch. Only long, straight, white fences, characteristic of every horse farm in the state.
Emerald green grass waved in the slight breeze, and Blaine wished the wind would pick up a little bit to cool him down. He loved Sunday afternoons like this, with the pastor’s words flowing through his mind, his thoughts wandering where they wanted, and only a sense of beauty in front of him.
Today, though, his thoughts seemed a little stickier than usual. Featherweight plodded along, her hooves barely kicking up any dust from the grass that had settled in the last week. Blaine felt more at home in the saddle than anywhere else, and had he been shorter, he’d have been the one riding the horses he and his brothers raised to run in the races.
As it was, he oversaw all the medical care of the horses and other animals at Bluegrass Ranch. He’d left the ranch for a couple of years to get his veterinarian technician license for large animals, but the time to invest in veterinary school was too much. The ranch had a team of vets they called on daily, and Blaine didn’t need to get the doctorate degree to work with the animals.
He monitored the cattle, the chickens, the sheep, and the goats, as well as the horses. Their main source of income was the championship horses they raised to win the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness, and the Belmont stakes, but there were dozens of other races with tidy prize pots too.
Blaine scheduled all the breeding, and he had seven studs coming in this week to breed with their mares. He, Spur, Duke, and Cayden named every horse, with a lot of the input coming from Cayden, as he was the public face of the ranch. Whoever bought the horse could and usually did rename them, but for a while there, when the Internet headlines ran about the birth of a possible future champion, it was the name the three of them chose.
“What do you think?” he asked Featherweight. “The ones with three or four words sometimes hit the best.”
With a gestation period of eleven months, he had plenty of time to pick out names for any foals they might get. There were races for fillies and mares only, some for colts and geldings, and some where they raced against each other.
His favorite race was the Kentucky Oaks, and while most people hadn’t heard of it, there was still over a million dollars to be won. Every time a Bluegrass Ranch horse won a race, their bloodlines became more coveted. They could sell their horses for more money.
Spur managed all of that, and Blaine helped when it came time for breeding. They owned one of the former Derby winners who could stud, and that didn’t cost them anything. Getting the other males to come to the ranch cost a pretty penny, and besides advertising their two-year-old sale every spring, that was the bulk of the money the ranch spent.
Ian was the numbers brother on the ranch, and Duke was the one who dealt with procuring all the studs. He’d been preparing for this week for the past month, and Blaine had been right at his side for most of that.
He needed to stop thinking about horses, horses, horses. He woke with horses on his mind, and dreamed of horses. He went to bed with horses in his brain, and sometimes he even counted horses when he couldn’t fall asleep.
The problem was, if he wasn’t thinking about the ranch, his job on it, or horses, he obsessed over Tamara Lennox.
She was ten times as dangerous to let into his mind, especially because he couldn’t seem to have an innocent thought about her. She stuck around, needling him, making him question the last two decades of his life. He felt like he’d wasted the last five at least, since she’d turned thirty then, and he’d completely forgotten about their agreement.
She’d reminded him of it last week. They’d agreed that when she turned thirty, if neither of them were in a relationship, he’d ask her out and they’d try something romantic. He’d given her a deluxe set of car mats instead.
“Stupid,” he muttered to himself. He’d started dating Alex about six months after that, and that had been his last