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had won multiple stakes races. Jake would never want to put Lyndie on an animal as headstrong as Unhindered.
    “She’d be a great hire for us,” Bo stated.
    Jake narrowed his eyes. Lyndie had only been riding his horse for ten minutes and already she had him anxious for her well-being and furious with himself because of it. Ninety percent of him wanted her to leave. The other ten percent had gone rebel. That part wanted her to stay, which scared him even more than the prospect of her taking a spill off Gold Tide. “I’m not interested in hiring her.”
    “Why?”
    “Too much history there.”
    “Make new history. It’s time.” Bo stepped forward, bringing them shoulder to shoulder as they both continued to watch Lyndie. “She tried to jockey for a few years, back when she was twenty-three, twenty-four. She couldn’t get enough trainers to take a chance on her and had to give it up. Osten told me that if he’d known then what he knows about her now, he’d have put her on his horses.”
    Jake grunted. “Don’t you have work to do, Bo?”
    His brother laughed. “Nothing more important than this. You and I both know that good exercise riders are hard to find around here. She’s better than good. She’s the best prospect you’ve got.”
    Jake held his tongue.
    “It almost seems to me like God arranged the timing just right,” Bo said.
    “Or that I’m the brunt of a bad joke.” Most of his staff had been with him for the full eight years that he’d been training for Whispering Creek. He rarely had available openings for exercise riders.
    “Why don’t you just commit to take her on for the season at Lone Star?” Bo suggested.
    Resistance sharpened inside Jake.
    “Lyndie can start now and continue working for you when we move our horses to Lone Star’s barn in April,” Bo said. “When Lone Star’s season wraps in early July, she won’t go with you to New York for the summer because it would mean leaving her family. You’ll only be taking her on for a total of four months.”
    Every spring Jake ran a contingent of horses at Lone Star Park’s track, located forty-five minutes from Holley, as well as a contingent in Florida under the care of an assistant trainer. When summer came, Jake took some of his horses to New York to race. In the fall, Kentucky. But Lyndie, who needed to remain close to her sister, would be limited to Texas.
    “The season at Lone Star Park is fixin’ to start.” Bo said. “If you don’t hire her, one of the trainers there will snap her up. We treat our horses better than they do, Jake. When our horses get to Lone Star, they’re ready. Another trainer might put her up on a horse who’s not.”
    How did Bo know what to say to push a knife into the softest parts of him? He didn’t want Lyndie working for him, but he wanted her working for another trainer ten times less.
    Four months.
    His work had been his sanity for a long time. It was all he did. Training Thoroughbreds to run to their full potential, his only goal. If Lyndie could assist with that goal, could he bring himself to deal with her for four months?
    How much damage could four months do?

    “I’m here,” Lyndie called as she let herself into her parents’ house.
    “I’m reading to Mollie.” Her mother’s voice drifted to her from the hallway that housed the bedrooms.
    “Be there in a sec.” Lyndie entered the living room. “Hi, Grandpa.” She gave the old man’s shoulder a squeeze. “How are you today?”
    Awkward with affection, he patted her hand indecisively. “All right, I guess. In other words, doing my best.”
    Her father’s father was one of a rare breed: an eighty-five-year-old male who’d outlived his wife. When he’d become a widower two years ago, there had been no discussion about him living independently. Grandma had spoiled Grandpa Harold. Asking him to cook, clean, buy groceries, or iron for himself at this point would have been akin to throwing a babe into the