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Natalie Keller Reinert Books

Foaling Season (Briar Hill Farm: Book One) Paperback

Foaling Season (Briar Hill Farm: Book One) Paperback

Regular price $19.99 USD
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Get to know all the best-loved characters by bestselling equestrian fiction author Natalie Keller Reinert, featuring beloved characters and settings from The Eventing Series, Alex & Alexander, and more! It's the perfect place to begin your equestrian adventure.

Briar Hill Farm

In a hidden corner of rural Florida, there’s a place where gleaming horses graze on green pastures, a round pool of clear water shimmers with the brilliance of a blue diamond, and majestic live oaks stretch their tangled branches over an old white cottage. A place where friends gather, children play, and riding skills are honed. A place which feels like a lifetime in the making for the people who have made it their home. This is Briar Hill Farm.

Briar Hill Farm is a new series featuring characters and settings from beloved novels by Natalie Keller Reinert in the Ocala Equestrians collection. These include The Eventing Series, Alex & Alexander Series, the Show Barn Blues Series, and more. You can read these books in companion with this series or enjoy each series individually.

This paperback ships directly from the printer. Please add your name to the "Notes" box at check-out to have a signed book-plate to add to your book! It will be mailed separately.

Other Editions: Find the ebook and audiobook here.

 

 

 

Synopsis


Spring is a time for renewal…and in horse country, it’s a season of late nights, early mornings, and fresh beginnings. At Briar Hill Farm, professional event rider Jules Thornton-Morrison knows a thing or two about starting all over again. But getting back in the saddle after having a child is an emotional battle she can’t fight on her own. Fortunately, Jules has friends at her back.

There’s Alex Whitehall, half of a legendary horse-racing duo who is hoping to carve out her own identity with Jules’s help. There’s Kit Parker, accidental eventing prodigy, who is struggling under the weight of her rise to the international competition arena before she was ready to take it all on. And there’s Gigi Whitehall-Wallace, a whirlwind of nervous energy who comes to Florida’s horse country in search of a happy ending she can’t seem to define yet. Together, they can make their dreams a reality — if old rivalries and prejudices don’t split their unlikely group apart.

Along with the students, employees, and friends of Briar Hill Farm, these women will come together for one tumultuous spring in horse country. It’s foaling season in Florida, and fresh starts and new lives are spilling into riotous existence.

Look Inside: Chapter One

“Close,” Alex told me, fighting a smile. “But you’re missing something. Look at it again, Jules!”

Beside me, Lindsay barked with laughter. “At last, we’ve found something Jules Thornton-Morrison isn’t perfect at!”

“Well, as far as I know, she can’t train a racehorse, either,” Alex replied smugly. “So that’s two things she isn’t the resident expert in.”

“Ouch, sick burn.” Lindsay squeezed my thigh with mock sympathy. “You gonna be okay, mama?”

“Teenagers are so annoying,” I sighed, refusing to look at her. I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction. “When do you turn twenty again? In a year and a half? I’m counting the days.”

I let Lindsay shake back her hot pink hair in a show of unbruised pride while I dropped my gaze back to the striped beach towel spread on the concrete barn aisle before us. I couldn’t see anything wrong with the instruments, bottles, and boxes I’d set out for Alex’s inspection. What was I missing? I’d assembled this foaling kit following every instruction to the letter.

I wouldn’t admit it to anyone, but prepping for the arrival of my first-ever foal was scarier than galloping up to an Advanced-level ditch and wall. Maybe even scarier than prepping for my own child had been. At least he was now asleep in his stroller, safely out in the world.
Carla’s foal was still waiting in the womb. And as usual, I was already far too attached to my pretty bay broodmare, even if she’d been an impulse buy at the Ocala Breeders’ Sale pavilion just a few months ago. She was just so endearingly no-nonsense on the exterior, with a secret, softie heart that melted for carrots. She reminded me of, well, me.

So, obviously, everything about Carla’s foaling had to go perfectly. Hence, the foaling kit inspection by Alex. She’d been one half of the Alex and Alexander Whitehalls, who ran their world-renowned Cotswold Farm in Ocala, for a very long time. After so many foaling seasons up at the broodmare barn, there weren’t many breeding scenarios she hadn’t encountered. For some reason, she’d agreed to oversee my foaling out Carla here at Briar Hill Farm.
But now, I was beginning to think I should just send the mare to Cotswold Farm to foal. This was complicated.
Still, I wasn’t the sort of person who turned my back on a hard job. And it was annoying to know there was something in the equestrian universe that frightened me. I wasn’t easily scared. I decided to label this lost, helpless feeling as frustration, instead.

Alex was still smiling at me. A sphinx-like smile, an I have a secret smile. She could just tell me what was missing from my foaling kit, but I could see Alex liked having the high ground for once. She wanted to make me sweat before she gave me the answer.

Well, I couldn’t blame her. I was usually the expert in charge. Alex had been taking riding lessons from me for years. So, I guessed she saw this little lesson as her time to shine. While I was the more accomplished equestrian in the horse showing and eventing world, she was a respected racehorse trainer and breeder. Neither of us ever missed an opportunity to lord it over the other when we discovered we had some bit of arcane horseman’s wisdom the other didn’t yet possess.

But honestly, girl! How long could she stand there and smirk at me?

Forever, more than likely.

“You’re holding out on me,” I accused her, folding my arms across my chest and jutting one hip. Half power-pose, half pout. “Whatever’s missing, it isn’t a textbook thing. I know, because I read everything you made me read and I followed all the directions. Admit it—you’ve got some kind of folksy, witchcraft thing up your sleeve, don’t you?”

“Of course I do,” Alex agreed, her smile fully escaping and casting a sunny glow over her tanned face. She was loving this. Her grin was fit to bust her cheeks as she said, “Trust me, it’s not in the books, but you still want this in your foaling kit. Want a hint? It comes from the soda and snack aisle at the grocery store.”

I shook my head, mystified. There was nothing in my tattered copy of Blessed Are The Broodmares about picking up essential supplies for the birth of one’s upcoming foal in the soda and snack aisle. If there was, I’d know about it, because I’d practically memorized the book, at Alex’s insistence—and then I’d made Lindsay read it, too. She fit the extra reading in around her college classes and barn work, grumbling whenever I was in earshot, but I stuck to my guns. There were plenty of days when Lindsay was my only helper around the farm. If Carla foaled during the day, which apparently some mares did even though most liked the nighttime hours for labor, Lindsay would have to be my assistant.

I glanced back at her, hoping Alex’s clue made more sense to her than it did to me. “Do you know what it could be?”

Lindsay shrugged, her gaze on her phone. “The only thing in my brain right now is this paper I’m currently not writing for my humanities class.”

She only brought up school assignments when she didn’t want to work. “Oh, would you rather be back at your apartment writing a humanities paper? Don’t let me stop you.”

Lindsay rolled her eyes at my acidic tone. Once people knew me long enough, they started ignoring my sarcasm. And Lindsay could give as good as she got, anyway. She put her phone down and told me, “Thanks for your concern, but I’ll get it written tonight. First I want to ride Jim Dear, and then stop by the co-op barn and visit with William. Ariel, that kid leasing him, is on vacation this week, so he needs extra carrots from me or he’ll feel forgotten.”

William, Lindsay’s childhood show hunter, was enjoying semi-retirement as a cross-rail hopper with a new little girl. But Lindsay wouldn’t consider letting him go to another barn, out of her sight, so Ariel became one of my assistant instructor’s students. I loved Lindsay’s fierce protectiveness, the way even when she moved on to younger horses with more potential, she kept close tabs on William—and made sure he had plenty of treats.

“Oh, that’s nice of you,” I said. “I really think Ariel’s doing a nice job with him. I completely forgot she was going on vacation, but it’s hard to keep up with everyone now that I’m only teaching a couple of nights a week, and of course she’s not my student, so—”

“Can we focus?” Alex demanded. “This foaling kit is not finished!”

“Did she miss the empty soda bottle?” an amused voice called from behind us. Her crisp British accent made my head swivel so fast I nearly threw it out of joint.

A slim young woman with a baby in her arms stood in the shade of the stable overhang, and I momentarily forgot everything else in the world but my infant son.

“Is everything okay with Jack, Gemma?” I rose to my feet, steadying myself with a hand on Lindsay’s shoulder when my hips protested. More than a month after Jack’s completely straightforward birth, I still felt like my body was trying to readjust to post-partum life—and frankly, struggling pretty hard.

Gemma tipped her chin over the infant’s pale, wispy hair and gave him a little kiss. I felt a surge of jealousy ripple through me—entirely unnecessary, since Gemma was a relative of Pete’s, and our live-in nanny, and the nicest girl on the planet, but jealousy was apparently my response to everyone who came near my son. I’d turned into the broodiest of mares since Jack came on the scene.

“Everything’s fine,” Gemma assured me in a sing-song voice. “Little Jackie-boy just wanted some sunshine, so we came outside to see what everyone was up to without us.”

I also didn’t like it when people called him ‘Jackie-boy,’ but Lindsay had informed me I sounded like a crazy person when I made up a million rules for how to address my child, so I’d stopped reminding people, “His name is Jack,” every time they added a cute suffix to the end.

“I’ll take him,” I told her, opening my arms. “Thanks for watching him for a little while.”

Gemma gave me an amused glance as she handed Jack over. “I think I had him for twenty minutes,” she said, pushing her dark curls behind her ears. Tiny silver horseshoes glistened in each lobe. “You sure you couldn’t use a longer break, mama?”

She used Lindsay’s nickname for me, not knowing that my snarky working student had labeled me mama after she overheard some grooms at a horse show using that nickname for all the bitey, mean-faced mares in their stable.

Gemma was incapable of snark. She was my total opposite, if you didn’t count loving horses, Jack, and Pete as traits. Those three things, of course, we had in common.

“I’m fine,” I assured her, scooping up my baby. I let the feeling of holding Jack to my chest wash over me—a warmth which spread from my heart to my fingertips with just a few quick breaths. Even at my most exhausted, I felt better when I was clutching him close. Before he was a week old, my mom said I had the worst case of attachment she’d ever seen and told Pete to get me a nanny ASAP. I told her to mind her own business. It was the first argument I’d had with my mom since I’d gotten pregnant, and it felt like old times.

But that was the only thing which had gone back to normal since I’d had Jack.

Mentally and physically, I was a bit of a mess.

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