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Jane is a teen dressage rider who must push herself out of her comfort zone and prove herself to the doubting know-it-all cowboy with piercing eyes as blue as the sky to meet the challenge of her fiery new show horse and achieve her dream of making the national riding team.

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 ~ Nope. No way. Not interested. As in, never!

The giant black horse ricocheted around the indoor riding arena. He leapt sideways, barreled forward, jerked against the reins. Whoa, was that a sliding stop? The rider held the reins tight, clearly afraid that the horse would take off again. I saw him signal the horse to walk, but the beast coiled like a spring. His muscles bulged, his eyes flew wide open, his nostrils flared. He trotted in place, bouncing off the ground and snorting. Spit splashed across his chest as he flicked his head up. If it wasn’t the dead of winter, he could be breathing fire with all the steam coming from his nose.

I wasn’t getting anywhere near that horse. Kate said it was a Grand Prix dressage horse imported from Sweden. Supposedly it had champion bloodlines. Well, they must be breeding dragons over there in their castle dungeons.

Dressage is ballet on horseback, precise, controlled, elegant. What I watched was not poetry in motion—it was a train wreck. A ninja fight between David and Goliath. When the guy didn’t let up on the reins, the horse started to spin sideways.

“He’s an idiot,” Kate hissed beside me. ~ Excerpt from And We Danced