Chapter 1
Veronica-or, Vicky, as she preferred to be called-watched as Christopher and his latest conquest rode off together towards the woods. Vicky felt the tears rushing to her eyes, and there was nothing she could do to stop them. She ran back into the stable and cried her eyes out.
It was just no use. No matter how hard she tried not to love him, the more she did love him. He was the only man she would ever be able to love as long as she lived. There was just no one else as far as she was concerned. She rubbed the tears out of her eyes and looked slowly around the stable.
She had been practically born in this stable seventeen years ago. Her father had worked for the Butler family all his life as their horse trainer, and so had his father before him. As long as the Butlers had been keeping and training horses to race, a North had worked for them as their trainer.
Three generations of Butlers and Norths had groomed the finest horse flesh in the whole country, and now that association was going to be upset by the fact that Veronica had been born a girl and not a boy. Her father had wanted a boy in the worst way, but after she had Veronica, her mother could not have any more children.
The older Veronica got, the more she wanted to be the first female trainer the Butlers had ever had. She knew as much about horses as any man, and she could ride as well as any man. Actually, her great ambition since she was five was to be a jockey, but there were no women jockeys either.
And now Christopher Butler had once more shown her that he didn't know she was alive. This was the fourth girl this week that he had taken horseback riding with him. Christopher never saw the same female twice, and at the age of twenty, he showed no signs of ever wanting to settle down with a wife and family.
It was summer and Christopher was home from college. Last summer he had gone off to Europe, and that had been more unbearable than this summer had been so far. At least she got to see him, even if that's all it ever amounted to. However, there were those rare occasions when he would talk to her.
It was never much of anything. Usually it would be something like,
"Hey, pony girl, saddle my horse for me, I'm going riding. And saddle one of the tamer ones for my guest." The guest was always a beautiful female who looked like she had just stepped out of a novel or off the pages of a magazine.
They were always beautiful, and whenever she was near enough to one, Vicky would feel like a boy. Vicky kicked at the dirt and almost yelled: "Why the hell can't I be a boy? I'd be better off. I wish there was some operation I could go through to become a boy. I'm no good as a girl, but I'd make the best male horse trainer and jockey there ever was."
Vicky looked out the stable entrance in the direction that Chris and Bunny-that was what he had called the girl, and she didn't seem to mind, and in fact had been falling all over him like the stupid blonde that she was-had just ridden off in. "Why doesn't he ever see me?" she asked of herself. "Am I that ugly?"
She saddled her own horse and walked him out of the stable and mounted him. Whenever she got depressed she would take Old Bess out and give her a good work-out. Actually the work-out was more for herself than Old Bess. Vicky was the one who had to get Christopher Butler out of her system, not Old Bess.
Vicky mounted Old Bess and off they went. She thought about that one boy she had met in school this past year who had actually asked her out. It was the first time any boy had ever asked her out, and Vicky had been scared to go out with him at first, but it was her mother who made her go out.
Her mother was a maid for the Butlers as had been Vicky's grandmother, and Vicky's great grandmother. Vicky could just see herself ending up as a maid for the Butlers, and so could her mother. It was her mother who surprised her by saying, "Find a nice young man and marry him and get away from this place. You'll rot here like the rest of us if you don't."
Vicky had known that her mother was right, but Vicky wanted to "rot here." She could never move away from the place and all that it meant to her. It was in her blood just like it had been in the blood of every male North. The fact that she was a female didn't change that.
She had gone out with that boy-Herbert was his name, and he was just as plain as his name implied-but she had not wanted to, even though he was the first boy who had ever asked her out. She still dreamed of the day when Chris would ride up to her window on his horse and carry her away with him. She knew that that just had to happen.
But Herbert had not been all that shy, even though he was boring and she hated the sound of his voice after she had been with him only five minutes. Herbert also turned out to be stronger than her, although he looked like a summer breeze would knock him over, and when he began to kiss her later that night, she wasn't able to fight him off her.