Page 12 of Wilder

Like she was meant for it.

Since then, they’d been inseparable.

As soon as winter hit, I’d had a hard time getting Asher to not spend every spare second with her. Didn’t matter how cold it got; didn’t matter if the ground was half frozen or if the morning fog clung thick enough to blot out the fence line. If he wasn’t in the bunkhouse or handling his daily chores, he was tending to her, riding her, reinforcing every lesson until they were second nature.

A breathless laugh echoed over to me as Asher tugged back on the reins to slow them down, her canter turning into a slow trot while breaking away from the course and heading toward me where the gate was.

I hitched a leg up on the lowest rung of the fence, the stretch helping ease the ache in my back that had settled there sometime this morning—right alongside the frost that clung to the outside of the kitchen window while I’d put on a fresh pot of coffee.

I liked to think I was too young to be moaning and groaning about joint pain. Too young for the kind of deep-set stiffness that made a man move slower and wake up feeling like he’d aged ten years overnight.

That was supposed to be reserved for people like Teddy who shuffled around half bent over after a full day’s worth of exams on our animals, rubbing at his lower back like it had personally betrayed him.

Then again, the winter months always did make things harder.

The days stretched longer than normal—ironic, considering how early the sun liked to set. But the cold had a way of dragging everything out, slowing even the simplest tasks.

Didn’t matter how many years you spent working out in it. You felt winter the second it rolled in across the untouched acres out past the property.

In your hands, your back, your damn knees. In the slower mornings and in the way your body protested bending down to muck stalls or hauling feed out of storage in the biting cold. It made getting up before dawn just that much more miserable, and by the time noon rolled around and the sun finally started burning off the morning frost, the damage was already done.

I preferred to bake in the heat over this any day.

March couldn’t come soon enough.

I rolled my shoulders as Asher tugged the filly into stopping right as he reached me. He blinked once, twice, at me before his lips parted in surprise.

“You’re up early,” I said.

His face pinched slightly, just visible enough in the faint light for me to catch. “I swear I was going to get those troughs cleaned out before you dragged the feed from storage.”

“Hm.” I had no doubt about that.

Even as distracted as Asher was lately, he never skimped out on chores. Not if it meant pushing that burden onto someone else’s plate. He was a fair player on our team, eager to pitch in his share and then some. Valuable in more ways than his unexplainable talent for working his magic on abused animals.

“Sorry,” he said, swinging a leg over the saddle to drop down onto the ground. His boots hit the dirt with a solid thump, and almost immediately, his hand went to the filly’s reins, fingers tracing along the leather, holding them in a tight grip. “I swear I was going to.”

My lip twitched involuntarily.

The thing about having someone as charming as Asher around was that it didn’t just affect the animals. That sincerity of his, the way he looked at you with those wide, open eyes and meant every damn word that came out of his mouth—it was disarming. Endearing in a way that made it damn near impossible to be too hard on him, even when I should be.

Instead of watching the way those brown pools of his glinted slightly in the light while he stared up at me, I should be telling him off for cutting his sleep short. Should remind him that work came before pleasure and that the morning chores weren’t going to do themselves no matter how good he got at multitasking.

But instead of doing any of that, I just exhaled once more, watching as he rubbed the filly’s neck in that practiced way they’d both grown familiar with.

Goddamn it.

“Next time,” I said, my voice even. “The troughs come first.”

His shoulders relaxed slightly, that telltale grin flickering at the corner of his mouth. “Got it.”

Shaking my head, I pushed off the fence. “Good. Now, go get her cooled down and meet me by the stables. Plenty left to do before sunrise.”

“Yes, sir.”

My stomach kicked up with that all-too-familiar flutter—a sudden and unwelcome surge that reminded me I wasn’t as immune to him as I’d pretended. It rose up unexpectedly like it always did, a quick burst of warmth that spread through my body and made it hard to breathe through.

I’d learned to recognize it over the last few months and, more importantly, stamp down just as fast as it came on.