Page 17 of Wilder

I exhaled slowly, bracing myself. “All right, let’s hear it. What dumbass plan have you cooked up this time?”

He laughed. “Why do you always assume the worst?”

“Because you’re calling me in the middle of the day while I know damn well you don’t have a break right now. Which means either something’s gone horribly wrong, or you’re scheming. And since you’re not calling me from a hospital bed⁠—”

“Yet,” he interjected playfully.

I closed my eyes, pinching the bridge of my nose. “Grey.”

His laughter rang through the speaker again. “Relax, Ash. I’m fine. No missing limbs, no broken bones. No official reprimands⁠—”

“That you know of.”

He ignored me. “But! I did come bearing news of a wonderful idea I had involving Gage.”

Oh, boy. Here we go.

I lifted my hand the second Pelly swung her head back around to watch me, absently stroking her mane as she nosed at my shoulder again, completely unbothered by my growing dread. “Do I even want to know?”

“That depends,” he replied. “Do you want to hear about my brilliant plan that’s going to make Gage pass out from joy or do you want to keep being an asshole?”

I snorted. “So is this the part where I ask what the catch is and you pretend there isn’t one?”

“Oh, there’s a catch. But don’t worry—it’s totally manageable.” He sounded way too pleased with himself.

That statement alone had alarm bells going off in my head. “Define manageable.”

“You know what I heard come out of your mouth? I heard: trust in your twin brother’s superior intellect.”

I groaned. “Greyson⁠—”

He cut me off. “Too late, I’m already explaining. So you know how you’re always talking about how you never get to take a break and you’re always stuck doing chores until after dinnertime? And have no time for family?”

“I never said that.” Not to mention it was hardly true.

Sure, some days we were all stuck raking the stalls well past the sun setting, or taking down top stock to ease the next morning’s burdens but that was never a usual deal. Wilder worked us well and good but not to the bone.

“Well, that’s what I hear when you complain,” he corrected. “Which is why I’ve taken the liberty of fixing that little problem for you.”

Huh?

“Fixing how, exactly?” I asked.

Greyson didn’t answer right away. Instead, there was a long pause—too long—before he finally said, far too casually, “So, you might be getting something in your email soon.”

I blinked, pulling my phone away from my ear. “...What?”

His soft, “Surprise!” was only faintly heard as I unlocked my phone and went into my email.

Sure enough, sent exactly one minute ago, was an email from a commercial airline with the subject line bold and impossible to miss: ‘ROUNDTRIP: BATON ROUGE’.

My mouth dropped open.

No way.

Putting the phone back up to my ear, I let out a slow breath, already bracing myself for whatever nonsense was about to come out of my brother’s mouth. “Tell me you did not just blow your government check on buying me a plane ticket home.”

“Technically, it’s a roundtrip ticket. And I bought us both one.”