Page 7 of Wilder

Getting stuck at a dead end job because I had nothing else to work toward felt like a jail sentence. And with Gage hardly pushing me at all to find something to do once Greyson was gone, I had nothing but the heavy guilt of him working his ass off to put food on the table motivating me into getting online and finding something that sparked my interest.

Finding nothing felt like even more of a let down.

Until I happened to stumble upon a seasonal work program out in Texas on a horse ranch that specialized in breeding top-notch animals.

I still remembered how my fingers had paused over the trackpad on my laptop, hovering over the ‘X’ button to close out of the website and give up for the rest of the night to lounge on the couch playing video games and wait for my brother to get home from his date.

It would’ve been easy to shove off finding something to occupy myself with for another day, leave that problem for future-Asher to deal with.

But something about that ad had gotten me to click on ‘more info’ and plug the address into my phone’s GPS to see how long it would take for a bus to get me from Baton Rouge to this beautiful piece of property out in the middle of the Texas wilderness.

Nine hours and fourteen minutes, I’d come to find out.

Now that I was here, baking under the oppressive Texas sun all day, I couldn’t be happier. This was by far the best decision I’d ever made, even if it kind of broke Gage’s heart each night when I called him to tell him I was still alive and kicking. The subtle sigh right as he wished me a good night wasn’t lost on me, either.

He was so bad at pretending being an empty nester wasn’t driving him slowly insane.

But staying in Baton Rouge for the foreseeable future wasn’t encouraging me to stretch my wings and do something with my life. With school done and nothing else to focus on, there was no reason for me to not become some couch potato who lived off of my brother’s salary while my twin went off and made something of himself.

I wanted that, too. Something to call my own. Some place, rather, that wasn’t the city I’d grown up in my entire life.

Why not work on a horse ranch for the next few months?

Or maybe longer if Wilder decided I was worth the trouble of keeping around.

He was kind of a mixed bag that I was still having a hard time reading. Trying to figure out what went on in that head of his whenever he gave me his familiar pinched expression every time I talked haunted me, even in my dreams.

Whatever his opinion of me was, I couldn’t begin to fathom if it was good or bad. Since being hired, I’d tried my best to not be a problem child; tried to blend into the background of my group and keep my head down so as to not make any waves while I was here.

The unfortunate truth about my personality was that it was kind of in my nature to eventually stand out whether I meant to or not.

But man, at least Wilder was handsome as hell. No matter how frustrated he got with me, or... whatever way he felt about me, at least I got some eye candy to obsess over in the meantime.

“Yo, Torres.”

I slowed my jog around the bale, clicking my tongue against the roof of my mouth to slow Pelly down from her trot, too. She let out a soft huff, her white blonde tail coming up to swat at her hindquarters to chase off a few flies buzzing around us.

While the Texas heat was no joke, the horse flies were absolutely nothing to mess with, either. Those shits could take chunks out of your skin if they happened to land on you for longer than three seconds.

Turning toward the voice, I spotted Laken right as he stepped up onto one of the rungs of the fence, swinging one leg over it and then his other before settling himself down on the rail. A sketchpad came to rest on one of his knees while his pencil was tucked behind his left ear.

“What’s up?” I asked.

He nodded at me, sliding his pencil out from behind his ear. “Keep her right there for a second.”

Amused, I patted Pelly’s chest and stopped us both right before we moved around the other side of the bale again, keeping her right in Laken’s sight as he hunched over his sketchbook and put his pencil to the paper.

Out here in the farthest paddock from the stables, it was nice and quiet. Peaceful enough to hear the scratching sound of pencil meeting paper in a feverish fashion.

I found it kind of funny that out of everyone here, Laken and I seemed to get along the easiest. Maybe it was because he reminded me a lot of Greyson—empathetic and deeply intuitive, and that he tended to hide behind an easy-going facade because it made things like getting in the middle of people’s business less complicated. Just like my brother.

Or maybe it was because I also had some weird kind of intuition, too. I’d never thought too deeply into my own mental fortitude before coming here.

That was an area my brother excelled in so why bother trying to step on his toes?

However, the longer I spent time with these horses, the more I was beginning to realize I had some kind of sixth sense when it came to what they needed; figuring out how they ticked while everyone else seemed stumped on how to handle them.

Bragging wasn’t exactly my forte, but I would be lying if I said I wasn’t pretty damn proud of how genuinely surprised the entire staff was after I’d gotten that gelding groomed and saddled before taking him on a short walk around the paths leading throughout the property. Endless stories about him kicking the shit out of farriers and vets gave me enough balls to try my hand at figuring out what the hell was going on with him.