Chapter 3
Asher
My hands were rubbed raw from the lead wrapped around my hand, a slight burning sensation that coupled nicely with the tugging of the horse, that I’d affectionately named Pelly, attached to the other end of it while I led her around the bale of hay again.
Doing this without a pair of gloves on was probably stupid, and a decision I was definitely going to regret come tomorrow morning when Wilder inevitably assigned me to clearing out the stalls and refilling them with fresh bedding; a chore he’d been talking about for the past week and a half but had yet to get around to delegating to anyone.
Usually, those were the tasks I got put on, helping to maintain the upkeep of the ranch.
It wasn’t a bad job by any means, definitely beating out some of the other non-glamorous chores that went into keeping a property like this running smoothly. My problem was that I wanted to do more than cleaning up shit all day.
Literally.
Obviously, working here with the crew we had meant pitching in equally and doing my fair share of getting my hands dirty.
I didn’t have that much of an inflated ego where I believed I was above any of that, not by a long shot, and had always enjoyed putting in my fair share of labor to ease the burden of someone else’s.
That was exactly what I’d been taught my entire life growing up. With an older brother in a career that was based exclusively on teamwork, those kinds of values definitely blended into how he raised my brother and me, too.
Greyson and I grew up always working together, no matter what it was—in school, during extracurriculars, being complete nuisances to our older brother because that was our job as the younger siblings; the list went on and on.
So, finding that here at the ranch it was required of me, felt like second nature to fall into.
I was well aware of the fact that I needed to earn my keep as the newbie and I had no problem doing so.
After all, that was exactly what I’d signed up for the moment Wilder had clasped my then soft hand in his sun-kissed, work-roughened, and calloused one, and welcomed me aboard.
Which was exactly why I got good at blasting through my chores for the day in order to focus on what I really wanted to do: trying to rehab the horses no one had any clue how to help.
Coming to work here had kind of been on a whim.
With Greyson headed off for the military weeks after we graduated high school and Gage busy with the fire station, I was the one left to drift aimlessly after high school.
I’d graduated with no plan and not an ounce of will power to drag myself into one of the local fast food places and ask for an application.
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.
Trial and error had earned me a few good swats to the legs but nothing that landed me in the ER with a swift call to my brother to make the almost ten hour drive to come get me. I’d yet to have any near-death experiences so far, and I was planning on keeping it that way.
Ironically, before any of this, I’d never been surrounded by highly intelligent animals. Or any kind of animal, for that matter. With Gage always working and Grey and I in school, none of us had time for pets.
Which made this manifestation all the more strange. And kind of cool.
“You taking a break?” I asked Laken. “Or did you actually finish early for once.”
He barked out a laugh, accidentally startling Pelly into jerking against her lead and causing me to have to tug her back into place.
I ran a hand over her chest and up the ropey muscles of her neck a few times to soothe her.
She was one of the ones that startled easily but was also, thankfully, quite simple to calm down.
I liked to think of it as a kind of reciprocity for her being willing to work with me.
“What are you trying to say?” he replied, squinting down at his drawing before turning his pencil over to erase something off the page.
His dark hair was pulled back from his face with a light colored bandana, the edges of it long since stained with sweat from the day. Unlike the rest of us, he tended to wear his t-shirts with the sleeves cut off, making him one of the only ones on the ranch not sporting a farmer’s tan.