Chapter 26
Asher
Holy fucking shit.
My heart was beating so hard in my chest, I thought it might crack a rib clean in half.
Each thump rattled through me, making it near impossible to suck in a lungful of air past the lump in my throat.
Sully hadn’t stopped staring me down since he’d dragged me in here—that hard, furious expression of his pinning me right to my spot, scaring the shit out of me. I’d never been on this side of his anger before, luck and good behavior putting me past the line of fire.
If I’d known Sully was in the house—if I’d had even the faintest clue anyone aside from Wilder was downstairs—I never would’ve left the bedroom.
Hell, I probably would’ve hidden myself under his damn bed like some kind of stalker waiting for him to come back, or climbed out the window and scaled the side of the fucking house until my feet were touching the ground again and I could run back to the bunkhouse.
Anything other than what I’d actually done.
I’d gotten up to pee. That was it.
A harmless, half-asleep shuffle across the hall to find the bathroom after managing to find my clothes strewn around Wilder’s room. Rubbing at my eyes with my brain still fuzzy from sleep and that stupidly good sex we’d had the night before, my body still sore from it.
What I hadn’t expected was for my dumb luck to run out the second I cracked Wilder’s door open and stepped out into the hallway, my hand still wrapped around the knob when Sully spotted me from where he was standing at the top of the stairs, looking like a fucking specter straight out of one of my nightmares.
It’d only taken him half a second to register on my face—his eyes snapping wide, his jaw clenching so hard I thought he’d crack a molar the second he realized what room I’d been coming out of.
I could see the exact moment when it all clicked. When his gaze drifted down to my wrinkled clothes and messy hair, looking like I’d spent the night exactly where I wasn’t supposed to be.
I should’ve run.
Or, fuck, lied.
Doing anything else but standing there like I was brain dead would’ve been better. Fainting right there in the hallway would’ve at least saved myself the next ten minutes of hell.
But I hadn’t.
Instead, I hadn’t fought him as he dragged me down the staircase and into the dining room, tossing me down into the chair across from Wilder’s mother who was also staring at me like she’d seen a ghost.
“Oh, dear,” she mumbled to herself.
What would it take for the universe to open up a hole in the middle of this house and allow me to crawl under the floorboards and die?
“Sully,” Wilder said, his words slow and careful. “It’s not what you think.”
Sully’s glare didn’t budge as he continued to keep his eyes on me. His mouth flattened into a thin line, grinding out between his teeth, “Then tell me what the fuck I’m seeing right now.”
Oh, I was so dead.
I swallowed hard again, my throat feeling like sandpaper.
What the hell were either of us supposed to do now?
Obviously this was exactly what Sully suspected it to be—that I’d spent the night and slept with my damn boss.
Didn’t matter that we were both grown adults who could make our own decisions. None of that counted when Wilder was my superior and wasn’t supposed to be getting involved with any one of his employees in the first place, regardless of our very obvious age gap.
Wilder let out a slow exhale, both of his hands coming up in front of him. “Listen, I... it’s my fault.”
My stomach twisted up painfully.
Was he actually going to try and take the blame for all of this?
To... what, make it seem like he came onto me?
Holy fuck.
No one would believe that, least of all Sully. Wilder was as straight-laced as they came. If anything, I looked like the guilty one for seducing him.
That sharp, stormy gaze flicked back to him instantly. “This what you wanted to talk to me about in the kitchen?”
Wilder’s lips pressed together in a tight line.
With a shake of his head, Sully stepped back from me. One hand came up to cover the lower half of his face while he shook his head a few more times, a small, “unbelievable” rumbling between his fingers.
He moved around the table, pacing the short distance from where the archway leading into the kitchen was and the end of the room.
When I glanced at Wilder, he was staring right at me with an expression I’d never seen before: fear.
“Should’ve known,” Sully was muttering to himself. “Back during Christmas. I should’ve fucking known.”
“It’s no one’s business,” Wilder shot back.
“You’re out of your goddamn mind,” Sully snapped, stopping short right in front of him. A finger popped to jab Wilder in the chest, two hard taps that forced the other man two steps back. “This entire time—when the hell did this start? Was it Christmas? That phone call?”
My stomach rolled. I was going to be ill.
How much did Sully know?
I’d been so careful keeping my crush to myself.
My drunken phone call hadn’t happened until New Year’s, so what the hell did Wilder say to grab Sully’s attention?
Christmas I’d been a mopey mess, not at all waxing poetic about my damn feelings and getting either of us into trouble.
But maybe that was all it took—Wilder stepping out to take my phone call when he never did that for anyone else. It wouldn’t take a genius for Sully to connect the dots, even if Wilder had come up with some grand excuse to wave the situation away.
That seed would’ve already been planted. All Sully would’ve needed was evidence to back it up.
Wilder’s shoulder lifted slightly, his gaze breaking away from mine to look at his second again. He hesitated for a moment, rubbing his fingers together at his sides. “Not long. It... after the holidays.”
That didn’t seem to satisfy Sully at all. In fact, it seemed to make him even more angry. “You’re his boss, Wilder. He’s almost half your goddamn age. You don’t think people are gonna talk about this?”
I winced, not being able to help it.
From an outsider’s perspective, it looked fucking rough, I wasn’t going to lie.
But did that really matter when it came to matters of the heart?
“I don’t care,” Wilder snapped back. “Like I said, it’s none of their business. It’s actually no one’s business what Asher and I do.”
Sully’s laugh sounded almost mocking, like he couldn’t believe this conversation was even happening. “Well, you fucking should, because you know what this looks like? It looks like you’re taking advantage of him.”
He pointed a finger toward me, the movement sharp.
The moment those words left his mouth, I rolled up onto my feet. “Sully, that’s not fair. I had a hand in this, too, you know.”
Heat flared through my body the moment his eyes pinned back on me again.
I wouldn’t back down from this. Letting Wilder take the heat when I also involved myself—hell, technically made the first move if we were going by semantics—was as ridiculous as someone trying to have an opinion on my sex life.
I got that it looked bad. Favoritism wasn’t something that should be going on when trying to run a business. However, at the same time, two people’s attraction to each other wasn’t something that could be helped in most cases. As long as we were both consenting, it shouldn’t matter.
I wasn’t some little kid needing to be protected—I was a fully grown adult capable of making my own decisions. If I wanted Wilder and he wanted me, no one was going to have a say in any of that.
Least of all our fucking coworkers.
The fact that the two of us were standing here being flayed open under Sully’s disappointed gaze while the rest of the damn ranch got to live their lives however they wanted felt too unfair. If I was getting involved with any of the other hands, like Laken or Ryder, no one would be batting an eye.
“You know I’d never do that,” Wilder said, ignoring me. He looked hurt, a little shake to his hand as he brought it up to run his fingers through his hair. “He— I’d never take advantage of anyone.”
Sully shook his head slowly. “I don’t know... I don’t know what I’m more pissed about. That you’re this reckless or this good at hiding shit.”
Wilder’s jaw ticked as he ground his teeth together. “You’re not my father, Sully. Stop lecturing me like you are.”
“Boys,” Emily chided.
Sully went quiet for a moment, the seconds stretching out between them—wide and cavernous.
The guilt boiling in my gut was an understatement.
Getting involved in something that was the cause of a fight like this, one that was never supposed to happen in the first place, was the last thing I’d been thinking about when Wilder brought me up to his bedroom last night.
If I would’ve known...
Fuck.
These two were never meant to be at odds, and now that they were, I wasn’t sure how any of us were supposed to come back from that.
Where did we even go from here?
Us being separated?
Sully forcing Wilder to let me go?
No matter what the end result to any of it turned out to be, I couldn’t help but imagine that we were standing over the edge of something irreversible.
I was going up against years of unspoken loyalty, years of family ties all tangled up in anger and grief, pent up with nowhere to go but implode internally. Being the catalyst for a relationship completely deteriorating was never something I wanted to do to either of them.
All I’d wanted was Wilder. Nothing else mattered at the time.
“You’re right,” Sully finally said. “I’m not. But what I do know is that your daddy would be disappointed in you.”
His words sliced through the air like a knife, aimed directly at the chest of the man standing right in front of him.
I watched the way Wilder reacted to them, like he’d been punched hard enough to make him flinch visibly, and for a split second, the solid, unshakable man I’d spent almost a year falling for looked like he’d been knocked clean off his feet.
My own heart cracked in half for him.
He didn’t deserve to be talked to like that. Not by Sully, not by anyone.
I knew what Sully meant to him, how Wilder looked up to him, how much of a second father figure he’d become in the wake of everything he and his mother had lost after his own father had passed.
To have that man throw those words around like a weapon was horrible, even if there was some truth to them.
None of this was fair.
Wilder’s face soon turned to stone, hard and unmoving while he squared his shoulders.
I could see the cracks forming underneath the surface, though, in the way his hands fisted at his sides. The hairline fractures in that careful mask he slipped over himself to keep his emotions locked up tight were visible enough for me to step forward and reach for him.
Fuck, all I wanted to do was cross the room and grab onto him, drag him out of here so he didn’t need to keep listening to this bullshit. Remind him that I was here—that I wasn’t going anywhere no matter how many times Sully tried to put this very obvious wedge between us.
“Enough.” Emily’s voice snapped through the awkward tension. “Both of you.”
They shifted awkwardly, like they’d both forgotten she was even in the room until she spoke. Honestly, I did, too. She’d been so damn quiet this entire time, it was like she’d completely disappeared into the background.
Neither of them looked at each other again after that, turning their glares away to anything else in the room.
When she turned in her seat, Emily’s gaze landed on me.
That steel in them softened instantly when she looked at me.
It wasn’t pity exactly, that was reflecting back in my direction, but something close to it.
More like a sad and tired understanding, like she already knew how this conversation was going to end and wanted to spare me from hearing the rest of it.
“I think you should head back up to the bunkhouse,” she said gently.
I opened my mouth, the protest right there on the tip of my tongue, ready to argue. “But—”
“Go, Asher.”
It wasn’t Emily this time; it was Wilder.
I whipped my head around to look at him.
There wasn’t an ounce of bite to his words.
No anger or frustration. Nothing like how Sully had been snapping at him seconds before.
If anything, his tone was too soft—careful in the way someone sounds when they’re trying to let you down easy even though the words themselves still feel like a blade between your ribs.
I hated it. Hated that it sounded like he’d already made peace with the fact that this wasn’t going to end the way either of us wanted it to.
My stomach twisted painfully. “Wilder...”
The worst part was the way he refused to meet my eyes, like if he did, he wouldn’t be able to go through with telling me to leave again, undoing whatever strength it had taken him to say it in the first place.
Why?
Why was he kicking me out now of all times?
When he needed me most?
Even if I wanted to know, the words were stuck in my throat the second I opened my mouth, sharp as broken glass when I tried to force them out into the open.
By the subtle shift of his body turning away from me, I could tell nothing I said would change his mind.
My legs felt heavy when I took that first step back, as I desperately tried to cling to the idea of him reaching out and telling me he’d made a mistake and to go upstairs instead.
Each step away from the table felt more weighted than the last, wading through what felt like thick mud, causing me to move slowly as I headed for the front door.
No one tried to stop me. No last minute shouts of my name or pleas for me to come back so we could talk this all out together; come to some sort of agreement between us all now that the truth was finally out there.
Only heavy silence followed me as I shoved my feet into a pair of spare house slippers by the door, not bothering to go back upstairs and grab my own shoes, and slipped out into the cold morning sun.
Everything around me felt heavy.
Like I was leaving pieces of myself behind with every measured step I took back up to the bunkhouse.