Chapter 3 #3
He’d come in on the same bus as me when our group had arrived at the ranch.
I’d had no opinions of him when we first got here.
To me, he seemed like an unassuming kid, around my age, who kept to himself most of the time.
As our companions began to drop like flies and head back to the city—or wherever else they came from—we’d been inexplicably paired up quite a few times for training.
While I hadn’t minded, apparently being stuck with the only other newbie had somehow personally insulted Carter and had given him a weird kind of complex.
Over the last week and a half, he’d gotten himself wrapped up in a few troubling issues, most of them brought on by his constant itch to prove himself to the senior staff.
I’d sympathized with him the first two times he’d fucked up and pissed Wilder off, knowing firsthand what it felt like to want more while still having your training wheels on.
However, I wasn’t going out of my way to pull ridiculous stunts in order to try and force the owner of the ranch and his partner into moving me up the echelon like Carter was.
“All I did was take a crop to that horse’s leg to get it to move. I didn’t even leave a mark,” Carter argued.
I winced.
Honestly, he was digging his own grave at this point.
Outside of that being a terrible fucking practice when it came to highly intelligent animals like horses—a fact I’d learned during my heavy research before arriving my first day—he had no right to discipline anything without some kind of permission.
Something I highly doubted Wilder gave out freely.
As quiet as he was, I knew how deeply Wilder cared about these animals. It was plainly obvious in how much time and energy he spent making this place run the way that it did and how hands-on he was with their care.
Hurting any of them would piss me off, too.
“That’s not the point,” Sully growled out again.
“It’s not like that horse was one of the broken ones. The brood mares are fine—”
“Enough,” Wilder cut him off. “We’re not debating this. If I catch you doing something like that again, you’ll be sent home. Am I clear?”
There was a beat of tense silence. “Yeah. Crystal.”
Boots crunched along a lightly graveled path, slowly fading in the distance until they disappeared altogether.
Honestly, it probably wouldn’t be a bad thing to send him packing today.
I didn’t know Carter all that well, and under other circumstances maybe he was a decent guy, but he’d definitely shown so far that he had very little compassion for the horses we cared for.
Allowing him to stick around was giving him more chances to fuck around and hurt something else in the meantime.
Why would anyone want to keep someone like that around?
I shoved away from the wall and sighed softly. Unfortunately, it wasn’t my business to run. If Wilder, and Sully, wanted to keep Carter around and give him another chance, there wasn’t much the rest of us could do aside from keeping our eyes on him and reporting back if things went sideways.
Laken turned around to look at me, a frown on his face that most likely mirrored my own.
Despite not being here long, I’d come to care deeply for the animals under our care.
They weren’t just things you fed and watered occasionally like plants left in a windowsill.
They were real living and breathing creatures that deserved just as much respect as the rest of us did.
At the end of the day, we were all trying to make sure they lived good lives.
Hopefully, Carter ended up quitting on his own. That was the best we could wish for.
Right as I nodded at Laken for him to follow me around to the other side of the building and far far away from whatever follow-up conversation Wilder and Sully were about to have, a figure appeared behind him, making me freeze in place.
Wilder’s boots skated against the hard ground, coming to a quick stop the second he saw us.
Fuck.
Busted.
He stared at us both for a long moment before saying, “Any reason you gentlemen are lurking around during a private conversation?”
“Conversation?” Laken repeated. “What conversation? I was coming around to show you my new sketch I did of that palomino Torres likes.”
Wilder’s brows shot up as Laken untucked the sketchpad from under his arm and flipped to the page he’d been working on earlier.
Dark eyes darted down to it for a long moment while Laken continued to tap the page while talking about the lines he’d used to accentuate Pelly’s strong legs, before raising to pin directly on me.
My stomach twisted.
I really was beginning to hate the way he looked at me like that. Like he was trying to dissect me.
Not knowing what else to do, I flashed him a smile. “Well, we’ve got to go back to the paddock and grab those bales so we should get going. Pelly’s already back in her stall.”
Those same dark eyes narrowed slowly. “Pelly?”
Ah, fuck.
“That palomino.”
He probably thought I was nuts already getting attached to a horse when I barely had a few months under my belt. “Ah.”
Actually, maybe I kind of was.
My face felt hot as I grabbed onto Laken’s arm and hauled him with me. “See you later!”
Refusing to turn back around to see whatever expression was crossing over Wilder’s face now, I kept a tight grip on Laken’s arm as I marched us back to the paddock.
Tonight really couldn’t come soon enough.