Page 14 of Last Chance Love

“Riley left about, oh…half an hour ago? Best thing for him is bed rest, and I know the beds in the cabin aren’t the greatest, but hey, our ball of sunshine has himself a Tier One cabin, so I’m sure he’ll be fine.”

He cocked his head. “I should know better, but sometimes I still find myself surprised at how much you figure out.”

I snorted. “Riley talks a lot. And Max was here.”

“He’s his mentor, so that makes sense, but I can’t imagine Max had much to say.”

“Actually, he did,” I said with a shrug. “You’d be surprised what someone will say when someone they care about is hurt. Even the most taciturn, antisocial, horse whispering types.”

Leon chuckled, leaning on his toned forearms, covered in a fine layer of pitch-black hair. “Some people might say Max doesn’t like anyone. Isn’t capable of it.”

“Some people, but not you.”

“Nah, I’ve been dealing with him for a couple of years. He’s grumpy and a bit of a dick, but he’s not inhuman. He’s bound to start liking someone other than the damn horses,” Leon said with a shrug. “I think he might even like me.”

“Well, I think you’d be surprised how much he seems to like Riley,” I said. “He was trying to hide it, but he was freaking out. Trying to keep it under control. Everything points to worried and freaked out, andnotbecause he would get in trouble over this.”

“Hmm,” Leon said, bowing his head, brow stitched together thoughtfully. I watched him chew lightly on his bottom lip, a finger tapping against an elbow, all signs he was in his head. I waited, and sure enough, he grunted, picking his head up. “I wouldn’t have said it before, but that makes sense.”

“What?”

“That someone like Riley might actually get through to someone like Max.”

“Really? Riley is like…walking on sunshine all the time. I mean, he works hard from what I can see, considering he’s not exactly scrawny, and he’s got some marks from working, and he’s smart from what I heard, but?—”

“Just makes sense. Pairing him with someone like Reno would have been a terrible idea. But putting him with Max makes sense to me now, points to Mona. I might not have made that same call…damn her.”

I’d seen him do something like that before, so I wasn’t surprised. He had always been incredibly intuitive, and his ability to gauge people was scarily accurate sometimes. On the other hand, it always seemed to slip away from him at the worst possible moments, and suddenly, everything could fall apart. It seemed better the past couple of years, at least more consistent, but it still made me wary of trusting it too much. His choices about his intuitive leaps tended to be bold, but if he lost the proverbial thread along the way, or his intuition failed him halfway through, it opened him and the people around him up to the whole experience of the crashing and burning.

“Well,” I said, pushing away toward the cabinet behind me. I fished out the keys and opened it, grabbing the bottles momentarily before getting what I needed. “You don’t need to worry about Riley. As far as we’re concerned, he’ll be back to his normal self tomorrow, most likely. A little sore for a few days, but he’s young, in good shape, so he’ll recover.”

“Well, that’s good, at least,” he said, though he didn’t sound relieved. I watched his left eye twitch and hold briefly before his eyes widened.

“So all you need to do is deal with your guilt because you think you’re responsible for what Reno did,” I said, bending down to grab a bottle of water from the fridge under the desk. Then, I placed the pills in a cup and set both the cup and bottle before him. “And take these before that migraine goes from flaring up to making you puke up everything you ate today.”

He glanced at the two things and then shook his head. “And how did you know?”

“I have my ways,” I told him with a smirk. There were things about Leon I didn’t know, that much was true, but I knew he could be one of the most stubborn men alive.

He had also spent too many years as the assigned third parent to his siblings at too young an age and had it stuck in his head that he couldn’t show weakness or pain. It didn’t matter that I was literally working in a clinic meant to help him. If I told him his tells for his growing migraine, he would probably try to hide it. Right now, in his mind, what mattered was that Riley was seriously hurt, so Leon’s hurts didn’t matter. And while I couldn’t prove it, I suspected there was some guilt-fueled self-punishment thrown into the mix.

“Though I’m less concerned about Reno’s infamously bad temper and would be more concerned about another one of your guys,” I told him with an arched brow.

He swallowed down half the bottle before frowning. “Who?”

“Elliot.”

“Elliot, why?”

“Well, he’s not the same level of sunshine and daisies as Riley, but he’s not normally known for his bad attitude, especially at this time of day.”

“What…aren’t most guys a little grumpier after a long day?”

“Not Elliot. I think it’s a product of his ADHD. A lot of people with the diagnosis tend to be night owls, more than your average person. So it doesn’t matter how early he gets up, he tends to ‘brighten’ as it gets later. But lo and behold, he was almost as grumpy as Max when he came in earlier. Got a laugh out of him finally, but phew, it was a close one.”

“Oh. I see.”

“And he also told me to tell you you’re an asshole but that he knows you mean well.”

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