Page 61 of Last Chance Love

“That’s gross, you’re gross,” Elliot informed him without the slightest malice or annoyance in his voice.

“I’m beyond disgusting,” Reno said, putting his hand on Elliot’s lower back, dangerously close to his ass, I noticed, and gave him a push. “Now get to work!”

Elliot only laughed, giving Reno a wink over his shoulder. I couldn’t see Reno’s face anymore, but I thought he might be smirking as he followed Elliot. It had been a while since I’d been able to really watch the two of them interacting, and for the first time, I felt a sense of calm and relief.

“Leon,” came Reed’s soft voice from behind me. Anyone else might think he was simply getting my attention, but I could hear the note of warning.

“It hasn’t even been twenty minutes,” I told him in a low voice so I wasn’t overheard. Which wasn’t likely now Elliot and Reno were further away, bickering, and the closest group of guys was banging, fixing up a barn while the animals roamed about. “I’m not going to keel over.”

“Leon,” he repeated, and I had to roll my eyes at the persistence. There was no way I could argue when he wasn’t giving me anything to argue with. It was something he discovered in our senior year, and it still drove me crazy.

“God save me. I’m surrounded by pains in the ass,” I muttered as I pushed away from the fence and went to where he was sitting on the bench. I joined him, trying not to be too obvious about the ache in my back, but winced when the drop jarred my spine. “And the pains in my back.”

“You probably wouldn’t have to deal with those if you listened to your body,” Reed said, flipping a page without looking up.

“Okay, well, it’s my body, not yours, but you’re the only one I keep hearing doing all the nagging,” I told him, purposefully ignoring the ache despite having just acknowledged it. Two could play at the stubborn game, and it didn’t matter if he’d say I started the game in the first place.

“Your body was telling you to sit down and take a breath long before I said anything.”

“Again, it’s my body. So unless you started being able to hear things for me, then?—”

“It’s almost the end of the day, and you’ve been walking and standing around as much as possible. When you’ve been standing too much, you lean on everything as subtly as you can. When that stops working, the pain gets worse, and you start to get cranky and lose patience. Which is exactly what you’ve been doing for the past ten minutes, evident by the fact that you’re getting grumpy with me.”

He hadn’t once looked up from his book, and I glared at him. “You’re really annoying. I hope you know that.”

“Mmm,” he said in an undisturbed hum. “Reno and Elliot seem to be getting on just fine on their own.”

“I’ve spotted that,” I said, knowing full well he was distracting me from the original topic, but it was nice to talk about the progress those two had made. “I’m thinking I might send them out on their own.”

“Oh? Where?”

“Eh, I know you’ve never been put on that duty since the clinic pretty much snatched you up from day one.”

“It wasn’t day one.”

“It was the first month.”

“True.”

“But sometimes guys get sent out onto the plains. Usually, it’s because animals get loose. Usually, goats or sheep, but sometimes just to scout around and see if anything has changed on the unused property.”

“Ah, right,” he said, looking up from the book. “I’ve treated a few cases of dehydration and severe sunburn from those little missions.”

I sighed. “We give them the tools necessary to survive out there without getting hurt and the information they need, but some people just don’t learn.”

“And you think Elliot and Reno are ready for that? They’re Tier Threes.”

Sometimes, it was easy to take for granted that another Tier One would understand how things around here worked, even knowing Reed’s experience at the ranch had been unique. “It’s usually at the end of a Tier Three’s time at the third tier. It’s a sort of final evaluation to see if they can do much without being supervised so closely and thus are capable of being bumped up to the second tier.”

“One hell of a risky way to test people,” Reed noted but didn’t sound bothered.

It wasn’t like he was wrong. There were plenty of things that could go wrong. Reed had already pointed out one of them, considering some guys did get hurt, which is why we never sent them out alone. Sending Elliot and Reno would be even riskier since it was usually a group activity, so if one or two of them got hurt, there was always more to back them up and bring them back to safety.

The other risk was that someone might try to take advantage of their newly granted expansion of freedom and make a break for it. That, again, was usually covered because there was more than one person out there to serve as reminders of what they weren’t supposed to do. The other, far less humanistic reason was sheer pragmatism. There was little out there for miles but unforgiving wilderness that could kill you in a few days. The only option, even if you could survive, was to risk crossing the lands of other ranches in the area that had a quiet agreement to bring anyone suspicious back to Isaiah Ranch, and the only direction that didn’t lead toward the ranches was straight to the border. And considering the presence of cartel movement in the area, well, it was better to run into a nosy ranch hand, in my opinion.

“Which just makes me want to ask, how did they test you?” I asked curiously, realizing he had never gone through the normal process.

“I honestly have no idea,” he said with a laugh. “It was just, little by little. They started letting me do more and then expecting more from me. Honestly, there isn’t much that separates me from the doctors at the clinic. I mean, there is, in terms of job experience, I’m beat there, but most of the same duties and responsibilities are there.”

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