Page 51 of The Barn: Frost and Q
Quentin shuddered. “Ew. Please don’t ever do that again, or I will be forced to eat with Carson.”
They all laughed together, and somehow, he was super-glad he’d come down for supper with the guys tonight.
And now he was going to have a burger with them before he went back up to start researching dogs.
Sixteen
“Babe? Come look at this.”
Frost had been home a day, and it felt damn good to be back in the lap of luxury. He’d loved being useful out there in the field, training the new crews, but he’d forgotten how gross they got.
Seriously.
He’d had a shower. A gourmet meal. A little tender slap and tickle with Q before getting a damn good night’s sleep in their amazing bed.
Now he was gnawing on a chocolate croissant and reading the Seattle newspaper on his tablet while Q did his morning computer shit.
“What is it?” He rolled to his feet, his sweater flopping back down around his hips. He was kind of freezing and he didn’t really want to go look.
“I wanted to show you.”
So, he humored his hubs and wandered over to peer at the computer screen. “It’s a dog.” It was, in fact, a relatively large dog, one who looked like maybe a sled husky and Great Pyrenees mix. He had a goofy, friendly grinning look on his face,and he had a banner over his head that read, “Congratulations, Graduate.”
“Neat. What about…him?”
“Yeah. His name is Yukon.” Q gave him a sideways kind of look. “He’s two years old. He was in the shelter in Ketchikan, and he was pulled out to be trained as an assistance dog. He just graduated as a balance and wheelchair assist dog.”
“Ah.” He got it now. “He looks like a hoot.”
“Yeah. I put an app in on him before he graduated. If we can get there to pick him up, I’m approved.”
“Nice.” He grinned slowly, feeling a little evil. “You don’t want to take the ferry?” The ferry was scenic and took about twenty-one hours.
“It’s an hour to fly…”
“Baby, of course I’ll fly you.”
Q shot him a shit-eating grin. “We’re going to figure this out—the walking. I mean, you’re the money guy.”
“I think we should just hire you a personal assistant. You know, like I have Ender.”
“Ender would never work for me.”
“Or walk a dog. Which is what you need. Someone to walk the dog and deal with anything you need as far as errands, coffee, paperwork. Mostly the walking, though. There are lots of people who could use the work, the safety net.”
It actually made sense to him. Rather than go to all the work to build a dog run, or Q having to deal with coming down from the fourth floor ten times a day. They could totally bring in an assistant. Maybe a little pool of assistants, something for all of them to share.
He tilted his head. “Now this is an idea.”
Q blinked at him. “Okay…”
“No, seriously, hear me out. What if we hired a pool of assistants? Three or four guys. And they would be availabletwenty-four/seven. I mean, one of them would be, for any one of us.”
“Oh, I see, so we’d have to find a little herd of them is what you’re saying? A pod of people who wanted to do this job. You get room and board; you have a salary. That’s cool.” Quentin wrinkled his nose as he thought, and it was so damn cute. “If there were four of them… I don’t know. We’d have to do the math. Can you do some quick math? You’re the money person.”
“Okay… Well at forty hours a week, we’d need four point two people.” That was some mental mathematic gymnastics.
“I love those point two types…”
