HUNTER (The Corbin Brothers Book 1) (7 page)

“I’ll get Chance’s laundry started and install the modifications to the bathroom upstairs,” I said. “Then I’ll change the laundry to the dryer and start Avery’s laundry in the washer before cleaning the front room. Then it’s more laundry and more cleaning and starting dinner.”

“Good planning, Hunter. Let’s hop to it.” She said it with a grin, teasing me, and I didn’t even feel the need to be defensive. I wanted to work, to surprise my brothers, to achieve everything that Hadley had put on my to-do list. For some reason, booting that picture frame out of the house had given me energy I didn’t know I had.

And that was just the first day of rehab. I slept like a baby, nightmares need not apply.

Hadley was lots of things, I was starting to learn—and a mover and shaker of people was one of them. She compelled people to bend to her will—whether they wanted to or not. I was at ground zero of this phenomenon, and she was propelling me around the house, making me complete chores and little repairs as best I could. I got to witness it with the rest of my brothers, too.

Hadley encouraged Avery to move out to a little trailer we had on the property—after I fixed it up, of course—so that she could take over his room, which was right next to mine.

“I’d live there, but I think it’s important to stay close to the patient,” she said, her green eyes wide and doe-like, Avery nodding at her like it was his idea in the first place.

“I think you want to stay in the house because the trailer doesn’t have air conditioning,” I murmured in her ear as Avery went upstairs to pack his room up.

“I think you want to help your brother move his things to the trailer,” she said, smiling cheerfully at me.

She also compelled people to do things for me. Working directly with the VA, Hadley used both her charm and her clout to bring a prosthetics specialist out to the ranch to save us the trip to Dallas. I was fitted right there and then in the comfort of my own home with a vaguely uncomfortable carbon fiber leg that chafed at my thigh.

“It doesn’t seem as sturdy as I thought it would,” I said, still clutching my crutches for support.

“It’s stronger than metal,” Hadley reasoned. “Why don’t you lose the crutches for a moment and see how it feels?”

“I don’t think it’ll hold my weight,” I said. “It feels weird.”

“You’ll get used to it.”

“I thought it would be heavier.”

“Science is a wonderful thing.”

And she even called a few friends of friends and got a counselor to agree to talk with me regularly over the phone. To be fair, she had to get me to agree to do it first.

“I don’t need a counselor,” I insisted. “Don’t you see how well I’m doing?”

“You’re doing better,” Hadley allowed. “I wouldn’t call it well yet.”

“I’m off the pills,” I said. “I don’t drink to get drunk. What more do you want from me?”

“To stop screaming in your sleep,” she said calmly. “That’s what you need the counselor for.”

I tried to keep a poker face and failed miserably, shame casting my eyes downward.

“It’s nothing to be embarrassed about, Hunter,” she said. “I didn’t mean it like that. I was just being honest with you.”

“You talk in your sleep, too,” I said, on the defensive.

Hadley paused. “Excuse me?”

“That night—the final night I was laid up in detox. You spoke in your sleep.”

Her face went pale. “I don’t remember that.”

“You were very tired.” I thought she would be amused, but she wasn’t. Had I said something wrong?

“What did I say?”

“You know, I’m sorry I brought it up.”

“Hunter, what did I fucking say?”

I gulped. “That you love me—well, not me. I don’t know. You were probably dreaming about someone else. You said, ‘I love you.’ That’s all.”

Hadley snorted, but the color didn’t return to her cheeks. “Love you? We haven’t even fucked.”

“Damn straight.”

“You’ll talk to the counselor by phone twice a week.”

“Fine.”

She seemed surprised that I’d relented, but I just didn’t want to perturb her any more than I had. I was puzzled over her response to my little joke. What was she so frightened of? It was almost as if she had something to hide, something that her subconscious might try and chat about when she was sleeping, her guard down.

I realized I knew very little about Hadley, even as her time at the ranch stretched to a month. We spent practically every minute of every day together, Hadley working me to the bone, pushing me well out of my comfort zone, but I didn’t really know much about her.

“You guys do realize we’re in the twenty-first century, don’t you?” she asked one day, shading her eyes, looking off into the distance. We were outside, me running through a brutal circuit of calisthenics.

I halted in my sit-ups. “Of course we are.”

“No one said you could stop,” she said, not even looking at me but continuing her scrutiny of the horizon.

“Why do you ask?” I grunted out, fighting to catch my breath enough to speak. It felt like I’d been doing these damn things for hours, and my abs—nonexistent though they were—were not happy.

“I’m either having a hallucination brought on by heatstroke, or I just saw one of your brothers ride away on a horse,” she said.

“You’re having heatstroke?” I muttered, sweat coursing down my body. “You probably did see one of my brothers riding a horse. It’s what we…what they do.” What I used to do.

“But you said you all are aware this is the twenty-first century, a glorious age of technology,” Hadley said, looking down at me. “Why do you keep stopping? You can talk and do sit-ups, can’t you?”

“I lose track of how many I’ve done,” I said.

“I’m keeping track, not you. Now, explain.”

I whooshed out an exhale. “Loads of people ride horses. It’s not a throwback. It’s a lifestyle.”

“But this is a modern cattle operation, isn’t it?”

“That’s right.”

“So why the horses? Aren’t their better ways to keep track of the cattle?”

“You mean ATVs?”

“I don’t know what I meant. I mean, I get that this is Texas and all that, but aren’t the horses a little…I don’t know…romantic? Old West? Nostalgic? You’ve done enough sit-ups. Let’s move on to push-ups.”

I groaned as I flipped myself over, trying to grab a few seconds’ rest with my response. “You might think horses are nostalgic, but that’s the way my parents wanted to run this place. They ranched because they loved it, and I guess they didn’t want ATVs. It seemed unnatural, it stressed the cattle out, and they enjoyed the exercise of riding horses when working the ranch.”

“Push-ups,” Hadley said impatiently, and I sighed as I complied with her endless, merciless demands. “You haven’t talked about your parents. Where are they?”

“Across the ranch, in a quiet corner of a field by the river.”

“A retirement home?”

“A family graveyard.”

“Jesus. Hunter, I’m sorry.”

“You didn’t say anything wrong.”

Hadley didn’t say anything for a while, letting me focus on my push-ups. They were so much harder than they regularly would’ve been, even if my arms were a little stronger than the rest of me because of my reliance on the crutches. It was less of a traditional exercise and more of a balancing act. I kept searching for my missing toes to join the others, helping propel me up and down, but they just weren’t there. I had to rely on the parts I had left to keep me moving, still uncomfortable with wearing the prosthesis on a regular basis.

“All of you Corbins are relatively young,” Hadley said hesitantly. “Chance can’t be much older than thirty or so…”

“He’s 35. It was a car crash that killed them.”

“I’m so, so sorry.”

“Again, nothing you did.”

“I’m expressing sympathy, Hunter.”

“Oh. Well, thanks, I guess. I don’t remember much about it. I was young. Please don’t say you’re sorry again.”

“So your parents made this ranch.”

“Nope. Inherited it. My dad’s great-grandparents.”

“So…this is a pretty big deal. A big family operation.”

“That it is.”

“Do you like ranching?”

“I haven’t ranched in a while.”

“But when you did, did you like it?”

“Yeah.”

“You don’t sound like you’re too thrilled about it.”

“I’m sweating balls and doing push-ups, Hadley!” I barked at her, every muscle in my body straining.

“You’re done with push-ups,” she said, ignoring my outburst. “Get some water.”

Goddamn. The last thing I wanted to do was heave myself to a standing position and hop over to the porch for the bottle of water, but Hadley was a tough taskmaster. Boot camp was a far-off memory, but I was having trouble deciding which was tougher—that training or Hadley’s rehab.

The water was still a little cool from the fridge, but it wouldn’t be for much longer. I drank whatever I thought my stomach would hold and splashed the rest on my face, whipping off my shirt to let it drip down my overheating core.

I opened my eyes to see Hadley squinting at me.

“Enjoying the show?” I joked.

“Just taking stock of everything we need to still do,” she fired back. “We need to put some meat back on your bones, Marine.”

I knew I still wasn’t in good fighting shape. I was a skeleton of my former self. Hadley was joking, but it still stung.

“I’ll get there,” I said wearily. “If you don’t kill me in the process.”

“What made you choose the Marines, anyway?”

“They’re the best.”

“Maybe, but better than the ranch?”

I squinted at her. “What are you getting at?”

“I’m not trying to get at anything. I was just making conversation. Sorry if I struck a nerve.”

Sometimes, I thought that joining the Marines was the worst mistake I’d ever made in my life. Well, maybe the worst one was choosing that road to patrol that day, running over that certain patch, and getting us all blown up in the process. But if I’d never decided to join the Marines, I wouldn’t have been in Afghanistan to begin with. So there was that.

“You didn’t strike a nerve,” I said. “Do you have any siblings?”

“No. Only child.”

“Well, you’ve never had to fight to stand out then.”

“I fought to distinguish myself from my family, from my hometown.”

“Then maybe you can understand.” I capped the empty bottle of water and set it back down on the porch floor. “I wanted to try my own thing. I’m the youngest of the family, and everything when I was growing up was always so fully invested in the ranch. We lived, breathed, ate, and drank this damn place. It’s what everyone talked about—keeping this place going. It was really important to our parents, to our family. It’s a legacy, a living, breathing memory, a way to keep our parents alive.”

“That’s a really difficult thing to handle,” Hadley said thoughtfully. “For all of you.”

I shrugged. “We did what we had to do. We didn’t have any family other than each other. We had to stick together and keep on doing the thing we knew best.”

“So all of you always worked the ranch.”

“We all came back,” I said. “We’ve all had tours of duty off the ranch, but mine was the only literal one. I wanted to be different from the rest of my brothers, and I did it with the Marines. For better or for worse.”

“You regret it.”

“You bet your ass.” I shook my head. “No, no, I don’t regret it. I don’t know. It was formative. It was important. I felt strongly about doing it—beyond differentiating myself among us ‘Corbin boys.’ But every action has a consequence.”

Hadley chewed on that a while. “I hope you’re not suggesting that your injury was somehow a consequence of leaving the ranch.”

“You think I would’ve lost my leg if I stayed here?”

“Well, you never know,” she said. “But it wasn’t some cosmic recompense, losing your leg in Afghanistan for leaving the ranch. That’s a silly way to think.”

She could tell me that, and I could nod my head at her, but it was what I believed nonetheless. I’d turned my back on the ranch, on my parents’ dream, on my hardworking brothers, and I’d lost my leg in the process as punishment.

“Are you happy to be back here on the ranch with your brothers?” Hadley asked.

And what was I supposed to say to that? I’d meant to leave the ranch, sure, at least for a while, so I could explore my own identity. But I’d always meant to come back. I loved this place. I wanted to see it succeed. I wanted to help everyone succeed. Instead, I’d come back to the place where I grew up as half a man, shattered in my mind and spirit, and a detriment to my brothers. They had to help me
and
run the ranch, and I didn’t know if any of them would ever forgive me for dragging them down like this—let alone if I would ever forgive myself. Lately I’d taken to believing that the drought was somehow my fault, too, that I’d brought it back with me—cloudless skies for months on end.