HUNTER (The Corbin Brothers Book 1)

by Lexie Ray

  “You were the one calling for help in the shower,” I muttered.

  “That reminds me.” She fished around in some shopping bags that were by her suitcase and dropped several at my feet. “You’re also going to be responsible for making modifications to whichever shower you’re going to be using. Handrail. Grips. Shower caddy.”

  “I don’t think I’m going to have the strength.”

  “You just want me to help you in the shower again.”

  “I wouldn’t say no to that.” I grinned wolfishly at her, and she threw her apple core at me. I only barely kept it from bouncing off of me and to my clean floors.

  “After you’re done modifying the showers, you’re going to fix the doorbell.” Hadley continued her laundry list of “rehab” tasks for me to complete. Where was it going to end?

  “That thing’s been broken for ages.”

  “Uh-huh. It’s a nuisance.”

  I rolled my eyes. “What else?”

  “I’m so glad you asked.” That made me particularly sorry to have asked. “You’re going to clean the rest of the house, do your brothers’ laundry, sweep the porch, and start dinner for everyone.”

  “You know how dirty this house is, don’t you?”

  “I am well aware. I live here now, in case you’ve forgotten.”

  “I’m not the best housekeeper of the family.”

  “I don’t care. You’ll do just fine.”

  Hadley just didn’t let up. I had to admire her—however grudgingly—for that. She was the toughest person I’d ever met, pushing me beyond my limits, well past when I felt like quitting. I got the laundry basket of my clean clothes up the stairs—after several close calls and near disasters—and dumped them on my unmade bed. Chance was just as big a slob as I was, but I gathered up all his clothes dutifully in the laundry basket to take back downstairs and wash.

  “Did you miss being back in your old room?” Hadley asked, looking around. “Has much changed?”

  It was strange to sit there and ruminate with her. I hadn’t been back in this bedroom since I’d been a man with two legs, returning to the ranch one last time before going to Afghanistan. Even though Chance had lived in here since I returned, he hadn’t changed anything—right down to the framed photos on the dresser. I colored as I saw Hadley examining them, hoping she would pass over the photo of the blonde, but Hadley was shrewd.

  “Ooh,” she crooned. “Who’s this with the glamour shot?”

  “Ex-girlfriend,” I said.

  “Does she have a name?”

  “Eileen.” I made a move to start my perilous trek back downstairs with the basket full of Chance’s things, but Hadley wasn’t through discussing this yet.

  “Who broke up with whom?”

  “What do you care?”

  “Just curious.” Hadley studied me. “She broke up with you.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “Because you’re still upset about it.” She looked down at the picture, then back at me. “What’d you do to make her break up with you?”

  I laughed bitterly. “Lost a leg in a war.”

  “Fucking bitch.” Hadley surprised me with her vehemence resurfacing as she snatched the frame from the dresser. “We have a new chore to add to our list.”

  “Okay…”

  “Come on. We’re going downstairs. Bring the laundry basket. Save yourself a trip.”

  Going down the stairs was much more harrowing than going up, but Hadley had piqued my curiosity. She’d tucked the frame under her arm and waited for me at the bottom of the stairs, whistling tunelessly. I ended up sitting on the top step and scooting on my ass all the way down to the first floor, dragging the laundry basket beside me.

  “Join me on the porch,” she said, opening the front door grandly.

  “Okay.” I felt a little uncertain, pushing out the screen door, wondering what Hadley had up her sleeve.

  “I hope you know that Eileen is a piece of shit,” Hadley announced loudly, the heat swamping us both and enveloping us immediately in heavy sweat.

  “She just couldn’t really handle it.”

  “She’s a piece of shit.”

  I swallowed hard. “Okay.”

  “Say it. Eileen is a piece of shit.”

  “I don’t really want to.”

  “Why not?”

  I couldn’t say that there were particularly fond memories, though we’d rutted like rabbits. We were young and stupid, and when shit got real, Eileen took off. It wasn’t as if we were married or anything. We were just …

  “Hunter! Tell me why you don’t think Eileen is a piece of shit.”

  “I guess I can’t blame her is why,” I said finally.

  “Why the hell not?”

  “Because if I had been able to run away from myself, I would’ve,” I said. “And I did, in a way, with the pills and the drinking.”

  “But you’re done running, aren’t you?” Hadley asked, her green eyes boring into mine. “You’re facing the music now, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hell, yes!”

  “Hell, yes.”

  “Eileen’s a piece of shit because she left you when you needed support the most,” Hadley said. “Let’s boot her from your life officially, shall we?”

  “I mean, she hasn’t contacted me again, if that’s what you mean. And I have no desire to contact her.”

  “No. I mean like a purification ritual or something. I’m not saying we should burn sage, but we can at least get this damn portrait out of your house.”

  “Okay,” I said, warming up to the idea. If I was going to spend the rest of the day cleaning, I might as well do some really deep cleaning.

  “Excellent.” Hadley held the picture frame out. “Balance on both your crutches and dropkick this piece of shit as far as it will fly.”

  “I’ll try my best.”

  The first attempt was a dud, Hadley withdrawing too soon and me whiffing the dropkick, the frame dropping harmlessly off the porch and into the dust.

  “Pathetic,” Hadley said. “Try again. I want to hear glass shatter.”

  “Okay. Let’s do it.”

  The second time was the charm, in this case. We timed the action perfectly, and I booted Eileen right in her smiling face, glass raining down across the front yard and gravel driveway, the picture frame skittering to a halt beside Tucker’s parked truck.

  “Yes!” Hadley screamed, jumping up and down. “That was exactly what I envisioned! You hit that piece of shit right out of the park.”

  Her enthusiasm was catching, and I found myself grinning from ear to ear—especially when picturing my brothers’ priceless reactions when one of them would inevitably stumble upon Eileen’s defaced portrait.

  “You’ve made a good start, Marine, but we still have miles to go,” Hadley announced. “Where are we?”

  “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 prope
rty—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.”