by Lexie Ray
“Your brothers usually aren’t there this time of day,” she remarked. “That’s too bad. No kiss or second base unless we’re alone.”
“What? Which brothers?” I peered up toward the barn, but it was hard to tell.
“Three of them, I don’t know who’s who. Confession time? Sometimes I can’t keep their names straight in my head. I mean, there are five of you—uh-oh.”
“Uh-oh what?” I paused in my plodding, as Hadley looked harder.
“Two of them are supporting one of them. He’s injured.”
“Give me my crutches. We have to hurry. We’ll never get there otherwise.”
Hadley complied quickly. “I’ll run ahead.”
“Go.”
I moved much quicker with the added security of those crutches even as Hadley dashed ahead of me, jumping over the taller patches of grass like a gazelle. Show off. I was making much better time than before, though, and I made it to the barn, though breathless, in time to see Hadley helping Chance and Tucker lower Emmett to a folding chair.
Emmett cursed bitterly, and not even Chance gave him a speech about foul language in front of women. They shouldn’t have bothered, anyway. Hadley had shown herself to have a foul mouth when flustered, and she didn’t so much as bat an eyelash when I berated myself or her or my missing leg with the creative language I’d learned both from my brothers and my time in the Marines.
“What’s going on?” Hadley asked as Chance and Tucker backed away from Emmett, Tucker mopping sweat from his brow.
“Tell her,” Chance prodded.
Emmett threw his hands up in the air. “Nothing. I don’t know. Jesus. We really don’t need this right now.”
“Is there ever a good time to get hurt?” Hadley asked wryly. “You’re favoring your right knee.”
“It doesn’t hurt right now,” he said, his hands now fluttering over the knee she’d observed sharply. “But it hurt like a son of a bitch—sorry—when it happened.”
“When what happened?” Hadley was busy rolling his pant leg up, all business.
“One of the calves had gotten stuck in the gully,” Emmett explained, wincing a little as she jostled his knee. “I went down there to carry it out, and I must’ve stepped wrong coming back up the bank. I don’t know. It was as if I fell down one way and my knee went the other. That doesn’t make sense—shit!”
“Sorry,” Hadley said. She’d been waggling his leg back and forth. “I was going to ask you if that hurt, but it’s obvious it did.”
“It’s not just pain,” Emmett said, his face pale. “It’s like…the connection is weak, somehow, in there. Like something’s not all the way tied together in there.”
“I’m thinking you’ve torn some ligaments in your knee,” she said grimly. “You’d need an MRI to be sure, but that would be my diagnosis.”
“How could I be so stupid?” Emmett demanded, pounding the couch with his fist. “I need to be back out there.”
“I don’t think so,” Hadley said, shaking her head. “You need to stay off that leg—at least until we know exactly what’s torn. You need to make an appointment at the hospital for —”
“For nothing,” he interrupted. “We can’t afford something like that. Just patch me up here. I can ride a horse, at least.”
She gave a short laugh. “That’s not how it’s going to work, I’m afraid. You’re going to need rest. You might require surgery. Let me take you to the hospital. I’ll work out the details.”
Chance cut in. “You’re not going to pay for whatever he needs. I can’t let you do that.”
“I didn’t say anything about paying. I’ll just call in some favors—that’s all. I have connections. You’re lucky I’m here, working with Hunter. This’ll take rehab to get over, Emmett.”
“We’ll pay you,” Chance said. “We’re not just going to take advantage of you like that.”
“Please.” Hadley waved him away. “Call it my two-for-one special. I’ve been around you guys for so long now, it’s as if you’re practically family. Emmett’s on the house. You’re already paying out the ass for Hunter.”
I jerked involuntarily at several of the things that left Hadley’s mouth so casually. I hated, first of all, the reminder that I was a burden on this family. No one said it as such, but I knew I was draining the coffers as much as the damn ranch was. Hadley herself had said she hadn’t come cheap.
But as much as I wished I could end our sessions together to start saving my family some money, I had to admit that I needed Hadley. More than that, I liked having her around. I’d gotten so used to it, but every day was still wonderful and new. I looked forward to working with her, to impressing her, to spending time with her, to her touch on my body…
That led me to the other thing. Did she really see us Corbins as practically family? That was nice, on the one hand. We could be a surly, sweaty, disgusting bunch. It was refreshing to have someone here who could hold her own against both my brothers and me.
But the feelings I had for her, that kiss that had just…happened…those things were decidedly a little more than fraternal.
“You’ve got to go to the hospital, Emmett,” Tucker was saying, drawing me out of my selfish ruminations. I stood in the barn like a useless sack of shit while everyone fussed over Emmett.
“Come on,” Hadley said, clapping her hands. “Stand up, but stay off that leg. Hunter, can he use your crutches?”
I looked down the rubber tips pushing into the dirt floor of the barn. “Yeah—sure. Take them off my hands.”
“Thanks.”
And then, like that, with zero fanfare whatsoever, Hadley focused completely on Emmett, I was standing there on my prosthesis without the aid of the crutches. There should’ve been at least confetti, or something. Sure, we’d been working on this eventuality during rehab, and Hadley had just pushed me outside of my comfort zone in the pasture, but now that it was here, it was almost anticlimactic. In my childhood, I would’ve been pissed as hell at Emmett for stealing my thunder, but now, after everything I’d been through, I was almost thankful he had all eyes on him.
“Fucking things—sorry, Hadley,” Emmett blustered, teetering on them. “I don’t know how you ever got used to these damn things, Hunter. I feel like I’m walking on stilts.”
“Think of them as training wheels,” I offered. “Don’t balance on them. Make them work for you—like a rhythm.”
“We’ll be back in no time,” Hadley said, ushering Emmett out of the barn and toward her car. “No need to worry about anything.” She threw a wink at me over her shoulder, and I realized that she’d not only stranded me in here without my crutches, forcing me to rely on what progress I’d made to get me back to the house, but she’d stolen them on purpose. She could’ve commandeered Chance and Tucker to carry Emmett to the car, or, better yet, driven her car down here to save my injured brother the trip. I knew how fraught with obstacles that path was with divots and holes and clods.
As soon as Hadley’s taillights faded on down the road, Chance and Tucker turned back to me.
“I hope everything turns out all right with him, but for shit’s sake,” Chance said. “We’re already down a man out there. How are we going to make up Emmett’s work, too?”
“We’ll just have to put in longer hours,” Tucker put in tiredly.
“Tuck, there aren’t enough hours in the day for us to put in anymore,” Chance fired back. “We need help, and we needed it yesterday.”
I cleared my throat. “I can help.”
Both my brothers looked at me as if they were seeing me for the first time. I felt more than a little self-conscious in their scrutiny and wondered if I looked weird or what. As discreetly as I could, I checked the status of my zipper, but it was all the way up.
“I’ll be a son of a bitch,” Tucker said at last.
“That’d make me one, too,” I joked weakly. “What the hell’s the matter with the two of you?”
“Look at you,” Chance said, finally f
inding his words, gesturing at me.
“What’s wrong with me?” I asked cautiously.
“You’re standing. On your own two feet. No crutches.”
“Can you walk like that?” Tucker asked, not bothering to disguise his gaping. “Like normal? Without the crutches?”
“Well, more or less,” I said, still shy of this blinding attention. “It’s still a little awkward, but Hadley says it’ll smooth out the more I practice it.”
I took a few steps forward, just like I’d been doing in rehab with Hadley, and my brothers gawked.
“I wish Avery and Emmett were here to see this,” Chance remarked.
“If Emmett were still here, Hunter would still have his crutches and we wouldn’t be seeing this,” Tucker reasoned.
“I’m just walking, like you all,” I said, feeling more than a little awkward at this hullabaloo. “You’re not witnessing a miracle.”
“That’s just the thing, brother,” Tucker said. “We kind of are.”
“Come on…”
“It’s true,” Chance added. “We saw you when you…well, no need to sugarcoat it. You were at your worst. Hadley came recommended, but she was a last-ditch effort to bring you back when we weren’t sure you would ever be back in sound mind or sound body.”
“The leg didn’t grow back,” I joked. “It’s new, but not really a part of me. We can’t really say sound body.”
“It’s helping you stand, helping you walk around, isn’t it?” Chance countered. “I’d say you better get used to it being a part of you. Can you ride a horse?”
I gulped. “Hadley and I haven’t really gotten to that part of the rehab yet.”
“If he’s walking, he can ride a horse,” Tucker scoffed. “Hell, he was riding a horse before he was even walking, when he was just a baby.”
“One of us was carrying him.”
“Well, it’s the principle of the thing.”
I knew what they were trying to figure out—if I was ready, really ready, now that I was apparently normal, standing and walking on my own, without the aluminum and rubber of the crutches. It was about time. I knew that was what they were really thinking, whether they’d admit it or not. It was about time I got my shit together and started helping out around here, especially with Emmett down for the count. Three people couldn’t run this ranch. There were too many damn things to do.
At the same time, I was afraid—afraid I’d disappoint my brothers, afraid I’d fail after trying so hard for so long to return to normalcy. I didn’t know how I’d handle a setback, what I would do if I injured myself or fucked something up on the ranch. There were so many ways to mess up out here, and I would be more prone to mistakes.
“Does your leg—the fake one—bend the way you need to so you can get up on the horse?” Chance asked as gently as he could manage.
“Don’t pressure him,” Tucker snapped uncharacteristically. “When he’s ready, he’s ready. He’s been through a lot, goddammit, Chance, and us pushing him before he’s able isn’t going to help anything.”
“What’s going on with you two?” I asked, suddenly consumed with suspicion. I’d been confident in my abilities, but now I realized that something bigger was at play here than the bank issuing us past due payments, or us falling behind on the work that needed to be done here.
“Nothing’s going on,” Tucker assured me.
“Don’t hide shit from me,” I said. “I’m a part of this family, too.”
“Well, welcome back,” Chance said. “He deserves to know what we’re up against, Tuck.”
Tucker sighed. “Bud motherfucking Billings is who we’re up against.”
“It’s always Bud Billings,” I said, trying not to register surprise at Tucker’s breach of decorum. “He was trying to buy the ranch ever since Mom and Dad were still alive. I’ve heard the stories.”
“It’s different this time,” Chance said. “Somehow, someone tipped Bud off about the loan we took out.”
“Everyone took out loans last year. It was hard on all of us.”
“But everyone was somehow able to pay them back—everyone but us.”
“We’re going to pay them back,” I said. “The rain’ll come; we’ll cull the herd. We’ll do something.”
“Bud knows we’re behind. He’s being very aggressive.” Chance looked unsettled, and I really didn’t like seeing him like that. He was our pillar of strength, the one who always knew what needed to be done.
“So with both Billings and the bank on our ass, you’re saying this is a real shit time to go two men short on the ranch,” I said.
“That’s what he’s saying,” Tucker confirmed.
“I guess we’d better go see if my horse remembers how to wear a saddle.”
Tucker and Chance exchanged glances.
“If you don’t think you’re ready, I don’t want you to push yourself,” Tucker said. “What if you have a setback to your recovery?”
“If I fall off the horse, I’ll get back on, dummy,” I said, echoing wisdom Hadley had imparted.
“Emmett’s horse is already saddled,” Chance said. “We have to move the herd into south pasture by nightfall.”
“What’s Avery doing?” I asked, walking carefully toward the steed Tucker held.
“Repairing fence line out there. One of the trees by the river fell on it. Knocked several posts down.”
“Is he going to fix it in time?”
“He’s got to.”
They both looked at me expectantly, and I realized they were waiting for me to get on the horse. It had been so long since I’d done it, but I knew all I had to do was get my right foot in the stirrup and swing my left one around. I’d been working out a long time. Even if I hadn’t regained all of my strength, surely to merciful God I could get on this horse, especially in my family’s time of need.
We all let out the collective breath we’d been holding as I pulled myself up, settling into Emmett’s saddle, much more ornate than the rest of ours.
“Like riding a bike,” I said, blushing lightly as Tucker and Chance both grinned at me unabashedly. “Let’s go if we’re going to get there.”
Galloping was something different altogether. I had to place all of my trust in both the horse and the strength of my thighs, gripping to keep myself in place, moving my body in ways it hadn’t moved in a long time to keep the rhythm of the hoof falls. It took a few minutes at a canter before I really remembered how, slapping at its flank to take it back up to a gallop and catching up with my brothers.
“Can’t put into words how good it is to see you back,” Tucker hollered at me before whooping and kicking his mount, taking off in earnest. Chance and I chased him until we caught up to the herd and began working in tandem to compel it out of a pasture it had gotten comfortable in and to a new one so this one didn’t get overgrazed.
“There’s still green grass by the river,” Chance explained before we split off. “We figure that can save us on buying feed—at least for a little while.”
“It’s a plan,” I said.
There was an art to herding, one that I still remembered well, one that made my blood sing and my heart take flight. To be a part of this moving mass of mammals was something special, even if it wasn’t for everyone. I wanted to do everything in my power to keep this place going, and now that I was back in the saddle, I’d really be able to help.
But when we were well into the south pasture, Tucker circling back around to close the gate, I noticed that the fence still wasn’t repaired, Avery laboring away.
“Keep the herd off this,” I said. “We don’t want them to get out.”
“They’re branded.”
“Think Billings will care?”
“Go.”
Avery heard the horse approaching but didn’t look up, his hands bleeding in several spots through his gloves as he wound barbed wire around a post.
“I need more than two hands for this job, goddammit,” he complained.
“I got y
ou.” I was out of the saddle as easily as I’d gone into it, holding the post in place, kicking more dirt in to fill in the hole, as Avery wrapped the wire.
“Hurry, the next one,” I said. “Herd’s here, and they’re interested in that river. Haven’t seen it in a long time—trees, either.”
“Almost there.”
Chance was able to keep several strays from crowding us as we finished. Avery wiped his brow and looked at me.
“Holy shit.”
I felt my face to make sure I hadn’t sprouted horns or anything. “What?”
“It’s you—you’re back!”
“I guess,” I said, feeling embarrassed but pleased as Avery pounded my back in a hug.
“Damn good to see you out here again. You were getting soft.”
“Pretty hard, now,” I said, knocking on my prosthesis. “I guess you heard about Emmett.”
“Think we’ll ever be five again out here?” he wondered.
“One of these days,” I assured him.
The ride back was leisurely until we saw Hadley’s car pull back in the driveway. I stayed back to put the horses away as everyone went to help Emmett and pepper Hadley with questions. I felt good—damn good.
Hadley was waiting for me as I drifted toward the house, flushed with my success. My brothers had rushed on to help Emmett into his house to rest, a brace encasing his knee, but I made a beeline—well, the quickest beeline I could manage—for Hadley.
“I rode the horse,” I began when I was still several yards away from her. “I rode the horse. I moved the herd. I helped repair the fence line. I’m back in the saddle.”
She opened her mouth to offer some kind of congratulations, but I seized her by the shoulders instead, dipped her down, and kissed her, my tongue in her mouth, the scent of roses overwhelming, my erection pressing against her hipbone, wanting to celebrate this milestone in a carnal way.
She bit down on my tongue and shoved me away, and I suddenly realized that I’d fucked up.
Chapter 6
Hadley spluttered, coming up for air, backing away from me, her chest heaving like it sometimes did when she was angry. I blinked swiftly, not sure that I believed what just happened. If she was upset with me that I’d kissed her, I’d be devastated—even though she had every right. I didn’t think I’d ever taste those lips beyond our little wagers, but it had just…happened. Maybe I’d misread everything, but when we were both so excited about my successful day on the ranch, I’d thought I’d punctuate it with a kiss.
