by Lexie Ray
“Get the fuck off of me!” I shouted, squirming as I tried to land at least one more punch on Chance and get away from whoever was keeping me from it at the same time. I fought to catch a glimpse of my oldest brother’s face, gleefully expecting it to be livid, but he just looked sad and more than a little bit defeated. It caught me off guard, relenting just enough for whoever was restraining my arms to get an even better grip.
“Stop fighting your family,” Tucker said in my ear, and in a bitter mixture of anger and disgust, I realized he was holding me just like he probably restrained violent suspects back when he was still working as a cop. “We’re all brothers, Hunter, and in this together. Can’t you see that? We’re all fighting for the same thing. For you.”
I twisted my head to see that Emmett had all but pulled the majority of his hair down from its knot in the helpless panic of the moment, that Avery was cracking his knuckles compulsively, and that I was in the middle of tearing this family apart.
Chance rubbed the blooming redness on his jaw almost absentmindedly, as if he were somewhere far away. “We’re going to have to hunker down especially money-wise this year so we can get you the help you need, Hunter. It’s not something we can just ignore anymore. Where you are, what you’re doing to yourself…it’s more harmful than the drought, a bigger threat than a debt we can’t repay yet.”
“Plus you’re drinking us out of beer, man,” Emmett joked weakly. “I have to hide whatever I want to have myself to keep it out of your hands.”
All I could think of was them shipping me off to some funny farm and leaving me there to rot. I’d seen so many friends suffer in the same way, forgotten and misunderstood by the people they thought they could always count on. It was my worst nightmare, and I’d brought it upon myself.
“Um, hello? Hate to barge in like this, but your doorbell’s broken and the door was unlocked.”
We all froze at the distinctly different female voice in our home, and Chance wheeled around, his eyebrows raised to his hairline.
“Let go of me right now,” I growled at Tucker, who only released me out of surprise at the sight of the woman standing in the foyer.
Emmett handed me back my crutch, which had tumbled to the floor during the struggle, and Avery kicked the beer bottle shards beneath the couch as smoothly as he could manage as we all stared at this beautiful intruder.
My first instinct was that she was here to try and sell us something, and I was afraid that we’d throw everything we had at her to get it. Maybe it was her outfit—a matching blazer and pencil skirt, heels that had no business being out here on the ranch—that made me think of a traveling saleswoman, coercing strangers into buying whatever she was offering. It could’ve been the way her auburn hair fell loose, nearly to her breasts, and shined in the sun finding its way in through the screen door, or the careful application of makeup—just so—to make her green eyes pop. But why would such a woman be here to sell us anything? She could be on the cover of a magazine, star in her own movie, and bring richer and handsomer men to their knees with just the right glance.
Her gaze right now was hard to read, a veneer of polish and powder masking anything useful I thought I could pick up on.
“How, uh, how long have you been standing there?” Avery piped up finally, when the silence dragged on for so long I realized I’d been listening, not to the wind in the cottonwoods outside, but to her breathing, her chest falling up and down rapidly. She was rattled, as hard as she was trying to hide it.
“Long enough,” she said, the unspoken things she’d observed weighing heavy on those words. “I’m Hadley Parsons. I’m here to help.” Her eyes roved around the room, taking in Chance’s swelling jaw, the broken glass that remained visible on the floor, the rest of my brothers surrounding me as if I was dangerous, my crutch supporting the empty half of my jeans. “And it looks like you sure need it.”
The tone of her voice, if anything, was disdainful, no trace of the accent we shared from being away from the city our whole lives. She was an outsider, and she judged this all so harshly it stung.
“Go to hell,” I told her, fully meaning it. I would’ve told her to fuck off, but I’d been raised to show ladies more respect than that. And even as I spat my vitriol at her, I experienced a surge of relief—they weren’t going to send me away, to lock me up in a straightjacket and leave me to rot. I could handle this woman, whoever she was. I could keep on doing what I was doing to survive and keep her at arm’s length.
Chance sighed and held out his hand to her. “You’re in the right place,” he said. “We’re the Corbins.”
“Welcome home,” Avery said, his words dripping with sarcasm.
Chapter 2
“You’re as high as a kite right now, aren’t you?” Hadley asked, staring at me lounging on the dusty couch. My brothers had left the house gratefully, probably because they were relieved I had a minder now. If they thought this woman was about to do me any good whatsoever, they had another thing coming.
“I don’t know what gave you that impression,” I said lazily, finally and fully feeling the effects of everything I’d taken this morning. If she left me alone, I might just sleep until tomorrow, dreamless, like a corpse on this couch. That was really all I wanted, but this woman seemed awfully intent on bothering the good thing I had coming.
“Your pupils for one,” she said, narrowing her eyes at me, bending closer to study my face. I could’ve grabbed her and kissed her if I’d wanted to. She was pretty enough, but she was disturbing my peace, threatening my way of life. I blinked several times as she scrutinized me. She smelled really nice, like roses.
“I’m pretty tired,” I said. “Didn’t get much sleep last night.”
“Uh-huh,” she said, fishing around in her bag until she came up with a penlight. She shined it in my eyes without warning. “Happen to you a lot—not being able to sleep?”
“About like anyone,” I said, wary, wincing at the pinprick of light tormenting me. “What are you anyway? A doctor?”
“Physical therapist,” she said, brisk and businesslike, tossing the penlight back in her bag and rubbing her hands together. “Not my first profession, but one I gradually got around to. I started out on the medical doctor tract, but didn’t figure out this line of work was my passion until, well, I’d already committed so much time and money to the cause. What a waste. But enough about me. Let’s see it.”
“See what?”
She gestured at the pant leg that hung empty. “Your leg.”
I snorted at her if only to hide my rising panic. “What leg?”
“What’s left of it.” She produced a pamphlet from her bag of tricks. “Didn’t anyone in the VA meet with you about prosthetics options? We’re living in the future. You’re going to be the bionic man—good as new. Better, even, than before, if you can believe it.”
Maybe she’d meant to make me smile, but I set my jaw instead. It was all well and good for her to spout off inanities about the power of prosthetics and all that bullshit. It wasn’t her leg that was missing.
I looked at the brochure just so I could stop looking at her and saw a bunch of smiling, dithering idiots with machine parts for limbs, giving metallic thumbs ups and all the rest. Yeah, life was great. Someone took what God gave me away from me, but thank Christ for science and the help of all these devoted doctors. This arm or leg or foot or hand is just about as good as the one I used to have, so thanks.
It was utter bullshit.
Hadley had been watching the range of emotions cross my face. I was never any good at poker, or at least that’s what my empty wallet and my brothers’ fat ones told me.
“Don’t you want to be mobile again?” she asked me. “Aren’t you ready to get on with your life?”
“What life is that?” I asked, putting my arms behind my head. “The one where people stare and whisper and pity me behind my back while sucking my cock about being some kind of war hero? That one? No, thanks.”
I had to give
her credit—Hadley didn’t so much as flinch at the word “cock.” She’d probably been in the city—or wherever she got that posh accent of hers—for long enough to hear everything.
“You can’t control what people say or think or feel about you,” she said. “Come on, Hunter. That should’ve been lesson number one growing up. Don’t pay your peers any mind. Didn’t anyone bother to teach you that in elementary school? Preschool, even?”
Mom’s familiar words echoed through my mind—“Easy with the baby.” I’d been cushioned and comforted from that, babied even, by the sole fact that I was the youngest in this family. If any one of my brothers ever hurt my feelings, Mom would give me a hug and they’d get a talking to. I’d employed the same strategy throughout my childhood, raining down swift consequences on classmates who crossed me until I grew old enough and big enough to command respect. Had I learned to let other people’s insults and misplaced demonstrations slide off my back like water from a duck? No. Not even close.
“Never mind that,” I said, closing my eyes.
“You’re a little spoiled brat,” she said, her voice filled with such delight that it made my eyes fly open. “That’s what you are. I figured it out. I marched in here and couldn’t understand why all these grown men couldn’t find it in them to beat some sense into you—and now I’ve got it. You’re a little spoiled brat. You’re the baby. Your parents spoiled you rotten, and now your brothers can’t get past it. You’re a brat, and that’s why you’ve been allowed to get away with everything that you’ve been doing since you got back.”
She rubbed me the wrong way, rankled me and made my hackles rise. “Don’t you even know where it was I got back from?”
“Afghanistan,” she said easily. “And you’re lucky. Not everyone got back from there.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, half rolling away from her. “I’m going to sleep.”
“The hell you are.” Another surprise that kept my eyes open. For as much of a lady as I assumed this Hadley Parsons to be, the curse, though mild, made me reconsider the idea of her.
“Didn’t I tell you I didn’t sleep last night?” I demanded, turning back on the couch to face her.
“You told me you didn’t get much sleep,” she said. “When’s the last time you slept through the night?”
I laughed at her.
“Okay, part of the night?” she tried again.
“Why don’t you just let me sleep right now?” I asked. “I’m finally tired enough to do it.”
“Only because you’ve drank enough beer and eaten enough pills to sleep,” she said. “And maybe not ever wake up.”
“A good sleep.”
“Not really.” She’d rolled my jeans leg up to where my knee used to be before I registered what was happening.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” I burst out, sitting up ramrod straight and performing a very manly scramble away from her.
“My job,” she said, exasperated. “Or at least I’m trying to. You’re not helping very much.”
“How much is Chance paying you to let you ogle me?” I hated the way my jeans looked rolled up, preferring to let the leg of denim hang down, providing at least the illusion that something was there.
“More than what your family can afford,” she said, not even being gentle about that revelation. “I’m expensive because I’m good at what I do, Hunter, and because I make house calls. Now, are you going to let me ogle that stump, or should I wait until you pass out, poke at it all I want, then pump your stomach for you?”
“You’re lucky I was raised by the people who raised me,” I said, rage making it hard for me to breathe normally. “If I were anyone else, from anywhere else, I’d teach you a lesson, show you that’s not how I want to be talked to.”
“You want me to pin a medal on you because you’re not going to hit me?” Hadley’s green eyes smoldered. “What’ll the award be called? The ‘Holy Shit, Look At Me, I’m So Cultured I Don’t Hit Women Medal?’ Should I contact the President, see if he’ll fly down here for the ceremony?”
“You called it a fucking stump, Hadley.”
“I called it a leg earlier, but you didn’t seem to like that either,” she countered. “What’s it going to be, Hunter? What do you want to call it? Should it have a name? Flipper? Butch? The Thigh? What?”
She was making my skin crawl with how intimate she was being and how easily she could talk about something I had trouble looking at—even though it was a part of my body. However, it somehow comforted me to see some of her facade fall down, to see her be real and impatient and offensive. Part of the reason I’d checked myself right out of the VA hospital before so much as starting physical therapy was because how sterile everything was there. The doctors were like robots, their gazes never flickering. I wasn’t sure that they blinked or had pulses or blood moving through their veins. It was frightening, and it made me think they acted like that because they believed me to be less than human myself.
“I don’t know what to call it,” I said finally, meeting her green eyes with hesitation. “This is all a little new to me.”
I expected her to soften, but she surprised me again. “What’s new to you? Missing a limb or not taking care of yourself?”
“I’m doing the best that I can,” I tried, but she wasn’t having it.
“Forget about the last time you slept at night,” she said. “When’s the last time you had a shower?”
She really knew how to cut a man down. “I…”
“Uh-huh. Thought so. Let’s go.”
“Go where?”
“Where do you think? If you’re incapable of keeping yourself clean, I’m going to help you relearn how. That’s my job.”
“You’re not going to bathe me.”
“Then why aren’t you bathing yourself?” she asked, and what was I supposed to say to that? That I didn’t care about keeping myself clean because what was the point? I didn’t have anyone to impress; I didn’t care about the way I looked or smelled; I didn’t really even stand out with the way the rest of my brothers drifted in while working on the ranch, dusty and sweaty and smelling of livestock.
“Do you think you might be depressed?” she asked in what I was beginning to understand was that no-nonsense way of hers in spite of the sensitivity of the question. In my line of work…well, in what had been my line of work before I’d lost the leg, depression was a dangerous thing. Depression might get you removed from duty, at worst, and mistrusted by the people relying on you to have their backs when shit really hit the fan, at best. I’d been just as suspicious of guys who moped in the barracks when the rest of us were monkeying around as I had been of the people who weren’t in uniforms when we went out on patrol. And now it looked like I was like them, moping around, trying to find things to dump into myself to make it, if not right, then just a little more bearable.
“Leave the head shrinking to the shrinks,” I said, wobbling as I stood up from the couch. “You’re just a physical therapist.”
“That doesn’t mean I’m blind or deaf or dumb,” Hadley said, standing up too, her hands on her hips. “I can diagnose a problem when I see one, and you, Hunter, are a big problem.”
“Do you want me to take a shower or not?” I asked, scowling at her. “If you keep insulting me, I can just let you keep on smelling me.”
“Lead the way,” she said, pressing her lips together tightly.
I hopped and hobbled down the hallway, past the kitchen, having to propel myself beyond the magnetic pull of the liquid contents of that refrigerator, aware that Hadley would judge me much more harshly than any of my brothers would if I opened another beer right now. I’d have to slake that thirst later, when she was gone and I could get a moment’s peace.
“This place is bigger on the inside than what it looks like from the outside,” she said by way of conversation, having more than enough time to observe her surroundings as I struggled on ahead of her. It made me self-conscio
us to be so physically inept, but that was just the way of the world now.
“It had to be big on the inside,” I said. “There were a lot of us Corbins.”
“You all still live here?” She’d paused at an old family portrait hanging on the wall, its frame embarrassingly dusty. “This place could use a woman’s touch. Or just someone who knows how to clean up after themselves or other people.”
“You offering?”
“Hell, no,” she scoffed. “Do you really think I went to medical school to sweep and mop and dust?”
We all looked happy in this photo. I couldn’t have been much older than four or five, and I had no memory of going to get the portrait taken. Avery had a gap-toothed grin, Emmett held himself with quiet confidence, Tucker puffed his chest out, and even Chance still looked hopeful about the future, all of us squeezed in together in front of a drop cloth draped in the background. We’d all inherited our size from Dad, but Mom wasn’t a shrinking violet. She was tough as leather when she wasn’t doting on us—at least, that’s what I gathered from my patchy memories and the times my brothers got drunk and maudlin enough to reminisce. I wondered what parts of which parent were mine and mine alone, not shared by any of my brothers. It was hard to know.
“We all grew up in this house, sure,” I said, answering Hadley’s first question. “And some of us left it to try to scratch out our own identities somewhere else. But we all drifted back, whether we actually wanted to or not.”
“Home always has that pull on us, doesn’t it?” she mused, and I could tell she wasn’t talking just about the ranch.
“Where are you from?” I asked, peering at her. “Not from these parts.”
“Around,” she said vaguely, waving her hand as if she’d appeared out of thin air.
“Not Texas.”
“And why not Texas?”
“You don’t talk like you’re from Texas?”
“And who are you?” That was her favorite pose…I was beginning to suspect…those hands pushed against her hips, elbows out like sharp little wings. “Are you some linguistics expert, familiar with how each and every single person in this state speaks?”