HUNTER (The Corbin Brothers Book 1)

by Lexie Ray

  “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.

  “Hunter?”

  I looked at Hadley and remembered her question. “I don’t know if happy quite covers it,” I admitted quietly.

  “I understand. There are a lot of things there. Squats.”

  I rolled my eyes at her and began. I understood that I had to get the leg I still had back up to strength. It was doing twice the work, now, of course. But squats reminded me the most of what I lacked, and I was sure I looked stupid doing them.

  “Your turn,” I said, already breathing hard even though I’d just started.

  “My turn for what?” Hadley looked surprised. “I’m not doing any squats. That’s your job.”

  “Your turn to spill your guts.”

  She pressed her lips together. “I don’t have any guts to spill.”

  “You’re an only child. You let that one slip. And you wanted to distinguish yourself from your parents and your hometown. More about that.”

  “This isn’t story hour,” she said, laughing even as she looked a little cagey. What could an all-American girl like Hadley have to hide? Whatever it was, it made the squats a little more bearable. I had a mission that was outside of myself, a point of focus: Find out as much about Hadley as humanly possible.

  “What’s so wrong with your parents?” I asked, gripping the handrail on the porch steps for balance.

  “Nothing’s wrong with my parents.”

  “Your hometown? I don’t think you’ve said where you’re originally from.”

  “That’s because it doesn’t matter.”

  “What are you so embarrassed about?” I asked, grinning and grimacing in the same spread of teeth. My knee was starting to ache. “Your town can’t be as bad as mine.”

  “You don’t have a town,” she scoffed. “You have a ranch.”

  “There’s a town.”

  “Twenty minutes away.”

  “If you’re not going to tell me, then I’m going to guess.”

  “Texas is a big state,” she warned me. “How long are you planning on doing those squats?”

  “I’m not going to guess the name,” I said. “But I bet I can guess what it was like.”

  “Oh, you bet you can? What do you bet?” She seemed more interested than secretive now, her green eyes flashing at me, a smile playing over her lips. She was so fair—I wondered if she’d burn under this hot sun, but she didn’t show any signs of it except for pink cheeks.

  “Hadley Parsons!” I exclaimed, grunting up from my squat before sinking down again. Everything was on fire. “I didn’t take you for a betting woman.”

  “Makes things interesting sometimes,” she allowed. “Now. What are you willing to wager?”

  “I’m not sure what’s on the table.”

  “It’s your bet. You’re the one who’s so interested in my hometown, even if it doesn’t matter to anything we’re doing here.”

  “It does matter,” I argued. “I want to know more about you. If I know more about you, I’ll like you better. If I like you better, I’ll be more likely to do what you tell me to do.”

  “You do what I tell you so you can get stronger,” she said, laughing.

  “Well, sure, but I give you a lot of shit sometimes.”

  “That’s true. Fine. What are we betting on?”

  “If I can correctly describe your hometown, I get to kiss you.”

  That statement shocked both of us, Hadley’s mouth dropping open. All I’d wanted to do was learn more about Hadley, not kiss her. I faltered during my exercises and had to stop. Would it be more awkward to apologize and retract the wager, or to go on as if I’d meant to make it? I felt like a creeper, and God only knew what Hadley thought of me.

  “Fine,” she said, sounding calmer than she looked. “And if you’re wrong, you get to do all of your conditioning exercises again—from the top.”

  I gulped. I wouldn’t be able to so much as crawl up to my room if I had to go through my exercises again, but there it was. Hadley was looking to castigate me for making a fool out of her by getting her to agree to a possible kiss. I deserved it, but the stakes felt a lot higher.

  “Done,” I said. “Can I stop doing my squats?”

  “You already have.”

  “Okay.” I gulped, my mouth feeling dry even though I’d just rehydrated. “Your town. I’m going to describe it.”

  “That’s the game.”

  “It’s small.”

  Hadley raised an eyebrow, but she didn’t say I was wrong, so I kept going.

  “Not only is it small, it’s out of the way—isolated.”

  Still no commentary from Hadley. I didn’t know if that was a good thing or a bad thing. If I was on the mark or if she was just letting me dig myself in deeper.

  “You live in Dallas now because you wanted a big city, somewhere with lots of people, somewhere to lose yourself. You thought of the biggest city in your brain and you set yourself up there.”

  “Houston’s the biggest city in Texas,” she said coolly.

  “Yes,” I said quickly, my abs tightening painfully at the thought of a double set of exercises. “But Dallas is farther away from your hometown. Farther away, and that’s why you picked it.”

  Hadley gave a small nod, and my spirits soared. I didn’t know if I was happier that I’d guessed something about her or that I was closer to kissing her. Why had I even proposed that to begin with? I couldn’t backtrack though. Not now. I had to keep marching forward to whatever conclusion we were going to end on. I had to think.

  “You wanted to distinguish yourself from your hometown because in your hometown, there aren’t many professionals,” I said, taking a figurative shot in the dark. “There aren’t many people with jobs who required the kind of rigorous education you sought out. And you decided to go to medical school, to try and become a doctor, because it took so long that you’d never be accused of not going home because you didn’t like it. There would always be a ready excuse.”

  Hadley studied me, and I just kept going, on a reckless roll or hoping I was.

  “You always felt different in your hometown because you were better than
it. It didn’t hold any interest for you. There was someone in your hometown you didn’t want to be around. A bad breakup.”

  “Sit-ups,” Hadley said, turning away from me. “Go.”

  “Fuck,” I sighed.

  “Hunter?”

  “Yeah?”

  I looked up, and Hadley planted a kiss directly on my lips. It was light and chaste and all too brief, but dammit if she didn’t still smell of roses. It made me not mind the idea of the second set of exercises so much.

  “After you get done with those and push-ups and squats, you’re going to walk,” she said, peering out again across the horizon as I heaved myself up from the ground, again and again, waiting for her to tell me I could stop.

  “Walk?” I grunted.

  “Yep. Walk. Without the crutches. On the prosthesis.” She glanced at me. “If you can do ten steps without complaining, I’ll kiss you again.”

  She was starting to get the hang of the motivational speech—or at least what motivated me.

  The exercises didn’t seem so bad at all—now.

  Chapter 5

  I didn’t know what it was about those first few kisses, but everything changed. I was more motivated, Hadley was more demanding, and I was making greater strides than ever before. It was as if the survivor in me had finally been coaxed out by the princess’s kiss—or something like that. Hadley worked me hard for what felt like ages, coming up with new and inventive ways to keep me involved and invested in my rapid recovery.

  “Let’s go,” she said one morning, just after my brothers had departed to work the ranch.

  “Where? The barn?” The barn had kind of turned into a workout area, Hadley leaving weights and giant rubber bands and other tools in there for me to use. The barn meant a break from the sun beating overhead, even if she did look good with a bit of a tan.

  “No. You’re going to give me a tour of the ranch. Put your leg on.”

  I felt a surge of anxiety. “The ranch is a really big place, Hadley. That’s why we use the horses.”

  “Do you want to ride a horse?” she asked.

  “I don’t think I can.”

  “Well, you can walk,” she said. “I’ve seen you do it.”

  I had done it—that was true. We were practicing more and more in the barn without the crutches, Hadley using bags of feed and other things she found to construct obstacle courses for me.

  “But the footing’s uneven out there. I haven’t taken the leg out anywhere except the barn.”

  “There’s no time like the present,” she said. “Come on. You’re going to take me on a tour. It’ll be a light workout day.”

  Maybe I wouldn’t sweat as much as doing the calisthenics she had me doing, but I felt highly nervous about this session—more so than any of the rest. I knew Hadley had faith in me, for whatever reason. I just didn’t trust myself, or the leg—even if it was the nicest model on the market, thanks to Hadley’s immovable force and the U.S. government.

  In the end, though, I strapped in and pressed my crutches against my ribcage, trundling carefully across the dust and drying patches of grass, following Hadley toward the east as the sun rose higher in the sky. There was no saying no to Hadley, no matter how much self-doubt I had.

  “I realized I’d been here all this time, and I’d never really seen the ranch,” Hadley said, speaking for the first time as I panted beside her, out of sight of the house. I really wasn’t used to walking with the leg even if my body was getting stronger. It was a whole different animal, and one I supposed I needed to start trying to adapt to.

  “It’s a big place,” I said. “Bordered by property the public school district owns, then a couple of other ranches.”

  “Other ranches?” Hadley glanced at me. “Stop dragging that foot. Trust yourself. The microprocessor understands what it needs to do. You just have to put your faith in it.”

  I tried to step more carefully, more deliberately, but it was hard to trust that this leg wasn’t going to send me face planting into the ground. “Yes, other ranches.”

  “Is that like competition?”

  “In a way.” It was hard to concentrate on walking and talking at the same time, but I tried for Hadley’s sake. “We’re pretty friendly with one of them—the Summers Ranch. You have to make friends in this business. We—well, my brothers—sometimes help them, like with branding and birthing, and they’ll repay the favor for us.”

  “But you’re all in the same business. Why help each other?”

  “For most ranchers, the lifestyle is enough to include everyone who works a ranch as a part of your extended family,” I explained. “So when you need something big done, you count on your family to help make it happen.”

  “But you said you Corbins were only friendly with one of them.”

  “That’s true. The Summers Ranch is our ally. It’s the Billings Ranch that gives us trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “Scalping help, stonewalling us when we ask for something, trying to buy the ranch out from underneath us. That kind of trouble.”

  “Bitches,” Hadley remarked in the way only Hadley could, like the time she’d called Eileen a piece of shit just because she knew it was true. “Which way is the Billings Ranch?”

  “Due east. We’re walking toward it.”

  Hadley flipped a double bird toward the horizon, sticking her tongue out for good measure. I had to laugh at her, forgetting my discomfort and trepidation for a moment. She did and said whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted. In cases like these, when there was a clear bad guy in Hadley’s head, her emotions were no mystery to anyone around her.

  “I like your ranch. Screw that stupid Billings Ranch.” Hadley looked around. “It’s all so open.”

  “There are some more trees down by the river, but the land’s pretty clear, for the most part,” I said. “Important to maximize the pastures.”

  “Hey.”

  “Yeah?”

  Hadley leaned in, without any warning, and gave me a long kiss on the lips. I blinked at her, surprised, as she drew away.

  “What was that for?” I asked. She hadn’t even offered anything.

  “You’re doing really well,” she said. “I’m impressed you’re not complaining more.”

  “You’re pretty good at distracting me.”

  “Damn right I am.”

  She took a couple of steps back, and I realized she’d spirited my crutches away…right from underneath my arms.

  “Give those back,” I said, reaching for them.

  “Not a chance,” she said. “We’re walking back to the barn without them. Well, you are. I have to deal with them now.”

  “Hadley, I need those.”

  “You need to trust yourself. That leg is better than what they did to the bionic man. It’s worth tens of thousands of dollars. Trust it. Trust yourself. Show me what we’ve been working on. I know you can do it.”

  The ground wasn’t even. We were on the meandering hill down to the river. There were snake holes and gopher holes and mole mounds and tufts of grass I couldn’t see that could trip me up. We were maybe a mile or more from the barn. It was hard to judge. This was an impossible task, something I couldn’t do.

  “Give me the crutches, Hadley, and stop screwing around,” I said. “We both know I’m not ready for this.”

  “Bullshit,” she said. “I know you’re ready for this. What are you so afraid of? What’s the worst thing that could happen? Tell me.”

  “I could fall,” I said, throwing my hands up in the air, feeling naked without the crutches.

  “You could fall,” Hadley repeated. “Babies fall when they’re learning to walk, and it doesn’t kill them.”

  “I don’t want to fall.”

  “No one wants to fall. But you’re going to have to in order to learn. Now let’s go. There’s a kiss waiting for you up at the barn, I bet, and maybe you’ll even get to second base.”

  Was Hadley really offering that up? It was tantal
izing, but it didn’t do enough to allay my fears. I’d come to rely on the crutches much more than my own leg and the prosthesis working in tandem. This was too much of a challenge.

  “I’m waiting,” she called, already yards away.

  I exhaled heavily and followed slowly, holding my arms out on either side of me as if I were teetering on a tightrope.

  “You’re doing nicely, Hunter. Good!” Hadley coached, keeping a distance between us—probably so I couldn’t lunge at her and retrieve my crutches.

  We labored along like this, me sweating and cursing under my breath, the leg feeling unfamiliar and a little painful against my thigh, Hadley dancing away whenever I got within arm’s reach, flapping the crutches like metal and rubber wings.

  “Look, I can see the barn already,” Hadley said. “You’re doing it, Hunter! You’re amazing.”

  I didn’t feel amazing as I trudged along, wondering what obstacle was going to take me down, but she allowed me to believe I was, if only for a few fleeting moments.

  “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.