THE CORBIN BROTHERS: The Complete 5-Books Series

by Lexie Ray

  “Hide?” I scoffed. “I’m in full view of the barn.”

  “And also that I’m not the only Corbin who wakes himself up screaming from time to time.” His grin had faded, though his eyes weren’t quite serious.

  I wasn’t sure what there was to say to that. “Everyone has nightmares, brother.”

  “Uh-huh. A little birdie told me that your nightmares have been going on for quite a while, now.” He carefully examined the toe of his boot, finding some invisible crumb of dirt to polish away on a clump of dead grass. “And that you’re supposed to be sleeping at Avery and Paisley’s tonight?”

  “Just a change of scenery,” I said with a shrug.

  “Not really like you to lie, Tuck,” Hunter observed, still not looking at me directly. It made him uncomfortable to confront me, I realized, though I didn’t really understand what he felt he needed to confront me about.

  “I’m not sure what I’m lying about.”

  “Your dreams.” He finally did look at me, and I had to pause for a moment and try to wrap my mind around just how far he’d come. Hunter was the youngest of us, the last of us, and he had perhaps lost the most of us, too. There had been several long months when we didn’t believe he’d survive the wounds he’d suffered in Afghanistan, and then Hadley came along. She’d been the entity needed to force Hunter to live again, and he was doing better than ever, even if he was a leg down.

  “They’re nightmares, buddy, not dreams,” I admitted quietly, looking away.

  “Same thing. Seems to me I remember you telling me one night that I could always talk to you about the things that I screamed at during the night.”

  I had told him that, back when he was at his worst and waking everyone in the house up — much like I was doing now.

  “This is all just old bullshit, Hunter,” I said now. “Nothing that’s worth talking about.”

  “If it makes you sleep better at night, then maybe it is worth talking about.”

  “Funny thing, though. I don’t think I would sleep better at night burdening someone else with this.”

  “I can handle it, you know,” he said, laughing a little. Gallows humor. “The shit I’ve seen — and done — would give your nightmares their own nightmares.”

  “I know you can handle it. I just don’t want you to have to.” I wasn’t about to subject any of my brothers, let alone the youngest of us, to my past. It was something they all knew better than to ask me about, and I volunteered very few stories from my time on the police force.

  “That’s the thing, Tuck.” Hunter looked like it gave him no pleasure to say what he was about to say. “It’s not sounding like you’re doing a very good job of handling it.”

  “Says who?” With a flush of anger, I had to wonder who he’d been getting his intel from. Zoe? Little Toby? It was probably Chance, who was notorious for shoving his nose into other people’s business. Maybe it worked for the ranch, but it didn’t work for my personal life. There were some things that were better kept private, and this was most definitely one of them.

  “I can tell you’re not doing a very good job,” Hunter said. “No one has to tell me. You look tired all the time. You’re napping during the day, for Christ’s sake. If you need help, ask for it. All of us would help you. You know that.”

  I could’ve told Hunter to back off, to keep his eyes and attention on his own affairs, but that wasn’t fair at all. He’d been grappling with episodes of PTSD brought on by the precarious state of the ranch recently. The gun battles we were having in pasture lands he’d grown up on didn’t do a single positive thing for his psyche, which apparently connected the gunshots here on a Texas ranch to gunshots on an Afghanistan battlefield.

  “I don’t need help,” I said, even if that wasn’t altogether true. Maybe I did need help, but I couldn’t use my family as a lifeline in this. It was too harrowing a story to burden anyone else with. And I could just visualize what a shrink would tell me to do — it was a solid ten years ago, so why can’t you get the fuck over it, Tuck? At least, that’s what I asked myself all the time.

  “If that’s what you really think, then I respect that,” Hunter said. The dubious tone of his voice told me that he didn’t respect it — or believe it — at all. “I just wish you could figure out that you can trust your family. You can trust me.”

  “I do trust you,” I said, jostling him a bit. “I’m just trying to tell you that this is nothing. Happens about every year around this time. Just the anniversary of something stupid. Something that was finished a long time ago.”

  Only it wasn’t really finished, was it? I might’ve been able to thwart him that night, but I hadn’t been able to catch him. He was still out there, somewhere, biding his time, unless something perfectly ordinary, like an auto-pedestrian incident, or a heart attack, or any number of things, had taken care of him.

  “I am the living, breathing example of thinking that things are finished when they’re really not,” Hunter said, earnest and visibly worried. “I know this is around the time of year you left the police force. I get that something happened you’re still not ready to talk about. But it is physically affecting you, and that’s not good.”

  “I’m hearing you.”

  “If you’re not hearing me, you’re going deaf, old man.” He eyed me. “What I want to know is if you’re listening to me.”

  “I’ve got a lot of things I need to be doing,” I said, suddenly acutely uncomfortable. Since when was Hunter giving me the advice? I’d spent the better part of my life doling wisdom out to Hunter and Avery and Emmett — and even Chance, on rare occasions. It didn’t make me feel very good to be the recipient of advice from my baby brother.

  “Taking care of yourself is one of those things,” Hunter called after me as I stalked away.

  I waved at him without turning around. What I really needed was a good distraction, and there was a ranch full of things I could distract myself with — to exhaust myself. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with myself tonight, though. My theory had been shot. It would be a waste to try to spend the night with Avery and Paisley. All I would do would probably consist of shouting myself awake and keeping my brother and his wife from getting a good night’s sleep.

  I rode instead back out to the herd, helping the rest of the hands move the cattle from the pasture nearest the river to another in the dead middle of the combined Corbin-Summers properties. Chance and Paisley’s new strategy — straight from the desk of the CEOs — was to buffer the herd overnight by using the land around them to our advantage. We suffered the greatest risks when the herd was nearest the river, or another edge of property. Even though we were still assigning hands to overnight with the herd, everyone felt better that whatever thieves looking to take some cattle were going to have to travel a long way to do it.

  I rode the length of the fence line after the gate shut behind the last lingering creature, making adjustments here and there even though the river pasture was the best defended piece of land on the property. The fences here had been reinforced time and again, mostly out of necessity. Our last near-disaster had been here, when thieves pulled down an entire section of fence, looking to drive the herd off our property. I double checked it and rode back to the barn, stabling my horse and reorganizing everything I could lay hands on until the sun drifted down below the horizon and the sky mellowed and I decided that I might as well try another night in my own bed.

  There was nothing, really, like getting home at the end of a long day when you worked really hard. I appreciated it so thoroughly here on the ranch, not taking it for granted like I suspected the rest of my brothers did. When you were home after work, you were really home. Nobody except for Chance really brought the work back with them, and I suspected our eldest brother could extricate himself from it only if he really wanted to.

  But my other brothers didn’t understand. In other professions, you didn’t always get so lucky. I’d brought case files back to my apartment with me every single evening
— or morning, depending on what my shift was that week. I studied them until I had them memorized, and then I studied them to make sure I hadn’t missed anything. I studied them after I watched a movie or read a book or had some kind of life experience that I suspected might give me additional insight, help me break the case.

  Ranching was so much simpler, even if it was harder manual labor. I tended the herd, tended the fences, maintained buildings and equipment, vaccinated, calved, weaned, culled, rode a horse all day, assessed water and vegetation, and recently was forced into a new role — night bodyguard to the herd, on a rotating basis with my brothers and the rest of the ranch hands. The cattle thefts were perplexing, but if I had to choose between dealing with those every night and being a cop again, I’d volunteer for herd bodyguard and sit astride a horse with a shotgun across my lap and a big smile on my face.

  My brothers didn’t know how good they had it. They were starting to realize it, though, I thought — Hunter with his prosthetic leg, reclaiming his life, Avery contributing in a way that made him happy, Emmett free to pursue his personal interests in the ranch. Only Chance remained unfulfilled, but I was pretty sure he was happiest in full lather, worrying over the cattle logs or the budget or payroll.

  Give me a hard day on the ranch over a hard day on the police force any day of the week. It had been a mistake for me to leave the ranch in the first place. I never should’ve done it. Chance had tried to keep me here, and he’d been the only one who had a chance at changing my mind, but I was stubborn. I would’ve given anything to go back in time and punch myself in the face, break my leg, do something to keep me here on the ranch and far away from Dallas. Life would be so much simpler if I’d never been a cop, never done the things I’d done or seen the things I’d seen.

  The ranch was my home, and my family’s legacy. I should’ve been here all along, but thinking like that would drive me crazy.

  I paused beside the porch, reveling in the ways my body was sore today — thighs aching from the horse, arms aching from relocating a few boulders down to the river, where they wouldn’t get in the way of our frequent night rides, face aching from the sun that had been beating down on it all day, my cowboy hat stupidly forgotten under the trees after my nap. They were all of the right kinds of hurting — well, minus the sunburn, maybe — and not the hurts I’d had after a long day on patrol, or pounding the pavement working a case. Those hurts had been tension headaches, stress threatening to burst an artery in my chest, my muscles sore from keeping taut for the duration of an unpleasant interrogation.

  I was cleaning the dirt and debris I’d accumulated on my boots throughout the day on one of the steps when the front door opened.

  “Hey, Tucker?” Something in Zoe’s voice made me stop what I was doing. Something was wrong. If it wasn’t wrong, it was at least … off. One thing I had been unable to shake from my time on the police force was an ability to pick up on body language and voice cues. Zoe was tense, unsure of herself. Living with her in the house for so long had given me the opportunity to subconsciously file away all of her various tones and mannerisms, different for each of her moods. It was simple police work, but a habit I hadn’t been able to rid myself of. Right now, though, she was doing a classic fig leaf — clasping her hands awkwardly in front of her middle. I’d never seen her do it before, not even when Hunter had brought her and Toby here to live, liberating them from an abusive family situation. Fig leaf hands meant something was so wrong that she was nervous about it, manifesting in hand gestures she usually didn’t do.

  “What is it?” I was half afraid she’d bring up my nighttime wakeup calls again. That wasn’t something I was prepared to discuss with anyone in spite of her breakfast mention or Hunter’s attempt at support. I was just going to have to medicate a little heavier before bed until I figured out the right amount of booze to keep the dreams at bay.

  “There’s someone here to see you,” she said.

  “To see me?” That was odd. Most people wanted to see Chance, the CEO for the Corbin side of things of the Corbin-Summers Ranch. Sometimes, though, officers from the town’s police department would stop by to bounce theories off of me. It happened with enough frequency for the city to posit the idea of paying me a contractor’s fee every time I gave my input on an ongoing case, but I declined. That was too close to being a cop again. As unpleasant as I found these encounters, I couldn’t very well turn them away and feel good about myself. Even good cops needed outside help with their cases sometimes. If I could do any good at all with the knowledge I’d built in Dallas, then I’d do it. There was too much bad around it.

  “Yes, you.” Zoe twisted her hands into an even more awkward fig leaf. This was beginning to go from curious to worrisome. “Specifically you. Only you. And immediately.”

  “Is everything okay?” I’d only cleaned one boot, but I stepped up to the porch anyway, more concerned about our housekeeper’s current state than the vitriol she’d unleash if I dared track dirt onto her clean floors.

  “She’s just very insistent,” Zoe said. “Very intense.”

  “She?”

  I moved around Zoe, my instincts signaling that something foul was afoot. I didn’t date, didn’t have female callers, didn’t have any business I expected with anyone of the fairer sex.

  And when I saw Amelia Banks sitting there in the front room, her hands on her lap, jiggling her foot in a show of nerves, it all made a sort of horrible sense.

  She saw me before I wanted her to, and was on her feet in an instant.

  “Detective Corbin. He’s back.”

  It wasn’t what I wanted to hear. I’d never wanted to hear any of those words strung together in that order again.

  Chapter 2

  Amelia Banks had changed over the years, but that woman would be forever seared into my brain, my retinas, my soul. We’d shared a horrific experience, the kind that stays with a person for an entire lifetime and maybe even beyond, and I felt like I’d be able to sense she was around me even if I were blindfolded. Any other person who’d been familiar with the nightmare we’d both pulled through wouldn’t have been able to recognize the woman who survived from the survivor standing in front of me.

  She was still beautiful. Time and experience had at least allowed her to keep that. But the beauty had transformed into something transparent, like glass, and I could see through it to her fragility, the terror that had honed her down to a sharp point.

  The Amelia who had survived had been slender, but this survivor was lean, muscles surrounding bones and joints. I wondered if there was a soft part of her anymore, but that was a stupid thing to wonder about. There was no more a soft spot within Amelia than there was in me. We’d been hardened by the same horror, the same man.

  She’d also hacked her brown hair so drastically that I had to assume it was to keep from being recognized. Calling it a pixie cut would’ve been generous. It looked like she’d picked up a pair of clippers and buzzed her hair off. It was shorter than some of my brothers’ hair. Somehow, though, it suited her — spare, like her body, the clothes she wore that were bland enough to escape special notice, making them impossible to describe to anyone later.

  Amelia Banks was on the run. That much was clear to me. All the signs were there, signs I was sure I could’ve picked up on even without police training. The biggest indication was that she was here, on the ranch, standing in front of me.

  “He’s back,” she said again, needlessly. I’d heard her the first time and had been unable to respond, unable to move past the shock of seeing her again. I’d never thought I’d see Amelia again. I’d never wanted to see her again.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “Can’t you hear me? He’s back. That’s why I’m here.”

  I shook my head. “He’s not back. He’s never going to be back. That shit is over. Why are you really here?”

  She dragged her hand across her short locks and exhaled heavily. “He. Is. Back.”

  There wa
s never any question of who “he” was. I knew who she was talking about. The same man who had been haunting my dreams. He always haunted my dreams, but so did Amelia. I just refused to believe it. It couldn’t be true.

  “He disappeared,” I tried. “Everyone agreed that he disappeared. That everything is done.”

  “He might’ve disappeared.” Amelia put her hands on her hips, lifting her chin at me, unflinching. “That doesn’t mean he wouldn’t reappear, if he wanted. He does whatever he wants. You know that.”

  I wasn’t having it. I didn’t want to be standing here having this conversation with anyone, let alone Amelia Banks. I thought she’d disappeared, too. Hell, I’d disappeared. After that night, I couldn’t justify being there anymore. I couldn’t be the thing I’d trained so hard to become. Nothing made sense, and as soon as my body was done healing and it became clear that my mind wasn’t about to follow suit, I knew I had to leave.

  This wasn’t what I wanted. I didn’t want Amelia Banks here. If she was here, the past was present. I couldn’t do this. I wouldn’t.

  “You need to go,” I said. “You need to turn around and go back to wherever you came from.”

  She stood in front of me, her mouth open in shock, trying to figure out just what the hell I was talking about.

  “You…” Her voice failed her, she looked down, and then she tried again. “You were the only one who even came close to catching him.”

  “Lucky.” Or unlucky. Depended on who you were talking to, on what kind of mood I was in.

  “You know him. You know what he’s capable of. You can get him this time. Make things really be over.”

  “Things are over,” I said, raising my voice, sweeping my hand sideways through the air. “Things are finished. I’m not a cop anymore. I don’t do that anymore.”

  Amelia shoved me — hard. “Things aren’t finished,” she spat. “They’re never finished.” Her chest heaved as she breathed hard. She was small, but deceptively strong. I had to take a step back, surprised, and already put off balance by her standing here, right in front of me.