HUNTER (The Corbin Brothers Book 1) (16 page)

“The reason I didn’t finish medical school, the reason I had to stop and could only pick back up with physical therapy was because there was another…before you.” Hadley laughed, apropos of nothing. If there was something funny about that statement, I couldn’t decipher it. “That sounded ridiculous. Of course there were others before you. I’m no virgin, and I wasn’t when we met, either.”

Hadley paced around, kicking at the dirt clods. “You all need rain,” she said.

“Is there anything I can do or say to make this easier on you?” I asked, peering at her. “I hate to see someone struggle, Hadley.” Even if that someone just kept hurting me.

“Just…be patient with me, if you can find it in yourself,” she said. “I’m trying, Hunter, I swear to God. I had like ten different versions of what I was going to say to you, and I was rehearsing them in the car on the ride over here, and none of them were right. It’s pathetic. I can’t string together a coherent thought. It’s ugly.”

“There isn’t anything pretty about whatever you’re trying to tell me,” I said. “Don’t try to make it pretty. Just say what you came here to say.” I didn’t care that, once she’d said it, she’d leave me forever, vanishing from my life—the life she’d returned to me, ignoring my attempts to be rid of it.

“I was in love with someone before,” she said, nodding to herself as she came to some inward decision. “Before I knew you, I was in love with him. Engaged to be married. It was a guy I met through some friends in college; he was going to West Point. He was…well, we were in love. I started medical school, and he shipped out to Iraq and he…he didn’t come back.”

She was quiet for a long time. It gave me time to see some of the missing puzzle pieces falling into place—her vehemence at me, when we first met, at me bemoaning the fact that I’d left part of me behind during my tour of duty. She’d snapped that I was luckier than most, that I was spoiled, and I had been. I owned that, even if I was confused about why she had been so angry.

“He was killed by someone he trusted, someone everyone trusted,” she said, her voice far away, all the way back with the dead man she had loved. “Part of the forces he was helping to train…there was an infiltration, or maybe someone just snapped. It was during a training exercise, when they all had their guns, and he died. One of three to die like that—the attacker included.”

Her parents had known. Of course they’d known. If they had been engaged, her parents would’ve known. More pieces falling into place. They cared about her, worried about her, and wanted nothing more than for her to be happy along with pretty and successful, but that happiness had been elusive. Hadley’s quest for happiness had been tragic.

“When he died…it broke me,” she continued. “It broke my heart, I guess, but it also broke my basic ability to function. I…stopped. I just stopped. I dropped out of school. I couldn’t do it anymore; I couldn’t face anyone. I didn’t even tell anyone what happened. I just left. I went home, and my parents had to figure it out for themselves.”

I didn’t know how to explain how I felt. There was great sadness, of course, and camaraderie. I knew plenty of guys who didn’t make it back, and the fact that this guy—Hadley’s fiancé—was one of them gave me pause. It was a brotherhood even if we didn’t serve in the same country or the same branch of military. We’d both served, and we were connected in that sense. I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t just a bit of jealousy, and if that made me an asshole, then I supposed I was an asshole. Even if Hadley had broken my heart, I still loved her—probably in the same way she loved me and didn’t want to.

She looked at me for the first time since she’d really started opening up. “I didn’t want to take your case, you know, but Chance was adamant. Said I was your last hope, and what a fuck ton of pressure that was. I knew you were different. You were a client. That was fine. You were injured in Afghanistan; he was killed in Iraq; and you were…not the type of man I would usually fall for.”

“Missing a leg?”

“Too much like my fiancé.”

And that’s when it became crystal clear to me, why she didn’t want to be in love with me, Hadley’s next words washing over me.

“It broke me so thoroughly that I didn’t so much as look at another man again,” she said. “Maybe I’m a freak, but I haven’t dated—haven’t had even the tiniest inclination to share any part of my heart or body with another man. I wouldn’t even accept a male lab partner when I finally did go back to school. They called me the ice queen. But you…”

She trailed off, looking away from me again. “It’s not fair, you know, to either of us. You’re so much like him, and that’s not fair to me. We’ll always wonder if I’m just using you as a substitute for him, even if he’s never coming back. We can never be sure of each other. And it’s not fucking fair.”

Whatever strength that had kept her from crying had left her, and she sobbed great big, gulping torrents of tears. She cried with no reservations, completely devastated, feeling her dual-edged loss at its fullest.

I stood slowly, warily, wondering what I should do, what needed to be done to respond to this torrent of truth. There was no coming back from this, no apologies or posturing.

“When I saw you with her, it was like losing everything all over again,” she said, hiccupping as she struggled for air. “Everything came rushing back, and I knew I couldn’t do it again, couldn’t do it anymore, couldn’t expect to love someone again.”

I was suddenly and brutally happy I’d chased Eileen off. Even if she never understood the magnitude of her crime, it was big enough to break Hadley’s heart, and I wanted to protect that precious part of the woman weeping in front of me as much as I could.

I approached Hadley slowly, not sure how she would react to me, whether she would push me away. But I couldn’t just stand here and watch her cry. It would be easier to sprout wings and fly.

She stiffened when I folded my arms around her, then changed her mind, clinging to me like she was trying to save herself from going under again. She was right. It wasn’t fair for her to feel like this. This was too much for anyone to cope with alone.

“I’m here now, Hadley,” I said. “I’ll always be here for you. No matter what.”

“I can’t lose you, too, Hunter,” she said, her words muffled by the front of my shirt. “I don’t think I’d ever be able to come back from it.”

“I’m not going anywhere. I’m never going to speak to Eileen again. She knows better than to come back here.”

“I love you.”

“I know you do. I love you, too.”

“But there’s probably always going to be a part of me that wishes I didn’t.”

“Well, there’s always going to be a part of me that’s plastic, so no one’s perfect.”

She laughed through her tears, and I smiled.

“You’re an idiot.”

“Yes. But you love me, so maybe you’re an idiot, too.”

“That’s fair. I am an idiot.”

Were there two more imperfect people in the world standing together right now? I drew back a little bit and looked at Hadley, her green eyes bloodshot from crying and exhaustion, her auburn hair greasy and falling apart. She was even more beautiful than she ever had been to me before, and I knew it was because, in spite of everything, all of the doubts inside of her own heart, she came back. She came back to me.

I kissed her, lightly at first, then deepened it as she grabbed at me. I felt that kiss creep up my spine, held her tight, tried to reclaim what we’d had, even though I understood this was a new phase of our relationship, completely different from the helpless attraction we shared. Now we came into this thing with clear eyes, because we wanted to be here. It was so powerful to realize, that things could return to a sort of new normal. I’d never have my leg back, but that didn’t mean life was over. Life was simply different, a new normal. After everything Hadley and I had been through, both separately and together, nothing would ever return to being the “same.” We woke up different people every single day. What mattered was that we stayed together and hung onto the fact that we loved each other no matter what.

“You gave me back my life, don’t you understand that?” I asked her, touching her damp cheek, sticky with tear trails.

“You did the same for me,” she breathed, and she kissed me again.

I hated it here.

That was the truest kernel of my soul, the one I kept most carefully guarded.

It was my truth. I hated it here. I hated the ranch. I hated living here, working here, being here. I hated all of it.

This hellhole had taken everything from us, from me, and the rest of my brothers were too blind to see it for what it was. We worked ourselves to the bone for something none of us wanted, a share in a place that was slowly but steadily dragging us under.

I should’ve hated my brothers, too, but I didn’t. I resented them, sure, but I didn’t hate them. They were misguided, and I didn’t like the way they more or less forced me into working the ranch right alongside them, but they were family—the only family I had left. I just wished they could see that life could hold so much more potential outside of this sun-scorched patch of earth. We could’ve gone anywhere we wanted, done anything we wanted, if we’d cut ties with this place and moved on. We’d had dozens of offers of fellow ranchers trying to buy the place, but it was a point of pride for my brothers to keep our parents’ dream alive and sink their entire existence into this place.

Why did all of my brothers love this place so much? Even the ones who had escaped the ranch came back, drawn like metal to a magnet. I didn’t understand why. I’d left and come back, too, but that was a much different story. Why couldn’t any of us Corbins get the hell out of here?

“Avery!”

I turned just in time to see myself nearly get run down by my baby brother on his favorite horse.

“Chance will never forgive you if you rob him of a ranch hand,” I reminded him, and that was true. I was nothing more than a ranch hand to my oldest brother.

“You got that right,” Hunter agreed. “He wants to see you. Something about the cattle logs being out of date. He sounded pissed.”

“He always sounds pissed.” Those damn cattle logs. They were the bane of my existence. I wished someone else would do it, keeping tedious and thorough details about each and every braying mammal we had on the ranch, but it was somehow my duty to be so boring. I loathed it, and I knew Chance had finally noticed that I hadn’t been keeping good records.

“What are you doing all the way out here without your horse?” Hunter asked. “Want to hitch a ride back to the house so you can deal with Chance?”

“Hell, no,” I said with a snort. “I’m taking a walk. I’ll get back to deal with Chance whenever I get back.”

“Don’t you get enough exercise working the ranch?” Hunter joked, more comfortable astride the back of the horse than he was on his own feet. Well, only one of them was really his. The other was artificial.

“Walking’s not exercise,” I retorted. “I do it to think. Don’t you get enough horseback riding done while you’re working?”

“I like going fast all the time,” he said, clicking his tongue at the animal and rocketing away at an almost instant gallop. I watched them until they were a dot on the horizon, then nothing, lost to the expanses of this rotten ranch. He loved the damn place, had ever since his first ride on a horse in Tucker’s arms as an infant. I remembered Tuck catching hell from our parents for that stunt.

Fine. It’d been good to see Hunter get better, borne along by love for the ranch and love for Hadley. That’d been a high moment, but those were getting few and far between. That was just part of the ranching life. When things were bad, they were really bad. Right now, they were the worst they’d ever been.

Last year, Chance had taken out a loan to keep us going. We’d had to buy feed for the cattle in the drought, had to truck in water as the river dried up to sustain the herd. No substantial rain had fallen since that deal with the bank, and the money had already run out. We could hardly grow hay, let alone maintain all our cattle, but us idiot Corbins seemed convinced that everything would eventually turn around, that we’d have a windfall of cash or the skies would open up and pour rain and everything would get better again.

I’d abandoned my count of how many days we’d been without. It got too damned depressing. I could keep track just from the way the leaves fell off the trees, the grass crackled and snapped and broke, the desiccated fish skeletons littering what used to be the river bottom.

When were my brothers going to understand that this place was going to suck up all of our dreams? We were already drowning in debt. What would happen when the inevitable struck? How would we repay everything if the ranch wasn’t worth a dime? It would be impossible for any of us to start over, impossible for me to ever escape this place.

I wrenched the mailbox open—it was rusty as hell for how dry it had been—and took the bundle of catalogs and envelopes out. When was the last time anyone had checked the stupid mail? A couple of letters fell to the dust underfoot, and I stooped to collect them before the dry wind rasped them away.

My eyes widened when I saw the one that had landed on top, brushing the dirt away to make sure I was seeing it correctly.

“Foreclosure notice,” it blared in thick, red letters.

A hole opened up in my stomach, thinking about the rest of my brothers who gave a damn about the ranch. In spite of their best efforts, the bank was moving to reclaim this property. They’d all be gutted at the news, scrambling to figure out what to do, selling everything that wasn’t bolted down to try and get us back on our feet.

It was going to be an ugly time.

But could anyone blame me for feeling…if not elated, then relieved? We’d been limping along, trying to stave off the end for so long. Now, the end was upon us. We knew what shape it was taking.

I smiled, looking at that blessed envelope.

The ranch was done.

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