HUNTER (The Corbin Brothers Book 1) (3 page)

“Forget I asked.” She was so difficult to get along with. “How long are you paid to be here, anyway?”

Hadley shrugged. “Your brother paid me a retainer. I’m here until the job’s done.”

I winced. “Retainers are for lawyers.”

“And I’m negotiating your recovery. Now, no more dawdling. You’re getting cleaned up, Marine.”

That startled me. I felt like even less a Marine than a rancher at this point.

“I don’t like that,” I said, continuing my long hobble.

“Don’t like what?”

“Being called that.” I pushed the door open to the bedroom and flipped on the light. “A Marine, I’m not.”

“That’s not what I heard.” Hadley looked around at the shambles my living space was in and whistled. “Though I heard Marines were a lot more disciplined than this.”

She knew her stuff. I’d have had my ass handed to me on a platter if any of my commanding officers had seen my quarters like this, but I wasn’t in that life anymore. I didn’t know what life to take on, where I stood. I existed in a sort of limbo, caught between several different worlds, none of them quite my own.

“This is a pretty big room,” Hadley said. “You have your own bathroom, too? How’d you swing that?”

“This is my parents’ old room,” I explained. “Chance had been in here, being the oldest and all, but he moved into my old bedroom upstairs when I…when I came back.”

“What was wrong with your old bedroom?” Hadley stared at me, and I recognized that question for what it was—a challenge.

“It was upstairs.”

“And what’s so bad about upstairs?”

“Hard to get up there these days.”

“Why?”

“Well, I seem to be down a leg these days.”

“That’s a sorry excuse, Hunter Corbin.” Hadley pushed a pile of dirty clothes from a chair and set her bag on it. “Here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to get yourself cleaned up. Then you’re going to clean this room up. Then we’re going to walk upstairs and take stock of your old room and start moving you back up there. That’s going to be our therapy session for the day.”

“Are you sure you’re not interested in the housekeeping position?” I asked her, shucking my shirt off in disgust. “You seem awfully eager to get to sweeping and mopping and dusting.”

“Who said anything about me doing any of that?” she retorted, her eyes drifting down my torso coolly. “You’d be surprised just how effective an exercise cleaning can be. And you need to build your strength any way you can. That’s important.”

I looked down at myself and flushed. My body was a wasted version of itself. I remembered how strong I’d felt before boot camp, my muscles honed from hard work on the ranch, and how invincible I’d felt afterward, every ounce of fat on my body melted away through brutal workouts and training. Now though, my chest was thin, my stomach sunken, and the act of using a crutch to get around the house made my arm and remaining leg burn in protest. I was a shadow of my former self. Exactly half of what I used to be.

“Shower,” Hadley reminded me quietly. “Come on.”

She cleared a path to the bathroom, kicking clothes and bottles and trash out of the way before flipping on the light in there. 

“Jesus, God almighty,” she remarked, her tone almost reverential. “Has that toilet ever seen a brush before?”

“Women and men have different standards of cleanliness,” I tried to tell her, but she was having none of it.

“This is unsanitary, Hunter,” she said, gesturing at the grime-encrusted sink, the mildew-speckled shower door. “Clean is clean, and dirty is dirty, and this bathroom is the worst I’ve ever seen.”

“Stop. You’re going to make me blush.”

She huffed a laugh at me. “You ought to. This is ridiculous. If you tried to have a girl over, she’d run away screaming in the opposite direction.”

“You’re not running.”

“I’m being paid not to run. But I will scream.” She opened the shower door and recoiled. “No wonder you don’t shower.”

“I usually just do it at the sink,” I said, shutting the shower door so neither of us had to look at it. My commanding officer would’ve had me go over this entire place with my toothbrush. I knew it was bad. “Like a sponge bath. See? My soap’s right there, in that dish.”

“You’ve been giving yourself sponge baths ever since you’ve been home?” she asked, shaking her head. “As soon as those stitches came out, you would’ve been fine to even go swimming if you wanted to.”

I scratched at my weeks-old beard, the one I’d stopped caring enough about to shave off anymore, feeling like an idiot. “Shower’s hard to get in and out of,” I muttered.

“Excuse me?” Hadley cocked her head at me.

I cleared my throat. “The shower. I fell in it, once, when I tried. Haven’t tried since.”

“You live on a ranch. You know how to ride a horse. I saw them, grazing in the pasture when I pulled up. I assume they’re not just there for show.”

“That’s right.”

“What did you do when you were just learning and you’d fall?”

I rolled my eyes at her. “Get back on.”

“And that’s what you have to do, now that you’re getting back on the horse so to speak,” she said. “You’re going to fall. That’s inevitable. You’ve suffered a great loss, but it’s not the end of your life. You’ve just got to keep on getting up again and again until you don’t fall anymore.”

She took her blazer off and had unzipped her skirt before I had the sense to at least try and determine what was happening.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“What the hell does it look like I’m doing?” she fired back, whipping her hair up and back into a bun before pulling off her shirt. “I’m going to help you take a shower until you feel comfortable enough to navigate that tub on your own.”

I was staring. I knew I was staring, and yet there was nothing I could do. I hadn’t seen a woman in her underwear since Eileen had sent me the dirty photograph of herself in a care package while I was in Afghanistan, and that photo hadn’t survived my injury. Neither had the relationship.

Hadley was unique from Eileen in more ways than I could count, but she was still gorgeous—just different from the shapes I’d grown used to. Hadley’s bra didn’t match her panties, but that didn’t make her any less lovely.

“Stop staring,” she commanded me, both of us blushing. “If you thought I was going to help you get cleaned up in that suit, you’re crazy. Take off your pants.”

I hesitated. “Turn around.”

“Not a chance,” she said, laughing at me. “I stripped down right in front of you, and that means you can strip down right in front of me. I’m a professional, remember? I’ve seen things.”

“You look a lot like a professional right now,” I muttered at her, hardly having to unfasten the button on my jeans before they came tumbling down. I’d lost too much weight even if I hadn’t been getting any exercise. I was wasting away, a visible sign of atrophy and apathy and so many other things eating me from the inside out.

I felt so much more than naked in front of her. Sure, my junk was right there in the open, on display, but it was the stump I was most worried about, even though I hated naming it that—even in my own mind. I hated to even look at it, and I had successfully avoided it for weeks. To have it there, naked, completely illuminated in even the dim bulbs in the bathroom, made me feel like I was throwing up.

“I don’t know why you’re gagging,” Hadley said, studying it. “Doctors did a good job with this, considering. It’s healed up nicely, not thanks to anything you did for it.”

“I fucking hate it.”

She looked me in the face. “Would you rather be dead?”

“Sometimes.” I lifted my chin, defiant, wondering if she’d shrink away from the truth. “Sometimes, I wish I were dead.”

She didn’t shrink at all. Instead, she slapped me. “Then you’re a selfish, spoiled, vain little bitch.”

That outburst seemed to surprise her as much as it did me. The hand that had slapped me, my cheek still stinging, flew back to cover her mouth, her eyes widening. We stared at each other, both of us at an impasse, each of us equally horrified.

“I’m sorry,” she said, those big eyes making her look even younger than what she probably was. “I’m really…I didn’t mean to do that. To say that. I don’t know what…I’m so sorry.”

As shocked and angry as I was at her, I didn’t like to see her so aghast. I blamed my upbringing, my chivalrous brothers, but I had to comfort her.

“That’s all right,” I said, my voice quiet and rough. “That just means you’re a Corbin now, so take that for what it’s worth.”

“Excuse me?”

I shrugged. “It’s how we communicate,” I explained. “Except none of us are very good at it. We usually have to rely on grunting and cussing and slapping each other around to get our points across, and even then it’s still a crapshoot. You’ve just caught it, I imagine. Like a disease.”

Hadley snorted, then guffawed, her cackling filling the bathroom up and spilling over, echoing through the house. When had anyone laughed like that in here? Certainly not since I’d been home, that much was sure.

“I’ve only been here for a couple of hours,” she said, wiping tears of mirth from her eyes. “You Corbins have a reputation around this town, but I didn’t realize it was catching.”

“There has been no sign of a cure,” I said resignedly, making her laugh harder. Seeing her laugh made me forget that I was standing—naked—in front of her, stump and all, if only for a moment.

“Oh, God, what a day,” she said. “I am, and I say this sincerely, deeply sorry for what I said and did. That was extremely unprofessional of me, and I apologize, truly.”

“I’m not going to tattle on you to Chance, if that’s what you’re afraid of.”

“That wasn’t what I was afraid of at all. I was afraid you wouldn’t trust me.”

“It’s the closest I’ve felt to you since I met you.”

She blinked. “What?”

“It made me realize that you’re not as perfect as you look.”

It took another blush from Hadley to make me realize what I’d said, and I had to bite my tongue to keep from groaning at my own stupidity.

“Okay,” she said briskly, as if she wasn’t standing in my dirty bathroom in just her bra and panties. “You’ve stalled enough. Let’s practice getting in the tub.”

“We could’ve done that with clothes on,” I said. “I think this was all a ploy to see me naked.”

“You wouldn’t have had to be if you’d been wearing underwear beneath those nasty jeans.”

“They’re all dirty.”

“This is my surprised face.” She held her rose-colored lips in a straight, sarcastic line. “Come on.”

I was forced to suffer—as if I hadn’t suffered enough today already—the feeling of a very attractive, nearly naked, virtual stranger of a woman steady my waist with her hands as I navigated toward the edge of the tub. It had a terribly sharp edge, the runner for the door, and that was what I feared the most—coming down hard on that with parts of my body I was still a little fond of.

“You’d have more stability if you used two crutches, especially since you haven’t been working out,” Hadley said. “Where’s your other one?”

“I don’t know,” I lied. In a fit of doped-up rage, I’d chucked it out the window of a moving vehicle as Tucker drove me back home from the hospital. He’d nearly wrecked the truck, as he tried to keep me from doing the same to the other one.

“Well, you’ll just have to get good at only having one until I can get you another to go with it,” she said, endlessly optimistic. “Steady yourself with your free hand on the door for now. We’ll get some handrails installed. Put your weight on the crutch; you’re going to have to trust yourself, Hunter.”

Trust myself—that was funny. I didn’t trust one thing about myself, not my ability to work past this, nor the possibility of ever being even close to the man I used to be.

“Hunter …”

I leaned on the crutch all the same, just to spite Hadley, to show her that I’d fall and hurt myself on the sharp edge of the tub, but I surprised both of us by swinging myself into the shower.

“You didn’t need me at all,” she said, grinning. “Now turn that water on.”

Navigating in that tight space was trouble. I didn’t trust my footing or the flimsy bar inside the shower door to hold my weight as I tried to creep forward.

“Add grip strips to our list of things to install,” Hadley said, climbing in behind me. “This thing is a concussion—or worse—waiting to happen.”

She reached around and turned the water on, giving a cute little squeak and ducking behind me as the water sputtered to life—ice cold.

“Fuck,” I said, cringing away from it.

“Sorry,” she said, though I wasn’t sure if her contrition was genuine. “Unfamiliar shower. At least you’re not getting scalded.”

I fiddled with the knobs until the temperature of the water was a little more agreeable.

“Shower caddy,” Hadley said, pointing to the showerhead. “We’ll get that so you won’t have to bend down to get everything, and then you’re all set.”

“Can you pass me the soap, until then?” I asked, jerking my thumb behind her. I risked my balance to crane my neck over my shoulder to watch her turn around and bend down, the sheer material of her panties stretching to leave precious little to the imagination.