HUNTER (The Corbin Brothers Book 1) (4 page)

“I’m only doing this because of how sorry I am for earlier,” she said, grabbing at the soap while maintaining eye contact with me over her own shoulder. “You get a good eyeful?”

I gulped, properly shamed. “Yep.”

“If only there was some kind of soap to scrub that mind of yours.”

I lathered up, self-conscious and hyper-aware that Hadley was behind me. “You know, this may come as a surprise to you, but this is the first time I’ve just met a woman and taken a shower with her.”

“That does come as a surprise to me,” she said, facetious as hell. “We’re going to be very close friends, I think. By the time this is all said and done with and you don’t need me anymore, I’m going to see more of you than I think any woman has. I’m going to see your soul, Hunter Corbin, and you’re going to show it to me.”

Those words were strange and had the ring of prophecy about them, but when I turned to try and puzzle out their meaning by looking at her face, she only arched a well-defined brow at me.

“Shouldn’t you be washing something?” she asked.

“I’m all done.”

“Nope. You didn’t wash anywhere past your ass.”

“I didn’t know you were keeping such careful track of it.”

“I want you clean for your clean start at life,” she said. “Now wash the rest of you.”

“The bubbles go down my leg, and that’s how it gets washed.”

“Oh, pity me. God, if you’re still listening to me, if you still take an interest in my life, please have mercy on me because this man doesn’t think he has to wash his leg and foot. He thinks that the bubbles that slough off the rest of his dirty body, Lord, are enough to cleanse him. Give me the damn soap, Hunter.”

That was all the warning I got before she launched into me, scrubbing for all she was worth, running her hands over my thigh and calf and ankle.

“Turn around slowly and don’t get any ideas,” she muttered darkly at me, and I was careful to oblige.

I was just a man, though, and it had been a long damn time since I’d seen a beautiful woman on her knees in front of me, since back before I went to boot camp even, since my last time with Eileen, and I felt my blood stir inside of me. It was the strangest thing. I’d been worried about…things. I hadn’t gotten hard or even wanted to since I’d been back. I figured there was nerve damage and that I’d be a cripple in more places than just my missing leg, but to my surprise and mortification, my cock twitched, the blood circulating, making it stand at half-mast in spite of my best efforts to think of anything else.

If Hadley noticed, she pretended not to.

“You see the black that’s coming off you?” she said, pointing at the sudsy water running at the bottom of the tub. “You think the bubbles were going to take care of that for you?”

I could’ve told her that her hair was getting wet down there, but I’d have missed the way it looked like dew drops on the drying hay in autumn, ready for another cut and bale before winter.

“Fuck!” I exclaimed, shocked and embarrassed and dangerously defensive. “What the fuck are you doing?”

“Cleaning your…did you give it a name yet?”

Hadley was touching my stump, running her hands over the wrinkled and dimpled scars as if they were nothing, and it made me want to throw up in earnest now. I had taken such great care to avoid the damn thing that it was a sensory overload to have her touching it, soaping it up, and caring for it as if it was worth caring for. Like I was worth caring for.

“Stop fucking touching it,” I growled, something in my voice making her drop the soap.

She squinted up at me, blinking at the shower mist that continued to rain down on her. “Why?”

“Because I don’t like it.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s not…because it reminds me…because I don’t want you to, okay?”

“You can’t just ignore an entire part of your body, Hunter,” she said, retrieving the soap and standing up in one smooth motion. If I’d shaken her up with my vehemence, she didn’t seem timid anymore.

“I can ignore it if it’s half of a part.”

“Wrong again.”

She reached around me before I could react. Suddenly, I was gasping under a cold stream of water again, mouth opening and shutting like a dying fish.

“I don’t care how much you resist me,” she said, as I struggled to shut off the water. “You’re going to live again, Hunter…if it’s the last thing I do.”

I got out of the shower without her help if only to escape her. She was so damn relentless, not letting up even as she followed me into the room in her damp underwear, thumbing makeup out from underneath her eyes.

“Don’t you dare flop down on that bed.”

“I’m flopping,” I said, “and there’s not a thing you can do about it.”

“So help me, Christ—”

“Go on, call God and Christ and all the angels,” I said, collapsing on the bed. “I’m tired, woman.”

“You’re drunk and doped up. Not tired.”

“Tired because I’m drunk and doped up.”

“You’re not done with what I had planned today,” she said, sounding angry, but I couldn’t even coax my eyelids up to see her face flush with rage and find out if it made her even more beautiful in that flimsy bra and panty number. I was bone tired, unable to resist the substances I’d put in my body to put it to bed, not even for a pretty girl.

“We’re done for today,” I told her, not caring that I was face up and naked in front of her, still dripping wet from the shower.

“There will be hell to pay tomorrow, Hunter Corbin, if you do not get up from that bed this instant.”

“That’s tomorrow’s problem,” I murmured, and that was the end of that.

My nights were so often spent tossing and turning, sweating, my hands hovering over where my leg used to be, my brain trying to convince me that, in spite of what my eyes were seeing, my leg was still there, shattered and painful beyond words. If I did get sleep, it was usually peppered with nightmares of terrible memories and terrible things that hadn’t happened, my brain making no distinction between the worst of my past and the worst of my fears.

If I had to decide, my brain was more my enemy than my missing leg. It was my brain that curled around that loss and convinced me all was lost. It was my brain that replayed the incident over and over in my mind until I had to drink and take pills to drive it out, to make my brain shut down for long enough so my body could recover from its onslaught.

I woke up hungover but with no memory of my dreams—all in all, an excellent state of being. Even more surprising was that it was actually morning. I’d slept the entire day, evening, and night all the way through without a hint of a disturbing image to sully my slumber. I’d have to try and remember whatever it was I’d taken yesterday to give me such an excellent night’s sleep.

What if it was Hadley?

The thought was an errant one, one I examined for a handful of seconds before struggling to a sitting position. Christ. I’d forgotten about Hadley. I’d been so knocked out that she hadn’t even made an appearance in my dreams, though nothing good could’ve come out of that. My brain would have probably fooled me by starting off with a sex dream and ending with her head getting blown off or something.

I was still naked, though I’d dried off long ago from the shower we’d shared. During the night, I’d yanked the cover partway over me, or someone else had done it out of pity. I doubted it had been Hadley. She’d been pissed.

I rubbed my eyes and looked around at the mess my room was. She’d wanted me to clean it up, to go upstairs and take stock of my old room, to move back up there as a part of therapy, of an attempt at normalcy. Normalcy—that was a laugh. I was missing my leg. Nothing was going to be normal about my life ever again.

But the way she’d touched my thigh, the one that ended so suddenly now, had suggested that Hadley thought it was perfectly normal. That didn’t make sense to me. My brothers told me they’d hauled my girlfriend—well, ex-girlfriend now—up to the hospital as soon as I’d been well enough to fly back home, and she’d cried and screamed so awfully they’d had to yank her right back out of there.

That’s how normal I was. I had to remember that. Things that were normal for Hadley weren’t normal for the rest of the world. She was used to working with cripples and amputees and everyone else whose lives were fucked up beyond all recognition. That didn’t mean that if she could touch me without shuddering or crying, then anyone else would. My own brothers could barely look at me. I still had trouble fathoming it myself sometimes, waking up and being so sure that all of it had simply been a terrible nightmare—and then realizing I was still down a limb.

I reached for my bottle of pills to ward off any early morning despair, but the bottle was empty. What the hell? I could’ve sworn there were still pills left when I went to sleep—or the last time I’d taken them anyway. I pushed myself up and pulled a pair of boxes on. They weren’t clean—not one piece of clothing in here was—but they were the closest that I could reach. I opened the drawer to the bedside table and rattled around in there, trying to find a bottle with pills inside. They were all empty, every last one of them. What was going on?

I grabbed my crutch on the floor and hopped to the bathroom, trying to ignore the rise of panic inside my chest. There had to be some pills somewhere. I wasn’t going to be able to do it without them. I hadn’t gotten through a day without a substance since I’d been back stateside. I shouldn’t have to do it alone. Hadn’t I been through enough?

The cabinet behind the side mirror was devoid of pills. All of the bottles were still there, lined up exactly as I’d left them, but there wasn’t a single pill inside of them. This was a nightmare. I was asleep. That’s what this was…except I was awake. My bladder reminded me of that fact. But when I turned toward the toilet, my mouth dropped open. Swimming in that dirty water, the filthy bowl that Hadley had complained about just yesterday, were all my missing pills. Most of them hadn’t even dissolved yet. They bobbed there, the capsules, while the tablets had sunk. This had to have just happened. Whoever had done this had wanted me to see it.

“What the actual fuck!” I bellowed. Whomever it was had to still be here. If they wanted a reaction, I’d give them a fucking reaction. I hated myself for it, but I actually considered, for the briefest of moments, trying to dip my hand in that toilet bowl pill cocktail and salvage some of them. Maybe it wasn’t too late. Maybe there was still some time to dose myself against this day that was insisting on happening.

“Oh, you’re awake.”

I wheeled around to see Hadley leaning against the doorframe, looking smug as hell. I knew immediately that she was the one who did this to me. She was wearing a different outfit from yesterday—slacks and a blouse—which meant that she’d had time to go back to wherever she was from, concoct a plan of attack, and come back here to execute it, all while I’d been passed out in bed.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing? Don’t you know that I need those pills?”

“See, that’s the thing,” she said. “You can cuss at me all you want, but I’m not convinced you actually need those pills.”

“My name is on those bottles,” I said. “They were prescribed to me by an actual doctor. You’re just a physical therapist.”

Her smile didn’t turn down a single watt. “That’s the thing, Hunter—a funny thing a lot of people don’t realize. Doctors are humans, too. Sometimes, they make mistakes. Other times, people manipulate them to get whatever they want. It’s a system that’s ripe for abuse. If you find the right doctor—or the wrong one, depending on how you’re approaching the issue—they’ll write a prescription just to get you out of the office, to move on to the next patient, trying to get through everyone they have to see in a day.”

“That may be the case for some people, but not for me,” I said. “That’s not how it is.”

“Then tell me how it is.”

“You’re a physical therapist,” I said, doing my best to make my voice drip with disdain. “Not a therapist. Not a real doctor. If you want to tell me to do some sit-ups or something, then that’s your prerogative. I don’t have to stand around and talk to you about my medication.”

“You do if that’s what I want,” Hadley said. “You do if I determine that your dependency on drugs is getting in the way of my work.”

I laughed at her. “Is that what you think this is? A dependency?”

“You seem pretty desperate.”

“Because I was taking those pills under the direction of my doctor. My actual doctor, mind you, and now they’re all in the toilet.”

“Ah, yes.” Hadley walked past me and flushed. “I knew there was something I forgot to do. Put the toilet seat down, but forgot to flush. There’s always something.”

“You think this is some goddamn joke.”

“No, I don’t see anything to laugh about right now.”

“I need those fucking pills. I have to call my doctor now, get him to phone the pharmacy, and then I need someone to pick them up for me.”

“That’s not going to happen,” she informed me.

“It is, and it’s going to happen pretty fucking immediately.”

“Let’s be honest, here, Hunter,” Hadley said, dispassionate, all business even as I sweated and swore at her. “What is your pain like these days?”

“What the fuck do you think it’s like?” I demanded, practically breathing fire in my desperate rage. “I’m missing a fucking leg.”

“Yes, you have made it very clear that you’re missing a leg,” she said. “But that’s not what I asked. I want to know what kind of pain you’re in right now.”

“A lot,” I barked at her.

“A lot is subjective,” she said. “On a scale of one to ten, with one being no pain, and ten being pain that requires hospitalization, where would you place this current pain?”

“Eight.”

“Eight?” She sounded surprised—or dubious, maybe—her shapely eyebrows raised.

“You asked me to rate it, and I did.”

“Hunter, when I helped you in the shower yesterday, your thigh looked like it had healed nicely. It didn’t look like something that would be causing you pain at a level eight.”

“Looks can be deceiving.”

“Yes, they can. Could you describe the nature of your pain?”

“Well…it hurts.”

Hadley frowned. “Can you elaborate on that?”

“It…really, really hurts?”

She sighed. “I’m trying to understand why you might be feeling that level of pain. If you’re as specific as possible, I can try to pinpoint its source and tailor workouts to address it.”

I gnawed on the inside of my cheek, well on the angry side of exasperated. “My head is pounding and my stomach is rolling.”

“You can’t include your hangover on the pain scale,” she snapped, her sarcasm sharp as a knife. “I want to know about the pain in your thigh, at the site of the amputation, in your muscles connected to that area.”

“It aches,” I fired back. “And sometimes I think my foot hurts. The foot I’m missing. I remember what it felt like when it was injured. When they thought they might still save the leg.”

“What is the pain of your leg on the scale we previously discussed?”

“It changes all the time.”

“I want to know what it is right now.” On the surface, Hadley seemed collected and patient, her hands folded neatly in her lap, her lips pursed in interest, head cocked to the side. But those eyes couldn’t fool anyone. That green sparked and flashed, fed up with smelling my bullshit, challenging me to tell her the truth for once.

“Five,” I said finally.

“Really?”

“Four.”

“Are you going to keep going down if I keep questioning you?”

“Three,” I snarled at her, “but that’s it. And that’s not accounting for the phantom pain, or the fact that I might puke on you right now, or that my head wants to jump out of my body.”

Hadley’s eyes roamed over my body. “Or the fact that you’re trembling and sweating.”

“What does that have to do with anything?” I asked.

She pinched the bridge of her nose. “Let me guess. Some well-meaning doctor has been prescribing you pain pills ever since you got back stateside, am I right?”

“I’ve been in pain, Hadley.”

“But you’re not in pain now. You’re not in pain, and you continue to take pain pills.”

I didn’t like her tone of voice—judgmental, like she knew so much more than I did, like she thought I was weak.

“You should try losing a limb sometime,” I said. My hangover felt like it was getting worse by the minute, but that didn’t make sense. I needed some water and a Tylenol or five. Then some more sleep. Then I’d wake up feeling better. “It fucks with my head, Hadley. It would fuck with anyone. You’re off balance, and you can’t stop thinking about what happened and what a single moment took from you. Pain comes in a lot of different forms. I can’t just put it on a scale of one to ten. It’s a lot more complicated than that.”

She’d lost that dubious look. I could tell I had her full attention. Good—maybe she’d realized she made a mistake throwing all my pills down the toilet. She’d write me a new prescription, if she had that power, or she’d find me someone who could.

“Hunter, there are ways of addressing the things you’re feeling that are a lot more effective than opiates.”

“I’ve been doing just fine. You’re the one who came in here thinking there’s something wrong.”

“Incorrect. Your brother called me here because everything was wrong. Because he thought you’d be on the mend at home, but you just kept getting worse and worse instead.”

“I don’t need anyone’s help,” I said. “No one here understands what I’m going through. You all are falling down over yourselves trying to judge me when no one gets it.”

“Then let someone in. Explain to me why you’re taking pain pills if you’re not in any physical pain. How is that helping you?”

I opened my mouth without any clear plan of what I was going to say, and then whirled around to the toilet, vomiting violently. I had to sink to my knee to support myself, and when I was finally done, I couldn’t so much as lift my arm to flush.

“This is the worst hangover of my life,” I admitted, as Hadley did the dirty work for me.

“It’s not a hangover,” she said. “It’s withdrawal.”

“What?”

“Your body has become dependent on opiates.” She offered me a hand, her mouth set in a grim line, and I sighed as I relied on her strength to regain my footing. The world spun, and I felt sicker than ever, but I managed to bite back the torrent begging to be released.

“That’s what I was trying to tell you. I need the pills. I don’t feel right if I don’t take them.”

“That’s addiction.” Hadley helped me to the bed.

“You don’t understand. The doctor prescribed me the pills.”

“I understand perfectly.” She piled pillows behind my head, ducked back in the bathroom, and returned with a damp washcloth that she passed perfunctorily across my forehead and torso. “Pain management is tricky. Your body and mind liked the way the pills made you feel. That’s why you continued to ask the doctor for them, and that’s why the doctor continued to prescribe them to you. Because you were reporting positive results, even if you were tricked into it.”