Free HUNTER (The Corbin Brothers Book 1) by Lexie Ray

to the ranch to save us the trip to Dallas. I was fitted right there and then in the comfort of my own home with a vaguely uncomfortable carbon fiber leg that chafed at my thigh.
    “It doesn’t seem as sturdy as I thought it would,” I said, still clutching my crutches for support.
    “It’s stronger than metal,” Hadley reasoned. “Why don’t you lose the crutches for a moment and see how it feels?”
    “I don’t think it’ll hold my weight,” I said. “It feels weird.”
    “You’ll get used to it.”
    “I thought it would be heavier.”
    “Science is a wonderful thing.”
    And she even called a few friends of friends and got a counselor to agree to talk with me regularly over the phone. To be fair, she had to get me to agree to do it first.
    “I don’t need a counselor,” I insisted. “Don’t you see how well I’m doing?”
    “You’re doing better,” Hadley allowed. “I wouldn’t call it well yet.”
    “I’m off the pills,” I said. “I don’t drink to get drunk. What more do you want from me?”
    “To stop screaming in your sleep,” she said calmly. “That’s what you need the counselor for.”
    I tried to keep a poker face and failed miserably, shame casting my eyes downward.
    “It’s nothing to be embarrassed about, Hunter,” she said. “I didn’t mean it like that. I was just being honest with you.”
    “You talk in your sleep, too,” I said, on the defensive.
    Hadley paused. “Excuse me?”
    “That night—the final night I was laid up in detox. You spoke in your sleep.”
    Her face went pale. “I don’t remember that.”
    “You were very tired.” I thought she would be amused, but she wasn’t. Had I said something wrong?
    “What did I say?”
    “You know, I’m sorry I brought it up.”
    “Hunter, what did I fucking say?”
    I gulped. “That you love me—well, not me. I don’t know. You were probably dreaming about someone else. You said, ‘I love you.’ That’s all.”
    Hadley snorted, but the color didn’t return to her cheeks. “Love you? We haven’t even fucked.”
    “Damn straight.”
    “You’ll talk to the counselor by phone twice a week.”
    “Fine.”
    She seemed surprised that I’d relented, but I just didn’t want to perturb her any more than I had. I was puzzled over her response to my little joke. What was she so frightened of? It was almost as if she had something to hide, something that her subconscious might try and chat about when she was sleeping, her guard down.
    I realized I knew very little about Hadley, even as her time at the ranch stretched to a month. We spent practically every minute of every day together, Hadley working me to the bone, pushing me well out of my comfort zone, but I didn’t really know much about her.
    “You guys do realize we’re in the twenty-first century, don’t you?” she asked one day, shading her eyes, looking off into the distance. We were outside, me running through a brutal circuit of calisthenics.
    I halted in my sit-ups. “Of course we are.”
    “No one said you could stop,” she said, not even looking at me but continuing her scrutiny of the horizon.
    “Why do you ask?” I grunted out, fighting to catch my breath enough to speak. It felt like I’d been doing these damn things for hours, and my abs—nonexistent though they were—were not happy.
    “I’m either having a hallucination brought on by heatstroke, or I just saw one of your brothers ride away on a horse,” she said.
    “You’re having heatstroke?” I muttered, sweat coursing down my body. “You probably did see one of my brothers riding a horse. It’s what we…what they do.” What I used to do.
    “But you said you all are aware this is the twenty-first century, a glorious age of technology,” Hadley said, looking down at me. “Why do you keep stopping? You can talk and do sit-ups, can’t you?”
    “I lose track of how many I’ve done,” I said.
    “I’m keeping track, not you. Now, explain.”
    I whooshed out an