EMMETT (The Corbin Brothers Book 3) Read Free Page A

expressly forbade you to ride.”
    I’d reached the clinic without realizing it, and Hadley was waiting outside for me, her arms crossed in front of her body. She was not happy. Not even a little amused.
    “I just wanted to see if I could,” I said, defensive. “And look. I can.”
    I hopped back down to the ground with little difficulty and just a few of those odd twinges, giving Sugar a pat on the neck for getting me here in one piece.
    “And what if you’d hurt yourself again?” Hadley demanded, just as unhappy with me off the horse as on it. “That would mean that all the work we did would’ve been in vain.”
    “But I didn’t hurt myself,” I reminded her gently. “I’m just fine.”
    “Ugh, Emmett.” She uncrossed her arms and rubbed her face. “All of you Corbins are just alike. Stubborn as hell and impossible to deal with and deaf to reason.”
    “Problems with Hunter?” I guessed.
    “Don’t even get me started.”
    She waved me inside the clinic and past a couple of walk-in appointments already sitting in the waiting room.
    “It’s not a problem, Hadley,” I said, looking at the old man holding his elbow and the younger man with a padded boot on one of his feet. “If these guys were ahead of me, I can wait.”
    “You’re the one with the early appointment,” she said grimly, opening a door to one of the examination rooms and waiting for me to pass through. “Let’s just get this over with.”
    “Hunter wants to be back out on night patrols, doesn’t he?” I guessed again — right enough to press on the nerve that made Hadley stop glowering and start talking.
    “I don’t understand why, when he had such an episode after Avery got shot,” she said, jerking her thumb at me in a gesture that I was pretty sure meant she wanted me to sit up on the examination table. “I know it’s PTSD, but he really wasn’t well. He wasn’t himself. And now he wants to go out there like everything is fine? Who in this family does Hunter listen to?”
    “Well, you,” I said, unfastening the Velcro that held my brace in place. “And maybe Tucker, after you.”
    “What I say to him doesn’t mean shit,” Hadley said. “Maybe I’ll deploy Tucker and get him to hammer some wisdom into Hunter’s head. He doesn’t need to be out there at night with all those guns and the potential for something to happen.”
    “Is he talking to anyone?” I jerked as Hadley tapped on my knee with a little rubber mallet, testing my reflexes.
    “He barely talks to me about it,” she said, gesturing for me to lie back on the table. “I didn’t think ranching was going to be like this.”
    “This … this is a little different from what ranching usually is,” I allowed as she tested my range of motion. I was no physical therapist, but even I could tell that my knee was much better than the first day, when she’d taken me to her Dallas office for a proper assessment. I’d come a long way, and now I was ready to resume my real life.
    “When is it going to be back to normal?” she asked, opening my file but not really looking at it. She was worried, a rumpling between her eyebrows. I couldn’t really blame her. Things were pretty distressing right now.
    “Normal is kind of a relative term,” I admitted. “Are you asking when the ranch is going to be normal? Because it never really is. If it’s not one thing, it’s another. If we got the cattle theft problem to go away, we’d still have money worries. If we got those resolved, we’d still have the weather to obsess over. At least it’s not boring, right?”
    But that last question fell a little flat. “I’m just worried about Hunter,” Hadley said. “After the episode with Avery, he just kind of shut down. I’ve been trying to read up on PTSD and everything, but I’m nowhere near qualified to help him deal with this.”
    “I don’t think you have to solve anything for him,” I said, sitting up and gathering my long hair back into its topknot.