HUNTER (The Corbin Brothers Book 1) Read Online Free

rolling away from her. “I’m going to sleep.”
    “The hell you are.” Another surprise that kept my eyes open. For as much of a lady as I assumed this Hadley Parsons to be, the curse, though mild, made me reconsider the idea of her.
    “Didn’t I tell you I didn’t sleep last night?” I demanded, turning back on the couch to face her.
    “You told me you didn’t get much sleep,” she said. “When’s the last time you slept through the night?”
    I laughed at her.
    “Okay, part of the night?” she tried again.
    “Why don’t you just let me sleep right now?” I asked. “I’m finally tired enough to do it.”
    “Only because you’ve drank enough beer and eaten enough pills to sleep,” she said. “And maybe not ever wake up.”
    “A good sleep.”
    “Not really.” She’d rolled my jeans leg up to where my knee used to be before I registered what was happening.
    “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” I burst out, sitting up ramrod straight and performing a very manly scramble away from her.
    “My job,” she said, exasperated. “Or at least I’m trying to. You’re not helping very much.”
    “How much is Chance paying you to let you ogle me?” I hated the way my jeans looked rolled up, preferring to let the leg of denim hang down, providing at least the illusion that something was there.
    “More than what your family can afford,” she said, not even being gentle about that revelation. “I’m expensive because I’m good at what I do, Hunter, and because I make house calls. Now, are you going to let me ogle that stump, or should I wait until you pass out, poke at it all I want, then pump your stomach for you?”
    “You’re lucky I was raised by the people who raised me,” I said, rage making it hard for me to breathe normally. “If I were anyone else, from anywhere else, I’d teach you a lesson, show you that’s not how I want to be talked to.”
    “You want me to pin a medal on you because you’re not going to hit me?” Hadley’s green eyes smoldered. “What’ll the award be called? The ‘Holy Shit, Look At Me, I’m So Cultured I Don’t Hit Women Medal?’ Should I contact the President, see if he’ll fly down here for the ceremony?”
    “You called it a fucking stump, Hadley.”
    “I called it a leg earlier, but you didn’t seem to like that either,” she countered. “What’s it going to be, Hunter? What do you want to call it? Should it have a name? Flipper? Butch? The Thigh? What?”
    She was making my skin crawl with how intimate she was being and how easily she could talk about something I had trouble looking at—even though it was a part of my body. However, it somehow comforted me to see some of her facade fall down, to see her be real and impatient and offensive. Part of the reason I’d checked myself right out of the VA hospital before so much as starting physical therapy was because how sterile everything was there. The doctors were like robots, their gazes never flickering. I wasn’t sure that they blinked or had pulses or blood moving through their veins. It was frightening, and it made me think they acted like that because they believed me to be less than human myself.
    “I don’t know what to call it,” I said finally, meeting her green eyes with hesitation. “This is all a little new to me.”
    I expected her to soften, but she surprised me again. “What’s new to you? Missing a limb or not taking care of yourself?”
    “I’m doing the best that I can,” I tried, but she wasn’t having it.
    “Forget about the last time you slept at night,” she said. “When’s the last time you had a shower?”
    She really knew how to cut a man down. “I…”
    “Uh-huh. Thought so. Let’s go.”
    “Go where?”
    “Where do you think? If you’re incapable of keeping yourself clean, I’m going to help you relearn how. That’s my job.”
    “You’re not going to bathe me.”
    “Then why aren’t you bathing yourself?” she asked, and what