Bury the Hatchet (18 page)

“Maybe I don’t want to be protected,” I said after a moment. It might already have been too late for me to protect my heart where Hunter was concerned, so I might as well learn all there was to know about his family.

“Maybe you don’t.”

“Maybe he should let me help him.”

John eyed me for a long time. “Maybe he should. Hunter isn’t very good at letting people help him, though. He’s a lot like Kade in that way. He digs his own holes and then insists on climbing out of them by himself even when someone else offers to lower a ladder for him.”

I felt a smile creep up to my lips. “I can respect that. I think I can be like that, too.”

“But you’re both helping each other right now. At least with some things.”

“Yes. With some things.” Just not with this.

John rested his elbows on his knees and propped his head on his hands. “This could be another long one.”

“I don’t have anywhere I need to be.” Nowhere but here.

WE LEFT THE
hospital sometime after three in the morning, making sure Hunter’s parents made it safely back to their hotel before returning to the house. I’d stayed in the waiting room the whole night, and I was utterly exhausted on both a physical and an emotional level, sometimes sitting with John, with Darren, with Mrs. Fielding… They took turns updating me on Kade’s condition. Hunter hadn’t come out until they’d discharged his brother, though. For someone who had argued so vehemently against going to the hospital at all when this had happened at the wedding, saying he didn’t want to stay by his brother’s side through it, the fact that he hadn’t left that room for hours seemed out of character. I wasn’t sure what to make of it.

Once we were home, it was clear we would be going down our separate hallways instead of continuing what we’d started before receiving that text message. Hunter kissed the top of my head. “You’d be much better off if you just stayed out of it, you know,” he murmured into my hair.

“I don’t want to stay out of it.” The more time I spent with Hunter, the more I wanted to be with him. I wanted to get to know him and his family. I wanted things he would probably never be able to give me, but the knowledge didn’t take the wanting away. The effect he had on me, this magnetic pull, only grew stronger with each day we spent together. I didn’t like it. I didn’t know what to do with it, but I couldn’t get out from under its pull no matter how hard I tried. I was afraid I was falling in love with Hunter, and that scared me.

Because he wasn’t falling in love with me. In lust, maybe, but not in love. And because the clock kept ticking, and what we had was going to come to an end. And because once it was over, I didn’t know who I would be.

He separated himself from me, effectively brushing me off. “I’m going to have to skip the gym in the morning,” he said. “There’s something I have to do.”

“Can I help?”

He shook his head. “You can help by sleeping in and getting some rest. I don’t want you to have to worry about any of this.”

Little did he know, I was going to worry whether he wanted me to or not.

By the time I got up in the morning, he was gone. I fixed a bagel and spread Nutella on it, grabbed a banana from the fruit bowl on the counter, and took it to the table to eat with my morning coffee. I’d finished without a word from him, and I didn’t know what to do with myself, so I grabbed the jar of Nutella and a spoon, and I curled up on the couch with it.

Hours later, Hunter came back with his parents. I had showered and put clothes on by then, and I jumped to my feet when they came through the door. Hunter headed straight for the kitchen and fixed a couple of baggies with ice. His nose was bent, and there were cuts and bruises on his hand. He passed one of the baggies to his father, who was in similar shape. Mrs. Fielding was just standing there crying hysterically.

There was no sign of Kade, but I had no doubt he was at the center of all this. I just didn’t know what any of it meant. Wordlessly, I went to the bathroom and found a first aid kit, bringing it out to tend to their cuts.

“I’ve got this,” Hunter said when I took out an alcohol pad to clean the blood off his knuckles. He took the first aid supplies from me, shoving some in Mr. Fielding’s direction across the bar. “Thanks,” Hunter added as an afterthought.

I nodded, backing away. The two men weren’t going to let me help them, but I could at least comfort Hunter’s mother. She was still sobbing uncontrollably, so I put my arm around her shoulder and led her into the living room. I eased her down to sit beside me on the couch and passed a box of tissues over to her, and I let her cry on my shoulder until the tears turned to hiccups. Around the same time, Hunter and Mr. Fielding joined us in the living room.

“We took Kade to Horizons. It’s a rehab facility along the outskirts of town,” Hunter said after a long silence filled only with his mother’s sniffles. “He wasn’t happy about it,” he added, flexing his hand, as though that was enough to explain everything. I supposed, in a way, it was. I still didn’t understand Hunter’s relationship with his brother, but Kade needed help, and Hunter apparently still cared enough to insist that he get it. That was a starting point. It was my way in. I just needed to figure out what to do with it.

We chitchatted for a while, never delving into the subject that they seemed to want to keep strictly in the family.

The next day, Mr. and Mrs. Fielding flew back to Canada.

Once they were gone, Hunter didn’t say another word about Kade. He never went to visit his brother. He never called him or accepted a call. Almost two more weeks went by with Hunter attempting to pretend it had never happened. We spent that time doing what everyone expected of us—we went out in public together, hand in hand and arm in arm, holding on to each other, kissing each other, and generally making sure every news source in the area caught us in the act of being disgustingly happy together. Then we went home and turned our separate ways.

It was as if that day on the beach had never happened. The evening in the kitchen, before getting the text about Kade being back in the hospital? That might as well have not existed, either. Hunter was trying to push me away, the same way he was attempting to push his brother away, and I couldn’t let that happen.

Tomorrow, Hunter would be reporting for the first day of the Thunderbirds’ training camp. “You’re probably going to be seeing a lot less of me for a while,” he told me just before we headed down our separate hallways to call it a night. I couldn’t make out how he felt about that. He’d been keeping his sarcasm in check lately, and I rarely saw the smiles and smirks that had been so readily available back when we’d been on our honeymoon not so terribly long ago.

“That’s all right,” I said, putting the last of the day’s dishes in the dishwasher so I could run it overnight. “I’ll be fine.” I’d be better than fine, actually. Because over the course of the last couple of weeks, I’d formed an idea of how I could fill my time, and it would be much easier to do what I wanted to if Hunter wasn’t around to realize what it was. If he didn’t know, he couldn’t attempt to stop me.

HORIZONS, THE REHAB
facility where they’d taken Kade, looked like a miserable place to live. The building had brick walls boasting very few windows, surrounded by a dry, brown yard with a high steel fence keeping everything private. I parked in one of the few open visitor spaces and had to pass through a group of smokers and the cloud of cigarette smoke surrounding them to reach the entry, holding my breath as I walked.

A harried receptionist glanced up at me from the desk just inside the door and shoved a sign-in clipboard in my direction. “ID?” she said tersely, holding out her hand. “And you’ll have to empty your pockets and check your purse with the office. You can’t take anything in beyond the clothes on your back. You’ll be going through a metal detector before going in, too.” She narrowed her eyes at my hair, as though trying to determine if I’d somehow tried to put something in it that I could give to Kade.

I took the ponytail holder out and shook my hair free, raising my brow in question as I did so. She scowled but kept quiet about it, so I figured that was her way of giving me the go-ahead.

The whole place felt cold, clinical, and seriously closed in. Good thing I’d never had issues with claustrophobia. Just standing here with the antiseptic smell of the place assaulting my nose, the wood paneling on the walls and the gray folding chairs in austere rows jarring my vision, I wanted to get the heck out of Dodge as fast as I could. The thought of spending any more than the maximum-allowable thirty-minute family visit gave me the heebie-jeebies.

I dug my driver’s license out of my wallet and passed it over to her, putting my cell phone and keys in my purse and zipping it shut before filling in my name, Kade’s name, and his patient ID number on the form.

She keyed a few things into her computer and handed my license back to me.

“Thank you,” I murmured, not that she had any reaction to my common courtesy. For a moment, I wondered if her parents just hadn’t taught her how to be polite or if she’d ignored their teachings. It wasn’t that difficult to be a decent human being, though. Even Lance could say
please
and
thank you
. I slipped my license into one of the outside pockets and double-checked to be sure I didn’t have anything else hidden on me anywhere. All clear.

“Visits are limited to exactly half an hour, no longer,” she said, not even looking up at me as she spoke, “and you can’t be alone with your family member. You’ll be in a big room along with all the other patients and visitors. No trying to slip anything to anyone or you won’t be allowed back.”

I wasn’t going to slip Kade anything other than maybe a dose of compassion. He didn’t even know I was coming, but I’d still never said more to him than a brief hello immediately before the wedding. Considering he had likely been high as a kite when that had happened, and quite a bit of time had passed since then, I wasn’t sure he would even remember me. I supposed I’d find out soon enough.

The only reason I was getting in to see him at all was that I’d insisted on having John send me the details a couple of days ago, once Thunderbirds training camp had started. At that point, I still hadn’t found a good use for my free time, but here it was, staring me in the face. I could figure out a way to help Kade, and maybe in the process, I could do something to help repair the relationship between him and Hunter. I might not succeed, but I could damn well try. The only thing it would cost me was my time, and that was something I had in abundance these days.

At least that was how I was looking at it. I wasn’t so sure Hunter would agree with my assessment, and I knew without a doubt that he wouldn’t be happy about me being here at all, but I hadn’t mentioned my plan to him. There wasn’t any point. He would just shut me down before I got started, determined to keep me as far away from his brother as possible.

Today, I intended to discover
why
he was so insistent on protecting me from his brother’s influence.

John had proven to be a little more willing to involve me, even promising to keep it from my husband. Darren had gone back home to his job after helping us settle in the new house, but John’s job was here right now, helping Hunter prepare for the season and overseeing our efforts for a media makeover.
Here’s Kade’s patient ID number
, he’d said to me the other day when Hunter was gone to practice.
You’re going to have to tell them you’re immediate family or they won’t let you through the door. You’re his sister now. Don’t forget it.
I’d had him brief me on the process of checking in, making sure I knew the answers to any pertinent family questions they might ask, just in case getting in wasn’t as easy as we hoped it would be.

In all fairness, he
had
tried to talk me out of coming. I hadn’t let him. It was just a gut feeling, this sense that I needed to involve myself with Kade in some way, but I knew I had to do something. Only I didn’t know what that something would end up being. Hunter always clammed up the second I mentioned his brother’s name, so I had decided to take things into my own hands. Make my own decisions. Stand on my own two feet.