9. Graham
GRAHAM
“How long until the sprinklers come on?” Holden asked as we made our way through the tunnels.
The heat lamps made the tunnels hotter than hell in July. Sweat slicked our chests, the drip of it down my spine like the endless trickle of the creek that meandered through the ranch.
“It’s random,” Ridge told him. “You’re the one who wanted it that way.”
“Am I?”
Holden’s bright ideas were legion. He only remembered half of them at best.
The heat in the tunnels was ever present, but we were used to discomfort. To the sweltering sun when we drove the cattle from field to field in the summer and the frigid cold when we fed the chickens and milked the cows at the ass crack of dawn in the winter.
Ranching was hard work — and that didn’t even count the other shit we did on the property.
The illegal shit.
“Going to take a dip in the river first thing when we get out of here,” Holden said.
“Not with the girl,” I reminded him.
We’d agreed on some rules before the last Hunt, and the first rule was we didn’t take our prey to certain places on the ranch. The girl we took home could have the run of the house, the main barn, the area around both.
But everything else was off-limits.
Some of it was practical: we didn’t need a stranger nosing around in the north barn.
But some of it was personal.
The ranch had been in my family for five generations. My great-great-grandfather had learned to swim in the creek, had herded cattle in the fields, had cooled himself in the river on hot days.
My mother had cooked in the kitchen. My dad had repaired tractors in the equipment shed. I’d buried more than one family dog under the ranch’s many trees.
The Calloway ranch was for me, and now, for Ridge and Holden, who’d become like the brothers, the siblings, I’d never had. It was fine to bring a woman there to stay.
To fuck.
But not to live. Not ever.
The ranch was the main reason we’d waited so long to join the Hunt in the first place. I hadn’t been put off by the prospect of killing a man at the end of it: death, my own and others’, was a fact of life.
So was fucking.
But I knew if we caught one of the girls we’d have to bring her back to the ranch, and that had felt like a violation of the sacred.
It was Holden who’d convinced me in the end. Fucking Holden, like a puppy always getting into the trash, gleefully ripping everything apart and leaving the mess for Ridge and me while he puked on the carpet.
But this time, he’d been right. It had been nice to have a woman around for a while.
Had been nice to have someone to fuck.
Still, I’d been relieved when the three months was over. Relieved to get the girl’s perfume off our pillows. Relieved not to see her outside, scanning the property like she was looking for an escape from the fields that stretched in one direction and the woods in the other.
Like she was looking for an escape from the quiet.
“I hope she’s at the chutes when we get there,” Holden said.
“We don’t know it was her.” Ridge was sweating up a storm under the heat lamps, his leather vest sticking to his skin, but there was no sign of discomfort in his voice.
Still, I sensed the hope under it: the hope that the doctor — Audrey — had been caught in the chutes.
That she’d still be there when we got there.
I recognized it because I felt it too.
But that didn’t mean I understood it. The Hunt was supposed to be a way to let off some steam, have some fun with a woman in the tunnels, bring her home or, if we didn’t catch her, knock off some asshole who had it coming.
Hope wasn’t part of the equation. Or it hadn’t been in the last Hunt anyway.
Every woman was desirable in her own way, so it didn’t much matter to me which one we caught.
I’d been under the impression that Ridge and Holden held a similar view, an impression that had been validated in the last Hunt when we’d debated between a blonde, a redhead, and a brunette before finally settling on the blonde.
So why had we all jumped on the doctor this time?
The answer for Holden was obvious: he’d been obsessing about her for months.
I’d thought he was off his rocker, but that was only because I hadn’t seen the doctor for myself. Now that I had, I got it.
There was something about her. And not just because she was pretty.
Pretty was as easy to find in a woman as it was looking out over the ranch when the sun came up every morning.
Audrey (the name suited her) was more than pretty.
She was beautiful, the way a tree finally taking root, finding its own way to the sun, was beautiful.
The way the north field glowed a special kind of gold in October, when the long grass hovered between the lushness of summer and the dying off of winter.
I could look out over the ranch in any season and find something pretty.
But every now and then something would catch my eye, something beautiful, something interesting. Then I’d stand on the porch or at the fence, take a long look, maybe even wander out into the fields or woods to get a closer look.
That’s how I felt about the doctor now. Like I wanted a closer look.
I was pulled from my thoughts when Ridge and Holden stopped walking, freezing in place.
“You hear that?” Holden asked.
“I heard it,” Ridge said.
“What?”
“You need to get your hearing checked, old man,” Holden said.
I didn’t respond to the light-hearted jab at my age. I’d learned a long time ago not to take the bait.
“Heard a scuffle,” Ridge said.
“A scuffle?” Holden chuckled at Ridge’s word choice. “I’m just going to call you two grandma and grandpa from now on.”
Ridge opened his mouth to reply and was cut off by a piercing scream.
It reverberated through the tunnels, a primal call for help that set my nerves on edge and made my dick hard at the same time.
Holden’s blue eyes lit up with possibility. “What are we waiting for? Let’s fucking go.”