“Yeah. In the next week or so, I was thinking.” He and Elsie were still working with the horses that they already had, making sure they were safe for any people they might be bringing in. The next step was to look at new horses. And he knew that Gus was feeling keen on the animals up north because the five that they were looking at had actually been used in therapy before, and could alleviate a lot of unknowns. It was a good start-up move, but they were very expensive. And it wasn’t that they didn’t have money, they did. But the way the finances worked at Four Corners meant that they needed to have buy-in from the others. While they operated autonomously from each other, they had a board of sorts. Unofficial, maybe, but they all had to live with each other, deal with each other, so they played by the unofficial rules. Making sure that everybody was happy with the direction things were going was extremely important.
Still, Hunter was kind of the...the face of this sort of thing. He knew most people would find it distasteful to make jokes about Gus’s appearance, but gallows humor was another McCloud family virtue. It was just how they dealt with things.
Gus didn’t have any issues or false ideas about what their father’s rage had left behind. Hunter knew how to turn on the charm when he had to. And he didn’t mind doing it in this case.
He might be the youngest, but in some cases he had to hold things together. That was just fine with him.
Anyway, it was the least he could do. All shitty things considered.
“Good,” Gus said. “The sooner you can come back with all the information on that, the sooner we can present it at the town hall and finalize it.”
“Why are you suddenly so into this?” Brody asked. “I mean, it’s a good business move, but you’ve never been all that into the business aspect of things.”
Gus shrugged. “Because I can’t just sit on my ass.”
“You’re a rancher,” Lach pointed out. “You don’t sit on your ass. Unless it’s on a horse. But we do it some twelve hours a day and it’s damned hard work.”
“You know what I mean. If we’re not moving forward, then what the hell are we doing?”
“Certainly not cleaning the house,” he said. “Or learning to cook better food.”
“Same goes for you,” Gus said. “I don’t see you offering to put on an apron and bake some bread.”
“Maybe Charity would cook for us,” Brody said, directing that at Lach with a smirk.
“You can suggest it,” Lachlan said. “But I suspect we’d all end up ingesting horse tranquilizer. She might look sweet, but she’s got a backbone of steel.”
Lachlan’s best friend, Charity Wyatt, was the most unlikely creature Hunter could have ever imagined his brother forming a friendship with. But he’d met the elderly town vet’s only daughter when they were thirteen and had formed a deep bond with her that nothing had ever come close to breaking.
Lachlan was a manwhore, a lot like Brody, but with some of Gus’s intensity. And it was a mystery to Hunter why that sweet, caregiving Charity seemed stuck to him like glue.
Or why Lach was stuck to her.
Not that Hunter didn’t like Charity. There was nothing to dislike about her. It was just his brother was one of the last people on earth he’d ever think could be just friends with a woman.
“I’ll pass on the horse tranquilizers,” Hunter said. He finished eating the questionable pizza, then tipped the rest of his beer back. “I’ve got to head out,” he said. “It’s an early morning.”
“It’s an early morning for all of us,” Gus said. “Every day.”
“Yeah, but you don’t all wrangle Elsie Garrett daily.”
Brody chuckled. “No. That is true.”
He felt a little bit mean saying that. Particularly after yesterday. Yeah, Elsie was kind of a pain in the butt sometimes, but he supposed that was kind of like having a younger sister. Being the youngest, he didn’t really have that experience. Though he wasn’t sure that the McCloud brothers really followed birth order. They were all too close in age. They stepped all over each other all the time.
Sawyer and Wolf were good to Elsie, but they shielded her in a way Hunter didn’t think did her any favors. Someone had to be honest with her, and he’d taken it upon himself to give her that honesty. He knew she didn’t like it all the time, but he considered it a service.
He made a big show of taking his paper plate to the trash, and putting his beer bottle in the recycling bin, which was overflowing. Then he tipped his hat and walked out of the place, headed down the trail that led to his cabin. There were some wooden steps, embedded tightly into a hillside, that led down to the back of his cabin. It sat just above the river, with a great view and better fishing off the dock just below.
Yeah, their parents might’ve been a total loss, but the legacy of the McClouds had to be this land. They couldn’t take credit for its creation, but one thing he could say was that mostly, over the generations, they had been good stewards of it. The houses that had been built here were sturdy, and they had done a good job utilizing the resources here. The pine trees that ran along the banks of the river were thick, different shades of dark green behind them, leaving the forest looking untamed and mysterious. If he was given to being poetic about the land, it pertained to its mysteries. He lived here all of his life, and still, standing there right next to his house, looking across the water and into the forest, he could imagine there were things there that he had never seen. That there were mysteries he would never know, because he was just a man, and nature was something else altogether. Wild and unknown, and all the better for it.
Hunter appreciated that. That even in all this sameness there could be something new.
The land provided a hell of a lot of fulfillment for him.
And maybe that was what Gus was looking for with this new move that he was making. An additional way to use it. To give back. To be something other than what their father had made them into.
Hunter, Gus, Brody and Lachlan had decent reputations about town. Yes, it was true, there were rumors that Gus had killed their father. But in truth, that didn’t actually damage his reputation. For some people, it strengthened it.
Gus said that their father had up and left. After Gus had given him a beating. Hunter believed his brother. But honestly, if Gus was lying, Hunter wouldn’t have judged him.
Which was maybe a little bit grim. But their lives had been grim.
Running a facility that offered therapy to people who had experienced trauma...he supposed they were full of trauma themselves.
Maybe that was the closest the McClouds could get to admitting they had trauma. Trying to help other people.
That made him pause for a moment, uncomfortable memories hovering around the edges of his mind.