Wild Hearts (Novella) Read Online Free PDF

him was eager to lay eyes on them, but more parts dreaded it. Love and hate, pride and shame, all twisted together.
    The forest on either side of the highway was lush and deep green. A recent rain left the air smelling of moist earth and wet, steaming asphalt. He pulled down the Blackwood gravel road leading into the woods. Memories of camping, hunting deer and turkey, growing up running free … damn, if he’d been a sentimental kind of guy, he’d be sucking it all in with a goofy grin.
    Yeah, maybe he was, just a little. He’d missed his family, even the chuckleheads. Which was most of them, now that he thought about it.
    Betsy, with her distinct sound, made sure everyone knew he was there. His core family was in the barn, tinkering with a truck that had been decrepit when he’d lived there. He’d barely stopped the bike when his brother Carlton flung himself at him, nearly tipping both of them and the bike to the ground.
    Rath tightened his thigh muscles and held himself straight as they did a quick hug/backslap. “Chucklehead, you’re going to knock us both on our asses.” Damn, did he have to tell him every time? Well, yeah. It was Carlton, after all, his younger brother, whose heart was bigger than his brain.
    Carlton stepped back. “When did you get in?”
    “Just now.” Rath found a place where the dirt and gravel were packed harder and got the bike up on the kickstand. “Came straight over.”
    Their dad ambled out, looking scrawnier than ever. And just as cranky. “How come you didn’t let us know when you was coming? We could’ve picked you up at the airport.”
    Rath gave his dad a quick hug. “I know how y’all hate trekking to the airport. I asked Emily to give me a ride.”
    Sam, his other brother, hoo-hawed and did a hip thrust. “I bet you gave her a ride,too.”
    Rath shook his head. “It was just a ride to the storage unit. We’re friends, nothing more.”
    They’d skinned that rabbit long before he enlisted in the Navy. He was gone for months at a time, and she needed sex a lot more than every now and then. Said she was a sex addict, and he believed her. They had gotten busy whenever he’d come home on leave those first few years, but the older he got, the more particular he became about where he put his pecker. Yeah, she’d made it clear on the ride to the storage place that she was up for some slap ’n’ tickle, but Rath had given her gas money and a polite rejection. No need to go back in life. Always move forward, that was one of his mottos.
    Carlton ran over with an ice-cold can of beer, offering it up like a puppy with a bone.
    Rath took it with one hand and ruffled his brother’s hair with the other. “That’s why you’re my favorite brother.” Except the beer had nothing to do with that truth. Rath took a long pull as he wandered over to inspect the truck. It looked as dilapidated as when he’d last seen it. “Finally thinking about doing something with this thing?”
    “Thought we might actually try to restore it, but it’s a mess,” Carlton said.
    “That’s what happens when you neglect it for umpteen years.” Rath knew his way around a wrench, after doing most of his own work on Betsy and his truck. He also knew that as soon as he rolled himself beneath the chassis, everybody would make some excuse to wander off and leave him to work on it alone. Been there, done that. He didn’t need another T-shirt.
    When Rath turned away from the truck, all three men were staring at him. “What?”
    His dad was the first to ask the question that Rath had been expecting since he arrived. “You gonna tell us what happened over in Mex-ee-co?”
    Carlton made some kind of snurfling sound. “Now you’re just a fuckup like the rest of us.” Then, obviously realizing how it sounded, he hitched his fat thumb toward their father. “That’s what he said when we was watching the news and spotted you being corralled into the building.”
    His father showed not a speck of