Hunter (Stud Ranch 2)

Dad was gone.

She was all alone.

Right as the gut-wrenching realization hit, she happened to look over and catch sight of herself in her full-length mirror.

She dropped the sheet she’d been carrying around, just to torture herself.

Fat.

Ugly.

Failure.

She squeezed her eyes shut. Body dysmorphic disorder. When she looked in mirrors, she never saw what was really there. Even if she weighed only ninety-five pounds, she still saw a fat pig. She had weighed ninety-five pounds—very briefly—right before she’d gone into the treatment facility at sixteen, surrounded by a ton of other skeletal girls all convinced they were fat too.

For a while when she’d been away at college, she thought she could change things—that she could change herself. Just like she’d thought she could finally fix her relationship with Dad by coming home and spending time with him before the end.

But if the last week had taught her anything, it was that things never changed. Dad died believing her stepmother’s side of the story. And she was always going to be ugly, screwed up Isobel. She was so far from ninety-five pounds it wasn’t even funny. She avoided scales like she tried to avoid mirrors, but barely any of the pants she’d brought home from Cornell fit anymore.

Without the anger that had been animating her for the past ten minutes, she felt completely empty. She wanted to drop to the floor right there and just…stop. It was all too hard. She couldn’t do this anymore.

Instead, her feet started moving.

First to her dresser. She put on her underwear and pajamas mechanically. The bedrooms were on the third floor of the Upper East Side brownstone and she clutched the banister as she hurried downstairs. She knew where she was going even as she hated herself for it. Nothing ever changed—so why fight fate?

Like a magnet, she was drawn quickly toward the kitchen. It was a pristine room with white marble countertops and dark espresso colored cabinets. Isobel pulled out the ice cream from the double refrigerator. She never bought it but it was always here. She shook her head, knowing it was her stepmother trying to sabotage her and hating that she was giving in. But seriously, what was the fucking point, anyway? She was a sucker for ice cream. Sugary, addictive, with a high calorie count? Sign her up.

She grabbed a wooden stirring spoon and ate the chocolate chip cookie dough straight out of the container.

She finished one pint and was halfway through another before disgust with herself sent her running to the trash can underneath the sink. Opening the cabinet, she yanked out the can. She knelt on the dark hardwood floor and then her finger was down the back of her throat before she could even think all the way through what she was doing. She retched and retched into the trashcan until all the ice cream came back up. Then she sat back against the cabinet, shoving the trashcan away in disgust, wiping her mouth with her forearm.

“Goddammit!” she screamed in frustration, furious at herself. She hadn’t binged and purged for four years before coming home to be with her dad. And now this was the second time this week since the funeral.

She pulled her knees to her chest, tears streaming down her cheeks.

She was about to give into a good sob fest—not unusual for her lately, she would go on random crying jags what felt like every half hour, even before her dad died—when she saw something strange.

The cabinet door under the sink was still open from when she’d grabbed the trashcan. And tucked in the back of the cabinet behind the Ajax, Windex, and dish soap was a tall container of… was that…?

Isobel blinked back her tears and leaned in, pushing aside the other cleaners to better see the big plastic bottle.

What the—?

Why was there a container of protein powder hidden at the back of the sink?

Isobel stared at the bottle in bewilderment. Was it Dad’s from before he got sick? But why on earth…? It wasn’t like Dad was into pumping iron. He’d go jogging occasionally, but she thought this kind of stuff was usually for guys trying to build up huge muscles.

She tugged out the bottle and unscrewed the cap. It was more than half empty.

She glanced back inside the cabinet and froze. Right beside where the protein powder had been was a bottle of the special cognac her stepmother drank—the shit cost six hundred bucks a bottle and Catrina was always paranoid and accusing Isobel of drinking it when she wasn’t looking.

The truth was Isobel had tried it once but then never again because it tasted like donkey piss.

But looking back and forth between the cognac and the protein powder, she froze, her teeth grinding.

That bitch.

“So he cheated on you.”