by Lexie Ray
Then, Peyton threw her head back and laughed — really laughed, not the derisive snorts she’d been ripping this entire time. I recognized she was laughing at me, or perhaps what had jumped out of my mouth at her, but her mirth was so genuine that I found myself wanting to laugh along with her, even if it was at my own expense. People were casting furtive glances over to our table to try and discern just what was so funny, but Peyton didn’t seem to notice or care.
“Oh, Emmett Corbin,” she was able to say at last, wiping tears from her eyes, “you have a lot more of a backbone than I thought. Good for you. Good for you.”
“I don’t really know what made me say that,” I said, feeling awkward. To me, backbone didn’t mean that you were impolite. There hadn’t been a reason to throw Peyton’s statement back into her face no matter how crass she was acting.
“Oh, don’t be a prude,” she said. “It was funny. You’re a man of many surprises, I’m beginning to realize.”
She looked at me appraisingly, and I couldn’t help but squirm a little bit. Something about her made it impossible for me to focus, let alone keep my mouth from going dry. My beer had long since dried up, and I’d still been knocking it back against my teeth, trying to eke out the last drops.
“Don’t you want another one?” she asked, watching me realize for probably the fourth or fifth time that the bottle was empty. “Horses are thirsty work.”
“I’m fine,” I said. “Better not have any more. Have to make it back out to the ranch when this is all over.”
“Doesn’t stop most of the people in here,” she said, her eyes roaming the bar with disgust. “Pigs, all of them. Present company tentatively excluded.”
But I was a pig, no different from the rest of the clientele. I struggled to remember the reason for my visit here, just where my last forty dollars had gone and to what purpose, but I couldn’t help but be intrigued by all of the various things Peyton had to offer. She was a beautiful woman, and she understood what it took to tantalize a person.
She lifted two fingers in the direction of the bar without looking away from me, and within twenty seconds, the bartender carted two cold bottles of beer to our table. It was the strangest thing. If you sat at one of the tables crammed into the bar space, it was with the understanding that every time you wanted a refill, you bellied back up to the bar, squeezing between patrons seated on the barstools. The bartender never just delivered your order to you. And even when sitting at the bar, it was completely common to wait fifteen minutes or more just trying to get the bartender’s attention, who refused to acknowledge someone’s thirst if he was immersed in a conversation with another customer.
Peyton seemed to enjoy something of a VIP status here.
“These are both going on your tab, by the way,” she said, taking a long pull from her bottle. “Common courtesy to get a lady something to drink while you’re chatting with her. I have to keep this whistle wet.”
I shuddered involuntarily as she smiled and picked at the label a little.
“Um, I don’t mind buying you a drink,” I said hesitantly, picking my way forward cautiously. “But I don’t want this one. It’s like I told you. I’m going to be driving home, soon. It’s a long drive and an early morning for me.”
“Don’t make me drink alone,” she said. “I hate it.”
“You’re not alone. You’re in a room full of people drinking.” Red-faced ranchers blustering, gesticulating wildly, predicting the rain that remained so elusive, the cattle prices that were dropping, the sound of their businesses coming to an end. I’d come here for company, to forget some of the problems surrounding the ranch and my life there, but there were reminders everywhere of just what was at stake.
“You know what I mean,” Peyton said, pouting as she nudged the beer so close to me I had to grab the neck to keep it from slipping off the table and into my lap. “You’re not drunk. I can tell when a man becomes drunk. You’re not even tipsy. Maybe if you got a little more beer in your belly, you’ll be more honest with me, with what you need to know.”
But I didn’t want to be honest with Peyton. I didn’t trust her as far as I could spit, even as attracted as I was to her, fascinated with her mannerisms and her story. It dawned on me that I knew very little about her, which was atypical for us living in the same small town. She was accessible and inaccessible all at the same time. It was both frustrating and cloying.
“Who else taught you everything you know about horses?” I asked, taking the tiniest sip of beer to appease her. It did little to solve my dry mouth problems. I knew that I wouldn’t get rid of those until I found some way to escape Peyton’s presence.
“I picked up things here and there along the way,” she said, peeling the label from the beer bottle completely off and folding it into little rectangles. “People my father knew. People who worked at the outfit. People I slept with.”
There was always that element there. Peyton was what she was. There was no escaping that. When would I stop jerking in recognition of the facts?
“People talk to you about … horses?” I found myself asking.
“You’re talking with me about horses, aren’t you?”
“I mean, after they … you know.” I swallowed hard. “This is different. There isn’t any …”
“You know?” she mocked. “You mean there isn’t any sex? There can be. I’d be willing. I’m always willing.”
“That isn’t what this is.”
“Maybe not. Not yet, anyway.”
Peyton glanced down at her phone and smiled before showing me the timer that had expired again. My shoulders sagged. This was getting ridiculously expensive. And we had still somehow managed to completely avoid anything I actually wanted to talk about.
“What can I say?” Peyton batted her silken eyelashes at me. “Time seems to fly when I’m with you. That’ll be twenty more dollars to you, if you want to hear more.”
“I think I’ve heard about all I want to hear,” I said, suddenly intent on cutting my losses and running. If Peyton really knew anything about horses, she wasn’t being very forthcoming. Of course, I was occupying her precious time. No one had dared to approach the table while we were talking, making her lose out on any other business. She was looking to squeeze out whatever cash she could from me, probably. She’d said it herself. That was how she made her living.
“Oh, come on, Corbin,” she said, eyes dancing mischievously. “I thought we were getting along just fine.”
“I have places I need to be.”
“I know that we can have a nice time.” And just like that, pressure on my crotch, making my cock jump even as my shoulders did, startled. Peyton lifted her eyebrows at me, making fun of what was probably my expression of utter shock, and she put more pressure on me through my jeans, using the bottom of her boot. She was fondling me in public, right where anyone could see if they just looked the right way, and it both titillated and scandalized me. Jesus, if anyone saw … the fallout would be tremendous.
“Twenty dollars,” she cooed at me, and I realized what she was proposing. We’d go on like this, her boot at the juncture of my legs, talking about nothing things until I messed myself from her careful probing. My fingers constricted and flexed and were on their way to my wallet before I came back to myself and stood up so suddenly my beer clattered against the table, slopping sour-smelling suds everywhere before Peyton quickly righted it. She lifted her eyes slowly to meet mine, her grin widening as she lingered over my crotch and the obvious evidence of her influence in that area.
“I have to go,” I said, hating just how unsure of myself I sounded. “Thanks for nothing.”
“Don’t be a sore loser. We were having fun.”
But it wasn’t fun. It wasn’t even a novelty anymore, shooting the shit with one of the most infamous people in town. I’d had faith that Peyton would have some kind of insight that would help propel me in the direction I wanted to go, but I’d been wrong. I’d nearly been sixty dollars’ worth of wr
ong, but I’d stopped it at forty. That was at least some consolation, even if we had just wasted half an hour. At least nothing else had happened.
I swiftly settled my tab and left through the back, unwilling to endure the stares and whistles I was certain to get if I made my way through the front and past all the other patrons. They all knew what Peyton was. I was the one who’d tried to see something different in her.
The air in the alley was just as stuffy as the air had been inside of the bar. I needed wind on my face. I needed somewhere else to be. Peyton had crawled underneath my skin and made herself at home there. I was uncomfortable, hot and bothered, disappointed in her and in myself.
"Hey, Corbin."
I whirled around. "It's fucking Emmett."
Peyton smirked at me as she let the door close to the bar behind her. "I know it is. I just liked the way you looked when you were all worked up about your name."
She approached me, sinuous, dangerous, a completely foreign experience, until I could practically taste the perfume she'd chosen — a citrus that melded well with the hot night. She tilted her head upward, and I felt like I didn't have a choice. I kissed Peyton Crow and wondered how much more money it would cost me.
The worry of money and prices quickly melted away. She tasted like fruit even if she hadn't been eating any at the bar, something related to pineapple and another item I couldn't figure out.
I broke the kiss as soon as my brains returned to my skull.
"All I wanted was horses," I said. "Nothing more."
"Uh-huh." She looked amused. "What about what I want?"
I'd never considered the possibility that Peyton Crow actually wanted anyone she slept with. Or sought to sleep with. I didn't know. I was drunker than I usually was, fuzzy with promises and whispers. I'd told her. I'd told her all I wanted was to talk about horses. Fucking horses. That was it.
And yet we were out here, in the alley behind the bar, which was the preferred location for a majority of her business transactions. What did she really want? Another handout? She couldn’t actually want to sleep with me, could she?
“How much is the kiss going to cost me?” I asked, only half joking.
“Depends on what you want with it,” she said. “The kiss was on me. How you choose to continue is up to you.”
“I’m going home.” I ached with exhaustion, all the way down to my bones, as if I’d put in a full day at the ranch. I hadn’t at all — I’d ridden Sugar for the first time in a long time, gotten shut down by Dax Malone, and been humiliated by his daughter. It was perhaps an emotionally tiring day, but nothing I should feel this physically tired for.
“Emmett, wait.”
I paused in the mouth of the alley, already on the way to my pickup truck along the street. I was done with this — done with Peyton’s games. I hated the way she made me feel, like I was helplessly attracted to her, drawn to her even as I had much more important things in mind, things I needed to do. She made me want her and know I could never be good enough to truly have her. It was perplexing and frustrating, and I was done.
“You seem like an okay guy.” Peyton picked her way around the debris littering the alleyway, the broken bottles scattered like painful stars across the pavement, her boot heels scraping along the loose gravel. “I mean, as far as men go. You didn’t try to take advantage of me. You didn’t try and push to see how far you could get without paying. I … I did that.”
I watched her warily, trying to guess what game she was playing now, not trusting that any of this would come from a genuine place. With her line of work, it was hard to imagine that Peyton Crow had a single genuine bone in her body.
“The ideas I have for horses … they’re good ones,” she said. “Ones we should actually talk about. I can tell that it’s your passion, and it’s rare to find someone who truly has dreams and is doing something to actively pursue them.”
Any minute now, I expected the punchline. Peyton was working on getting me vulnerable, backing me into a corner, and then she would launch her final attack on me. Everyone would probably come pouring out of the bar to watch it happen, and I’d be unable to show my face in this town for the rest of my life. Perfect. This was about how I expected today to end.
“I don’t really think the bar is a good place to discuss the ideas I have for horsing operations, anyway,” Peyton said.
“You prefer the alley?”
“I prefer that maybe tomorrow or the next day, or I guess just whenever you’re free, we should really talk about it.” She cocked her head at me and smiled. “And I mean just talk. Bounce ideas off each other. No cash required.”
“You told me your time was money,” I said, confused enough to let my guard down a little. “Why would you do anything for free?”
“I don’t know, Emmett Corbin.” Peyton rubbed her nose playfully against mine. “Maybe I think you’re cute.”
And, punchline.
“I’m leaving,” I said, turning away again.
“I’m serious,” she said. “About the horses, I mean. And I like guys with long hair, so I guess I’m serious about you being cute.”
“You don’t have to patronize me.”
“I’m not.” She took me by the shoulder and pulled until I turned around, reluctant. “I have ideas — good ones. If you think you really want to make a go of it, to actually make a horsing operation that you can be proud of, if you’re really serious, then I want to talk about it.”
“I told you. It’s only theoretical.”
“Yeah, yeah, your ‘research.’” She didn’t curl her fingers into air quotes, but I could see them all the same in the way she pronounced it. “I told you once, and I’ll tell you again. I’m good at keeping secrets. Very good. It’s practically my job … well, part of it.”
My face colored. “I really, really need to be going.”
She sighed heavily, looked away briefly, then flashed her dark eyes back up at me, as if she’d come to a decision. “Rehab.”
I blinked a couple of times. “What?”
“You heard me. Rehab.”
“You’re going to rehab?” I was so confused.
“No, idiot.”
“You’re suggesting I should go to rehab?” I frowned. “I don’t go out drinking every night.”
“I’m saying that it should be a horse rehab facility,” she said, exasperated. “That’s the idea I have. And that’s the knowledge I bring to the table.”
I inhaled deeply, and it was as if I was breathing for the first time this evening. That simple statement had ignited all kinds of synapses in my brain, and I was thinking about how that would work, what we would need to learn or amass or do or commandeer in order to set something like that up.
“Does your father do something like that, or anyone else in the area?” I asked. “What kind of knowledge, exactly, would you say you have about rehabbing horses? Is it something anyone can learn to do? Can I learn how to do it? Do you think it would work? What kinds of things are we prepared to do, here?”
Peyton held her hands up to my rapid-fire questions. “Like I said. The bar’s not the place to discuss things like this, and neither is this alley. You stick around back here long enough and people really are going to think that you took your pleasure in me.”
“Jesus.”
She waved my quiet exclamation away. “Oh, people talk. They’re probably already talking. If you’re seen leaving too soon, they’ll say you don’t know how to handle yourself around a woman. That you’re a minute man.”
“If this is supposed to be making me feel any better …”
“You’re so sensitive,” she said, smiling like this discovery pleased her. “All I’m trying to say is that we should meet and really talk about this. Are you serious about wanting to do this horsing operation the right way, in a way that would be truly effective?”
The only words that I could even think of right now were “horse rehab.” I couldn’t quite place why it made me so excited, but it did. Pro
bably because it was something I’d never considered before, some possibility that had been outside the realm of my experience. This was exactly what I had wanted out of Dax Malone, and the fact that I was getting it instead from his daughter, Peyton Crow, was even stranger. But I had to temper my enthusiasm with caution.
“You said you’re good at secrets.”
“That’s right. I did say that. Glad it stuck with you.”
“If my brothers find out that I’m going behind their backs, talking to people about horses instead of cattle, all four of them would probably gang up on me and beat my ass in for me.”
“Well, I won’t tell your brothers about us discussing horses if you don’t tell my father we’re doing the same thing.” She raised her eyebrows at me. “You tried to go talk to him earlier today, didn’t you? Don’t lie to me. I can smell it from a mile away. He turned you down. You wouldn’t have approached me, otherwise.”
“You think he’d be pissed if he found out you were talking to me?” I asked. “He seemed pretty hostile.”
“He would never give away even a scrap of information if he thought it might give someone the leg up over him,” she said. “I’ve had to yank every bit of knowledge from that old fart like it was pulling teeth, but I know enough — and then some. Yeah. He’d hate it if he found out I was talking to you — especially since he turned you down first.”
“I guess we both have secrets that need keeping, then,” I said.
“I guess we do.” She stepped back and stuck her hand out. “I’ll keep yours if you keep mine.”
I only hesitated a moment before putting my hand in hers and shaking it. She had a strong grip — stronger than any woman I’d ever shaken hands with.
“It’s a deal.”
I hoped I knew what I was getting myself into.