EMMETT (The Corbin Brothers Book 3)

by Lexie Ray

  “You know, just drop me off here,” Peyton said, making me squeeze the brake briefly.

  I looked out her window. “Here? But this is …”

  “My father’s horse farm. I know.” She refused to look at me. “I guess I want to talk to him about all of this.”

  “Peyton, I really don’t think that’s a good idea.” In fact, I knew it wasn’t a good fucking idea. Not after everything I heard, everything we both now suspected. This was the worst idea in the history of ideas. Nothing good at all could come of this.

  “If you don’t stop the car, I’m just going to open the door and roll out. It’s your choice.”

  I still didn’t have a grasp on Peyton’s sense of humor, on whether she was exaggerating or perfectly serious about throwing herself out of my moving vehicle, so I stopped.

  I really didn't want to, but I pulled the truck over for Peyton to get out, just a little beyond the entrance.

  "It's a long walk to the barn," I warned her as she stepped out. "Can I drive you there?” What I really wanted to know was whether I could come with her. I was still operating under that strange notion that I was supposed to protect Peyton — even if I couldn’t block the venomous facts of her heritage, or the casual hatred and apathy her mother exhibited toward her.

  "I think a long walk is just what I need," she said, glancing back at me for the briefest of moments before shutting the door. I struggled to try to read her expression, but she had closed herself like a book, shoving her fists into the pockets of her jeans as she walked up the road leading to the barn. Mary Crow had told her long-estranged daughter some pretty disquieting things — perhaps even things that Peyton didn't really need to know. I didn't think it was a good idea for her to talk to her father right now — or, if I was being honest, ever. Dax Malone was good with horses, maybe, but he failed at people. He failed hard.

  Peyton shouldn't talk to him. Not now. Maybe not ever.

  That thought kept me rooted in place, the truck still braked, pulled over on the side of the road. A sense of unease that had been present from the moment we'd pulled up in front of Mary Crow's trailer built in my chest, making it hard to breathe. Call it a gut feeling, or intuition, or anything you want, really. I just knew, in that moment, that this wasn't a good idea.

  Was it too late to catch up to Peyton and stop her? Would I be able to stomach the rage she'd have for me interfering in her personal affairs? I had to stop and assess my motivations. I was privileged, and I'd enjoyed much more of a happy and secure childhood than she had — minus my parents dying, of course. But before then, they'd loved and supported me.

  It was becoming clear to me that Peyton had never enjoyed that kind of relationship with anyone. But who was I to attempt a rescue mission? Did she even need to be saved, or would she only lash out at me for trying?

  I searched my heart. I wasn't trying to be a hero. I just couldn't stand to sit by and do nothing again and let Peyton get hurt any more.

  Mary Crow had already fractured her daughter's heart. Would Dax Malone put the final nail in the coffin?

  Steeling myself for a nasty confrontation, I threw the truck into gear and motored up the drive. Peyton was nowhere to be found, choosing not to dawdle like I had. Shit.

  I pulled up to the barn and got out, hoping the old motherfucker had left his shotgun out of reach somewhere, hoping against hope that Peyton was getting some closure or shouting at him or doing whatever it was she needed to do to come to terms with the very sad reality of her parents’ meeting.

  I expected the sounds of a fight, or, at the very least, voices, some of them raised from time to time, but there was nothing. I poked my head into the barn cautiously, afraid I’d find a gun pointed at it, but the barn was empty. Maybe it was Peyton rubbing off on me, but my first inclination was to snoop around. She’d already combed through her father’s things, divesting him of his ledger of contacts and a good deal of the knowledge he had unknowingly imparted to her. I was curious myself, until I remembered the very reason Peyton had come up here in the first place: Dax Malone was a piece of shit. I had to find them. Ideally, I would find Peyton before I found her father, or before she found him.

  I hopped back in the truck, my pulse elevated, and took the road to the house. No one. Peyton’s little cottage was empty, too.

  Then, I had a nasty thought that made my heart race even faster. I gunned the engine to the truck and took it bouncing down the rutted road we hadn’t dared to repair, out to the project Peyton and I had been working on in secret for all this time. In spite of our resistance to smoothing out the way back there, the rutted cow path had gotten more tamped down, more trafficked since we’d set up shop. It was out of the way, and Peyton had assured me that her father never came to this end of the property, but where else would they be? I’d checked everywhere. Peyton didn’t just vanish into thin air.

  My worst fears were confirmed as I saw Dax Malone stomping around, swinging a sledge hammer at the corrals, then dashing over to the little office we’d worked so hard on, full of the equipment we’d invested in, breaking everything with wild arcs. He was furious and frightening, red in the face, spittle flying as he shouted things I couldn’t yet hear. But where the hell was Peyton?

  I barely had the presence of mind to throw the truck into park before leaping out of it and running toward the scene. It struck me that I didn’t have a weapon, didn’t have any way to defend myself against that devastating swing, but it didn’t matter.

  “Peyton?” I bellowed, looking around before I even addressed the problem of Dax Malone on the other end of a sledge hammer.

  But then she sprang out of the office, where she’d been hiding or taking shelter or trying to save some vestige of our work together, and took her father by surprise, sending the sledge hammer spinning across the corral. He got a good punch in on her face before she sagged to the ground, holding her wrist in a strange way.

  I ran faster than I’d ever run in my entire life, Dax so intent on inflicting harm on his daughter that he didn’t see me until it was too late. He was yelling things — terrible things — but I couldn’t hear them. I couldn’t hear anything except for the pounding of my own heart in my ears.

  I didn’t remember much after that, but it was as if a veil descended in front of my eyes, obscuring the majority of things. I realized I was hitting Dax, driving him away from Peyton, that I was yelling at him, things about Mary and Peyton and the quality of his character. I couldn’t say that I was an inherently violent person. Ranching is a tough life, and I grew up with four other brothers. I was used to roughhousing, I knew my way around a fist fight, I’d been in a shootout. But this was different. I’d never been as angry at a person as I was in this moment, and I realized it was because he’d been hurting Peyton. I couldn’t stand that. I couldn’t stand that at all. It made me completely lose my mind.

  “Emmett, stop.”

  Her voice was the only thing that got through to me. I let my fists drop down to my sides, realizing belatedly that the knuckles hurt, that I’d been walloping an old man who was mean as all get out but no competition for me. That Peyton was lying injured on the ground, her wrist twisted, her breathing hard, tears and blood running down her face.

  “Hey,” I said. “Hey.” I knelt beside her. “What hurts? Tell me. Can you get up? I can get you to the hospital.”

  “I already called the cops,” she managed to say, wincing at the words, grabbing at her ribs. “Well, I dialed 9-1-1 and slipped the phone back in my pocket when I realized just how bad this was going to be.”

  “What happened?” Already I could hear the sirens far off, but getting gradually louder, approaching us to help sort all of this out. I could hear Dax Malone groaning on the ground, but I couldn’t make myself feel anything about that. I’d done what I’d had to do to try and help Peyton. I’d been too late. She’d been hurt in spite of me, because of me. If I hadn’t pushed her about the horse rehab project, if I hadn’t approached her in the first place, we n
ever would’ve gone to Mary Crow’s trailer, never would’ve ended back up here, on Dax Malone’s land, inciting his rage and getting Peyton hurt. This was my fault.

  “Whatever you’re doing, stop,” Peyton said, sitting up a little with my help and yelping at her ribs. “Fucker kicked me while I was down.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “I don’t need your apology. You weren’t the one doing the kicking. Thanks for getting him off of me.”

  “How did he know about this?” I asked. I surveyed the damage done to our project with a cursory glance. It was hard to care about any of that with Peyton so obviously injured. But it seemed to be a total loss, glass glittering across the floor of the office. I was certain our computer — or records — hadn’t survived Dax’s temper.

  “I told him,” Peyton said. “Well, it’s a lot more complicated than that. I guess I’m the one who should be sorry for causing all this.”

  “You didn’t cause this,” I said. “This is all fine. Things we can replace. We can’t replace you. Are they sending an ambulance?”

  “God, I hope so,” she laughed, though the movement pained her. “I confronted him about my mother. He tried to lie about it, at first, but when I threw this project in his face, that’s when everything kind of came to a head. Truths were revealed.”

  She shook her head, and I could only assume she was in shock. This was a lot for a person to take in a single day, and even if Peyton was behaving pretty ambivalently about it, I knew that she was so out of her mind that she probably didn’t even realize how badly she was hurt. She had a cut over one of her eyes, but both of them were swelling, bruises already forming from what might have even been a broken nose.

  “How’s your wrist?” I asked, concerned at the way she held it against her chest.

  “Hurts,” she said simply, and then three cop cars, an ambulance, and a pickup truck I knew all too well pulled up to a stop in a cloud of dust.

  “Get away from her,” one of the officers I recognized from school hollered.

  “No, idiot,” Peyton yelled back. “The guy who did this to me is over there.”

  “Emmett, what the hell?” Tucker approached with the rest of the police officers, his brow furrowed like Chance’s got when he was really pissed. I guessed I should’ve been thankful that it was Tucker the police department got a hold of instead of Chance, or I would’ve been in some real deep shit.

  I threw up my hands. “I guess things are a little complicated.”

  “You think?” Tucker took one look at my knuckles and then over at Dax Malone. “You’d better tell everyone what happened.”

  “We have a pretty good reckoning on the general gist of things,” the sheriff said. “Dispatch has a record of the 9-1-1 call. You can end the call on your phone now, if you like, Ms. Crow.”

  Peyton had trouble fishing the phone out of her pocket, but she made it happen. “Thank God for technology, right?” she joked weakly.

  “She’s very injured,” I said, waving the EMTs over. “Don’t try to speak, Peyton. If they want to talk to you, they can do it later, after you’ve been looked after.”

  They bundled her up into a stretcher and carted her off, her eyes closed against the extra pain the jostling caused her. I watched her go, only vaguely aware of Tucker’s bulk still shadowing me.

  “You going to explain yourself?” he asked as we watched the EMTs work on Dax while the police officers argued over the merits of handcuffing an injured old fart.

  “I don’t know why they even called you,” I grumbled, noting the hits I’d gotten on Peyton’s father. She’d stopped me too quickly. He wasn’t nearly as hurt as she was.

  “They called me as a professional courtesy,” Tucker said curtly.

  “Professional courtesy, my ass. You’re not a cop anymore.”

  “That’s true, but it’s a matter of principle. They can respect that, even if you can’t.”

  “I’m not trying to insult you,” I sighed, turning away from Dax Malone and the rest of the officers. “It’s just that this isn’t anybody’s business but mine and Peyton’s.”

  “You just beat the shit out of an old man,” Tucker reminded me. “That makes it other people’s business.”

  “I was defending her.”

  “From what?”

  “Her father half-killing her, obviously.”

  Tucker pinched the bridge of his nose. “Emmett, I don’t know what you’ve gotten yourself mixed up in, but this isn’t your fight.”

  “The hell it isn’t.”

  “This is a family dispute,” he tried to explain. “And it’s not your family.”

  I weighed a couple of things. I was going to be asked what I was doing out here. What all this was. What my relationship was with Peyton. And I needed to come up with something vague as quickly as possible.

  “Peyton and I are … involved,” I said finally, and Tucker shook his head before lightening up.

  “You never even got into fights when you were in school,” he said. “You’re a real Corbin, now, I guess. We should have a party, or something.”

  “Screw that,” I said, somehow finding it inside myself to laugh. “Just don’t tell Chance, and that’ll be celebration enough.”

  “You know he’ll find out.”

  “Yeah, but it doesn’t have to be from either of us.”

  “So, you and Peyton?”

  “Yeah. Me and Peyton.” And that wasn’t such a stretch to believe, was it? “Involved” could mean a lot of things, and it did. We were confidantes, first and foremost. And we were business partners second. And somewhere between those two things, or perhaps separate from them, it was hard to tell, was the fact that we were lovers. I didn’t know if we were exclusive. I didn’t know if she still sat at that table in the bar, waiting for a little extra cash to flow in. I didn’t care. That Peyton was somehow separate from the Peyton I was involved with.

  “Well, good for you,” Tucker said at last, making me expel the breath I’d been holding. I hadn’t known until that very moment how important it was to me for him to support that choice. I knew what a lot of people thought about Peyton, but it was a relief that Tucker was able to see past that.

  “Thanks.”

  “These guys will probably have a few more questions for you,” he said, “and I’ve got to get back to the ranch. I expect you won’t be back for dinner.”

  “Dinner?”

  He gave me a small, pointed smile. “Don’t you have someone to visit in the hospital?”

  I followed one of the police units to the hospital after I’d answered their questions thoroughly enough to satisfy their curiosity, half surprised I wasn’t going to jail. I couldn’t say the same for Dax Malone, loaded into the back of another cruiser after the EMTs popped a couple of bandages on his face.

  The town’s hospital was usually described as a place to go get a Band-Aid slapped on a gaping cut or just a holding center for old folks to die. I hoped they weren’t mistreating Peyton, that they’d have the sense to refer her to a hospital in Dallas if she was really bad.

  But when I finally got the right directions to her room, she looked to be doing about as well as she could after getting the shit kicked out of her.

  “I knew you weren’t going to go to jail,” she said as soon as she saw me. “Though I kind of wish you had.”

  “Why would you say that?” I asked with a surprised laugh.

  “So you wouldn’t get to see me like this.” She gestured at herself, her swollen and bandaged face, the cast on her wrist.

  “I like seeing you however I can,” I said, bending to give her a light kiss on the forehead. “What’d the doctors say about your ribs?”

  “Bruised, but not broken,” she said, managing a smile. “But I guess I’m kind of stuck.”

  “Stuck how?” I eased myself into the seat beside her bed, wondering why this moment was the most normal part of our day. We’d started out with the problem of a horse with a broken leg, and now Peyton was
broken in a hospital bed. If we had been anywhere else, if she hadn’t had obvious wounds on her, this would’ve felt almost ordinary — a couple chatting in the bedroom. But we were hardly a couple, and definitely not normal.

  “They want to keep me here overnight,” she explained. “That shit’s expensive.”

  “We’ll figure something out.”

  “You’re not paying for it.”

  “I didn’t say I was. I said we’d figure it out.”

  Peyton looked down at her lap. “There’s something else.”

  “What else?”

  “Well, a lot of things.” Her eyes slid to the opposite wall, but there wasn’t anything there to look at. She just didn’t want to look at me. “The project is completely destroyed.”

  “I gathered that. It’ll be okay. What else?”

  “What else?” Peyton huffed. “It took time and money and effort to get that put together. We still have appointments that we’re missing. What the hell are we supposed to do?”

  It would’ve been easy to allow the panic of letting people down, of screwing up our dream take over. But seeing Peyton like this and going through everything today made one thing very clear: she was more important to me than any of that. If something had happened to her today that had compromised her life even more than this beating from Dax, I didn’t know what I would’ve done.

  “We’re supposed to take care of you, first,” I said. “That’s what we’re going to do. Don’t worry about the project right now. Worry about getting better.”

  She looked at me, tentative. “I don’t have anywhere to go.”

  “What do you mean?” Even as I asked that, I kicked myself. She had the cottage back at her father’s place, but there was no way she was going to want to go back there. It didn’t matter how long the bastard was going to spend in jail, and I assumed it wouldn’t be a lengthy stint. That place meant bad memories, and bad blood. Of course she wouldn’t live there anymore.